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My stint as a EU McD worker did give me a feel of how well scripted low skill labour can feel like pleasant work. I didn’t appreciate it at the time but it was six sigma checklist everything. There is a magic to smooth operation. In all my other jobs (dishwasher, mechanic, cleaner and now 20 yrs in insurance) nobody came close to the McD smoothness of operations. I hope I bring some of this smoothness to the people working in my lines of operation. I’m going to ask them!

What are your thought on risk / reward (more precise: cashflow matching) with regards to physical products with a software component? I think buy (hardware) + fee (software) is the natural way of looking at things. Just as you pay separately for car maintenance.

The buy-once, upgrade-years model puts too much risk on the developer. Which in turn results in lousy experiences for customers (dropped support for software, loss in value of hardware on the second hand market). I actually bought an iOS app twice because I found it crazy to be able to use the same €5-app as a baby monitor for over a decade. That is probably a single developer churning out features at a low pace, but continuously for a big part of a career.

Insurers do notice that small claims (in P&C) are a relatively small part of claims + cost so most don’t offer the high deductibles. As a bonus, with higher deductibles come relatively more lawsuits. So safer to only offer low deductibles. (My experience after 20 years in the sector.)

In my country a family perhaps pays about €5k total a year for two cars, health, house and the assortment of legal and liability insurance. That is quite modest (not for all income classes though), since there are catastrophes possible in nearly any avenue of life. A minimalist insurance scheme would save one about €2k/yr. That just isn’t that worthwhile utility wise.

Totally get your point between individual skill / trust and the agency level. In my little country we had a recent event where a governement agency, pretty much failing for the last 20 years, but especially pronounced the last 5 years suddenly came clear in a PR-move. What? Turns out a newspaper had succeeded in a neatly tuned FOIA-request (local equivalent) and forced their hand. At the same moment a vote was underway for extra budget, looking to fail. So the sudden transparency was really pretty ugly.

Surrounding collusion. I can’t tell you what to believe, but keep in mind that there are a lot of reasons why correlated moves in prices can occur without communication. Lots literature in industrial organization (the field of why markets have particular ordening and how actors behave on markets) on signaling. A though experiment might be the games of poker versus bridge on explicit vs implicit signaling / coordination.

1. If anything, this public dataset will increase 'collusion' by giving the parties in the market access to the integral set of market prices.

2. Collusion is a strong word. It hints at breaking the law, willfull action, etc. Looking at the price of a competitor and acting upon that, and internal information, is not collusion. It is completely legal and economically rational behaviour. There are hints and information everywhere on which to act. Groceries are an oligopoly, and they are ogipolistic buyers as well. Lots of information for grocers in the price bids of their suppliers, that all groceries get in tandem.

3. I've worked as an economist at one of those government agencies. They are filled with keen PhD / MSc economists looking to bust kartels and find collusion. Geographical price dispersion models are so '00s. There is a lot of positive energy and interaction between academia and government. Actually _proving_ collusion is terribly hard. Prices that move in parallel is not collusion. Proving collusion is finding documents, emails, phone calls, tracking cars with staff members of various firms to motels , paper trails of inside information in another firm. That's collusion. And I fear that's not what happens in the grocery sector.

The motel one comes to mind as real life example of how DoJ in the US prosecuted a proper cartel. The talk was by more a broad-shouldered officer type, than an economist. Certain set of transport firms always had a interesting way of responding to auctions. Always the second best offer was quite far behind and there was a pattern to which firms did or did not reply to a bid request. End of the investigation, they could trace employees of the firms to meeting in a motel before bidding. And somebody left a paper trail.

This might be a partial explanation why indie studios can be in meaningfully competition with the AAA-developers. They often integrate early and use beta, even alpha, early access. As a layman I find that approach more understandable. In my work, I always favore incremental changes to large process overhauls. We do have to understand that 10 years ago early access was a lot less common.

