Lawn Craze

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here's a comic about the lawn craze.  Some further thoughts ...

It goes a lot farther back than postwar suburbs.  Lawns started as a status symbol among European aristocracy.

Advice to stop watering, fertilizing, mowing, etc. or to replace lawns with something else is great -- if it's legal.  In many areas it is not, and people are fined or even evicted for being unwilling or unable to keep their lawn in a manner pleasing to others. Such laws are bad for disability and bad for the environment, but those are things fewer people care about than power. Check the local level of tyranny before trying to solve lawn-related problems.

Comments

Re: Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

What I'm looking at is this tangle of concepts:

* Insurance people aren't generally elected. So if the populace dislikes these people making rules that everyone else is stuck with, some of which cause serious problems, there's no straightforward way to oust them and fix the damage.

* Insurance companies have a ton of money. Most people don't. Statistically speaking, America is a plutocracy/oligarchy. This means rich people make decisions poor people are stuck with, which causes problems.

* As you mentioned, the main way to challenge these is litigation, a tool unavailable to many people, and for anyone but another megacorp, you're pushing on the short end of the lever if you can reach it at all.

* But insurers are the most alert to climate change. That'd be really useful if they were doing more about it than refusing to insure people who need insurance. See also their patchy response to flood-prone and fire-prone areas. It'd be fantastic if they lobbied to CLOSE those areas to development. "Don't build things in fire chimneys" is great advice. But mostly, they just leave people uninsured, in the same dangerous places.

* And a lot of times, it's not even the kind of insurance that can be used. They overwhelmingly deny claims, because they never want to give the money back. Some fields of insurance are still useful, but others are basically "Insurance" -- money you pay by force or threat. This then has a negative impact on public perception of insurance as a concept, which undermines the functionality of the fields that are still working.

I can see the problems. I can see a few things that would make improvements. But I don't see a way to fix the whole system, it's too entrenched with a lot of other fuckups in America today. In some cases I can see feasible replacements, but basically nobody wants to do those. Frex, lots of civilized countries have a public health system, some of them excellent; studies show that nonprofits consistently outperform both government and for-profit caregivers; we could conceivably take all the best parts and build a nonprofit NGO health network. But nobody wants to.

I imagine that's a lot more maddening for folks in the industry.

Re: Yes...

[(Anonymous)]

as someone in healthcare....the breakroom bitchfest over "HOW MUCH MORE PROOF DOES THIS INSURANCE CARRIER WANT BEFORE THEY REALIZE they SHOULD COVER X" is ugh.

Re: Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

And then they wonder why people "don't want help" or "didn't come sooner." Because they've been turned away often enough to realize nobody cares and asking for help is frequently pointless. So a lot of perfectly fixable things don't get fixed.

In this regard, health "Insurance" is an inherent conflict of interest. Sick/injured people want to get health care. Corporations want to keep all the money. This does nobody any good.

Re: Yes...

[havocthecat]

Many of your comments on insurance are very much reductions of the actual issues, but we're also running into the problem with why I don't talk in any great detail about my field of employment outside of work: I'm also not going to deal with the negative perception of the industry and those employed in it, which affects literally every discussion of the industry I have with someone who doesn't work in it.

I also don't work in the health insurance industry, which is vastly and wildly different than the property and casualty and the life insurance industry. They require entirely different discussions, and the issues involved are vastly different.

Re: Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Many of your comments on insurance are very much reductions of the actual issues, <<

That's pretty much inevitable with any large complex issue. It is sometimes possible to separate one small part for discussion, but as they all tie together, that's not always useful.

>> but we're also running into the problem with why I don't talk in any great detail about my field of employment outside of work: I'm also not going to deal with the negative perception of the industry and those employed in it, which affects literally every discussion of the industry I have with someone who doesn't work in it. <<

That makes sense. It sounds like a lousy work situation.