Nah, I've seen the lives of my friends who have kids. I'm happy for them, but my wife and I don't want that life. Sounds like having kids was the right choice for you, that's great, but don't preach at us.
We looked at the choices, and made ours. Don't tell me it was the wrong choice, without knowing literally anything about me or my wife. That's pretty patronizing.
I know a few couples that don't have children by choice. In small talk, they are constantly being asked how their children are doing, do they have any children, are they planning on having kids, etc.
Even when it's not meant to be judgmental, those kinds of questions can get old after a while. Then, add in the fact that the line of questioning often is judgmental and you'll frustrate even the most patient person.
It doesn't take an overly sensitive person to get frustrated by that. Hell, I got frustrated by the attitudes and questions, and I actually wanted (and now have) kids.
Well that tends to happen. People usually talk the most about things that are a big part of their life. So if someone wants to connect with you, they will inevitably try in certain point of life to ask if you have kids.
I really genuinely don't see the point. Yeah, it gets old when people talk about kids and ask you about it (especially when you made a desicssion to not have them), but that does not hurt my feelings. Not in a way that I would have to go around telling them to "stop preaching" etc...
Everyone around me at around 28 years of age started having a kids and guess what: our coffee talks started to revolve around parenting quite a lot more...
Makes sense since it is literally the biggest experience/thing in life for them at the time. I don't care that much - I either join in or just wait a while for another topic.
I'm not sure I understand how Kelly applies to insurance, as by definition the Kelly of any -EV bet is 0. Can you elaborate on how to do a Kelly calculation with a wager of negative expected value? Or what am I missing?
The Kelly bet for any negative arithmetic EV is 0 when you are fully in control of the bet size. Sometimes you're forced to bet, and then you might want to hedge your bet to avoid large losses which will set you back more than the insurance, when you look at it from a growth perspective.
In other words, when you are choosing between "a loss" and "no loss", then the correct Kelly bet is of course "no loss".
However, when you are choosing between "a loss" and "a different loss", which is the case when it comes to insurance, then you need to whip out your slide rule and do the numbers.
This is an example I used with another group of people in another context:
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Let's say you get the opportunity to try to hover a helicopter close to ground, for whatever reason. There's a real pilot next to you who will take control when you screw up (because hovering a helicopter is hard!)
However, there's a small (2 %) chance you will screw up so bad the other pilot won't be able to recover control and you crash the helicopter. You will be fine, but you will have to pay $10 k to repair the helicopter, if that happens.
You can get insurance before you go, which will cover $6 k of helicopter damage (so even with insurance, you have to pay $4 k in addition to the insurance premium if you crash), but cost you $150 up front.
Do you pay a $150 premium to reduce an unlikely (2 %) loss of $10 k down to a still sizeable $4 k?
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If we do the arithmetic expectations, we'll find that with insurance, the expectation is negative $200 if you don't go for the insurance, and negative $230 with the insurance. So always skip the insurance, right?
Not so fast. That is correct if we had effectively infinite money in the bank. If we have an infinite amount of money in the bank, we can repeat that "no insurance" bet over and over and get the arithmetic expectation.
In practise, we don't always have an effectively infinite amount of money compared to the losses in question, so we need to consider how the growth of what we have is affected by the losses.
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The answer then, according to the Kelly criterion, is "it depends". Specifically, it depends on how much money you have in the bank.
If you have more than $35 k in the bank, then the $10 k loss is small enough to not affect the growth of your money significantly. If you have less than that, the $10 k loss is sizeable enough that it's worth spending $150 to reduce it down to $4 k.
Going the other way around, if you have $20 k in your bank, you should be willing to spend as much as $186 on the insurance, to protect against the risk of halving your available money.
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In terms of how the calculation is done: I find it easiest to do it the way Bernoulli did it back in the 1700's when he invented the mathematical formulation of the Kelly criterion: use the geometric expecation. (This is equivalent to the arithmetic expectation of the log.)
It's strange to me how you overcomplicate it all by thinking about growth instead of utility of money. Once you switch everything becomes easier and more intuitive. You will also see why Kelly is not a good guideline for most cases as it's utility that matters (by the very definition of it) and not growth.
I commented elsewhere already, but I have a blog post where I go through some examples of applications of the Kelly Criterion, including two that are related to insurance: https://blog.paulhankin.net/kellycriterion/
Halts are temporary (generally a few hours to a few days). If it's delisted from NASDAQ it will almost certainly move to another exchange (OTC / pink sheets) and the stock will still trade.
If the stock truly is wiped out and common shareholders equity is 0, you can exercise the put, receive 100x the strike value per contract, and deliver nothing.
I think they're defining "productivity" as a fraction, i.e you used to be able to do 38 hours of work in exchange for 43 hours of your life. Now it's 38 hours of work while only using 38 hours.
Then it would be nice if you could suggest an experiment which would yield useful pricing results for him.
I don't know if this was your intention but it's kind of a pet peeve of mine when someone posts "that's useless" to a content creator without elaborating on how they would've approached the issue.
> your trades are getting a different result than if you explicitly paid a brokerage who charges a commission on it.
Yes...the average retail customer submitting a market order will generally get a better fill with PFOF. This is what most people don't usually mention when talking about those terrible high-frequency trading firms.
E.g. if a stock is trading at 10.00x10.10 and I submit a market buy via Robinhood. Citadel or someone else is going to pick that up and sell it to me for, probably, 10.08 or 10.09. Not the 10.10 I would've paid on the open market hitting the offer. It's in fact illegal for me to get a worse (higher) fill than 10.10.
Agreed... I remember a study on “do kids make you happier” and their conclusion was “kids make you happier if you want kids”.. people who didn’t want kids but had them or wanted kids but couldn’t have them were sadder, but people who didn’t want kids and didn’t have them were just as happy. Which I guess makes sense... people are happy when they get what they want!
Sure I could have rephrased it along the lines of "you have the invaluable blessing of children, and surely that's more important than a 15% pay rise?".
Your edit got under my skin way more than your comment did.
Kiss of death seemed melodramatic at best though. Every CEO, CTO, and CFO I've worked with had kids. Guess they were the lucky few who didn't have their professional career ruined by those goblin children?
Only if you care personally for the kids. Pick up a history book, filled with famous persons who had lot's of kids, but they were raised by family and staff.
Maybe to someone who isn’t ambitious or intelligent but personally, I’d rather write a great book or make great software. I believe, like Proust, that art is how you reach immortality.
What’s dumb is to tell people you’re better than Proust because you popped out some brats.
We looked at the choices, and made ours. Don't tell me it was the wrong choice, without knowing literally anything about me or my wife. That's pretty patronizing.