GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”
Lol
Lmao, even
With some rofl on the side.
For Elon this means Relying On Father’s Luxuries
Wow, haven’t seen a roflcopter in a long time.
Yay, I knew it would be that super old reference!
I was actually looking for the version that includes The Muppets, because there absolutely is/was a version of that video with the Mnah-mnah muppets. I just couldn’t find it.
Edit: excuse me, but 17 years old isn’t super old. That’s not even voting age.
Ijbol?
Elon bad, haha
Tomorrow I post Elon bad, ok?
No, truck bad. More read article.
Reading hard. Easier to make quip.
God, I hope other places follow. I work in insurance and not only is everything about the cybertruck an absolute fucking nightmare to source, let alone find a shop for, every single goddamn owner is like the most insufferable chod. That goes for women too. Tesla drivers could already be a problem, but the truck owners are like regular Tesla owners gone feral.
State farm was the first to drop them
Tesla drivers have single-handedly done more PR for BMW drivers than BMW ever could have.
Pretty sure they were one of the last major companies that would…
Even if warranty pays for repairs to it, if it damages anything else the insurance still has to pay.
The article mentions multiple examples of them just randomly shutting down during operation. That’s already bad. But this is going to be it’s first winter, it’s not surprising insurers don’t want to deal with it. They deal with large numbers, it’s not a question of “if” like an individual owner, its “when” for the insurer
Class action lawsuits are gonna be a mother fucker
Class action lawsuits are gonna be a mother fucker
Part of the purchase agreement of a Tesla agreeing to binding arbitration. This means no class action suit. You can opt out of this within the first 30 days, but you have to send a letter requesting it.
How many Tesla owners do you think do that?
That assumes the court finds that enforceable. Usually they do, but a few times recently, they’ve said it’s not.
That’s one of the nice things about the law in Quebec. Binding arbitration clauses are illegal.
Je devrais demeneger a Montreal.
*Je does
“doivent” is third-person plural (they, not I)
Oh, and I didn’t notice that autocorrect changed my French to English. Should be"dois" or, as you say, “devrais” for the conditional.
Whoops, I really meant “devrais.”
I mean in trumps court of law musk can’t lose.
If dumpy wins, for sure no class action.
If dumpy loses, his Supreme Court will still side with the conservative side anyway, so probably still no class action.
i don’t own a tesla, so if their cars injure me I can sue them*
Steam recently removed their arbitration clause, largely because paying for a thousand arbitration cases is worse than dealing with a class action.
I’ve heard that death by 1,000 arbitrations is a good way to make em regret it. Glad to see it’s true.
Which is what Musk is looking at happening.
Between cybertruck and twitter, dude’s gonna bankrupt himself.
Wow, I never thought I’d find an actual good argument for keeping independent car dealers as middlemen instead of allowing first-party sales, but here we are.
Can you connect the dots for me? Third party dealers always have idemnity? clauses anyways.
Presumably anything you’d agree to while buying from an independent dealer would be between you and the dealer, not you and the manufacturer, right? I don’t understand how the manufacturer would be a party to the transaction.
(It might be that I’m naive about how modern car sales work.)
I’m pretty clueless too, but to me your assertion doesn’t hold up to the concept of recalls.
The true answer is probably that we’re both wrong and the answer is that as a consumer: you lose, fuck you. Also fuck your family dog.
John Wick enters the chat
This didn’t work for valve so I can see it also going poorly for Tesla.
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The article mentions multiple examples of them just randomly shutting down
Which is really strange considering they don’t pay anything for that…?
A vehicle shutting down in the middle of the freeway can easily cause multiple accidents.
I don’t know how you got to the assumption that they all broke down in the middle of a freeway?
I don’t know how you got to the conclusion that OP was saying “all” and not being hypothetical.
Because hypothetical is a pointless and irrelevant discussion, and isn’t exclusive to the Cybertruck.
According to this comment thread and the article, these cars have abruptly stopped functioning with no warning. Do you not think it is only a matter of time before that occurs in a dangerous situation? Insurance companies base their decisions on statistics and probabilities. It is very much related to “hypotheticals”.
Do you not think it is only a matter of time before that occurs in a dangerous situation?
I literally just explained this in the comment you replied to.
It depends on what it means by “stopped functioning”. It could mean any of a hundred different failures. Did the screen shut off? Did it slam on the brakes at 60mph? Did it lose propulsion, and can simply be rolled off the road?
Once again, this is not remotely the first time cars have had issues like this and never before were their insurance policies canceled for something that never happened.
In other words, this ain’t it.
It’s rare for normal cars to shut down with no warning.
It’s pretty common for cybertrucks to do it.
Eventually that’s gonna happen on a highway. Insurance works by assuming the worst thing that can happen will happen and charging you appropriately. It’s far from irrelevant in this case.
