http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php Actuarial discussion forum and jobs, home of the Actuarial Outpost en Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:01:49 GMT vBulletin 600 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=304 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:47:50 GMT I have just joined this... I have just joined this forum, after passing 3 examinations (P, FM, MFE).

I find that it is interesting to know that there are so many people in world are working on the same stuff.

I currently live in Tokyo. I found that less than 15 (rough figure as I did not count exactly) candidates were taking the May2010 MFE in Japan where there is only one exam center in Tokyo.

Currently, I am studying MLC for Nov2010. Tough stuff. ]]> kylui1 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=304 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=303 Sun, 04 Jul 2010 01:30:41 GMT Thought I should have a... Thought I should have a random place for all my random dull HEY GUYS YOU KNOW WHAT THINK!!!1! If nothing else it should keep me safe from the political forum. Mind you, I take no personal responsibility for what ends up here.

-- Directed sales taxes
Health and education are not properly luxuries. This is partly because these markets have a poor contractual basis: students are too poor to be primary consumers, patients are too old to be anything else. And this is partly because , especially at a baseline value, they have moral and investment implications. They are considered "important" to a proper society, and to this degree they are a "right" or a "need".

So fund socialized medicine/education via sales taxes instead of income taxes. Then only those who subscribe to this 'need' would be required to donate. For it's one thing to say "people don't need to go to college." It's another thing to say "my child needs to go to college; yours does not." The latter position is still a viable, of course, but less so.

-- The greatest charity
The greatest charity is to die. If you live a good long life, then social security, medicare, health insurance, LTC insurance, retirement savings, pensions, and assets you happen to be tying up-- these are probably worth more than whatever you've donated. (Don't forget to sum back whatever tax advantages you get, either from employee benefits or from charity, since that's all money that you're taking and using, in some sense.)

So, basically, if you feel like you haven't given enough back to society, all you have to do is to wait till retirement age and kill yourself. Society will come and collect the millions of dollars of beach-front property, nurses, hip replacements, and pill bottles you thought you had coming.

--Politics and Religion
On the way home from Regan National the cab driver tuned to the political radio. It was a lot like the Pro Football talk station at home. The DJs were very informed, both generically and specifically, and very focused on detailed, complicated, strategy and tactics. In contrast, the callers were all basically morons. Anyway I wondered who my taxi driver was rooting for, and I was, I admit, impressed that he cared enough to listen to the meandering vulgarities of everyday national politics.

I mention this because I just moved to a big blue state. People here also really care about politics. The problem is they care more and think less. In DC it's a great big game, full of touchdowns and fumbles and pass interference. Around here people are effing serious about recycling. It's about who's liberal and who's more liberal. It's pretty sad, and I end up sympathizing with conservatives. But on the other hand, I guess if I'm going to be in a state that bases its politics on spiritual axioms, I'd rather it be progressive than aynrandian. At least the progressives manage their own worship with grace, with drinking, and partying, and caring. Conservatives are barred from witnessing their own spirituality, because they that's how they got to be conservative in the first place.

Some of the people here are even super-environmentalists, so they basically worship Gaea, the old Goddess. And while I do appreciate holy water, Ave Maria, and Flannery O Conner; I have to admit I like druids and trees a lot better than priests and crosses. Have you ever seen a real nature shrine? Let me tell you, it's worth the pilgrimage. ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=303 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=302 Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:47:43 GMT I am looking for two Actex... I am looking for two Actex 2009 manuals to study for exam P that are in good condition...if you have one that you are looking to sell I would like to know. Thanks! ]]> sunnycolorado http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=302 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=300 Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:00:40 GMT My cheap ass was bothered... My cheap ass was bothered that my debtor sister went the extra yard to get me a $150 5th gen mini for christmas instead of a $50 off-brand 8-gig player. Then I was at this TV store with mom, advising her to get the 52 in and not the 60 in when suddenly every TV was advertising how the new Ipods have video cameras and I thought, "hey wait a minute, that's my ipod! I have a video camera!" Awesome, right? So far I've recorded the cats, a drunk party, insurance evidence, and the side of my face to check for zits or something.

