[Nexus 6P General] cb474:
You really haven't read (or understood) what I said. I dicuss the fact that the phone insurance is for two years and then I prorate my calculation over one year, so that I can compare apples to apples. In other words, I just considered half of the $89 Nexus Protect cost, when I did the calculation, so I could get cost per year. If you're not using the same units to compare two things (which your examples don't) then you have made a meaningless comparison (which you have).

So in fact you're doing exactly what you accuse me of (a typical argumentative strategy when one has no ground to stand on) by picking facts to fit your narrative, shifting your argument around inconsistently, comparing apples and oranges, and so on.

I was thinking about this, before you replied. A big problem with your approach to this is that you outlne specific scenarios and then make judgements based on those scenarios, as if they represent what will happen generally. So you assume (for no reason) that you will have one accident in ten years and then make a calculation of cost for insurance based on that. This is essentially the same as making judgments in hindsight. You chose a specific scenario, decide that is what will happen, exclude all other possible scenarios, and then it's easy to say whether it is worth the insurance or not.

I can pick and choose a scenario in which phone insurance will pay off or won't pay off easily. But the problem (and the point of insurance) is that you don't know what will happen. You make your decisions before you know the outcome. Making up one scenario (out of many possible) as if that's what will happen is basically assuming you already know what will have happend and your are just making the obvious choice that hindsight offers.

But since you don't know what will happen, the only real basis for a decision is what is the cost of the insurance, what is the maximum possible benefit, what is the probability that you will make a claim, and what is the downside if you don't have the insurance. So if the downside for not having the insurance is low and the cost is high, that is a bad choice (which is what phone insurance is). If the downside of not having insurance is devastating and the cost is reasonable, that is a good choice (which is what liability insurance is).

So you keep trying to put things in terms of specific concrete scenarios, which is a way of ignoring all the other possibilities. When really you have to think in terms of probabilities, costs, and risks. But the latter way of thinking is more abstract, harder to do, and that's why it's so easy for insurance companies to fool people with things like phone insurance.

Indeed ironically it's the low risk events (in terms of financial loss) like phone damage that are the most compelling to people because they're easy to imagine (everyone just about has probably dropped their phone or damaged it in some at least minor way). Whereas the relatively remote probability of high risk events (in terms of financial consequences) like killing or maiming someone in an accident is much more abstract and harder to imagine, because few people have an experience of this and everyone thinks they are a good driver. The result being people overinsure for things that hardly matter and underinsure for the things that might destroy them.

Anyway, as they say, you can lead a horse to water....