The go pedal and the steering wheel are equivalent to a keyboard/mouse and are not physically connected to anything. If the car shuts off, the wheels go where they feel like with absolutely no driver control.
Never thought of they how would you brake if the car shutoff.
The brake pedal.
How well does that work after losing vacuum assist?
Definitely not as well but you can still use them. Cars didn’t even have vacuum assisted brakes up into the 1960s and 1970s
Yes, and they were designed with that in mind- brake pedals with more leverage for one…
My mom had a Ford ranger for a while that had lost its brake boost, it took a lot of force to get it to slow down, and that wasn’t even a heavy vehicle, this was back when a pickup was a two-seater…
That’s absolutely not how that works. There is no such thing as “off” for this vehicle. It can mean any number of things. There are also several redundancies built in. Airplanes full of hundreds of passengers thousands of feet in the air are also flown without mechanical controls but society seems to accept that that’s okay?
Did you really just draw an equivalency between Tesla’s software practices and the aerospace industry? Even Daddy Musk isn’t stupid enough to pretend those are the same.
Also your assertion that there is “no such thing as off” blatantly displays your horrible lack of understanding that distributed computing still relies on electricity.
Edit: since Tesla is apparently the same thing as Airbus, can you point me to the source code published by the relevant regulatory body that controls the Cybertruck’s steering mechanism?
Do you really just not understand the difference between an analogy and an equivalency?
Also your assertion about computation and electricity displays your horrible lack of understanding of the concept of redundancies.
If you have evidence that there was a complete lack of power to any and all systems, please do present it, but I’m very confident that you don’t, so please come off it.
Yes, I fully understand the difference between analogy and equivalency. You claimed that fly by wire on an aircraft is exactly as safe and redundant as the steering wheel of a Tesla vehicle. That’s called an equivalency and is a demonstrably false statement. I never claimed that there were no redundancies to the power supplies, but it’s simply not relevant. You do understand that there are different regulations and rigors applied to an aircraft compared to a crappy car that hasn’t even passed any crash safety testing and hasn’t been certified by any engineering standards bodies, right?
You claimed that fly by wire on an aircraft is exactly as safe and redundant as the steering wheel of a Tesla vehicle.
I did not. You just pulled that out of your ass. I don’t have time for bad faith arguments. Good night.
…yes? Was there something you wanted to add? I can’t see anything in Twitter.
Have you looked at the cybertruck’s manufacturing practices? Airplanes have redundancies for their redunancies and that’s why people use them. The cybertruck was built with the “go fast and break things” model, does not have redundancies, and actually removed some standard safety features found in every other car. Like tempered glass.
Comparing a cyber truck to an airplane is like comparing a pinewood derby car to a military personnel carrier. One was made by a child. The other is engineered to keep as many soldiers alive as possible.
Have you looked at the cybertruck’s manufacturing practices?
I have, fairly extensively. You clearly have not.
On the internet, anyone can say anything. I am the Pope.
Is there a point you’re trying to make here?
They do when it shuts down while driving and careens into another vehicle.
I assume you have a source for this collision?
No one is saying it’s actually happened. It is a fact though that they are shutting down while driving which introduces a higher risk of it happening which the insurance companies don’t want to take.
That’s my point. Unless it’s actually happened, you’re completely blowing things out of proportion, and most likely does not explain this situation.
This isnt the first vehicle to ever break down on the highway…
I can steer to the shoulder of the road in a traditional vehicle hit the brakes. Can I do that in a cyber truck?
Yes.
More importantly, Anderson has eight vehicles. GEICO is only choosing to terminate the insurance coverage from Cybertruck and is actively pursuing renewal of his vehicle coverage for the rest. This leaves no doubt that GEICO’s issue is directly related to the Tesla Cybertruck and not to Anderson or other factors.
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
Robert added, “It makes no sense, as there are other, riskier cars out there. Let me know if you recommend any insurer for the truck. I have eight cars with an amazing record. I will be canceling my entire Geico policy!! Bye-bye!”
I can’t think of a vehicle that is more likely to be a risk to others than the Cybertruck. I’m sure insurance adjusters see how people use Tesla FSD in spite of its shortcomings. The truck is heavy as hell and breaks in all sorts of ways others vehicles don’t.
Also, there have been no independent crash tests done so no insurance company can accurately assess the risk, so this is wholly unsurprising.
Tesla have allegedly done their own crash tests, but they still have not released the data. It’s kinda what you’d expect when a government-regulation-hating techbro designs a “I got mine fuck you” vehicle.
If Geico, and presumably soon others, are angering the chuds by refusing to insure this, independent crash tests definitely occurred and they were not favorable.
You don’t have to be an obnoxious YouTuber to crash a car.
