GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”

  • 2ugly2live@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    God, I hope other places follow. I work in insurance and not only is everything about the cybertruck an absolute fucking nightmare to source, let alone find a shop for, every single goddamn owner is like the most insufferable chod. That goes for women too. Tesla drivers could already be a problem, but the truck owners are like regular Tesla owners gone feral.

    • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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      5 months ago

      I hope other places follow

      Are they actually allowed to sell these pieces of shit elsewhere?

      Also is anyone else stupid enough to buy one?

      • Nollij@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        Presumably, “other places” refers to other insurance companies. IOW, GEICO is (allegedly) denying them coverage. OP is hoping that Allstate, Progressive, etc will also deny coverage.

      • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        People knowingly buy stupid vehicles. I’m one of them. It’s expensive to drive, big, has expensive insurance and only seats two but I love it.

        • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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          5 months ago

          I didn’t realise they only had two seats!

          Is that one for each of your brain cells? 😉

          • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Someone with more than two brain cells could easily look that up and and realize they’re talking about a different vehicle before insulting a complete stranger for no reason.

            • IGuessThisIsForNSFW@yiffit.net
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              5 months ago

              I thought ‘expensive to drive’ would have given away it wasn’t a cybertruck, since the only good part about those things is that it’s an EV and probably doesn’t cost much to charge. I might not agree with your decision to drive a huge vehicle, but I’m not gonna call anyone an idiot for doing it.

              It’s also generally good form to not make spelling errors (realise) in a comment calling someone else stupid…

              • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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                5 months ago

                Please tell me the comment about the spelling mistake is some kind of weird humour (sic)

                • IGuessThisIsForNSFW@yiffit.net
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                  5 months ago

                  It is mostly tounge in cheek, but they did misspell realize in their comment and later edited it to correct it.

                  I mean if you’re gonna call someone else stupid, but you misspell it you’re kinda putting your foot in your own mouth no?

          • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            They likely didn’t know they were dangerous when they preordered and many are now stuck with them. I think they have a no resale contract for 2 years after buying.

            • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              I mean I don’t mean to sound ridiculous, but they even looked dangerous. I am not sure why anyone would assume they were safe. I didn’t even think they were street legal at first.

              That is a bummer to be stuck with one though, but you do have to be rich enough to buy one too.

  • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    GEICO claiming this isn’t true

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/7/24264330/geico-insurance-coverage-cybertruck-cancelled-dropped-policy

    "In an email to The Verge, Geico pushed back. “Geico has coverage available nationwide for the Tesla Cybertruck,” Geico spokesperson Ross Feinstein said. Feinstein did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about individual dropped policies. "

    So maybe it was something VERY specific to this persons use of the truck?

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Thank you.

      That part about how they insured his other vehicles so that PROVES this is a cyber truck-specific policy was so dumb. Insurance will deny for a million reasons or combinations of reasons.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Pretty sure they were one of the last major companies that would…

    Even if warranty pays for repairs to it, if it damages anything else the insurance still has to pay.

    The article mentions multiple examples of them just randomly shutting down during operation. That’s already bad. But this is going to be it’s first winter, it’s not surprising insurers don’t want to deal with it. They deal with large numbers, it’s not a question of “if” like an individual owner, its “when” for the insurer

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        The go pedal and the steering wheel are equivalent to a keyboard/mouse and are not physically connected to anything. If the car shuts off, the wheels go where they feel like with absolutely no driver control.

          • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Have you looked at the cybertruck’s manufacturing practices? Airplanes have redundancies for their redunancies and that’s why people use them. The cybertruck was built with the “go fast and break things” model, does not have redundancies, and actually removed some standard safety features found in every other car. Like tempered glass.

            Comparing a cyber truck to an airplane is like comparing a pinewood derby car to a military personnel carrier. One was made by a child. The other is engineered to keep as many soldiers alive as possible.

        • Auli@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          Never thought of they how would you brake if the car shutoff.

              • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                Definitely not as well but you can still use them. Cars didn’t even have vacuum assisted brakes up into the 1960s and 1970s

                • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  Yes, and they were designed with that in mind- brake pedals with more leverage for one…

                  My mom had a Ford ranger for a while that had lost its brake boost, it took a lot of force to get it to slow down, and that wasn’t even a heavy vehicle, this was back when a pickup was a two-seater…

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Class action lawsuits are gonna be a mother fucker

        Part of the purchase agreement of a Tesla agreeing to binding arbitration. This means no class action suit. You can opt out of this within the first 30 days, but you have to send a letter requesting it.

        How many Tesla owners do you think do that?

  • w3dd1e@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Semi-unrelated but insurance as a whole is bonkers right now and I’m not sure how much the average person knows. I work on commercial real estate. The whole industry is having to review tons of insurance waiver requests because insurance in some properties is out of control. Business either can’t get it for can’t afford it. Especially, in flood zones. I’m actually kind of worried about the damage these hurricanes are doing in the US. Not just in the lives lost, which is devastating, but also the financial damage of all the uninsured losses.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      That’s not bonkers that’s sanity. If you want to build your house in front of a dike don’t expect to get insurance. The trick is to build in a place where there’s a risk, not certainty, of damage.

      It’s absolutely bonkers. I don’t get how Americans can build houses in leopard enclosures and then act all surprised when, inevitably, their faces get eaten. I know you’re a settler country with little connection to the land but it’s been long enough to know which parts get flooded and which don’t, now hasn’t it. Around here you don’t even get building permits for lots of stuff in places even if you were willing to take on all financial risk yourself because it’d put unconscionable load on disaster relief, and thereby society at large.

      So, there’s two ways to go from where you are: a) Double-down on being Yanks and say “fuck you got mine sucks to be you”, abolish disaster relief and let those rugged individuals fend for themselves, or b) fucking build where it fucking makes sense. It’s not like you’re Singapore or something, you’ve got more than enough land.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      Sounds kind of like exactly what insurance is for? If you can’t get insurance for a flood zone, then maybe there’s a fucking reason for that.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        5 months ago

        The problem is people have gone and built entire cities in unsafe areas. If we were being sensible basically the entirety of Florida should not be occupied, the place is a disaster waiting to happen, or more accurately is a disaster that has already happened, but somehow nobody’s learnt from it.

    • skozzii@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      Climate change is clearly a hoax, the Republicans were right all along!

      /s

    • interurbain1er@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      If an event chance is too high the cost of insurance increase to a point where it stops making sense.

      If every house in an area is 100% guaranteed to get at least one flood event over a 5 years period, that means that every 5 years the insurer need to get in enough money to rebuild all houses, so the cost of insurance will be more than 1/5th of value of a house per year (plus operating cost, profit, and so on). There’s no other way, it’s just maths.

      Ok, the actuarial math is more complex but it boils down to getting enough cash in to pay for claims and pay the operating cost.

      At a that point people need to realize that if the risk is too high they need to accept it, plan to rebuild every 5 years on their dime, or move.

      Unfortunately people suck at understanding risk.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Wait, how is Warren Buffett nepotistic? He’s giving the vast majority of his wealth to charity. He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills. But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).

      I really don’t see him as nepotistic, he’s pretty much the best kind of billionaire.

      • Glytch@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Buffett himself is a nepo-baby. His father was a congressman who’s connections were very helpful when starting out in business and investing.

        Sure it isn’t Emerald mine money, but you can’t tell me being the son of a 4-term congressman didn’t give him a leg up.

          • Glytch@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            You’re underestimating the effect of his father knowing the right people. Yes, there was no “small million-dollar loan” and yes Warren actually hustled quite a bit to capitalize on the advantages given to him by his father, but that doesn’t erase those advantages when talking about his success.

            Hard work is not the thing that got him where he is. If it were there are millions of people working multiple who should also be billionaires. Or, better yet, no one should be a billionaire at all and we make it so people don’t have to work multiple jobs to survive, but I digress.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Hard work is not the thing that got him where he is

              No other investor has his track record, or anything close to it, so I really do think it comes down to hard work.