One thing I think about these days is how friggin cheap this stuff is. Digital recording equipment is so affordable that even my cheap ass could afford to record anything. No, not anything, everything.

These days a couple hundred bucks will get you digital cameras and terabytes of hard drive space. That's 1000's of hours of decent resolution video and/or about a billion minutes of audio. Who needs photo albums? You could just as cheaply and much more easily stick a camera in your purse or on top of the fireplace and record every moment of every day. But what do you do with these archives? Catch a thought-criminal? Keep them in a box in the basement? Review holidays? Rewatch the fights you had with your wife? Remember the father that left? Listen to you talking to yourself? Watch gradual shifts of habit? See your children grow in time-lapse?

I don't know, how about add some nice voice recognition software to the mix? Now every conversation you have could be roughly translated into text. Throw in a quick search engine. Now every conversation could be searched and played back.

"Hey, you didn't tell me you were planning on building a deck!"

"Yes I did... See, right here, March 11th, listen:"...

Creepy? Yes but how creepy can something be when it's so easy? That's what the internet is about right? Making things so easy they're no longer creepy.

This is all to say that I think there's still a lot of room, from a business perspective, for information technology to blossom in scope. This isn't even to say something about, say, what wire tapping has become. Course, far as I'm concerned, the goddamned ipod is bad enough, I wash my hands of this shit. ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=300 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=299 Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:03:45 GMT not sure how, but i got on... not sure how, but i got on the scale tonight and i've dropped 10% of my weight since the start of the year. i have not been excercising much or vigorously. i have not been eating well. i have been eating less. and my stress has been more. but i know my metabolism has sunk way low. and i bet when i have my next physical, my counts will be awful...cbc, bp, probably even cholesterol and honestly, the worst my charts have ever shown was slightly elevated bp but never a concern.

i'm not complaining about the weight loss but it's weird. i only notice a tiny difference in my pants at the waist, but i notice a bigger difference in the pants around the hips and butt. i'm not complaining. just strange. in the past when i've lost any weight, the waist goes down and i drop a clothing size at least.

:shrug: ]]> IMP http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=299 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=298 Fri, 28 May 2010 05:10:44 GMT She said, "I could kill you in your sleep for what you just said."

I turned off the light, and tried to get to sleep. It had been the worst day of my life, and I was quite done with it. It had started with the smallest perceivable irregularities. Like when I went to make an omelet, the color of the refrigerator seemed fascist, except it didn’t just seem, it really was, or it really is fascist. It's that off-white you see in every Mao poster. Or Portia’s hair, for example, had a look of Lolita bitterness to it, like she might go and get an ugly tattoo on her bottom in the afternoon. And maybe she really did. I mean to say, it’s not like I was deluded into thinking that the day was especially irritable. It was that I was more awake, that morning, to a world that is always irritable.

My wife. The woman that I suppose might kill me tonight, bothered me most of all. And again, to excuse her, to give her the grace she deserves, I must explain that this is not her doing either. It’s more like I hate God, or let’s say the sun, and all the light it produces, and it just so happens that my wife, Margaret, reflects more light than anything else in the world.

When I told her this, she said "are you calling me fat?"

"Margaret," I could have said right then, "I don't know. Your freckles are dusty street lamps that make it impossible for telescopes to see past your neckline."

But that’s not what I said. ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=298 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=297 Fri, 14 May 2010 03:32:07 GMT A few years ago, H and I went... A few years ago, H and I went out to drink with the Canadians across the street. They talked about starting a restaurant. H and I didn't have any cool plans like that, but we were eager to live our lives too. Then we went home and went to bed, and I couldn't sleep. This thought, in its entirety, popped right into my head:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

It was shocking. Not the idea itself, which is just a silly thing really, but how the whole damn thing slipped unannounced into my head, in the middle of the night, as though a fully-grown mouse, trying to escape the cold, had squeezed through my earlobe.

I've never taken much pride in my analytical ability. I've always been afraid of becoming someone's calculator, and surely I couldn't be more on that track now. But all my life I've also turned away from the dismal science, and swam upstream instead, through a whole river of art and music. Saying "yes, I'll think because it's fun and it's easy but I won't forget what it's like to feel either."