If Geico, and presumably soon others, are angering the chuds by refusing to insure this, independent crash tests definitely occurred and they were not favorable.
When I said no independent crash tests had been performed, I was specifically referring to the IIHS since they’re the only ones who opinion really matters and they’ve stated they have not tested any Cybertruck. But yes, regardless of whether Tesla’s internal crash tests were performed by their staff or some other testing lab, the fact that they’re sitting on the results clearly indicates that they know just how poorly the crumplezone-less sharp-edged quality-uncontrolled ketaminemobiles fare.
Ahhh, that’s a reason that makes sense. Much better than the article itself. Thanks.
To be clear, I don’t know if that’s why GEICO is cancelling policies on Cybertrucks, but I’d bet heavily it’s a contributing factor. It could be that they decided the risk was worth it, until the trucks actually started coming out and the sheer number of recalls due to shitty manufacturing was just too much.
I thought that was the sort of thing that the government mandated companies had to do in a controlled and transparent fashion. I wouldn’t have thought that the NTSB would allow a vehicle to be registered without a thoroughly vetted crash testing procedure.
Apparently “rare” or “limited-release” vehicles don’t get tested. Which means the Cybertruck will probably never get tested 😂
The cyber truck has no crumble zones. I’d like to see Tesla’s tests.
Cody Johnston did a vid about the Cybertruck on his most recent episode of Some More News. He starts talking about the crash test Tesla did (with video) around the 8:45 mark.
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
He might be too poor to be able to afford more than that.
Suffering from Success
Maybe it’s 1 cybetruck and 7 Dodge Caravans saved from the crusher
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
Why does anyone have anything? If they can afford to collect the things they are interested in, they will have many of those kinds of things.
What if they’re interested in naked pictures of children?
I use an extreme example to point out that “the market will provide” is a terrible argument for the existence of anything.
The gulf of difference kind of undercuts your point in this case. One is undoubtedly immoral and illegal. And it doesn’t change that part of the answer why somebody would have either is because they want that, which says nothing about it being a good thing.
Mining several normal human lifetimes of metals and resources (and the CO2 released into the atmosphere in order to gather those materials) just for something to sit around unproductively is obviously immoral so I don’t understand the relevancy here.
Oh I wasn’t even disagreeing with you. I was just saying that your example may undercut your point. I use extreme examples too, but it only works well when the analogy is solid throughout. In this case I don’t think they are as comparable as you do. That’s all.
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
Car collectors exist, and I have the impression quite a few of them are among the Cybertruck’s early adopters.
Honestly, a car collector is probably the best kind of person to have one I’d bet, given that they now exist out there. They don’t seem terribly safe for pedestrians and others to have around, so it they’re going to be out there in individuals hands, them being kept parked in some guys garage as some weird curiosity vehicle of the 2020s is probably better than being driven around on the daily as a pointy oversized commute vehicle
I can’t think of a vehicle that is more likely to be a risk to others than the Cybertruck.
A Hummer for sure.
Also most pickup trucks when you consider frontal visibility. I mean there are just an endless number of ways to measure and weigh safety.
The H1 was basically a civilian tank. The H3 on the other hand was a reskinned Chevy TrailBlazer and fell apart just as easily as one.
I think they’re talking about the new Hummer EV.
I completely forgot about that car…
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
Because he’s a car enthusiast with a problem.
(Source: I own six.)
Kinda funny how it sneaks up on you when you get the space. I have 7 vehicles split between my wife and I. Most of them were bought at bottom of the market. People act like I must be wealthy as they drive a new suv worth $20 more than my fleet. I could replace the whole spread for like $30k. I’ll add the qualifier that 2 are motorcycles and I’m totally, definitely, working on selling my prior daily. But $3k isn’t exactly life-changing. I imagine this is a fuckcars zone but it’s a hobby for people. Every hobby is destructive. It’s not like car enthusiasts are driving multiple cars at a time, so the fuel consumption over time is normal. And the thirstier cars tend to be broken more often!
I imagine this is a fuckcars zone but it’s a hobby for people.
More than you know: even I use a bicycle as my daily-“driver,” LOL!
Of the six cars I have, only one isn’t an old, unreliable project car and/or two-seater. Even then, I only have that because my parents essentially forced it upon me. (They have some kind of silly hang-up about having a cargo bike be my sole means of transporting the kids, other than public transit.)
Perhaps ironically, good urbanism is what gives me the freedom to treat cars as a hobby instead of a necessity, and I firmly believe that’s the way it ought to be. It’s a lot like how people can be into horses while also still understanding that it’s a dumb idea to commute to work on horseback.
There are better ways to blow money but that’s just a opinion 🫡
Hence the “…with a problem” part.
