alexsteffen.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

"Someday, any day, a truly staggering insurance loss will occur... damage arising from hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires is massive, growing and increasingly unpredictable... We must never write inadequately-priced policies in order to stay in the game." www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2024...

submitted 11 minutes ago • 0 comments

This'll end well. "Underpricing of climate risk in insurance & mortgage contracts has led more people to move to high–climate risk geographies... because the ability of lenders to sell mortgages to Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac... masks the cost of potential damage." fedlit.substack.com/p/issue-1-cl...

submitted 30 minutes ago • 2 comments

New podcast! "Places and systems which are brittle to climate impacts are vulnerable to loss. That vulnerability, in turn, makes them less valuable than they were previously. We are surrounded by lost value, a situation I call the brittleness bubble." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-trilli...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

I keep thinking about this treating of new development in high-risk locations as inherently temporary and requiring funds be set aside for removal of that development when it becomes no longer tenable. It's like producer responsibility for brittle real estate.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

New podcast! "Places and systems which are brittle to climate impacts are vulnerable to loss. That vulnerability, in turn, makes them less valuable than they were previously. We are surrounded by lost value, a situation I call the brittleness bubble." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-trilli...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Their numbers are staggering: $1.47 trillion dollars of lost real estate value over the next 30 years, impacting 84% of U.S. communities, but concentrated in 21,750 “climate abandonment neighborhoods.” @alexsteffen.bsky.social

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Tell me again how fringe the idea of a brittleness bubble is, please. "The growing crisis in the insurance industry may make it hard to get a mortgage in parts of the country in the coming decades, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday." finance.yahoo.com/news/powell-...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

This is solid work. Worth remembering two things: Most professional pressures spur modelers towards conservative results. A $1.47T estimate of the brittleness bubble shouldn't be taken as an upper limit. Some losses push harder-to-predict value rises elsewhere, which will also be disruptive.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

My next Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins in three weeks! If you're serious about building a personal climate strategy, this intensive class may be for you. Check it out. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/you-need-a...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Tell me again how fringe the idea of a brittleness bubble is, please. "The growing crisis in the insurance industry may make it hard to get a mortgage in parts of the country in the coming decades, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday." finance.yahoo.com/news/powell-...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

I wish the message I heard from every pundit, every day is: he’s taking all these things away from you because they cost money. And is he planning to lower your taxes with that saved money? No. He’s planning to lower Elon Musk’s.

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

I feel like I'm going insane every time I see a media story about DOGE that doesn't also mention the fact that the Government Accountability Office exists and performs the exact function that DOGE pretends to, only in a credibly constitutional, non-partisan, and conflict-of-interest-free manner

submitted 8 days ago • 186 comments

This is a dire turn - the most monumental tax cheats in the land are seizing the tax records of everyone to use to frighten and intimidate and persecute anyone they feel like savaging who rubs them the wrong way.

submitted 7 days ago • 4 comments

This is all worse now, as the educational and institutional bulwarks of middle-class meritocracy in creative work are undercut, the nepotism grows shameless, AI companies are stealing every creative asset they can find, and the rewards for success are concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

We're so used to seeing climate action as decarbonization and the politics of energy, that we can't see that climate response and the economics of risk are now much larger driving forces in our society — and likely to have deeper impacts on our life prospects than decarbonization ever had.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

How the climate-housing squeeze is already playing out in high-cost areas. This is only the beginning. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/there-were...

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

We're so used to seeing climate action as decarbonization and the politics of energy, that we can't see that climate response and the economics of risk are now much larger driving forces in our society — and likely to have deeper impacts on our life prospects than decarbonization ever had.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

We're about to get more familiar with the brittleness of complex supply chains.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Oh! I know the answer! It's moral cowardice. apnews.com/article/trum...

submitted 15 days ago • 226 comments

Amidst the chaos and the law-breaking the most important thing to remember/focus on is that they are doing these things illegally because they know they don't have the votes to do it by passing laws, even in a GOP controlled Congress.

submitted 15 days ago • 64 comments

Climate brittleness, household economic precarity and regional reliance on declining industries are the trifecta of broken American futures.

submitted 2736 days ago • 1 comment

We're about to get more familiar with the brittleness of complex supply chains.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

The deflation of the Brittleness Bubble is a slow leak now, but that won't last long. www.wsj.com/real-estate/...

submitted 495 days ago • 0 comments

There is no new normal. For at least the next century, we'll live on an ever-changing planet, amidst the loss of predictability. There is no destination future, now. There are only pathways that open more options for humanity as we move forward—and the delay that closes them....

submitted 2197 days ago • 1 comment

“I promise, America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries—uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire.” Brilliant.

submitted 18 days ago • 27 comments

Going to need trading cards for the DOGE people so if we see them in public, we can give them an earful of our thoughts. Elon should never enjoy a public moment again. No awards shows, parties, football games. Wherever he goes, he should be shunned and booed.

submitted 17 days ago • 3 comments

Last week: Can’t handle this This week: Now I’m pissed Next week: Clowns go down

submitted 18 days ago • 19 comments

"Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) on Wednesday rolled out the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy (ELON MUSK) Act, which would ban 'special' government employees like Musk from having federal contracts."

submitted 18 days ago • 251 comments

The complex collapse of a system is not the same thing as an intentional interruption of the functions of that system for political gain. They're working hard to convince you that their attack is the collapse of the US system of democracy and rule of law. If they convince you, they've won.

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

So much of this was predicted. But it takes courage to make foresight matter.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

This is probably fine...

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

It’s hard to overhype how dangerous this moment is. This a naked attempt to seize government by the right wing billionaire class so they can steal from the American people.

submitted 21 days ago • 338 comments

Not for nothing but everyone realizes that these teenagers and 20 somethings who have complete access to the Treasury payment source code are now #1 espionage recruitment targets for Russia and China, right?

submitted 20 days ago • 2269 comments

Exactly. "'Why don’t you just leave?' ... The word 'just' is the poison. As if leaving were simple. It's never simple. The reasons to stay in a job or a relationship– children, money, comfort, love– can be every bit as compelling as the reasons to hit the road." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 25 days ago • 3 comments