• Registered (unregistered)

    Wow - also, the frist thing that came to mind about a life insurance company and failed operations was "of course there's no urgency to re-establish operations". They are sitting on a bunch of payout liabilities and now they don't have to pay them as they come because "reasons".

  • (nodebb)

    I'll add that "don't have to pay" pretty quickly morphs into "can't pay even if we wanted to" when there's no money coming in.

    This xkcd comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/2347/
    Just substitute "3rd party subcontractor" for "project" and the drawing's not a tech stack, but rather a business operations diagram. And equally rickety.

    This will not end well. Not for TruStage, not for anyone else in their web of business dependencies, and surely not for any of their customers.

    The fact the same mess exists inside nearly every "modern" company suggests yet another way we all live in a house of cards. Badly made, badly maintained cards pretty quickly morphs into "can't even if we wanted to" when there's no money coming in.

    Addendum 2026-09-21 07:41: The last sentence should read just "Badly made, badly maintained cards.". The rest is a C&P error.

  • COBOL Dilettante (unregistered)
    It also highlights something about how insurance works: it's middlemen all the way down.

    This reminds me of a book I read about the Lloyd's of London collapse in the late 1980s. Some insurance syndicates sold reinsurance to other syndicates, but also had their own excesses reinsured in the same way. If they did this enough times, the same underlying policy could keep coming back to them at different levels of reinsurance. Hence when the money ran out, some syndicates ended up suing themselves

  • Snarkenstein (unregistered)

    I have to wonder whether any of these people have ever heard of diversification.

    And don't the state insurance commissions keep a close eye on this kind of thing?

  • my name (unregistered) in reply to Snarkenstein

    could it be that some of them have been DOGEd?

  • OldCoder (unregistered)

    I'm guessing is that the reason they still haven't fixed this is because hackers got in and nuked their database(s). And their nightly backups or restores didn't work either.

  • (nodebb)

    FFL is an MLM. It doesn't surprise me that their CEO is a jerk.

    Addendum 2026-09-21 10:22: It's meant to be "weakest link". I thought at first that you took "weakest leg" from the captions and the captions got it wrong, but Meakie does seem to say "weakest leg".

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to jeremypnet

    I agree "link" is more popular but "leg" makes sense in the context of relay races. Anyone who ran track thought nothing of the use of "leg."

  • Hmmmm 🤨 (unregistered)

    I think you meant "clawbacks" instead of "chargebacks". ("A chargeback is a forced payment reversal initiated by a customer's bank over a disputed card transaction, whereas a clawback is a retroactive recovery of funds or commissions already paid out—such as when a salesperson must return a commission after a customer cancels.") ... em-dash retained for effect

    Odd that they would call it "democratizing" when you specifically remove people from the decision-making process, although I guess that results in the customers being charge...

    Also, DOGE'ing only happened to Federal agencies and it was meant to punish incompetence, fraud and waste, which is where a massive chunk of taxes go. A big part of DOGE was also to consolidate the many redundant, poorly written and poorly maintained systems.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Hmmmm 🤨

    That's what we were told DOGE was about. What really happened was that Musk destroyed a number of agencies holding businesses, especially Musk's businesses, accountable. Interesting that every single agency regulating (and in many cases, investigating) his businesses got gutted...

  • (author) in reply to Llarry

    It's also an assault on a major power that belongs to Congress: the power to fund (or not fund) agencies to further an agenda. The correct way to reform spending is acts of Congress, not a made up "department" answerable to no one. Once Congress chooses to fund a department, the executive branch is duty bound to execute it.

    // Congress also makes federal departments and names them, which is why DOGE was never a true department, and why it's still technically the Department of Defense.

Leave a comment on “The Weakest Leg”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #704546:

Log Out

« Return to Article