And even now that I understand that math is beautiful, rich with creative elements, the art of truth you might say, I still don't want to be one of those people whose smile stops short of his glasses, so I shunned my own ideas. But see how they come anyway. I hope they keep coming. ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=297 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=288 Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:59:23 GMT All this electronic media... All this electronic media flushes my brain. I'm ADD and I feel poisoned all the time. That's why I have to write. It's so loud in my head, I have to shout thoughts against the vomitous chaos, and there can be no peace. It is a war between sound and noise. Life left silence for death.

I just watched the princess bride again and what stood out this time was the true-love-story where the lady tells the farm boy what to do and the farm boy says "as you wish". You don't see a lot of ladies on farms anymore. More likely to find them on buzzing about a mall or a club or the internet, where not talking is equivalent to not existing. The greatest communication technologies to date do nothing for silent communion. And "as you wish" is a pretty retarded facebook status comment.

(And what about Audre? Didn't we have peace? You'd think I could love her for just that. How did I lose it? Was it the thunder of other women's hooves? Or just the necessary and sufficient message of one possible probable hen? If I need to save myself I must need another to save me too.)

I've been tutoring advanced math, which means I've been studying it. It's more righteous than actuarial science, but it's still a hub of nonsense and sense. It's a less dirty city, but it's still a city, and maybe I want a wilderness or even a cave. I've been studying and also reading DH Lawrence while undergoing an 'experimental pain study' at the hospital. (Can you believe that an experimental pain study should be a breath of fresh air? In my life it is.) And you know that guy is always going on about the colliers and their dismal unscience, about finding beauty in industrial waste. And you know what? At least all the dirt and smog in that modern air doesn't clog their dumb brains. I mean to say, I decided that if I don't get these jobs I've applied for, I'm going to look hard into becoming an industrial worker for a while. I know I need to begin my actuarial career soon, or never, but you know what, screw any lesser brain-work. Let me try enslaving my body for a change. See what happens if I can turn some of this sense and nonsense away from my door. ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=288 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=287 Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:06:51 GMT I'd be so much happier if people would be how I want them to be. No more idiots clogging up traffic or otherwise getting in my way. I've noticed a lot of stress in my life is caused by other people. If everyone would just listen to me and do what I tell them, we'd all be alot happier. Also, that girl from High school should totally have chosen me not that other guy. He made her so unhappy. I knew that if she chose me we could have been happy. Now, because of her not listening to me, she's ruined the fun we could have had. ]]> Hugh Jass http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=287 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=285 Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:32:12 GMT Couldn't they have come up with a better word? Blog sounds like "blah" and "log". Blah=nothing important to say, log=feces. So it's really a pretty bad word. I recommend calling these knolbits. knol=knowledge, bits=tidbits. Tidbits of knowledge. ]]> Hugh Jass http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=285 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=283 Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:54:25 GMT Went to the library. Came... Went to the library. Came home with 4 "for dummies" books: Joomla, SQL, Access, VBA. All of them are too light, partly because I'm not a dummy, and partly because nobody needs a book to learn that stuff. But I might have an interview coming up in a couple days, and it would be good to know all the basics. And I'm going crazy again, and if I don't do something then I don't know what I'm going to do.

I reached out to my friends. About being depressed. Just the other day. I don't normally think of that as something you do. It's supposed to be something that sneaks up on you. You're supposed to get really upset one day when you're trying to do the dishes and someone says "hey why are you so upset?" Or else you're supposed to be driving one day, and mention, accidentally, nonchalantly, that you feel like driving into something.

I don't feel like driving into anything. That's why I don't really know if I'm depressed. What do I feel? I feel like having a duel. Or sleeping on the roof. I don't feel like dancing. I wish I could write. That's why I think I might depressed, even though I don't feel like crashing into anything: because I can't write.

My writing voice is the closest approximation of my living soul. It's like visible breath on a cold day. When I have spoken, I am full. When I need to speak, I am hungry. When I can't speak, well then plans like self deprecation and suicide become redundant.

