TheBailey
soapy mop
No bio...
User ID: 3254
TheBailey
soapy mop
30d ago
Losing your car to an uninsured hooligan sucks a lot, disrupts your whole life, and happens once in a blue moon. It's happened once so far to me, and has happened multiple times to almost every responsible adult I know. Even if there must always be some "house edge", I'm wanting UMPD coverage just to take the edge off the impact to my life.
What I resent is paying the additional premiums for full Collision coverage which also "insures" me against my own irresponsibility, at a premium based on the responsibility of my demographic peers. Even if there were 0 house edge, that's still a bad bet for me because of the massive behavioral component.
He's being forced to insure the value of his own car
No! That is not the case. Per my original post, I'm only being forced to buy Collision coverage if I buy UMPD coverage in Alabama:
I've contacted 5+ insurers trying to purchase an auto insurance package that includes UMPD without Collision, and they all alleged that Alabama bans the sale of UMPD-without-Collision.
Every insurance company is happy to sell me a plan that only includes Liability and (at my option) UM/UIM and Medical; and several reps commented they'd be happy to sell me UMPD-without-Collision if I were to move out of Alabama.
(presumably) he is prepared to replace it out of pocket in the event of an accident
That's exactly it. I'm happy to eat rice and beans for 6 months to rebuild the emergency fund if I break my car due to my own stupidity (which is the risk that Collision coverage defrays), but I'll be damned to do it again because local deadbeat Micahal Rayshone Taylor was driving effectively uninsured because his worthless mother lied to the insurance company about who regularly drives the car (which is the risk that UMPD coverage defrays).
In the latter case, I'm not a squillionare yet so reducing the variance is still worth the middleman's fee; but every insurer claims that Alabama law forces them to bundle these coverages together. But I couldn't find such a law (and obviously the insurance reps don't know shit), so I'm trying to figure out what exactly I need to ask my Alabama State Legislature rep to do.
As a responsible, frugal, young, male driver witnessing the Decline of America, I would be utterly fucked without UMPD coverage, which is extremely valuable and necessary so I don't have to empty my emergency fund every time someone's juvenile delinquent runs a red light; but Collision and Comprehensive are just plain negative-value since their premiums have to be high enough to include the amortized cost of said delinquent replacing his own car also. (Before you ask: Liability is its own thing; I don't mind paying for that.)
I've contacted 5+ insurers trying to purchase an auto insurance package that includes UMPD without Collision, and they all alleged that Alabama bans the sale of UMPD-without-Collision. Most also claimed that Alabama is nearly unique in this.
However, I couldn't find any such law on the books, or any historic arguments/rationale behind the (alleged) Alabama status quo.
What the fuck am I missing? And what due diligence should I do before I start trying to get my state rep to fix this shit?
EDIT: to be clear, my vehicle is not financed; I am the unencumbered owner. Insurers are happy to sell me an Auto insurance plan that has neither UMPD nor Collision ("Liability-only", or Liability+UMBI if I want my hospital OOP covered), which would be significantly cheaper. But having such a plan screwed me over last time.
And if it were just 1 insurance company that said "uhh it's state law or whatever", I'd easily write it off as just a lazy, poorly-trained T1 rep lying to get the customer looking for something they don't sell off the phone (and blaming "the government" has a nicer ring than blaming "company policy" or "our underwriters" anyway.)
In fact, that's what I did assume, for the first few companies I called... but by the time I got to the sixth, and they all gave the same answer in perfectly clear terms (*sans the actual citation), and several of the reps elaborated that Alabama was somehow special (USAA rep said there's only "one or two states where that has been the case"), I had to concede that they might not just be bullshitting me.
UPDATE: just got this nonsensical reply from the Alabama Department of Insurance Consumer Affairs division:
> Is there any law or regulation in Alabama that forbids insurers from offering UMPD coverage outside of a Collision policy? If so, what is the citation?
>
> I ask because I have tried to buy UMPD coverage from 6 different insurers so far (USAA, Progressive, GEICO, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, and AAA), and every one has claimed that Alabama law forbids them from offering UMPD outside of a full Collision policy. Most of them additionally claimed that Alabama was an extremely strange case, and that they are allowed to sell UMPD without full Collision just about everywhere else in the country.Alabama law does not explicitly forbid insurers from offering Uninsured Motorist Property Damage (UMPD) coverage outside of a Collision policy. However, the law does require insurers to offer [UMBI] coverage as part of any auto liability policy, which includes Collision coverage. This means that while insurers can offer UMPD coverage separately, it must be part of the Collision policy, which is a type of liability coverage that covers damages to your own vehicle.
Current draft of a response:
Thank you for the reply!
