I'm pretty sure that the pervasiveness and the inability to do anything about it is what the person you're referring to meant by 'exhausting', though I may be projecting what I find exhausting about the topic!
While there are certainly some issues of concern in the article and the reviewed book, the above seems like exactly what insurance companies should be doing: pricing (or making available) coverage based upon risk.
This is not much different from an auto insurance company raising your rates (or cancelling coverage) because you've received a number of speeding tickets, which implies increased future risk of loss.
In fact, I received a letter from my homeowners insurance company a couple years ago stating that they would not renew our coverage due to conditions that they'd observed (clearly from aerial imagery) including overgrown bushes touching the walls of the house and some larger tree branches growing over the house.
I had a landscaping company come and fix the issues, sent my own drone up to take new pictures, sent the company the pictures, and they agreed to continue coverage. And now my house has less future risk of damage. This seems like a win-win for both of us.
Your bushes only seem like a reasonable example because you are looking at them in isolation - it was only a single issue you had to deal with, and something you seemingly wanted to deal with anyway. If they had instead blasted you with a litany of different issues, or a bush that you wanted to keep for sentimental reasons, or you simply didn't have the time/resources to create your own counter-documentation and operate their heavyweight bureaucracy, you'd be singing a much different tune.
And while these things can happen anyway with regular in-person home inspections, the point is that increasing surveillance and unaccountable "AI" make it much easier to bury customers in a deluge of complexity making for even-less-competitive markets.
(I would give a healthy list of examples of my own home being deficient in many ways an insurance inspector would call out yet are in the process of being managed, but I'm sure it would just invite a lot of "well ackshually" out of touch responses from people who don't know which end of a screwdriver to hold)
[0] Notice how they weren't going to raise your premiums by $30 a year or whatever, but outright cancel your policy - in other words a massive overweighting of the actual risk from some bushes growing into the house.
In my opinion, Uber has several key innovations over traditional taxi services:
* An accurate machine-provided fare quote that you can review at your leisure before agreeing to take a trip. (Instead of, like, calling a human dispatcher to ask for a quote.)
* The fact that the passenger can't screw over the driver by making fake requests and not showing up, or running off at the end of a trip - because the online platform is in charge of the payment collection.
* The fact that the driver can't screw the passenger over by driving extra distance, because the price is set ahead of time.
> roughly 75 percent of the items in identical Instacart baskets purchased at the same time varied in price from one shopper to the next
If the price differential is large enough, it sets up an opportunity for arbitrage. Maybe if 10 people cooperate and compare notes on each of their Instacart account's product prices, and then make group purchases using the account with the lowest prices...
In general, it's harder (though not impossible) to price-discriminate on goods rather than services. If seniors get a grocery discount for example, then it might be worthwhile to hire a senior to purchase things on your behalf.
This is more like your insurer following you around and evaluating your driving skills.
And yes black boxes are a thing but a) are opt-in and b) universally reviled.
So it is not necessarily objective, fairly considered observations (and I think pretty different from speeding tickets). At least in our case it was maximally for the benefit of the insurer. I think that is relevant to their claimed premise.
bbor•1h ago
*ETA:* And FWIW, the author here goes about as far towards that as they can -- a shoutout at the end! Anything else would be decried as biased, after all. Great article; shame it'll soon be downranked by the wonderful machines running this place :(
bix6•1h ago
bbor•56m ago
RangerScience•46m ago
That said, this’d be one of those things where you can say “this is my prediction”, and if it doesn’t come true, go looking for the forces and factors you missed from your initial prediction.
EA-3167•48m ago
alphawhisky•32m ago
EA-3167•23m ago
bbor•18m ago
EA-3167•11m ago
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/addiction-s...
https://www.samhsa.gov/communities/homelessness-programs-res...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44302#_Toc437336722
It’s not exactly a cryptic relationship, and it implies the need for more than just housing, people need serious inpatient care or structures outpatient programs and those are hard to fund. It’s doubly challenging because of how the US mental health system changed in the 1980’s… very much for the worse.
At least you didn’t assume I was arguing against housing.