Why do we assume the soul is rock? That it can holds us up, or keep us down? Is it not obvious that this stuff is thin, thin as plasma and as light as the luminiferous aether? That it comes and goes like green to the grass? Is it wishful thinking that makes people believe it is heavy, or does the belief itself carry some weight.

My voice is three parts. One part Earth, one part Hell, one part that great bridge built by Sin and Death. The part that is Earth is mostly working. I'm having trouble picking up novels, but I still have logic in my heart. Hell is definitely lacking in color right now, but that's not too unusual either, to be honest, I've never had many exciting Jungian dreams. It's the bridge I think that has sustained the most damage. My earthly machinations have no fire. My demon thoughts have no instantiation in the physics engine of my consciousness.

How to mend. How to mend? ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=283 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=282 Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:30:35 GMT When I walked away from the... When I walked away from the Marine Corps to start my family and new career, I never thought it would be this uneventful.

I attend class, get good grades, end up being bored. I studied for the first actuarial exam, learned a lot, and felt fantastic after passing it.

I got married, loved my honeymoon and haven't been happier in my entire life. It's a bit of work, but it's very much worth it.

I won't pretend to have a good grasp on the job market, but from the looks of things around campus and on the forums here... it's not exactly the best. I spoke to a few companies at the career fair, got 3 calls, 3 interview offers and 1 internship out of it. I actually declined one interview because I had already started at my internship and I felt it would be unprofessional for me to waste their time and mine with the interview. Not to mention that few people have enjoyed their internship with that particular company.

I have my internship. It's year-round. Right now it's 25 hours a week. I hope this counts as half-year experience when I'm considered for full time somewhere else.

So... the pursuit of employment is filled full of unknowns. Hopefully things work out in a year or so. ]]> Scars http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=282 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=280 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:52:46 GMT Today begins the official... Today begins the official first day of studying for Exam FM.

Lessons learned, with regards to studying, from Exam P should be very helpful in my preparation for this exam. What I find to be interesting is that this is listed as the "second" exam for both the SOA and CAS, but most actuarial students found FM to be easier than P. I think that it might have a lot to do with people figuring out how to study.

That's a funny phrase isn't it? "How to study" seems like saying "How to read" or "How to write" but it's so much more than that. When I was studying for Exam P, I had the help of a classmate or two to help me understand the material. Unfortunately, it wasn't in our group study sessions that I had big breakthroughs on concepts... it was studying alone, listening to some soft music, staring at the book, flipping my pen and having torn out and ripped up a few dozen pieces of papers before things would really sink in. Some like to take short, regular breaks to keep their mind fresh. That's not me! I sit for hours upon hours working on problems over and over again. At my peek, I was studied 9 hours without a break (even missed lunch). And from all that, I learned that if I had more time between decided to start studying and the exam, I could have scaled this sort of thing WAY back.

Studying, to most early actuaries, is something we've never done. Look around, most of the people you know have always found school to be easy, trivial and probably even boring. We've never had to study. Heck, most of us probably heard the word study and quietly laughed inside with the thought of "Maybe you had to, but..."

I'm lucky I suppose. I've known how to study for years because of my IT background and studying for certifications. Studying, in all seriousness, is really teaching yourself. I don't mean reviewing until you "get it." I'm talking about knowing nothing about the material walking in and feeling like some sort of an expert walking out. And that, my friends, is a very humbling and rewarding process.

Good luck to me. Here goes round two. ]]> Scars http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=280 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=279 Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:59:07 GMT This is my first blog post,... This is my first blog post, ever. I am just seeing how it works. I would like to wish everyone a happy MLK Jr. day. Thank you. ]]> Jasmine Pearl http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=279 http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=278 Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:22:42 GMT I use this blog almost... I use this blog almost exclusively for purging my most obsessive and boring thoughts. Sorry to anyone that reads it. This post is no different. Rachel's party is coming up and I've been derelict, swimming in a garbage heap of mind. I need to write it all off now.

