Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulS
Jim, you're an actuary. Actuarial pricing is known as being as much an art as a science. No actuary can price something perfectly - there are too many unknowns. You look at risk and the potential payout for different scenarios. You don't have perfect information and there are things you know are so remote they are unlikely to happen - however, occasionally they do. When those outliers occur, your company is going to take a big hit for that. Katrina was 1 of those outliers and many Insurance Companies went out of business bc their reserves were not adequate – they did not anticipate a hurricane of that magnitude and thus didn’t reserve for that many claims. Our embassies are always going to be vulnerable bc we want them to show how open we are as a society. They are going to always be vulnerable to a mortar being shot into them. As much as we like, we can’t put them on an island with a dome over them.
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Paul, as usual, you sound like you know what you are talking about. As an actuary, I also know that I need to allow for the unknown, for contingencies. I learned that my first month of my first semester at UCONN. If I told my boss that all our claims were paid and closed and told him we could therefore give ourselves huge bonuses...and then another $25 million claim comes in and now there's no money to pay for it, I'd get fired on the spot, no questions. Similarly, when you send peole to the few places on the planet that are legitimately dangerous, you cannot have the cavalry more than a 13 hour flight time away. You just can't. When you ask people to go into harm's way, you owe them more than that. You don't need a PhD in international relations to know that. If Hilary doesn't know that, she needs to stay on the lecture circuit. Just my $0.02.
"When those outliers occur, your company is going to take a big hit for that. Katrina was 1 of those outliers "
true. Which is why you need to have money set aside to pay for those outliers. You know they will occur, you just can't know when. So you set up a rainy day fund. Which is precisely what Obama/Clinton did NOT do here. We can't predict when and where the jihadists will strike. What we can do, what we must do, is have a quick recation force that i snever more than a few hours' away, if someon needs to call the cavalry. That i snot beyond our capabilities. We chose not to have that set up, because the administration didn't want there to be any outliers. Not wanting them, doesn't mean they won't occur.
I get that you can't predict every possible event. But you don't need to be Nostradamus (spelling?) to know that when you send Americans to the Middle East in a public capacity, that they are potential targets.
I think you are every bit as upset as I am over what happened. I don't claim that my side has a monopoly on empathy for the families. I just think there was evidence to suggest that teh threat was there.
"we can’t put them on an island with a dome over them."
No one suggested that. But the closest help cannot be half a world away either, it just can't.
I don't want my kids dealing with this, and they will be. Pisses me off.