Comments on Weather Bill dot com - REDUX

Chris F. Masse January 6th, 2007

#1. I have posted a short comment at Tech Crunch, under the login name “Midas Oracle” (with an embedded deep link to Thoughts on Weather Bill), quoting one sentence from Eric Zitzewitz:

I really don’t see that many accredited investors having so much exposure to daily weather risk that they’ll feel the need to hedge at prices they’ll assume imply negative expected value (given that both Weather Bill and the hedgies they offload risk on need their pounds of flesh).

I did that on day one, but I made the mistake to put the deep link into the text body (and I wrote it in HTML so it would be clickable –a stupid idea). Of course, my comment was “held for moderation”, because the machine (blogging software Word Press and plugin Askinet) feared that I was a spammer.

—

#2. One interesting additional comment from a retired business owner:

PJN: I used to own 30 golf course and clubs. This would have been highly attractive, as weather was a principal driver of our economics. We bought catastrophe insurance back then, and collected once during a hurricane, but this would allow me to smooth out my ordinary weather fluctuations - and eliminate all those “bad years due to poor weather.”

Since lots of other businesses are subject to weather impacts, this makes a lot of sense - if the company has devised an effective distribution method. Small business owners are hard to get to, and many of them are tech or change averse.

—

#3. I have spotted a comment from Texas-based (but of world-wide fame) economist Sam Dinkin:

It’s tough to do a pay to play weather game without creating a security and thereby impinging on SEC’s domain, creating a proposition bet which makes it difficult to shield officers in the US from criminal action, or creating insurance which brings a company to the attention of insurance regulators. I built one at http://www.space-shot.com if you want to play one. It’s a skill tournament.

Hey!!! Sam Dinkin managed to get his comment published even though he inserted a (root) link in the text body. How come?

Tags: WeatherBill