              Whether the type of work he did should be compensated as well as it was is certainly a valid discussion to have. That said, he’s pretty much the top of his industry and extremely well-respected by his peers, so it makes sense that he has an outsized portion of the wealth of those in his industry. That said, I absolutely agree with Buffett that we should have higher taxes on the wealthy (like Buffett) because that level of wealth concentration doesn’t benefit anyone, including the wealthy individual.

              What got him to the top of his profession absolutely was hard work. What got him to become one of the richest people in the world was that plus the tax system and other legal structures that reward that work. In other words, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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        5 months ago

        Warren buffet is literally a senator’s son… CCR has a song on the topic ;)

        He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills.

        Literally this what nepotism looks like… 17m is prolly just enough not to get eaten by estate tax.

        You are confusing estate planning with charity.

        But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).

        Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro

        Use some critical thinking? And a bigger question why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby enough to try to defend him with propaganda that he paid a lot of money to get into your head.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro

          You can literally see the donation of $48B. The pledge itself isn’t legally binding, but he has been consistently donating. He’s 94, so I don’t think it’ll take long to see the proof in the pudding.

          Here are some notes from his Wikipedia page:

          In 2008, Buffett was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of approximately $62 billion. In 2009, after donating billions of dollars to charity, he was ranked as the second richest man in the United States with a net worth of $37 billion.

          As of 2023, Buffett has given over $50 billion to charitable causes.

          I will note that the last figure probably includes the money given to his kids’ organizations (not directly to his kids).

          And a quote about inheritance for his kids:

          “I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing”

          He has a pretty consistent track record of philanthropy and statements about philanthropy, so I would be really surprised if he changed that in the last few years of his life. I guess we’ll see though.

          why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby

          Where did I say I was worshipping him? I’m merely saying I think what he’s doing is admirable and that he doesn’t qualify as a “nepo baby.” If you look into his history, he worked hard throughout his early life to save and invest, and I see no indications that his parents gave him a huge inheritance or kickstarted his career in any meaningful way. Yeah, his dad was a House Rep for 8 years (6 of those consecutive), and here’s a quote about him on his father’s Wikipedia page:

          ‘Unshakably ethical, Howard refused offers of junkets and even turned down a part of his pay. During his first term, when congressional salary was raised from $10,000 to $12,500, Howard left the extra money in the Capitol disbursement office, insisting that he had been elected at the lower salary.’ His wife said he considered only one issue when deciding whether or not to vote for a bill: ‘Will this add to, or subtract from, human liberty?’

          That doesn’t sound like the kind of man to give his son an unfair advantage…

          • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            It’s not charity to give money to an organization you (or friends or relatives) control, it’s a way to keep your assets under your control without having to pay taxes that would otherwise be required.

            • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

              • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                I think you’re missing the point - it’s not that he’s enriching himself - he’s already done that. It’s that the charity carries out his will, not necessarily the will of people who need charities.

                • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

                  The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

                  Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

                  Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

  • Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz
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    5 months ago

    More importantly, Anderson has eight vehicles. GEICO is only choosing to terminate the insurance coverage from Cybertruck and is actively pursuing renewal of his vehicle coverage for the rest. This leaves no doubt that GEICO’s issue is directly related to the Tesla Cybertruck and not to Anderson or other factors.

    Why would someone own 8 vehicles?

    Robert added, “It makes no sense, as there are other, riskier cars out there. Let me know if you recommend any insurer for the truck. I have eight cars with an amazing record. I will be canceling my entire Geico policy!! Bye-bye!”

    I can’t think of a vehicle that is more likely to be a risk to others than the Cybertruck. I’m sure insurance adjusters see how people use Tesla FSD in spite of its shortcomings. The truck is heavy as hell and breaks in all sorts of ways others vehicles don’t.

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Also, there have been no independent crash tests done so no insurance company can accurately assess the risk, so this is wholly unsurprising.

      Tesla have allegedly done their own crash tests, but they still have not released the data. It’s kinda what you’d expect when a government-regulation-hating techbro designs a “I got mine fuck you” vehicle.

      • Auli@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        The cyber truck has no crumble zones. I’d like to see Tesla’s tests.