Thanks. I see the context now. Our asset managers are indeed lucky to have Bloomberg and such, which are easily integratable (and indeed, have been "SQL" for more than a decade now). I'm aware of the third party providers of customer financial information. Lucky to operate in a niche that is not served by them. Graydon (the only one I've been in contact with) is facing a massive disruption though. Their higher tiers are perhaps not enterprise expensive, but Trellis and the likes are probably more integratable and more affordable.

But still, the one building the LLM-integration is 4x as expensive as the one manually entering the data. It's all about TOC, scale and risk perception. I also love that "risk people" (in the banking context, I'd say: model people) think their data quality should be exceptional and then use end user computing MacGyver style models. Spit and popsicle sticks.

Am I in another world? (See my response above.) Most of the ‘hundreds of LLM apps’ I see are, well, not very fancy and struggling to keep up on accuracy in comparison to the meatspace solutions they promised to massively outperform.

I agree with your assessment that the IT risk barrier is very high in big corp so that entry might be hard for Trellis. Plus a continuous push afterwards to go back to traditional cloud once their offerings catch up.

Who, in your example, put the customers financial data in the SQL database? Because in my part of finance that’s either the customer, or an employee.

Our customers are asking for integration with a lot of their systems (say HR / patrolling), but never ever offer to hook up their accounting system. If we want financial data, we either get a PDF with their audited financial statement or in exceptional cases a custom audited statement (you know, the one where a print of a part of the ledger gets a signature from the CPA for a not insignificant bill).

So I am enthusiastic from a data science point of view. Financial data processing of customer data is / was scarce since limited to what was feasible to manually process. That is nearly in the past.

Thank you. Nice read. Even given a protective order to keep discovery confidential, the ensuing discussion about the clients lacking IT-policies that exacerbated this crisis is public.

Most entertaining would be the discussion where CrowdStrike would argue that based on common IT-risk criteria, you should never hand over the keys to an unaudited party not practicing common IT-risk best practices and (thus) the liability is on the organization. Talk about CrowdStrike managing risks worldwide. They are doing it right now!

It’s an argument that hits home at any bigcorp where the execs are entertaining the thought of suing CrowdStrike. Making it public once is a lot more effective than relaying it privately a hundred times. I expect most liability to come from abroad, where parts of the contract might be annulled because not in line with local law. But still I don’t expect it. CrowdStrike delivered the service they promised. The rest is on the customers IT. Hand over the keys and your car may be driven.

Thank you. I see your point. It's only one year of fiscal budget. That's not immense, but only impactful. I was putting some (actuarial) things I know little of together in my mind. US state pensions being unfunded, large risks being handed over to state insurers. Quite different than EU, in actually the opposite way than I'd imagine.

Wow, eye-opening, especially reading up on the wiki [1]. If the state-sponsored insurer of last resort ask about 40% of the going actuarial rate, that suggests in the long run Florida's insurance market will be collectivized. This seems to be Florida state taking on immense financial risks due to the combination of climate change and unsound regulations.

I'm not gloating though. I think what's happening to Florida right now (sea level changes, hurricanes, uninsurability) is what will happen to for example Amsterdam in a few decades. Flood risks are mostly uninsured in the Netherlands, while hurricane risks seem insured in Florida. I don't see house prices correcting for flood risks in Amsterdam, even though the risk of going under seems well inside the time boundary of current sales / mortgages. People are myopic and seem to expect states to handle all adverse effects of risk, both in the Florida case ("Florida residents already pay too much for insurance"), and in the Dutch case (no insurance, but we'll get bailed-out, right?).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Property_Insurance_Co...

Totally true. For a car insurer you are looking at what, 500 years of premium for a serious total loss collision? That means 499 people get nothing (drama?!). Actually this percentage (the “24%”) gets higher the more extreme the covered events are. Daresay, a low percentage suggests something shouldn’t be insured, since it’s a regular event and people shouldn’t pay the insurers overhead and margin for something they could save for. So the suggestion that “1%”-“24%” is a wrong combination gets the nature of insurance exactly wrong. I read the 5% in OP that once in twenty years you get a serious condition where no expenses are spared to save you. That’s amazing. (Opinions on absolute US health spending are another topic.)