Who said other ways ain’t a problem 🤣
How is cybertruck more risky to others that your average truck?
Heavier (6,898 pounds compared to 5,540 for the F-150), lithium fire risk, inattentive drivers using the FSD
This is all on top of how dangerous American trucks have become to others
Don’t forget the cybertruck body panels are basically dull knives due to being flat sheets instead of curves where they are joined.
Just look at the front “bumper”. It’s triangular, and made of metal. If it hits a pedestrian, unlike other cars that try to bump and deflect the pedestrian up onto the hood, the Cybertruck will cut the pedestrian in half with that angle. Also, because it’s metal, there is NO give. That could even be dangerous to other cars, let alone pedestrians and cyclists.
That’s just one aspect, though. You got 3 others from another commenter, making the Cybertruck tonight’s biggest loser.
I would assume he’s either a car collector or he owns a small fleet of work vehicles for his small business, (like a plumbing business or such).
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
My uncle was like that - he was a contractor and realtor. He had several work trucks, each for a specific purpose, plus one general purpose, and half of them had snowplows of various sizes. Most of them had something wrong with them that didn’t interfere with their specific purpose, but would have been a pain to deal with daily. Only new one was a minivan for driving clients to sites… Then he bought a house closer to town that had a flatbed truck left on it…
No word from the insurance company itself? This whole article seems to be based on a single tweet by a cybertruck owner. For all we know his might be modded in a way that they dropped the insurance on it.
More specifically, the only source the article even gives is a link to a reddit post with a screenshot of the tweet, of which doesn’t have a direct link to the tweet. This is half assed journalism at best, considering they even quoted the original screenshot wrong.
Edit: lol they couldn’t even get the person’s name straight. It changed from Robert Stevenson to Anderson after the email portion. Why’s this article even here?
Why’s this article even here?
Anything Elon bad = upvotes
If you manage to find an article with both Elon bad themes and AI bad themes in the same story Lemmings would upvote it up into the atmosphere. You’d be on top of All for like a day!
To top it all off the email/text had information redacted not by blurring it with paint, but by using characters in the same font with the same line breaks.
I mean seriously, who does that? Only time I’ve ever busted out inspector to modify a website or tweet or email is to elaborately troll someone with a sceenshot.
Did they really use inspector to redact info out an legit document about an allegedly widespread thing that no one else can produce, or did they draft the whole thing, used strings of ‘x’ to mark where to blur, and forget to blur? /shrug
This isn’t new. They’ve dropped cybertrucks before, and they’re not the only company to drop/straight up refuse to take them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CyberStuck/comments/1ejtwkt/insurance_wont_cover_my_cybertruck_so_i_cant/
Everyone in here like yay truck bad, I don’t give a fuck about Teslas what’s fucked is goddamn insurance companies can just arbitraryly drop your coverage for no fault of your own. It should be illegal. Like sorry but you agreed to cover this, with all its flaws and took my money for years.
I really wish car/home/health insurance were just federalized. These companies are the oldest con perpetrated on the general public tbh.
It’s in the article, they didn’t drop him during the coverage period they declined to renew.
It’s perfectly fair, if you can decline to review and insure with someone else when the 6 month term is up, so can they.
Yep, this is 'merica and a bunch of people are already driving this destruction derby without insurance. Do we really want to add a bunch of Cybertrucks to that terrifying demographic?
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Yes the circle jerk on this has gone way too far.
This whole article seems to be based on a single tweet
Ah yes, news these days…
Why are insurance companies the ones making the rational decision about saying it’s a dangerous piece of shit and not our transportation regulators? It needs to be banned.
I don’t think insurance companies care of the trucks are dangerous per se. They care if they are expensive to repair, or prone to accidents which could attach liability to the policy holder and thereby the insurance company.
I keep telling conservatives this. It makes sense to have some form of suspicion around a message when some corporation has a profit motive behind it. For instance, climate change and companies selling solar panels (although I wish they wouldn’t put SO much effort into that faint connection).
However, that also applies for the inverse - that when insurance drops coverage for Florida homes, it’s because climate change is real and they know it will hurt their bottom line.
i never understood the suspicion about companies selling solar panels… they’re not snake oil, they work exactly as they are advertised. But, they allow people to be self reliant and not forced to rely on large enegry companies. It really shows where the allegiance for “conservatives” lie.
Funny enough, that’s exactly what the article says.
The extra danger to pedestrians might also affect the liability calculations.
The weird thing about this claim is that these aren’t deal breakers. It’s possible to get insurance for exotics like McLaren or Bugatti (although no idea if GEICO does those); it just costs a lot.
I’d really like to hear more about those underwriting standards.
There probably aren’t that many people using a Bugatti as a daily driver. For Cybertruck I would think there are many people using it as a daily.
