So a study commissioned by the alcohol industry demonstrates that banning alcohol adverts will be a bad thing. Consider me unsurprised and cynical. I don’t know that the impact would necessarily be positive. I don’t know how much of an impact banning ads will have on consumption, but it does seem that the alcohol industry…
A few people have mentioned that they found my “live blogging” or tweeting of the 2013 LAC Seminar in Cape Town and Joburg useful. I used the hastag #LACseminar2013. I’m repeating all of them here in case they’re useful in a slightly more long-lived medium of my blog. I didn’t cover all the sessions –…
The Continuous Statistical Investment Committee of the Actuarial Society does fabulous work at gathering industry data and analysing it for broad use and consumption by actuaries and others. I can only begin to imagine the data horrors of dealing with multiple insurers, multiple sources, multiple different data problems. The analysis they do is critically useful…
Income inequality is a bad thing. It’s a suboptimal scenario. This isn’t something that is debatable. It follows from a few fairly fundamental principles: Wealth demonstrates diminishing marginal returns. This is evidenced through risk aversity and other empirical studies Happiness does generally increase with wealth, but at a decreasing rate. There’s plenty of evidence that…
URL shorteners are handy when space is limited, but each one adds another fatal point of failure. To make the point, if I want you to read about New Business Margin on Revenue. And by the way you should because it’s an important newish concept, the link will work provided your internet connection is working,…
Unsecured credit explosion? Sure. Concerns about abuses and sustainability in this sector? Absolutely. But is overall domestic credit extension out of control? Are real interest rates negative? Is the global economy strong and steaming ahead? The answer to all these questions is “no”. Here is a graph produced from public reservebank data.
So I may need to revisit my prediction about Bitcoin irrelevance. While they’re still an awful idea as a currency, they’ve had more attention this year than last. To reiterate the point about how awful they are as a currency, let’s take the price movement over the last few days. From the peak (yes, I…
Ok, it’s not exactly the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but it tastes the same. Members of prediction market Intrade, have to decide whether to cooperate or be selfish. The exchange is insolvent. It seems like the operator didn’t separate member money from its own money and then spent it. This basically makes it a ponzi scheme. It…