These people did 40 years of fieldwork to prove the point. ‘Beak of the finch’ by Jonathan Wiener is a very readable story about their work.

Sorry, but I feel the author is reaching for a conclusion.

From OP, in the OVH-case liability seems to override the contract / waivers when OVH was both the storage And backup provider and did not actively underline that this solution is suboptimal, in a situation where multiple data centers are physically very close. That's a chain of evidence.

For CrowdStrike, it is clear that the offering is to more mature counter parties (thus raising the B2B standard of evidence) and that CrowdStrike very essentially did not do / support staging, whatever. This is indeed bad industry practice, but one that can thought to be explicit from the start of the agreement. At least in my locale you either make explicit agreements OR industry standards are leading. We do not do industry standard X is pretty clear. Read the list in OP, replace CrowdStrike with Microsoft and then think of the international liability cases you've heard from where Microsoft was found liable for downtime, hacks and other issues.

Look, liabilities will always arise in such situations. But I expect only minor liabilities will arise. Mostly (AFAIK IANAL) the terms & conditions are applied in B2B-cases. This case is pretty obvious: you got what you signed up for. CrowdStrike with full scale access to your machines and no guarantees. On the other hand, Crowdstrike lost 125 billion in market cap. That's an indication of {liabilities + loss of future profits}. Pretty massive event for not being willing to do staging. But I expect it's mostly that CrowdStrike is tainted from now on. A friend of mine had a very bad stint as an employee of CrowdStrike recently and from what I learned from that case, I'm happy that the nature of the firm is somewhat more in the open now.

Cassette tapes doubled as music storage and data storage for machines like ZX Spectrum and C64. You could just copy software like you would copy a music cassette. Code via radio would be as easy as playing a song. Another time long gone computer magazines would print code that you could enter yourself! Before that Sussman is reported to meditate on code, and acolytes where supposed to create machines that could run that code.

You are punning, but if a big tech would create a map of publicly available toilets that would be great for many demographics (any man 65+, those with bowel syndroms). It’s the little things that make life easier (or more affordable) that matter the most (in my opinion).

I know there is a debate in the group that needs “fast toilets” whether they should be free. Well that debate is moot when there are near zero options. A coffee brings what €1 of margin? A toilet could cost €1, and still help those in need. I hate paying for dirty toilets (German and Belgian gas stops grmbl, learn from France). But a clean toilet can be a lifesaver.

Emphatically NO. Involved in (IT) Risk and DORA in a firm that actually does IT risk scenario planning (the sort opposite of checkbox compliance). DORA is rubber stamping al the way round. One caveat is that we are way ahead of DORA, so treating DORA as a checkbox exercise might be situational. But I haven’t noticed a place where the rubber hits the road regulatory wise. It’s too easy to stay in checkbox compliance if the board doesn’t see IT-risk as a major concern. I’m happy one of our board members does. We’ve gone so far as to introduce a person and paper based credit line, so we can continue an outgoing cashflow if most of our processes fail (for an insurer).

As an extra set of info: from about 8-9 years old children are often allowed to cycle alone to friends within the neighborhood to play. Around 11-12 years old middle school starts and you are expected to have your kids ready to cycle the city. School has a cycling exam as well. That means getting them to learn the city, know the difference between where separated cycling paths are (safest) and knowing what are the most dangerous situations (in NED: dead angles of trucks and forcing your right of way going straight on a motorist). It quite amazing that this cycling culture is at least 60 years old.

(As a though experiment) The problem would be how to combine shareholder capitalism with post hoc lowering of prices. Why should the shareholders Novo accept less returns on their bet, in order to give Americans a better price than 'the US' with all it's market power (or lack thereof considering their institutional arrangements) can bargain for? My opinion: The US could obviously change their institutional arrangements and get lower prices for patients (plus the shortages that go along with low prices), but this change would face stiff opposition in Congress from those gaining from the current status quo. You get what you pay for. Massive prices, and all the preferential treatment of suppliers and those involved in the supply chains that money can buy.