Because automobile regulation in the US is an absolute joke.
Because insurance companies are filled with bean-counters (not intended as an insult, I’m a bean-counter in a different field) who want to come out ahead. That’s why the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) exists. You’d think organization that does crash tests and promotes new technology would be a government organization, but nope, it’s insurance providers that want to minimize payouts.
because it aligns with their financial incentives.
Go try to get insurance for a Lambo or a nice exotic.
Good luck giving that free market talk to the insurance sales guy.
I don’t see anything in the article suggesting it’s particularly dangerous, only that it’s very expensive to fix, and in a collision will probably cause significant damage to the other vehicle (though that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily cause injury).
The US doesn’t exactly approve or deny vehicles in general; any vehicle that conforms to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards can be sold, as far as I know. And I don’t see any section that covers safety of the other party in a collision, unfortunately. Maybe write your reps and suggest they add one.
The US doesn’t exactly approve or deny vehicles in general; any vehicle that conforms to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards can be sold
Sorry, I’m not getting the distinction here. Isn’t a vehicle that conforms to the FMVSS the same as one that is approved?
Or is the check against FMVSS is not done ahead of time, but only later in any lawsuits?
Conforming = here’s a guide book. Follow it and we won’t bother you unless there’s an issue.
Approval = please submit every model/trim you release to our inspection/test facility for approval.
One requires a lot more people going back and forth between the manufacture and government than anyone wants.
They have to pass inspection to be sold initially.
In before trump’s new monkey calls the Gecko a pedo
Next do lifted pickup trucks please!
And the Carolina Squat!
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GEICO claiming this isn’t true
"In an email to The Verge, Geico pushed back. “Geico has coverage available nationwide for the Tesla Cybertruck,” Geico spokesperson Ross Feinstein said. Feinstein did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about individual dropped policies. "
So maybe it was something VERY specific to this persons use of the truck?
I heard he was renting it out on Turo. That is unconfirmed. I have no source.
True or not to this specific situation, in general, that is definitely the kind of reason you might get dropped if you didn’t get the proper insurance.
Yes. If this is true the owner should be happy they did this before trying to make a claim. Often people break the terms of the insurance and then when a claim is made they are denied all coverage.
Thank you.
That part about how they insured his other vehicles so that PROVES this is a cyber truck-specific policy was so dumb. Insurance will deny for a million reasons or combinations of reasons.
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“their” is shorter than “his or her”
(Even if you don’t care about gender inclusiveness, they is just more convenient)
Similarly, “they” is also shorter than “he/she”
The best English literature doesn’t follow the basis of most convenient or shortest. Sometimes there are other reasons to choose a word of phrase.
The plot of Romeo and Juliet could be rewritten in a paragraph but probably wouldn’t have had the same impact.
“some teenage idiots do teenage idiot things and die. fin.” roaring applause
I once heard it described as a “3 day relationship between a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old that left 6 people dead”
True, but this isn’t prose or high literature. What reason do you suggest why “his or her” would be preferable to “their” in this context?
The prescriptivist “It’s grammatically incorrect” argument doesn’t hold much water when it has been used since middle English.
In a poem, I can see the thought:
“I tried to fit the cadence of this clause
Within the measure of this poem’s form
Which has in past and present be the norm
By which this poem, too, seeks to adhere.
This is my authorial choice’s cause
for my decision not to use a “their”.” But if to find an alternate way to word
Your writing’s pronouns strikes you as absurd
I nonetheless opine that you still ought
To make the token effort to include
With “their” all people by the same respect
That you for yourself would from them expect.
Refusing this, I feel, would be quite rude.Comments here are a short form of writing, therefore people are allowed to phrase things and say things however they would like to. You won’t know someone’s intent before reading, so the way they write makes a difference.
And which intent would warrant using “he or she” rather than “they”?
They felt like it? Their brain worded the thought using “his or her”?
Yes, of course, nothing wrong there. I’m asking what’s wrong with using “they” instead, given that there seems to be some pushback
Thats how they speak.
That’s a habit, not an intent. You implied that there were some deeper intent behind using “he or she” over the shorter and more inclusive “they”. Of course people are allowed to write however they want to, and they’re free to ignore my suggestion. I’m wondering why people are so bent on pushing back against it - what is it about my remark that turned this whole thing into such an involved discussion?
Maybe your T key is broken?
Then the original comment would read
hose hings are very poorly made and all he most imporan pars are made of cheap plasic ha an average person can lierally rip off wih his or her bare hands
That sounds more like someone that would deffend the cyber truck I suppose.
Nice ditty.
What reason do you suggest why “his or her” would be preferable to “their” in this context?
Regional dialect, fluidity of language, variety - even habit.
