Look what do you usually insure?

Yeah, stuff[*]. YOUR OWN stuff -- that's *yours* to insure.

You don't have an insurance policy on your neighbour's car, do you?

Or would you feel all right with me taking out a policy on, say, your house?

No, that's just fucking weird -- your neighbour's car isn't yours to insure, and your house isn't mine to insure.

So even apart from the fucking OBVIOUS conflict of interest in profiting from someone's death[**], this is indeed a fucking no-brainer: The employer doesn't OWN his employees LIVES, so they aren't his to insure.

And that whole concept of "insurable interest" is suspect, too: Seems like just a slimy way of sneaking in-effect "ownership" of someone else's life into the picture, without admitting that exactly that is what it really is. There's insurance for everything, in the world of business too (malpractice-suit insurance, anyone?), so why don't they just take out a regular "unforeseen business problem" policy? Then, *if* a death of an employee really does affect their bottom line, they get to try to prove that when they claim it on that policy.

Due diligence on the part of insurance companies would then work in the opposite way of what Brandi describes: "Well, if you have the guys washing skyscraper windows without a safety line, how 'unforeseen' was it really that one of them would fall?", or "Since Dennis was the only guy in the company who knew how that object-oriented library he'd spent the last seven years building really works, even the slightest -- and required -- amount of foresight would have told you you'd be up the creek without a paddle if you didn't do something about his notoriously lax documentation, now that he stepped in front of that bus".

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[*]: Which is why the whole concept of "life insurance" is a bit weird in the first place -- but let's not get into that, here and now.

[**]: And how the HELL could you NOT see that, even before Drew's and Brandioch's explanations??? What the fuck are you, a freaking Capitalism-Über-Alles brain-washed Randroid, replying from reflex in stead of reason?!?

Though it could of course be that I picked a name not too unlike Linus because it's also the canonical example of what might happen to him in various Linux horror scenarios. ("He doesn't even use CVS!", and so on.)

But I really can't say I know him; only met him the once, briefly, when he signed my copy of _Just for fun_.