Anarchitect

all sorts of doom and gloom in this report including stuff like this

"The rising cost of homeownership is partially explained by steep increases in insurance premiums and property taxes. Home insurance premiums jumped 57 percent from 2019 to 2024, according to Freddie Mac. The sharpest increases were in areas with the greatest risk of a climate-related disaster. In Miami, annual premium rates average $17.20 per $1,000 of coverage, according to the ICE Mortgage Monitor, or an annual payment of more than $11,000 on the metro’s median priced home (of $644,000). Rising construction costs and the scale and frequency of disasters have prompted private insurers not only to raise premiums, but in some cases to reduce coverage or pull out of markets entirely, as in California, Florida, and Louisiana. In response, homeowners are turning to public Fair Access to Insurance Requirement plans and the National Flood Insurance Program. However, like private insurers, these programs face the threat of insolvency. Against this backdrop, the number of uninsured homeowners, estimated at 6.1 million households in 2021, has almost certainly risen. Property taxes also increased an average of 12 percent between 2021 and 2023, lifting the average annual tax bill to $4,380, according to the ACS. Some state and local governments have implemented tax abatement programs, typically targeted to low income and older adult households. However, discounts are often limited, as property taxes are one of the few sources of local revenue."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00284-9

Some individuals persist in behaviors that incur harm to themselves or others. While adaptive decision-making requires integrating such punishment feedback to update action selection, the mechanisms driving individual differences in this capacity remain unclear. Here, in a sample spanning 24 countries (N = 267), we used a conditioned punishment task to identify how individuals learn from and adapt to punishment. We identified three, behaviorally robust phenotypes: (1) Sensitive, who correctly inferred punishment causality and adaptively updated decisions through direct experience of punishment; (2) Unaware, who failed to correctly infer punishment causality from direct experience but corrected their decisions following an informational intervention clarifying consequences; and (3) Compulsive, who persisted in harmful decisions despite both punishment and informational intervention. These phenotypes were driven by distinct cognitive mechanisms: (1) causal inference deficits, where individuals misinterpreted punishment causality, impairing correct knowledge acquisition (remediable via targeted informational intervention); and (2) integration failure, a deficit in synthesizing causal knowledge, action valuation, and action selection that rendered decision-making inert to punishment feedback, even after targeted informational intervention. Remarkably, these phenotypes predicted longitudinal outcomes (learning trajectories, choice behavior) six months later. By identifying the cognitive mechanisms driving variation in human punishment learning, this work provides a framework to understand why individuals persist in harmful behavior and highlights the need for approaches to address these distinct cognitive barriers to adaptive decision-making.