When presented with something ridiculous, my brain immediately goes to “what conditions would make this true”.
Sometimes it’s enlightening sometimes it’s just amusing.
When sales reps would come to me begging me to lower the premium to whatever amount the competitor was charging, I would do this. “What set of assumptions would make that a rational premium?”
Every once in a while I’d say “yeah, sure, that’s pretty close to our actual assumptions… go ahead”. But the other 98% of the time I’d go to the sales rep and say “to justify that premium I would have to assume that people in this group are 90% less likely to die than our normal mortality assumption. Do you have any reason to believe that’s actually the case?” Then he’d give me a sob story about how the HR rep is his college buddy and he really wants to help out his buddy. And I’d respond with “if you want to help your buddy, tell him to run - don’t walk - to our competitor and sign before the competitor realizes what a colossal mistake they made and rescinds the quote.”
Yeah. Modern farming has taken much of the fun out of a bull’s life. The days of the bull and his harem disappeared along with the family farm in the past 60 years.
It varied by farmer. My dad kept a bull until he retired from farming around 1980. However the big corporate farm next to ours dispensed with their own bull much earlier.
Never thought I would be discussing the artificial insemination of cattle on an actuarial discussion forum!
“The only reason he stays where he is is because everybody’s afraid of him,” Ryan said. “They’re afraid of him going after them, hurting their own ambition. But as soon as you sort of get the herd mentality going, it’s unstoppable.”
Paul Ryan doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of people in his party.
