It's not hard. T-America is actually set up for that concept already. What you do is scale it like this:
* Small issues are covered by the family. Frex, Skippy needs hi-visibility clothes so people can find him easily when his superpower stutters and lands him up a tree or whatever. These cost the same as, or slightly more than, regular clothes so no assistance is needed.
* Slightly larger issues are covered by local government and/or insurance. If someone melts a piece of playground equipment, the town can usually afford to replace that but most families cannot. Insurance can also function at this level, even if it is a relatively small provider.
* Medium issues are best covered by the state government, much as each state has its own welfare programs. If someone needs special housing, such as reinforced floors and walls due to Mass Shifting, then Public Housing can and should accommodate that. It is beyond the means of all but the rich and very-upper-middle-class to do so. Large insurance companies can also function at this level.
* The largest issues require national support. If someone's toddler flickers and sparks a wildfire, you're not fixing that with smaller resources, you need to bring in disaster response from all over. Unlike here, T-America has a fully fluent emergency system to solve a crisis, pull civilians away from ground zero, and clean up the mess efficiently afterwards.
Other organizations can slot themselves in wherever they fit. Soup to Nuts already helps people gather resources offered from other sources -- like a chamfer or an ombudsman. SPOON has some programs to help people with special needs, but it's not a cohesive effort yet, because the group has always been a loose conglomeration rather than something official.
The thing is, superpowers have been publicly visible now for about 80 years. The density has gradually gone up. It's high enough now that what started out as adaptive responses to a rare occurrence no longer suffice when that sort of thing is happening somewhere most or all the time. They need to upgrade their ways of handling superpowers, not just with insurance, but with education and emergency services and everything else.
The Maldives has gotten a jump on this because climate change made them aware of impending doom if they didn't do something about it. So they pulled together soups, and as the density spiked in a very small population, they started seeing some of these issues very quickly. But they'd already put in the solution, as bait to attract soups: the first offer included a government seat. That means they have representation, which makes it much easier to solve problems as they come up. They had one teleport collision before deciding that they needed to make a teleport-airport to organize as much of the traffic as feasible, which would cut down the remaining amount to safe levels.
These are some of the interesting things that will be developing in the next few years. The berettafly incident sparked a lot of conversations about what does or does not constitute heroic behavior. As more towns give the key to the city to local superheroes, they'll talk more about how to handle damages. The Big One is the galvanizing event to mesh emergency services between soup and nary efforts. And so on.
It's a fun time to write about. :D
And to think that some people have spent slightly longer than that whole timespan on mainstream comics, and they're still writing about ... people hitting each other.
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dancing_serpent
Re: *sigh*
Date: 2019-08-07 08:27 pm (UTC)* Small issues are covered by the family. Frex, Skippy needs hi-visibility clothes so people can find him easily when his superpower stutters and lands him up a tree or whatever. These cost the same as, or slightly more than, regular clothes so no assistance is needed.
* Slightly larger issues are covered by local government and/or insurance. If someone melts a piece of playground equipment, the town can usually afford to replace that but most families cannot. Insurance can also function at this level, even if it is a relatively small provider.
* Medium issues are best covered by the state government, much as each state has its own welfare programs. If someone needs special housing, such as reinforced floors and walls due to Mass Shifting, then Public Housing can and should accommodate that. It is beyond the means of all but the rich and very-upper-middle-class to do so. Large insurance companies can also function at this level.
* The largest issues require national support. If someone's toddler flickers and sparks a wildfire, you're not fixing that with smaller resources, you need to bring in disaster response from all over. Unlike here, T-America has a fully fluent emergency system to solve a crisis, pull civilians away from ground zero, and clean up the mess efficiently afterwards.
Other organizations can slot themselves in wherever they fit. Soup to Nuts already helps people gather resources offered from other sources -- like a chamfer or an ombudsman. SPOON has some programs to help people with special needs, but it's not a cohesive effort yet, because the group has always been a loose conglomeration rather than something official.
The thing is, superpowers have been publicly visible now for about 80 years. The density has gradually gone up. It's high enough now that what started out as adaptive responses to a rare occurrence no longer suffice when that sort of thing is happening somewhere most or all the time. They need to upgrade their ways of handling superpowers, not just with insurance, but with education and emergency services and everything else.
The Maldives has gotten a jump on this because climate change made them aware of impending doom if they didn't do something about it. So they pulled together soups, and as the density spiked in a very small population, they started seeing some of these issues very quickly. But they'd already put in the solution, as bait to attract soups: the first offer included a government seat. That means they have representation, which makes it much easier to solve problems as they come up. They had one teleport collision before deciding that they needed to make a teleport-airport to organize as much of the traffic as feasible, which would cut down the remaining amount to safe levels.
These are some of the interesting things that will be developing in the next few years. The berettafly incident sparked a lot of conversations about what does or does not constitute heroic behavior. As more towns give the key to the city to local superheroes, they'll talk more about how to handle damages. The Big One is the galvanizing event to mesh emergency services between soup and nary efforts. And so on.
It's a fun time to write about. :D
And to think that some people have spent slightly longer than that whole timespan on mainstream comics, and they're still writing about ... people hitting each other.