Vox Nihili

Adding on. This is all crappish btw. All in the name of fun.

More thoughts on consistency:

One of the things I do in my line of work is reviewing actuarial assumptions set by the pension scheme’s employer, such that they are reasonable for estimating the scheme’s liabilities. For example, say we think the discount rate should be 5% based on market conditions, but the employer uses a discount rate of 7% instead. Theoretically it’s not quite right, and we’d classify this assumption as “weak”, or “aggressive” because discounting on a higher figure might result in the liabilities being underestimated. Blah blah blah whatever it is, it’s not good. BUT, say the same methodology was adopted last year i.e. 2% above market conditions, and that was approved. Hence if it was given the “OK” last year, and if this year’s method of setting the assumption is consistent with last year, this implies that it should also be “OK” this year. No problems then. Such is the power of consistency.

How do you create incentives such that people who are a few minutes late are not worse off from people who are say, an hour late?

I was 10 minutes late into work today and blindly walked into our weekly Tuesday morning assembly. With everyone in the department gathered round, I could not avoid the undesirable attention as I made my grand entrance. Because being 10 minutes past is relatively small on the punctuality measuring scale, I completely forgot about the morning meeting for I hadn’t put in much thought into avoiding being caught. Whilst if I knew I was going to be very late, I would have taken extra means to avoid being scorn upon. And by that, I would have thought about using another entrance, gracefully blend myself into the meeting (or completely miss it if necessary) and avoid being noticed. Furthermore, if on a regular day I was 10 minutes late, it’s most likely I was nothing else but late. No escape. Now given I arrive a time significantly later than intended, but made clever improvisations to the situation, I might have people assumed I had a more important prior engagement. An acceptable excuse. So why should someone who is slightly unpunctual receive more humiliation than someone who abuses punctuality more? How can this be avoided?

0.26? As DeLong says, “Be afraid, be somewhat afraid.”

Yes there is. Hence the Fed responded to the emergency call by slashing rates down 75 bps. The cut though, is not as deep as expected which might imply the situation is not as bad as it seems. Or is that what they want us to think? This is like throwing buckets of water into a building on fire. It’s not enough and may in fact, prolong the burning process. Since there will be casualties anyway, better to let the fire burn?

Feel free to correct the payoffs.

Wikied:

“Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. memorialized the shay in his light poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”. The fictional deacon built this wonderful one horse shay so it wouldn’t break down. He built it from the very best of materials so that each part is just as strong, straight, and durable as every component. In Holmes’ humorous, yet “logical”, twist, the shay endures for a hundred years to the day (actually to the moment of the 100th year of the Lisbon Earthquake–to the precise hour of the earthquake shock) then it went to pieces all at once, and nothing first, — just as bubbles do when they burst. It was built in such a logical way that it ran a hundred years to a day.”

The same might be said for the mighty Bear Stearns.

We know her as the mother of modern nursing. But little did we know her reputation as a pioneer of design information and her innovation in the graphical portrayal of statistics. In her Coxcomb diagram, she brings home in an emphatic manner how British deaths owe principally to “Preventible or Mitigable Zymotic Diseases” rather than the wounds of war i.e. how many more soldiers died off the battlefield than on it.

The Economist teaches how to interpret:

“As with today’s pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it is the radius of each slice (the distance from the common centre to the outer edge) rather than the angle that is altered to achieve this.”

Quite a lady, she is.