That conversation came up recently in Los Angeles California due to the small handful of homes built as you describe that are still standing after the fires. That created an entirely different problem as the city wanted to rebuild the area as affordable housing but now have to deal with the handful of homes that withstood the fires. I have no idea how that will ultimately play out.

> If only as a PR move, the insurance industry could easily build some examples of such construction, push for building codes friendly to them, and offer far-cheaper hail damage insurance for them.

That wouldn’t lower costs for consumers, that would only allow the insurance companies to have lower costs for themselves.

Remember: prices for consumers only ever go up. Even if costs to the company go down, that is an opportunity to see higher profits. It’s why the cost of groceries continued to go up even as cashiers were replaced by self-checkouts.

Under capitalism, businesses have only one responsibility, and that’s to their already fantastically wealthy shareholders. Anything that increases shareholder value is good. Anything which doesn’t is bad. And so the average Joe is squeezed from both ends in order to extract every last possible penny.

It doesn’t have to be like that, but our civilization has been brainwashed into thinking that an exceptionally tiny group of obscenely wealthy people parasitizing off of the bulk of humanity for every last shred of wealth they have is somehow the only possible economic system.