“It’s grammatically incorrect” argument doesn’t hold much water
Oh, I do respectfully disagree with that, especially when you cite medieval English but reference an American language dictionary as your source.
I could just as viably give “his or hers” as equally valid as “theirs”, because it is. We’re not newspaper headline writers, nobody penalises us if we use a few more characters for any reason. And you could switch back and forth between them both for variety.
Nice ditty.
Thank you :)
Regional dialect, fluidity of language, variety - even habit.
Those explain why it might be the first thing people reach to, but I wasn’t trying to demonise that. I was trying to offer an argument for the alternative that I consider both more convenient to write and read and more inclusive. Habits can be changed.
Oh, I do respectfully disagree with that, especially when you cite medieval English but reference an American language dictionary as your source.
Does the nature of the source invalidate the content and points it makes? English is still English, and I was looking for a source that wasn’t Wikipedia, but also was publically accessible. I could have just copied all of Wikipedia’s references, but most of them are books or journals that I don’t expect people to have access to and didn’t individually check. We could debate here what burden of proof is to be expected in an online debate, but I didn’t think the matter to be worth serious discussion.
The point is the same: there are plenty of historical examples of it being used. To be clear, this is a pre-emptive counterargument to a point I’ve occasionally seen made: That the singular they was a new invention and should be rejected on that ground. If past usage has no bearing on your current decision, that argument obviously holds no weight.
In the latter case, I contend that the increasing spread, particularly in the context of that spread, legitimises its use for that purpose. I fall in with the descriptivists: Rules should describe contemporary usage, not prescribe it.
Ultimately, I believe using “they” for gender neutrality is more inclusive for identities outside the binary. I consider the difference in usage trivial enough that the difference in respect justifies it.
I was trying to offer an argument for the alternative
But that’s not what you did, at first anyway. You were looking for an argument. You asked someone to justify something that to you is a slight, with no way of knowing whether the other person intended it that way. They got defensive because they have no idea what you’re getting at, from their perspective you’re just saying “you said something wrong, this is right” without explaining why.
Irrelevant. You don’t get to grammar like Shakespeare did.
If you’re correcting, sincerely, then good job.
If you’re trolling… also, good job.
Either way 👍
I wasn’t strictly meaning to correct so much as point out a reason why it’s more concise. I value the inclusive motivation too, if that was hard to tell; I just think there is another reason even if you don’t care about inclusion.
It seems a lot of people are actively opposed to it though, not sure why. I’m just asking questions, you know?
😉
I’ll bet a lot of times people just start typing “he” and tack on “or she” when they catch themselves.
Warren Buffet refuses to insure Elon Musk
aka the battle of geriatric nepo babies
Wait, how is Warren Buffett nepotistic? He’s giving the vast majority of his wealth to charity. He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills. But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).
I really don’t see him as nepotistic, he’s pretty much the best kind of billionaire.
Buffett himself is a nepo-baby. His father was a congressman who’s connections were very helpful when starting out in business and investing.
Sure it isn’t Emerald mine money, but you can’t tell me being the son of a 4-term congressman didn’t give him a leg up.
Sure, but he didn’t start with millions or anything to invest, he started with money that he, himself, had saved up. He certainly didn’t have a normal childhood (he bought his first shares at 11), but this timeline doesn’t show much financial assistance from his parents, it shows a lot of hard work.
That’s a very different story from people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump.
Just stop
They have to believe in meritocracy, that wealth isn’t intrinsically tied to exploitation and a long history of classism.
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Look at his history. He started out selling gum and candy to kids at school, then took increasingly demanding jobs (delivered newspapers and whatnot) until he went to college, after which he worked for his professor (IIRC, I don’t recall specifics).
And he never was a day trader, so he’s not the type that’s making money on the margins off other traders, he’s actually investing and sometimes buying a controlling stake in companies that he believes in. If you look at his lifestyle, he very much doesn’t look like your typical billionaire, he lives in the same house he bought in his 20s, and generally lives a pretty modest life, especially given his wealth. Yeah, he makes a ton at his job, but he seems to be doing it because he loves his work, not because he loves money.
In my mind, he’s basically the best possible example of a billionaire. He didn’t do much of anything shady to get rich, he worked hard in his youth and invested wisely the rest of his life. And he started a pledge for other billionaires to donate the vast majority of their wealth, leading by example by giving away half of his wealth to drop from #1 to #2, and now to #10 or so.
If you’re going to criticize billionaires, start with Gates, Bezos, Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg, not Buffett. Buffett is about as ethical of a billionaire as you can get, and while there’s room to criticize him, he should be nowhere near the top of the list.
I hope you get paid for this becuase this hellava shilling by one adult for the benefit of another adult man
Jfc… The bootlicking, never seen anyone do it this strong on fediverse.
