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Admin
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".
Admin
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.
Admin
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
Admin
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?
Admin
could it be that some of them have been DOGEd?
Admin
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.
Admin
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".
Admin
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."
Admin
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.
Admin
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...
Admin
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.
Admin
There's a problem, though; there's a big trend for Congress to write vague mandates, which sort of purposefully create departments that aren't answerable to elected officials outside of the Executive branch. See FCC v. Consumers’ Research, 2025, which upheld the validity of adequate "intelligible principle" to constrain the agency's discretion, so "duty bound to execute it" exists within a really big grey area (bounded on the other side by West Virginia v. EPA, 2022).
That leaves the unelected agencies (read corporate capture with oversight from the Executive branch) to perform tasks like deciding on the regulations themselves. It's also up to the agency how it performs the mandated task, including whether or not it should modernize, consolidate, lay-off etc.
Then throw in a heavy dose of networking/back-scratching/turmeric... :D
Admin
@Hmmmm: The intent was to make the decisions based on sound reason rather than political whim. It's not good. The alternative of political control is even worse, though.
Admin
Man, DOGE apologists? I never thought I'd meet one, even on-line.
Admin
To be fair, looking at the whole thing as an outsider the whole thing sounds like a good idea just terribly implemented. Or, well, rather it was a corrupt scheme incompetently implemented by a fraudster techbro and his team of henchmen but advertised under a cover story that would have been a good idea had it been true. Sort of like Rhodesia.
But you get my underlying point.
Admin
Hahahaha
Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Admin
It depends on what "idea" is pointing at. If the idea is an honest accounting of spending, yes, it's a good idea and actually, it's already implemented. Government accounting is incredibly detailed (outside of the Pentagon anyway). There are multiple federal agencies responsible for overseeing this. Everyone already thinks it's a good idea and is already doing it.
If the idea is "an unaccountable executive branch strike squad should reallocate funding and cut programs that were instituted by congress"- that's a terrible idea. Hell, we've run multiple private sector versions of this story, where new management comes in and starts ripping out Chesterton's Fence without understanding why it was there in the first place.
And here's the thing, they weren't even doing lip service to the "good idea" part: they were literally parading around with chainsaws and bragging about how much damage they intended to do.
Admin
Honestly, is it really so hard to keep politics out of a Tech site? It's like some people just can't resist it. Bad enough that a lot misinformation is being peddled here by people who believe everything from sources connected to those fighting to keep their culture of corruption that has existed for decades, as if they were all just going to give up and go quietly into the night without a peep. Seriously, this is NOT the place for these discussions, there are SO MANY other places for it, it's not censorship, it's just keeping on the topic that people actually come here for and not that for which most don't.
Admin
516052 - Your first sentence had me already composing a reply, but then I read the rest of your post and that was exactly what my reply was going to be. :-)
Admin
That's politics. Or should I say that it's the pretext being used to advance a political party. Wait, that's not even right - it's advancing a collection of scammers masquerading as a political party.
Basically, writing "let's keep politics out of here" and advancing political positions in the same post really, really undermines your credibility.
Admin
@Jonathan Rubbish. It is a very basic failure of understanding on your part. Most readers here do NOT want to come here have the tech-related articles suddenly taken over by the politics of the days. As I have seen other people point out in this and various other threads, there are a lot of places better suited to this. Kindly leave it out of places like this where it clearly does NOT belong. This hijacking threads that has been happening for a while here just needs to stop.
Admin
I was referring to the idea of modernizing, systematizing, consolidating and updating the governments computer infrastructure to reduce the potential for waste, corruption and error.
I've worked with governments and their systems. And if your country is anything like all the others on earth its government computer systems are going to be a mess. Half the things will still be running on hand cranked analytical machines (or servers with about as much processing power at least), every department of every agency has its own incompatible system and the only way they ever talk to each other is if you as a private citizen personally walk from one to the other with a piece of paper and manually request updates.
And the primary driver behind this all is institutional inertia. Which is to say, petty fiefdoms set up by every department head, old grognard with hidden knowledge or really anyone in any position to do so all stubbornly resisting any sort of change that might replace them or even worse... make their work transparent and reviewable. Even when a new system arrives it ends up neutered, forced to comply with old procedures and thus adds no efficiency or worse ends up just being a shell over the old one.
So an executive task force with a free hand to go in and ruffle every feather imaginable and just fix things even if it means dragging anyone and everyone who complains or obstructs things into the future by their balls and forcing them to get with the program no matter how much they whine is what I and many others would call a wet dream.
It's also a very bad idea in practice since you are basically taking a wrecking ball to your public administration and praying that the guy in charge is good enough to put the pieces together afterward.
But it sounds really nice.
Admin
You should be talking to Hmmmm. Advocating DOGE is political, and that's what kicked the whole thing off.
Also, if you just want it to go away, then stop responding. That's the best strategy, like not using "Reply All" to tell people to stop "Reply All"ing.
Admin
I kindly disagree, that post wasn't the hijacking point, it was everyone who used that as an excuse to drag this thread into completely off-topic territory. Again, this really needs to stop happening here regardless of beliefs.
Admin
Nope, "Also, DOGE'ing only happened to Federal agencies and it was meant to punish incompetence...." kicked it all off. Elon advocates don't get one freebie. And I repeat myself, you are free to stop responding whenever you want. Continuing to reply makes it look like you're more interested in having the last word than it stopping happening.
Admin
Jonathan, except many of the people the jumped misrepresented what that organization was actually doing, when the facts are that it was presenting findings, and not actually acting on them themselves, something that has been misreported a lot, along with it having no accountability, which is also not true; it's just as much so as any other agency created by executive order, along with the EPA, the Peace Corp, the National Labor Relations Board, the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
I will grant that that statement might have been better left out, but that it was not the first statement to mention it, as @noname first poses a question, though neither one fully dragged it into a political discussion. The one you quoted just provided factual followup to the first. It was those who came after that thought that made it ok to just hijack the rest of the thread.