I was contemplating the feeling “I miss my parents” just this afternoon. Bit by a tiny shard of glass. They died 18 and 11 years ago and still there are moments where I would like to share a story or have a little uplifting chat. They would have loved their grandchildren. My sister who has done so great. Life is living and letting go.

A fun thing in that broader thread is that cperciva is actually interacting with a Dropbox founder and both pulled of their vision via wildly different trajectories. Having a vision and sticking to it long term. ‘07 was a good time to be wrong on this forum.

Untrue. Even small communities have shown to be able to do maintenance on whatever piques their interest. 250 customers with a high stakes product is large enough for them (or their insurer) to collectively hire say one programmer and one mechanic. That would be more capacity than 50% of FOSS.

Sorry, the 'should' probably has an unintended negative connotation when talking about a specific study.

To delve a little deeper. They seem aware (under HOW WE CONDUCTED THIS STUDY [1]): "While the information collected by the OECD reflect the gold standard in international comparisons, it may mask differences in how countries collect their health data. Full details on how indicators were defined, as well as country-level differences in definitions, are available from the OECD."

They do not mention the specific CDC caveat mentioned above regarding the check box on US death certificates.

And then the pincher: The study points to CDC [2] where explicitly this effect is mentioned as a possible issue with the reporting via death certificates ("Efforts to improve data quality are ongoing, and these data will continue to be evaluated for possible errors.").

I'll leave the interpretation to you. They mention there is a gold standard and that some countries might not follow that gold standard. The conclusion is mainly based on US CDC data vs. OECD non-US data. They link to a CDC report mentioning this issue. Should they mention this fact in the study in the main body, or is this transparant enough?

Going back to the Noahpinion link with graph above in this discussion. For me the time series gives quite the hint that ICD-10 is not being followed appropriately and that false conclusions may arise. If this were my report, I'd take one or two paragraphs to explain why this issue doesn't affect my conclusions in the main body of text.

And then even a 'How to solve this (partially)'. As an actuary I know death is very unlikely in the childbearing age. Show a comparison table of deaths per 100k for women in the age of 20-40 between countries, including the 'US-Black' category. If that comparative line is a lot more flat (my expectation), I would really presume there is a data collection issue. The other interpretation would fail Occam's razor (that non-pregnancy death in US / US-Black categories are less likely than in other OECD-countries). First inkling: [OECD - 3], US ASMR in Women up to 20% higher than other countries.

[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2022...

[3] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_MORTAN#

The study cited uses OECD data. If the US does not adhere to the OECD guidelines for the data fields, for example by collecting a too broad measure and not correcting for it, studies are going to compare apples to pears. Not saying that the conclusion is false. But researchers should do their due diligence on the way international statistics are compiled.

How do you know this (and can explain it so well)? Next level insights these. Thank you.

Agree with this. Been on quite large deal teams in non-tech. We always made fun of the lawyers and merchant banks. They bring dozens of teens to do chores, sit in on meetings where serious business is conducted (best one was 2x4 people talking in a room with 60! people in silence in Teams) and generally do nothing that is of any value to us serious business people considering the deal. At the end of the period where we’ve worked our asses of creating possible avenues of value, both the contracts and financial arrangements materialize out of thin air. This is boring paperwork of course, so we keep on joking about the absence of value added and the fact that we pay them hundreds to thousands of euros per hour to get us coffee. (This started out as a cynical post, but this is I think how it is. They add unseen value, transactions are closed without legal and financial snags, and we deal-makers should be thankful for that. You can’t spend a week pissing on commas in a contract if someone hasn’t written it first.)

Don’t tell me “fork” and “four” are related.

Did my homework: “Old English forca, force (denoting a farm implement), based on Latin furca ‘pitchfork, forked stick’; reinforced in Middle English by Anglo-Norman French furke (also from Latin furca ).”

Four in Latin is quattuor. Scared me there.

Concertmaster is available as a paid companion app to Spotify. (For others interested in classical.)