Quote from: RE on Jun 01, 2026, 10:31 PM

Quote from: TDoS on Jun 01, 2026, 04:55 PMstill a small sample size but....markedly different than yours RE.

We can consider your experiences and mine as outliers.

You can maybe. I do statistics for a living....two of us don't a reasonable sample size make.

Quote from: REThe official stats say 50% of claims are rejected.  IOW, it's basically a coin toss on getting paid.

Statistics can lie, and liars use statistics. Whom are we calling "official" stats? Sources matter of course, as peak oil taught all of us.

But let us assume your stat is correct. For starters, the stat of 50/50 could be true....now lets talk dependencies. I use Insurance A, and you use Insurance B. All of my claims are paid, none of yours. 50/50. INSURANCE isn't an outlier, the COMPANIES are. I have only used a single independent "price matters" insurer in my life. A year or two, until I bought my first motorcycle on a loan, and needed full coverage. Hit a Toyota with it, damaged the Toyota badly, broke my back, totaled the motorcycle. Allstate paid it off, fixed the Toyota, gave me insurance when I replaced it with an identical replacement, no change in insurance rates. Stuck with the big names ever since.

Quote from: RENot buying insurance, I am 100% guaranteed not to spend money on it, and no legal battles trying to get paid off.

That is logical. And so is being sued for whatever you have for someone or something you damage to recoup their losses. Lacking assets means someone can sort of be sue-proof. So my motivations are different from someone angling for that scenario.

Quote from: REOf course there was a risk I would have an accident at some point, but I considered it negligible.

Of course. Discounting high impact, low probability events changes the distribution of outcomes certainly. It is like playing the lottery, except in reverse. What you "consider" it though is irrelevant....life is life. You can be careful, drive safely, and still have a tie rod snap and send you barreling into the path of another semi.

It is a personal choice, certainly.

Quote from: RECertainly far less than what actuarial tables said it was, which is what the premium cost is based on.  So even with an "honest" Insurance company, the cost was a ripoff.
RE

I don't have the statistics that an actuary does on behalf of accidents and whatnot, and of course their job is to make a profit, but I don't need actuary tables to suss out how this game is played. To you, the cost of insurance is a ripoff. To me it is exactly what it represents itself as....a hedge against a form of risk that has ZERO requirement of being known by my, or your, calculation in advance to place our bets. 

Sure, shit can happen, but in driving most "accidents" are avoidable, they result from poor decision making of the part of the driver.  The insurance tables price out based on this.  Even discounts for good drivers factor in driver error.  I don't make errors driving, so my rates should reflect the extremely low probability I would ever make a mistake driving.  They don't.  I evaluated my odds of having an accident and bet I wouldn't have one every time I got behind the wheel for 50 years.  I won the bet every time, so obviously I made a good bet. lol.

RE

Failure is inevitable.

Quote from: TDoS on Jun 02, 2026, 07:20 PMYou, as an exception, most certainly do not define the rule. 

Never said I did.  Just that for me as an individual it made more financial sense to take the risk.  Which as it turnhs out was the corredt decision.  It would have still been true with a few typical accidents as long as the costs came to less than $50K.  The only case not true would be a large liabilitty claim if I killed or hurt someone badly.  For me, I considered that chance negligible, and again I was right.  Had I been wrong,, well the injured party would have been shit out of luck.

RE

Oops, sorry, I accidentally overwrote your post instead of replying to it.  Feel free to rewrite it, I won't delete it.

RE