It is a tankie strategy too, just keep repeating falsehoods with home it resonates with somebody since clearly people ain’t buying it
You’re underestimating the effect of his father knowing the right people. Yes, there was no “small million-dollar loan” and yes Warren actually hustled quite a bit to capitalize on the advantages given to him by his father, but that doesn’t erase those advantages when talking about his success.
Hard work is not the thing that got him where he is. If it were there are millions of people working multiple who should also be billionaires. Or, better yet, no one should be a billionaire at all and we make it so people don’t have to work multiple jobs to survive, but I digress.
Hard work is not the thing that got him where he is
No other investor has his track record, or anything close to it, so I really do think it comes down to hard work.
Whether the type of work he did should be compensated as well as it was is certainly a valid discussion to have. That said, he’s pretty much the top of his industry and extremely well-respected by his peers, so it makes sense that he has an outsized portion of the wealth of those in his industry. That said, I absolutely agree with Buffett that we should have higher taxes on the wealthy (like Buffett) because that level of wealth concentration doesn’t benefit anyone, including the wealthy individual.
What got him to the top of his profession absolutely was hard work. What got him to become one of the richest people in the world was that plus the tax system and other legal structures that reward that work. In other words, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
Warren buffet is literally a senator’s son… CCR has a song on the topic ;)
He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills.
Literally this what nepotism looks like… 17m is prolly just enough not to get eaten by estate tax.
You are confusing estate planning with charity.
But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).
Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro
Use some critical thinking? And a bigger question why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby enough to try to defend him with propaganda that he paid a lot of money to get into your head.
Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro
You can literally see the donation of $48B. The pledge itself isn’t legally binding, but he has been consistently donating. He’s 94, so I don’t think it’ll take long to see the proof in the pudding.
Here are some notes from his Wikipedia page:
In 2008, Buffett was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of approximately $62 billion. In 2009, after donating billions of dollars to charity, he was ranked as the second richest man in the United States with a net worth of $37 billion.
…
As of 2023, Buffett has given over $50 billion to charitable causes.
I will note that the last figure probably includes the money given to his kids’ organizations (not directly to his kids).
And a quote about inheritance for his kids:
“I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing”
He has a pretty consistent track record of philanthropy and statements about philanthropy, so I would be really surprised if he changed that in the last few years of his life. I guess we’ll see though.
why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby
Where did I say I was worshipping him? I’m merely saying I think what he’s doing is admirable and that he doesn’t qualify as a “nepo baby.” If you look into his history, he worked hard throughout his early life to save and invest, and I see no indications that his parents gave him a huge inheritance or kickstarted his career in any meaningful way. Yeah, his dad was a House Rep for 8 years (6 of those consecutive), and here’s a quote about him on his father’s Wikipedia page:
‘Unshakably ethical, Howard refused offers of junkets and even turned down a part of his pay. During his first term, when congressional salary was raised from $10,000 to $12,500, Howard left the extra money in the Capitol disbursement office, insisting that he had been elected at the lower salary.’ His wife said he considered only one issue when deciding whether or not to vote for a bill: ‘Will this add to, or subtract from, human liberty?’
That doesn’t sound like the kind of man to give his son an unfair advantage…
You are poorly educated on the issue and you are citing propaganda he paid for.
Please do some proper researcher on topic of oligarch charity and what that’s all about.
I can’t believe in 2024 we still have adults larping this shite. No wonder we got shit sociology-economic conditions and only getting worse…
If you have better sources, I’m happy to review them.
I haven’t watched the YouTube video (I generally distrust what Reich says), but here’s what I see from the other sources:
currentafairs
Mentions Buffett once, and only when mentioning the pledge to Gates’ foundation. The article seems to mostly be about the Gates’ foundation taking credit for things they didn’t do. I’ll certainly read through the rest of the article, but it definitely seems to be a criticism of that org, not Warren Buffett.
inequality
Talks about The Giving Pledge (created by Buffett) and how those who have pledged aren’t donating their money fast enough (i.e. their money is growing faster than their donations). I don’t really see this as an issue, since the problem should correct itself when they die.
The article also complains about most donations going to foundations or DAFs, but honestly, when you need to move that much money, that’s probably the most efficient way to do it. So I guess I don’t understand the criticism.
apnews
This one is about wealthy people avoiding taxes generally. I don’t know how this applies to Warren Buffett, whose wealth is in the US and AFAIK isn’t being hidden in tax shelters like offshore banks or trusts. His tax bill is relatively low (this article claims 0.1% from 2014 to 2018), but I think that’s countered by his statements about increasing taxes on the rich (he is registered Democrat, if that matters to you at all).
