The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2026-09-21 Reply 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".

WTFGuy · 2026-09-21 Reply Edit 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 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.

2026-09-21 Reply Admin

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

2026-09-21 Reply 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?

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