I don't quite understand your reply, though; it seems to contradict itself:
> "Alabama law does not explicitly forbid insurers from offering Uninsured Motorist Property Damage (UMPD) coverage outside of a Collision policy."
> "while insurers can offer UMPD coverage separately, it must be part of the Collision policy, which is a type of liability coverage that covers damages to your own vehicle."Could you confirm what specific law or regulation is behind the second point there?
Why, exactly, is it illegal for Alabama auto insurers to sell me UMPD (which I want) if I don't also buy a Collision policy (which I do not want)?
TheBailey
soapy mop
1mo ago
I want to give the same "quiz" to close friends and see their response/reaction.
Be sure to be clear, not handwavey, about whether you're posing the question in terms of still-mainly-fictional "gene editing", or here-and-now "embryo selection".
- "Improving your bloodline" (in the abstract) is one thing.
- Improving your bloodline by siring a bunch of children and killing the "unfit" ones is another thing.
- Some would say improving your bloodline by producing a bunch of embryos and gestating only the "best" ones is a third thing still.
The "shiri's scissors" around prenatal infanticide could distort your inquiry on eugenics unless you take measures to address those distortions.
Why is so-called "Open Banking" a good thing for payments?
Almost all discussions of [Open Banking] center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.
Under the (non-Open Banking) status quo: If the merchant and I trust each other, I pay with check and we cut out the middleman; otherwise, I break out a bankcard, the merchant gives me a 3% discount, and I pay my bank between a third and negative two-thirds of that amount as an escrow fee. This seems like a perfectly cromulent setup, and it's not at all clear how "Open Banking" provides any compelling advantages on either side of that fork.
Plaid was asked [by Chase] for $300 million [in exchange for API-based direct debit access to Chase's customers]...
For customer-to-merchant transactions, "Open Banking" just seems to combine
- All the downsides of plastic (potentially unlimited interchange fees, as Chase has reminded us)
- All the downsides of Check/eCheck (no consumer protections for fraudulent transactions; permanent direct debit account numbers are revealed to a party that is not the customer, the customer's bank, or the customer's bank's contractors)
- Further additional downsides (no precedent for competitive "rewards programs" to renegotiate the effective interchange fee back down; normalization of the use of sketchy as hell 3rd-party intermediaries like Plaid and Stripe, which all actually just screen-scrape most banks anyway.)
For customer-to-customer transactions, if the banks license out access to a mostly-standardized set of APIs to select partners like Venmo, Zelle, and Plaid, that doesn't seem compellingly different from the banks licensing out access to a proprietary set of APIs to select partners like Venmo, Zelle, and Plaid.
For customer-to-self-at-a-different-bank transactions, supposedly Gen Z is so mentally fried that a 3-day ACH transfer time will meaningfully impact conversion rates for new brokerage account sign-ups as they get bored/distracted and wander off; getting around that is the only remotely compelling payment use-case I can see in McKenzie's article.
What am I missing here?
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
If you aren't knowledgable about guns, buy one from a reputable retailer carrying a reputable manufacturer.
See bulletpoint #1 in the post you're replying to. That would entail putting myself on the gun owner registry (that doesn't technically identify as a registry.)
no one actually cares if you own a gun. ... Grow up and realize you are not the center of the universe.
Maybe they don't care yet; I just can't stand to be in the registry when the upcoming generation of boiled frogs who has their anchoring bias reset starts coping about bubbles actually forming on the bottom of the pot.
When Biggus Dickus, the uninsured hooligan who happens to have recently changed his name, destroys my vehicle in a collision he caused,
-
What specific good is that court order going to do me?
-
How much of that good would not be got just as well from an Alabama DS-60 clone?
You keep vaguely rambling about how the DMV has some "reason" for treating a common law name change as a boogeyman, a reason that's supposedly so good as to be worth breaking the law to stop, yet have refused to give me any model of why it's any more of a boogeyman than a court-ordered name change.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
That a high roll scenario is being required to enter your name into an overt registry of gun owners does not suggest the 2A is "doing rather well".
Heck, I'm in Alabama, which is the best-case scenario with so-called “constitutional carry”, but I still consider 2A effectively dead considering my only options to arm myself are:
-
Submit my name and address into the federal covert gunowner registry that comprises the FBI logs of background checks submitted by FFLs;
-
Open myself up to entrapment*, which to my knowledge is still a 100% permitted strategy when done with agency approval, by buying from a non-FFL stranger;
-
Buy from a non-FFL non-stranger, which is logistically a massive nuisance since it requires them to have already owned the gun in question for at least a year, or since before I mentioned the topic to them, lest box
21.aof the 4473 render their involvement moot.