        • Billiam@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Cody Johnston did a vid about the Cybertruck on his most recent episode of Some More News. He starts talking about the crash test Tesla did (with video) around the 8:45 mark.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        If Geico, and presumably soon others, are angering the chuds by refusing to insure this, independent crash tests definitely occurred and they were not favorable.

        You don’t have to be an obnoxious YouTuber to crash a car.

      • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I thought that was the sort of thing that the government mandated companies had to do in a controlled and transparent fashion. I wouldn’t have thought that the NTSB would allow a vehicle to be registered without a thoroughly vetted crash testing procedure.

        • Billiam@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Apparently “rare” or “limited-release” vehicles don’t get tested. Which means the Cybertruck will probably never get tested 😂

  • The Pantser@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Why are insurance companies the ones making the rational decision about saying it’s a dangerous piece of shit and not our transportation regulators? It needs to be banned.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I don’t think insurance companies care of the trucks are dangerous per se. They care if they are expensive to repair, or prone to accidents which could attach liability to the policy holder and thereby the insurance company.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I keep telling conservatives this. It makes sense to have some form of suspicion around a message when some corporation has a profit motive behind it. For instance, climate change and companies selling solar panels (although I wish they wouldn’t put SO much effort into that faint connection).

        However, that also applies for the inverse - that when insurance drops coverage for Florida homes, it’s because climate change is real and they know it will hurt their bottom line.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’m waiting for any kind of sourcing of this that’s more than “a guy on Twitter shared the text of his rejection letter.”

    This letter does not clarify if, as a matter of policy, all cybertruck insurance will be categorically rejected.

  • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    No word from the insurance company itself? This whole article seems to be based on a single tweet by a cybertruck owner. For all we know his might be modded in a way that they dropped the insurance on it.

    • fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      More specifically, the only source the article even gives is a link to a reddit post with a screenshot of the tweet, of which doesn’t have a direct link to the tweet. This is half assed journalism at best, considering they even quoted the original screenshot wrong.

      Edit: lol they couldn’t even get the person’s name straight. It changed from Robert Stevenson to Anderson after the email portion. Why’s this article even here?

        • SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          If you manage to find an article with both Elon bad themes and AI bad themes in the same story Lemmings would upvote it up into the atmosphere. You’d be on top of All for like a day!

    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      “their” is shorter than “his or her”

      (Even if you don’t care about gender inclusiveness, they is just more convenient)

      • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        If you’re correcting, sincerely, then good job.

        If you’re trolling… also, good job.

        Either way 👍

        • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          I wasn’t strictly meaning to correct so much as point out a reason why it’s more concise. I value the inclusive motivation too, if that was hard to tell; I just think there is another reason even if you don’t care about inclusion.

          It seems a lot of people are actively opposed to it though, not sure why. I’m just asking questions, you know?

          😉

          • scarabic@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I’ll bet a lot of times people just start typing “he” and tack on “or she” when they catch themselves.

      • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        The best English literature doesn’t follow the basis of most convenient or shortest. Sometimes there are other reasons to choose a word of phrase.

        The plot of Romeo and Juliet could be rewritten in a paragraph but probably wouldn’t have had the same impact.

        • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          True, but this isn’t prose or high literature. What reason do you suggest why “his or her” would be preferable to “their” in this context?

          The prescriptivist “It’s grammatically incorrect” argument doesn’t hold much water when it has been used since middle English.

          In a poem, I can see the thought:
          “I tried to fit the cadence of this clause
          Within the measure of this poem’s form
          Which has in past and present be the norm
          By which this poem, too, seeks to adhere.
          This is my authorial choice’s cause
          for my decision not to use a “their”.” But if to find an alternate way to word
          Your writing’s pronouns strikes you as absurd
          I nonetheless opine that you still ought
          To make the token effort to include
          With “their” all people by the same respect
          That you for yourself would from them expect.
          Refusing this, I feel, would be quite rude.

          • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            Comments here are a short form of writing, therefore people are allowed to phrase things and say things however they would like to. You won’t know someone’s intent before reading, so the way they write makes a difference.