Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "ABC Action News" channel.

@dirkdiggler69 Wrong, houses in Europe are not being built to withstand storm surges, because there's no reason to do so. On the other coast, we get mid-latitude cyclones from time to time and I sort of wondered why they do relatively little damage compared with even category 1 hurricanes, and the reason is largely that they don't come with storm surges like hurricanes do and it's not sustained gusts. So, the gusts may be over 100mph, but it's gusts, that's not sustained. And the highest recorded windspeeds in North America come from the West Coast due to the mountains being able to funnel the wind.
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@LinusLarrabee The problem with T-Mobile is that they do have some generous travel features, either they didn't understand what was included or somebody at T-Mobile screwed up. But, in no situation should somebody be allowed to rack up that sort of a debt without being cut off prior to being contacted. Just let the phone call a T-Mobile customer care line or local emergency. But, that's enough money to buy a house in some parts of the US.
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@forevergogo The problem is that if you knew 40 years ago that you'd never use it, there'd be no reason to buy it and it would be extremely expensive for the people that do wind up needing it.
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@Mnil52 That's Florida, a state that's notorious for being the last refuge of con artists and scammers. What's supposed to happen is that the company sees a bunch of claims coming in that they can't afford or that are more than they intended to pay and files a claim with whichever re-insurance company is covering them. The re-insurance company pays in cases where the amount is truly extraordinary so that the insurance companies don't have to charge enough to have the money to cover every possible scenario.
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@Tinystrom For future reference, that's where you hire an independent claims adjuster to review the coverage and see what it should have been and go to an attorney to get a nastygram sent demanding payment of the claim if it is supposed to be covered.
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@thecircledance That's mostly because they paid them off decades earlier and young people can't afford a mortgage to buy the houses at the current rates.
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@john_mccarthy_hi They can't legally do that. They're legally obligated to spend at least 85% of group policy premiums on health care activities. IIRC, it's a bit lower for individual policies. The reason that the rates have been going up has to do with things like out of control medication costs, the elimination of lifetime caps on services and the states where they didn't extend medicaid to cover everybody that wasn't otherwise covered. And if the GOP would have expanded medicaid with the money the feds were provided and would allow for regulations on pharmaceuticals, the price of health care would be a lot lower. Not to mention the markup on care to account for malpractice insurance because if a doctor hurts somebody, they're on the hook for paying for treatments that would be free in other countries as just normal medical care.
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@lindamastropietro4429 Generally speaking, apart from routine legal work like writing wills and creating trusts, you want the sort of lawyer that most other folks hate. Somebody that's an aggressive shark and not afraid to play tough.
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It's only self-insured if you have the money to pay. I get sick of people not buying insurance and then expecting the government to bail them out, while opposing things like universal health care coverage as being handouts.
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@kelleyspears1218 The issue is that providing insurance for hurricanes in Florida is extremely expensive as the state gets hit frequently and the storms seem to be getting bigger. The result is that the amount of money that the insurance companies have to charge just to break even on the insurance is increasing, but the amount of money that the people living in those areas are making isn't necessarily increasing. So, either they pull out, they increase the rates a lot, or they come up with more creative ways of cutting the payouts. This is in contrast to the West Coast where much of it is staring down the barrel of a massive earthquake. The risk goes higher every year, but every year they're collecting money to pay for it and the building code standards have been increased a lot over the decades to help mitigate the loss of life and property. Wildfires though, are basically the same problem as hurricanes in FL where the fires go around more and more of the West every year, but unlikely hurricanes, once a forest has burned to the ground, you can be reasonably sure that it won't happen again for many years as there's not much to burn.
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Around here we have houses that fall into the ocean as the land erodes due to storms. So, I'd wager that including the land in that probably depends a bit on what's going in the area in terms of the local geology. We also had an entire town wiped out in a landslide. (Admittedly, it was probably more of a housing development, but the land was completely worthless afterward for anybody that was fortunate enough to survive)
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@justayoutuber1906 People forget that unless you've got a question that is dead simple, there's usually a trip to their law library to look up not just the law, but what precedence might apply and what the case law has been like. Most of the time, the answer is that it depends for a reason, a different, and sometimes very similar, set of facts can lead to a very different outcome.
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T-Mobile may not have a peering agreement with whatever network the phone was connecting to. What makes roaming relatively affordable is that the carriers are often swapping capacity.
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@Nakameguro97 He likely would have just had it discharged in bankruptcy. That's a massive charge without it being secured by anything.
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