*I do not have the firearms knowledge to know with certainty whether a given gun secretly has some illegal modification, nor do I trust my ability to reliably identify a glowie posing an an individual at a gun show.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
Should the Alabama DMV do as you ask, just wait for the first news report of "Biggus Dickus in car crash" about the guy who took out his licence in a joke name, has no insurance, and refuses to give any other name other than the one on his licence.
The uninsured cause car crashes all the time, even as it stands. It happened to me, and it happened to many people I know.
If you want to make the case that the DMV's refusal to accept common law name changes is somehow preventing this from happening more often than it does, then please make that case instead of just painting dramatic vignettes about how “it would be bad if a deadbeat caused a crash (and also that deadbeat had recently got a common law name change)”.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
link's not working for me...
Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.
However, it's loading (cached?) on the main public Nitter instance
https [://] nitter [.] net/kanyewest/status/1920387087049572704
[EDIT: had to mangle link because The Motte worthlessly normalizes them]
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
The DMV would likely just grant your request request which would moot the case
I find it extremely unlikely that the DMV would waive policy only for special ol' me, just because I threatened to take them to court over their illegal behavior. Are you saying that, or that they'd predictably chicken out on their half of the case only after the lawsuit is actually underway? In either case, such action seems like it'd just be begging the ACLU to throw together a form letter to get them to repeat it on cue.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
The point is, this particular flavor of “sill[iness]” is not just enshrined in law as a right, but enacting it completely, and without any discretionary approval from the gov't, is also (as far as I can tell, pending any assault on my actual motte in the OP/C,) enshrined in law.
If the law is to be changed (regardless of the reason), it should be changed through the legislature, not illegally by some administrative employee too big for his britches.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
You're claiming that the law as it stands leaves too much opportunity for fraud, we should just abolish the common law name change doctrine, and the DMV is actually kinda doing the right thing here by (illegally) refusing CL name changes and we don't even know how much crime they're prevented by doing so?
If this specimen could just rock up to the local tax office and go "Hi, my name which I am commonly known by is Susie Susan, new licence I can use as legal ID please", you think she'd avoid doing that?
The picture you paint is a strawman. I simply argue that Alabama could—and in fact should, even if it takes a lawsuit to effect them getting off their ass about it—adopt a process like the one the U.S. passport office has adopted for validating & legitimating common law name changes. It's possible to create a paper trail without sticking the little thumbtack of “this is a discretionary license, you fucking peasant” in there, and that this thumbtack has been stuck in by executive fiat, rather than due process is my complaint.
You don't have to argue practicality to me. I already did it, for all the reasons you name. I was only elaborating in reply to this comment asking why I said that what I did is “cowardly”.
Bending over and doing the wrong thing because it's “preferable” to me...
“Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other (‘defecting’).”
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
...doesn't magically make it the right thing.
Most people do not do the bare minimum of things that they are strictly required to do but the things that makes everything the most straightforwards
Suing the DMV would not be "strictly required", either, but if I were to win* it would "mak[e] everything [more] straightforwards" for the next guy who would then only have to fill out an Alabama DS-60 clone instead of waiting for a court order to get approved — so by your own logic, that seems like the right thing to do?
*As a boring tactical matter, I probably wouldn't anyway; I don't have any history of crimes involving moral turpitude, I do have a reasonably well-paying job, and I think my county offers hardship fee waivers for the court order even if I were bereft, so I'd be a pretty poor candidate plaintiff due to the question of standing... but that's just contingent.
REAL ID requires you submit…a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name [when those names are different]. Those are: …
Citation needed; that may be how Alabama has chosen to implement their so-called “STAR IDs”, but it is not what “REAL ID requires”.
Even if you do come up with some argument—which would be prima facie absurd—that a State-authorized clone of the DS-60 form would not fulfill the 6 CFR § 37.11(c)(2) criterion therefore “everyone would be mad at me” if I got the ACLU to force Alabama to do that…
there is probably an easy way to get a non-Star ID that is presumably legal under this interpretation of the law
…that still wouldn't be an argument in favor of the actual status quo of the DMV (I argue, illegally) refusing to apply common law name changes to any ID, STAR or nar.
EDIT: just for the record, your statement of the situation seems to imply that a passport could be used to fill this purpose:
REAL ID requires you submit one of many documents with your current name, which would be your common law legal name in such a case. But to do that you need to get a passport or … a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name.
however, this is false (if you mean it as a mechanistic explanation of the status quo in Alabama); nothing on the DMV website suggests that even a person who brings in all these:
- a birth certificate reading "Joe Cool",
- a valid Alabama ID card reading "Joe Cool" and matching his face and all other information,
- a completed DS-60 evidencing this "Joe Cool's" social transition to "Jo Cooler" and matching all his information,
- a valid passport reading "Jo Cooler" and matching his face and all other information,
- a signed residential lease agreement with "Jo Cooler" current tenant at the address on his current Alabama ID card,
- a utility bill addressed to "Jo Cooler" and matching the address on his current Alabama ID card,
- a burning desire for an Alabama ID card to be issued reading "Jo Cooler"
would have the requirement that he still first convince the Social Security Administration of his new name waived. The DMV would still refuse Jo in this situation, and I'm just trying to figure out if he could sue for that.