First of all, I'm moving from the age of sand into the era of sawdust. The grainy dry bits that get caught in your skin and in your hair and fall from her hair into my eyes, those are all becoming the grains of new projects. I'm hand replacing my car mirror. I'm learning how to make an omelet. I'm rebuilding a dresser. I'm learning how to program an iphone. All everyday practical knowledge that every real man should have, and why I shouldn't I?

Also, I'm rescrounging two important ideologies. You might say: hey sweetiepie, who cares about morals and mores? And I'd say, well I'd rather think about how I'm a certain kind of philosopher than about how I'm broke and lonely, with no possible means of fixing either.

Then there's this business in Haiti. The earthquake. The sympathetic are donating. The president, of course, as leader of the sympathetic is donating. The libertarians of course are pissed. I'm not doing anything really.

It's weird when we try to look at the whole world as a problem. Too much scope. What's to stop anyone from declaring their need for our help? Same reason it's hard to get a non-local job in a field you didn't study in college. What's to stop anyone from getting that job? It's so much easier to look next door. But of course there's nothing to justify looking next door when you can see for miles and miles.

What I mean to say is heavier than that. It's more like this. We can look at the people of Haiti, and watch them screaming from under the wreckage, and be happy that they're there, struggling to survive. Or we can be sad that they're there, and wish they never existed in the first place. In the former case, maybe we shouldn't send help because if we always helped people to survive than the story of survival would be lost. In the latter case, maybe we shouldn't send help because those people will have kids and those kids will also die. Everyone does die, and screaming from under a building, while a bad death, isn't really that much worse than most deaths, even in America MY country Tis of Thee.

What I mean to say is, we can try to solve the world, or we can try to say the world is already solved, and its best to just leave it alone for freedoms sake. Or we can look at the biggest picture I can think of, which is that people are born, they make choices, they struggle, and then they die. And we can try to inform and optimize each part of this process, by choosing who should be born, when they should die, what sorts of struggles and choices are allocated to each person. The whole shebang.

None of this has anything to do with government. Government is just what we call down upon us. Who really cares about the sorts of liberties we give up. They are the seeds of greater liberties. Why do you get so caught up in it?

Getting caught up in things is what we do best. It's what I've been training my whole life not to do. Not out of moral obligation, but because I want out. We've been talking about this. Moving to the farthest reaches of the world and forgetting about it. Or better yet not forgetting about it, but living in it, but not of of it. Or is it living of it but not in it? Anyway. What I mean to say is I want an island with fishes but no bosses. Or a Swiss Family Robinson or a Serenity or a Bloomsbury Group because frankly you people don't impress me. All your small cares and all your small problems. I would commit suicide if I didn't believe in another side to things. The most important things: family, dreaming, building, sex, laughing, breakfast. These things that nobody makes time to do. That's what everyone says but a small percentage of us actually mean it. If someone actually released you, the people of the world, to freely be and do and spend and love as you saw fit, you'd play golf everyday.

That's why every decent story about people like me ends in escape. Not escape from the world, but escape from the rest of the world. From the terrible necessity of tedium, I've lost myself to it. I've lost my mind among you people. I need a vacation and I believe that if you need a vacation for one day then you need a vacation for another day. Proof by induction. Einmal ist keinmal. Not that I don't want to work, but lord am I sick of this-here-now. I'm perfectly happy producing but on my own terms, uninformed by you and you and you. I mean just like I said I'd rather live a part from the world, and I could support it so much better. Like Serenity fighting the empire. Like Virginia Woolf as a suffragist. My friends likewise, ought to be apart from this gravy dip of a planet. They ought to know how to live beside me and not make sh** for no real reason. And we ought to build, not just build, but seriously create internal social structures that are more beautiful than anything you and you and you have ever dreamed of. Because we know how to dream, damnit, and will do so given the chance. And we ought to be able to do harmoniously. Harmony isn't that complicated you know. Here's how the proof.

1. I live in my head.
2. Two heads are better than one.

Sarah and I we live in such balance, swinging from each other in fantastic arcs like a foucault pendulum. I've started to realize the only reason I can't share that unity with everyone else is because everyone else is a d***b** the end. End of story. Sweetiepie out. ]]> sweetiepie http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/blog.php?b=278