ancientadvert @ancientadvert

Insurance is the oldest of the four ways. It is a nine-trillion-dollar global industry. The equation underneath it was invented in 1560 by a broke Italian gambler. His name was Girolamo Cardano. He wrote a book called Liber de Ludo Aleae. A short manual on how to win at dice. Nobody in finance read it for four hundred years. Then in 1996 a ninety-year-old man in New York wrote a book that traced every modern risk model back to that manual. He called it Against the Gods. One thesis. Every dollar of premium ever collected on Earth is a footnote to a gambler scribbling in Milan. His name was Peter Bernstein. He founded the Journal of Portfolio Management in 1974 and ran money at Bernstein-Macaulay before that. Wall Street called him the historian of risk. In 2008 a small production company filmed him for thirteen minutes. He walked through the entire five-hundred-year arc. Cardano to Pascal to Fermat to Black-Scholes. Then he stopped and said the industry had built glass towers on the back of an idea a broke Italian scribbled to settle a card debt. He died the following summer. Age ninety. Reinsurance premiums crossed six hundred billion dollars last year. Every actuary on Earth prices catastrophe risk with the same expected-value framework Cardano invented to shave the house edge in Milan. The video is thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds long. Free. Eleven years on YouTube. Twenty-nine thousand people have watched it. Almost none of them work in insurance.

Superior @andreysuperior

2 months ago

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David Lynch was heavily inspired by Irish-British painter Francis Bacon and it shows in his works.

“A Short History of America” is a haunting 1979 comic by Robert Crumb

The iconic ending photo in The Shining wasn’t staged with extras. Stanley Kubrick said he couldn’t make them look as good as the people in a real 1921 photo, calling each face “an archetype of the period.” The original image was recently rediscovered in the Getty Images archive.

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The most dangerous mistake in life is assuming people are responding to reality, when they are actually responding to perception, because once you understand that people act based on what they believe is true, not what is true, you start managing how things appear, not just how they are.

The world respects the man who can remain useful without becoming eager. Neediness lowers price. The desperate man signals that he will accept bad terms, poor treatment, and delayed dignity just to stay included.

@hthieblot Friendster - met some very sophisticated ladies on there

En 1944 la CIA publicó un libro para combatir regímenes políticos enemigos sin violencia. El documento explica cómo destruir la moral del adversario de manera pacífica. Se titula Simple Sabotage Field Manual y no hace falta que lo leas porque te lo resumo aquí: 🧵

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MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST READ

Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana

6 months ago

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I'm too old to know what a "torrent" is, so I use the 'intitle:"index.of"' trick to find all my media. You break into all sorts of abandoned web pages, ftp sites, etc. It's like the "Morrowind" of file sharing.

Ziuk, witaj znowu

@DrNeilStone BUT THE BACTERIA IS MAGIC

@zjawiskofilmowe Honky Chateau

@SamaHoole European aristocracy was proud of their gout and cardiovascular disease because the peasants didn’t eat much meat.

@saylordocs ME NEED LIQUIDITY

@LeddyLLC You deserve the Nobel prize in medicine

@Winterrose You should know when a website tracks you, you should choose whether it can - so annoying

@Arcfunmi This has to be one of the most American things ever.

@AutismCapital You can buy used Akai samplers on EBay duh…

😹🫵