EDIT2: I hate that your point here is somewhat solid...
there is no good faith reason to challenge the [current state] ID reqs, … you wouldn't have standing to do that, because its cheaper to [just get a court order].
...since this seems to imply the only action brewing is for some sex offender or fraudster to sue on the basis that he was denied a court order 😬
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
Right now it seems to be "this section of the code says A, that section says B, who gets to juggle the hot potato?"
- I'm not aware of any code that actually says either “A” or “B”.
- It seems the court clearly stated that “A, unless otherwise specified” is their interpretation of § 1-3-1.
- I'm not aware of any court cases that either overturned that ruling, or named “B” as their interpretation of any existing piece of the code.
Either go to court so a judge makes a ruling or the state legislature clears this up. What is happening right now is ripe for all kinds of problems.
We are “ripe for” exactly 3 outcomes that I can see: (1) situation stands, sovcits suffer slightly; (2) a lawsuit is filed, probably by the ACLU; or (3) someone opens this can of worms in the legislature.
You seemingly named the latter two as desired outcomes, and I don't get the impression you consider the first outcome to be particularly problematic, so I'm interested to see what “all kinds of problems” you scry here... Am I misreading you? Do you actually sympathize with the plight of a person who wants to change their name, but isn't eligible or can't be bothered to file for a $50 name change?
Or do you just mean that the situation cannot stand, and every possible outcome is going to be slightly problematic?
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
Given that Alabama issues real IDs that seems likely.…even if you won, …what you've done…is, essentially, [destroyed] Alabama's implementation of REAL ID.…Now your whole state is mad at you
If any federal regulation actually exists which would prohibit REAL ID cards from being issued in a person's actual legal name, when that name was acquired by a common-law name change—and so far this is just speculation, no-one has found any such rule*—then
- that would be a legitimate, statutory restriction where applicable, which is on “STAR ID” Driver's Licenses
- that would be inapplicable to non-“STAR ID” Driver's Licenses**
AND you have to pay for a passport, AND you have get the court ordered named change to do that.
*I expect no-one will, either, considering that the passport office explicitly allows common-law name changes, Form DS-60.
**I seriously expect these will never be discontinued anyway, because discontinuing them would harm the voting block of “people who live a lifestyle rendering them incapable of fulfilling the REAL ID requirements”.
trying to go for change in the law would work better
You mean getting a bill passed to solidify either “DMV respects common names” or “DMV entitled to do what they want”, so that either way we're not stuck squinting at a 1982 court case and trying to guess whether a lawsuit is warranted?
(But I do agree with @Rov_Scam: with the law as it stands, it seems more likely that the ACLU would address a case of actual anti-transgender discrimination by the judge by simply making the judge do the thing, rather than making the DMV do the thing, if only because it would be a more valuable ideological win.)
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
But why do we want to surrender a freedom we currently have to the government?
On a weaker but more dialed in note: if we are to get rid of that particular liberty out of arguably valid fraud and impersonation concerns, it should be done procedurally, not just by the Alabama License Director invoking the secret “Who Will Stop Me, LOL” clause of the Alabama Constitution to overturn decades of established case law.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
I'm not objecting to the DMV asking for something to evidence the name change, like sworn witness statements; I'm objecting to them requiring, by policy, these particular evidence which includes getting sign-offs from a federal agency that has an axe to grind against common law name changes. That just seems to be laundering their noncompliance.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
I'm filling out this form verbally fellating a judge “praying” that he “grant” a fucking permit for something I (should) have every right to do “without resort to regal proceedings”.
That I rolled over and complied with these (arguably) illegal demands, because it was more “convenient” to do so, is essentially a vote of support for the State to shoot down the guy who eventually tries to make the DMV actually abide by the law, on the basis that it's the "usual process" or something like that.
TheBailey
soapy mop
4mo ago
Arguing that the DMV and whoever else needs to accept the new name based on Alabama law concedes that the probate court was within their rights in denying the name change.
Good point, even the ACLU may prefer to force that angle rather than making the DMV abide by the law...
Even if some federal law prohibits REAL IDs from being issued in the legal name of a person whose name has been validly changed under common law—which I highly doubt—the DMV policy banning common law name changes is not restricted to STAR IDs (Alabama implemntation of REAL ID) anyway; it applies to all photo IDs.
which I highly doubt
EDIT: Looks like I was right; that is instead explicitly allowed.
I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?
Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.
There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.
If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)
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