What about the NHI sounds like a bad idea? Free, universal, comprehensive medical care – it’s a great ideal. What about our current healthcare setup sounds good? A small proportion of the population have access to excellent healthcare, but the vast majority have “access” to public health comprising long queues (often after long walks) to…
CEIOPS issued additional guidance around the standard formula for calculating capital requirements in respect of operational risk late last year. Why was a new OpRisk formula needed? The original formula for OpRisk proposed in QIS4 was widely condemned. Complaints included being too simplistic, being insensitive to risk (and basely primarily on business size) and the…
A friend “volunteered” me to answer an insurance question from Aardvark on allocating economic capital across different insurance products. After writing a short response, I received the frighteningly useful message: “Error”. Having written a brief summary of the different techniques used in this really important area, I thought I should use it as a blog…
Are you outraged at the proposed increase in electricity prices from Eskom? If you are, you’re not alone. 88% of readers polled in a News24 poll were “outraged” at the increase. The problem is that all this outrage is irrelevant at best, and dangerously distracting at worst. Why price is the wrong thing to worry…
The Taxi It’s fair to say the South African taxi industry isn’t besotted with the Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system. It’s understandable too. No matter what assurances are provided around newly jobless taxi drivers being placed within BRT, the reality is that a more efficient service with larger vehicles will need fewer drivers. It’s also…
This post is a little different from usual. It concerns VBA macros for MS Excel. Writing macros is quite easy, but writing efficient macros that run in an acceptable time requires a few tweaks. Commonly known tweaks include turning off screen updating (see the code below for an example of how this works) and then…
Wise quotes I stumbled across an interesting hypothesis today. It’s a few hundred years old so I expect many of you will already know it. It’s attributed to a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhaur* who is described by the authors and editors of Wikipedia as beinng “known for his atheistic pessimism and philosophical clarity”. All truth…
It’s slightly disconcerting how in a relatively short few years, I’ve become so hopelessly dependent on objects, services and technologies (and one food) that I can’t imagine doing without them. This is not a long list, but I’ve thought fairly hard about it and while it is probably hyperbole to say I couldn’t do without…
