Risk Management

Ovaltine. Why do they call it Ovaltine? The glass is round, the container is round – why don\’t they call it Roundtine?

This risk management stuff you gave me is gold, Jerry!

Yes, I often end up making jokes when I\’m frustrated by current world events. I\’ve got three links for you people, read them all after the jump.

We\’ll start with this link (Quicktime required, first twenty seconds or so somewhat NSFW, depending on your work environment). I don\’t know this Ze Frank, but I like this entry quite a bit. The show from the day before is good too. I haven\’t watched any more than that.

But so the subject is risk management, and how no one is talking about it w/r/t The War on Terra! Here\’s an article that\’s been flying around the office lately, in convenient PDF format. Link. Personally, I\’m partial to Senator McCain\’s quote:

\”Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It\’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud! You\’re almost certainly going to be okay. And in the unlikely event you\’re not, do you really want to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape? That\’s not a life worth living, is it?\”

If only he\’d say something like that on tv – it\’d be a great soundbite. Sadly, that\’d probably be politically unwise, and I\’m sure he knows it. He said it in a book. Nobody reads books.

And finally: F\’in A, Cotton. F\’in A.


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5 responses to “Risk Management”

  1. alex Avatar

    Hold on, wait. One more: Liquids on a Plane

  2. monkey Avatar
    monkey

    Ze Frank is right on the ball. I don’t really have much to offer by way of interesting new thoughts, so I’ll just put in what my stock response has been for the last few months:
    J: Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it.
    K: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

    With the occasional (read: extremely rare and preventable) mountan lion attack around here, and with bears and lions occasionally wandering into backyards, people sometimes ask something to the effect of “what’s the most dangerous animal in the forest here?” The answer of course is “people.”

    Wait. The guy who wrote the pdf is the *Woody Hayes* Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center at (the) Ohio State University. Woody Hayes?

  3. wadE Avatar

    yo… the ze frank from 8/7 is worth checking out… I like this new site… at least he updates more often than askaninja… lazy-ass ninjas…

  4. alex Avatar

    Another excellent opinion piece can be found here.

  5. anderswa Avatar

    monkey wrote: “The guy who wrote the pdf is the *Woody Hayes* Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center at (the) Ohio State University. Woody Hayes?”

    you have to assume it’s the same one, right? i wonder if being endowed with that position allows one to punch misbehaving students in the face?

    i thought the PDF was great; the most telling line to me:

    “What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.” Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled “a false sense of insecurity.”

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