So I don’t think the issue here has anything to do with Buffett himself, the issue is the tax law doesn’t account for unrealized gains. Or in other words, don’t blame the player, blame the game. The closest Buffett gets to tax shelters is his stock donations to his kids’ foundations, but my understanding is that those are charitable orgs, so I don’t see a ton of difference there vs donating to other orgs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he has donated way more to vs his kids’ orgs.
My personal view here is that any compensation above some amount (say, $400k) regardless of source should be taxed at the current rates, and those assets stepped up in basis appropriately. I don’t like Harris’ proposal though because it’s based on wealth instead of income, but I think Buffet himself would approve a change here. If we handled it that way, the income from stock grants and whatnot for extremely highly compensated employees (like a CEO) would end up being taxed as income (short term gains), and therefore would be functionally equivalent to a cash salary, which is what it’s intending to be.
It’s not charity to give money to an organization you (or friends or relatives) control, it’s a way to keep your assets under your control without having to pay taxes that would otherwise be required.
It is if that charity uses the money to help people. So any accusation needs to actually look at the financials of those orgs to see where the money is going.
That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.
I think you’re missing the point - it’s not that he’s enriching himself - he’s already done that. It’s that the charity carries out his will, not necessarily the will of people who need charities.
Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.
The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.
Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.
Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.
There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.
Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.
Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.
They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.
🤡
Now that little gecko who works for GEICO will probably tell you “You can save a load of money by switching to GEICO, and its so easy a caveman can do it, but we refuse to insure that abomination you call a Tesla Cybertruck that needs to be road illegal everywhere”
Semi-unrelated but insurance as a whole is bonkers right now and I’m not sure how much the average person knows. I work on commercial real estate. The whole industry is having to review tons of insurance waiver requests because insurance in some properties is out of control. Business either can’t get it for can’t afford it. Especially, in flood zones. I’m actually kind of worried about the damage these hurricanes are doing in the US. Not just in the lives lost, which is devastating, but also the financial damage of all the uninsured losses.
If an event chance is too high the cost of insurance increase to a point where it stops making sense.
If every house in an area is 100% guaranteed to get at least one flood event over a 5 years period, that means that every 5 years the insurer need to get in enough money to rebuild all houses, so the cost of insurance will be more than 1/5th of value of a house per year (plus operating cost, profit, and so on). There’s no other way, it’s just maths.
Ok, the actuarial math is more complex but it boils down to getting enough cash in to pay for claims and pay the operating cost.
At a that point people need to realize that if the risk is too high they need to accept it, plan to rebuild every 5 years on their dime, or move.
Unfortunately people suck at understanding risk.
Climate change is a big reason for the policy denials for property insurance. What wasn’t risky 20 years ago is much riskier today. Data doesn’t lie.
Climate change is clearly a hoax, the Republicans were right all along!
/s
Sounds kind of like exactly what insurance is for? If you can’t get insurance for a flood zone, then maybe there’s a fucking reason for that.
I agree! And, I know government was bailing these people out for a long time, which just makes them double down. I’m not worried about those people. I’m worried about the ones that don’t want to be there and can’t afford to relocate, or for some and even worse, evacuate.
That’s not bonkers that’s sanity. If you want to build your house in front of a dike don’t expect to get insurance. The trick is to build in a place where there’s a risk, not certainty, of damage.
It’s absolutely bonkers. I don’t get how Americans can build houses in leopard enclosures and then act all surprised when, inevitably, their faces get eaten. I know you’re a settler country with little connection to the land but it’s been long enough to know which parts get flooded and which don’t, now hasn’t it. Around here you don’t even get building permits for lots of stuff in places even if you were willing to take on all financial risk yourself because it’d put unconscionable load on disaster relief, and thereby society at large.
So, there’s two ways to go from where you are: a) Double-down on being Yanks and say “fuck you got mine sucks to be you”, abolish disaster relief and let those rugged individuals fend for themselves, or b) fucking build where it fucking makes sense. It’s not like you’re Singapore or something, you’ve got more than enough land.
You’re telling me. I just started a small construction company on the side and have to do it uninsured because it cost at a minimum $4,000 a year just for liability. Seems ridiculous
Edit: I’m in Iowa too so clearly away from any possible large disasters. I know liability insurance is different from homeowners but I think it having a large effect on insurance as a whole. Also when the derecho went though Iowa, everyone and their brother apparently became a contractor and collected insurance money and that ruined it for a lot of other people.
“transparent metal” that breaks if it gets too hot, gets wiped with a microfiber cloth, or tapped by a wedding ring… 😂
I want to feel bad for cyber truck owners, but at the same time these problems are not new and not unknown. So if you know that something is known to have problems, and you still buy it, don’t be so shocked that it has problems for you too.
It was only a matter of time before insurance companies did something. I mean is it really that surprising that a company known for not wanting to pay out money if they can avoid it would want to not insure a rolling money pit?
