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> nobody has ever disputed that, but if you read my comment again, you'll see that I was discussing expected value of writing/taking a policy. Your original po

> nobody has ever disputed that, but if you read my comment again, you'll see that I was discussing expected value of writing/taking a policy. Your original post strongly implies that making a claim against the policy is net negative: "they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim". I am disputing that implication. > Yes, indeed, loans also have neutral or negative expected return, so do lotteries, and that doesn't mean that insurance doesn't too. A is a member of S doesn't mean that the cardinality of S is 1. The point is that you said that insurance "lets you break a $5k lump expense out into $50/mo payments", this is not true. That is what a loan does. There is a meaningful difference. Insurance allows you to pay to guard against risk by spreading payments out over multiple people, not spread out a large payment over a period of time. > You're trying to be cute and contrarian, in the finest HN spirit (it's also not cute or funny when anyone else does it, fyi) but you're going off on irrelevant tangents. Please, you're not furthering the discourse here, you're just being tangential and contrarian. Please read the HN guidelines before commenting, in particular this section: > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." You can find a link to the guidelines at the bottom of the page, or here's a direct link: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

paulmd 4y ago
Again, the comment I made: > Generally speaking equipment riders are generally not worth it except for during a larger event (home burns down, etc) because of this - they get you on premiums if you don't make a claim (generally it ends up zeroing out after a couple years) and they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim. This in no way implies that you should not make a claim if you have a covered event. It simply says that the expected value of any given policy or clause within a policy is net-negative - because that's how insurance operates. You took that comment and cleaved off the bits you didn't like, until you had a sufficiently narrow statement that you could come up with some contrarian bullshit to look pithy on HN. Again, have you finally accepted that just because loans also operate in this way, that it doesn't mean insurance can't too? > Please read the HN guidelines before commenting, in particular this section: Haha, this from the person who didn't even read the "please follow the most generous interpretation" clause? Your entire comment chain has sprung from a least-generous interpretation of the rules, which is explicitly against the HN rules. Don't cite rules to me while you're breaking them yourself. And again, you should read the rules about not being snarky or making shallow dismissals. You wanted to make a cute contrarian comeback post and you made a very in-generous reading of the comment in order to do it, and then if I point that out I'm the bad guy. Again, a very HN phenomenon - too much coddling here. You broke the rules trying to look cool on a social-media site and when called out you tried to rules-lawyer to make yourself look like the good guy. Take it up with @dang if you want, I don't really care. But I'm not going to be scolded by the wrongdoer for pointing out that someone is cleaving apart substantive comments to make little gotchas. It's a real problem on this site, as is the hiding behind rules-lawyering when people call it out. Your reply is a low-value comment that doesn't belong on this site and it's gone downhill from there on both sides. This is why we have a rule about that, your comments set the downhill direction here.

paulmd 4y ago

Again, the comment I made: > Generally speaking equipment riders are generally not worth it except for during a larger event (home burns down, etc) because of this - they get you on premiums if you don't make a claim (generally it ends up zeroing out after a couple years) and they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim. This in no way implies that you should not make a claim if you have a covered event. It simply says that the expected value of any given policy or clause within a policy is net-negative - because that's how insurance operates. You took that comment and cleaved off the bits you didn't like, until you had a sufficiently narrow statement that you could come up with some contrarian bullshit to look pithy on HN. Again, have you finally accepted that just because loans also operate in this way, that it doesn't mean insurance can't too? > Please read the HN guidelines before commenting, in particular this section: Haha, this from the person who didn't even read the "please follow the most generous interpretation" clause? Your entire comment chain has sprung from a least-generous interpretation of the rules, which is explicitly against the HN rules. Don't cite rules to me while you're breaking them yourself. And again, you should read the rules about not being snarky or making shallow dismissals. You wanted to make a cute contrarian comeback post and you made a very in-generous reading of the comment in order to do it, and then if I point that out I'm the bad guy. Again, a very HN phenomenon - too much coddling here. You broke the rules trying to look cool on a social-media site and when called out you tried to rules-lawyer to make yourself look like the good guy. Take it up with @dang if you want, I don't really care. But I'm not going to be scolded by the wrongdoer for pointing out that someone is cleaving apart substantive comments to make little gotchas. It's a real problem on this site, as is the hiding behind rules-lawyering when people call it out. Your reply is a low-value comment that doesn't belong on this site and it's gone downhill from there on both sides. This is why we have a rule about that, your comments set the downhill direction here.