IT’S MARCH!!!
I’d like to say this month’s voting incentive pic is seasonal, but nah. It is, however, a picture! If you’d like to see it…
VOTE TO BECOME THE KING OF CARTOONS!!!
As for this comic…
Lots of problems getting this one finished. Elements got corrupted, the file started acting really weird, and it was only through sheer luck that I was ultimately able to export a decent PNG version.
Anyway, more Satan. This arc is obviously going to be primarily Satan-centric, though Puck and the gang will be entering the picture relatively soon. (And by ‘relatively soon’, I probably mean ‘in two or three months’). We’re playing the long game here.
Oh no.
Why O Why were numbers invented.
My mom, the Jule Cat, cares not for numbers.
She never had a name until humans were involved.
Like most … animals … we identify according to the smell of our butt.
DO NOT JUDGE US.
Other than humans only whales have names. But they are actually sounds, that travel a thousand miles.
sigh
At least I am friends, with a Dragon, that is so delusional he believes he is Saint Patrick.
He hates snakes, like me.
Wish I could post a pic of him.
He is glorious.
I wish you could post a pic too.
Dragon Saint Patrick shares his hatred of snake with our neighor, the 12 foot SKELETON Saint Patrick. RED beard and Angry Eyebrows.
Despises snakes.
Beats every last one with his massive Shillelagh.
Our neighborhood is insane in our holiday virtue.
This is virtue?
Down with Sesame Street.. wait. I learned my numbers on Sesame Street. What a catch-22.
All evil thoughts find their root in Sesame Street.
My human pet is 100% engaged.
His mate, Jante, is wise and silent.
Though she does actually assist the madness on occassion.
The Count is a HERO
The numbers have gotten to you.
Numbers are not evil. Numbers are true neutral, they do not care for suffering or joy.
However, numbers can be used for good or evil.
Though Evil tends to use them more, because evil tends to be more materialistic.
I guess this is a little editorializing on my part, but I personally dislike how ‘the bottom line’ is so frequently cited as the reason something horrible happened. This has always been human nature, but in a prior time, a selfish idiot at least had to face his own selfishness head-on and acknowledge that he was stealing the poor people’s land because he thought he was better than them.
In the era of the publicly traded corporation, CEOs have a ‘duty to the shareholders’ to grow the company. The number must go up, no matter what. And they can perform all types of awful deeds in the pursuit of growing profit while thoroughly washing their hands of morality. They had to. It was their job.
It’s all them dang numbers.
The numbers are nothing without the underlying circumstances which allow the true evils to be so evil – the Cats of the Bureau, as we see in recent pages!
Well, reminds of some other people who just did their job. Or followed orders, same thing.
I really thing you shouldn’t blame the numbers for that.
THIS!
So much this!
I just wanna point out that the theory that a CEO’s prime duty is to increase shareholder value is a common although misconception; it is highly promoted by our more sociopathic elements because it’s profitable.
All corporations (in the Western world anyway, I don’t know about other legal systems) exist only by operation of law; they are not natural entities like human beings, cats or rivers. Without a license from a government, the shareholders in a corporation would be jointly and severally liable for the debts and wrongdoing of the corporation, and nobody wants that … it would be too risky to invest $100 in an enterprise if it went belly-up and creditors could take your house.
In exchange for the limited liability system, the government gets to impose duties. These duties could include things other than maximizing shareholder value. If you – the investor – do not want to assume those duties, then don’t take advantage of the business license.
The apparent purpose of the Chicago School and others in promoting the theory of that shareholder value is the first duty of a CEO is political: to persuade the body politic that we are and should be helpless. This is a pure example of lawful evil.
I’ll stop now, I just wanted to encourage you to rethink the conventional wisdom.
I like the cut of your jib.
Encourrage away.
The number nine is evil. It’s the first number that’s odd without being prime.
Seems funny to talk about numbers on Pi Day…
Cosine! Secant! Tangent! Sine!
Three point one four one five nine!
Yay, MATH! 😀
Shh! Do you want to summon a math demon?
Yeah?
Rachel Riley from Cats does Countdown? Yes please. Summon that math demon!
Bob from The Laundry Files would like to have a word with you :}
Wish I could say I planned this to line up with Pi Day. But I plan nothing.
Numbers may be your enemy, but remember: know your enemy!
Actually, believe it or not, there IS such a concept called “Evil Numbers” in number theory (Also known less dramatically as the Thue-Morse Set).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_number#:~:text=In%20number%20theory%2C%20an%20evil,called%20the%20Thue%E2%80%93Morse%20set.
Frankly, the concept of “Evil Numbers” set forth by Satan’s minions here is a lot less boring. 😛
Numbers hide behind the boring and then hit you with the evil.
That’s actually a fair description of how a Universal Life Insurance police works… or a Collateral Mortgage, for that matter. Both are traps that take years to be sprung on you, but then it’s nearly impossible to escape.
Anyone want me to dig into my past as a financial advisor and explain how either of those scams function? They’re long explanations, and I’ll admit kind of dry if you don’t have a vested interest (like having already signed the paperwork on one or the other).
Well, seeing how Everyone is Gullible, I’m goign to admit to interest.
It’s not really a matter of gullibility. Nearly every single person I’ve ever explained these to properly is smart enough to follow the explanation.
They are deliberately choosing not to share the most relevant information to you, and present it to you in a way that is misleading and lacking in needed context, yet skirts the definition of criminal fraud by the most technical of technicalities.
Which you want first?
Let’s start with the one on your left.
Universal Life Insurance:
This will require some backstory.
To begin with, originally, Life Insurance was invented by farmers, who noticed how big a tragedy it snowballed into, when Jedidiah tripped and fell under his plow, leaving behind his wife and three sons under the age of 5 who were two young to run the farm.
They came up with what is called “Term Insurance”, where you pay a little every month, for a fixed term of, say, 20 years until you no longer need insurance(such as, when the farmers kids are grown up, OR for the non-farmers, when you reach retirement age and ideally stop working, and have no income for the insurance payout to replace.)
In the mid 20th century, as Insurance companies got larger and more profit motivated, they noticed this Term Insurance thing wasn’t making them as much money as it could be (you know, with so much being paid out to widows and such) so they created a new product called Whole Life insurance. As the name implies, it insures you for your whole life, and pays out a Death Benefit no matter WHEN you die (unless they can pin insurance fraud on you, as they try to, but that’s a whole other discussion). Which sounds great in the sales pitch. However, because they price WLI at 5-10x the cost per benefit of the original TLI product, the premiums it would cost you to get a useful death benefit would be absurdly high, so what happens is they reduce the payout amount until the premiums are low enough to be afforded, and now the payout is tiny. Usually only enough to replace your living income earnings for one year or less (example: you made $40,000/y and when you die they pay your survivors $50,000) then the wife and kids lose their house! In short, you pay a lot more and get a lot less, as a trade-off for a “guarantee” to get something when you die, no matter what. Since the vast majority of people won’t die until they’re quite old, this deal works out VERY much in the Insurance companies favour, which is why they own skyscrapers with their names on the top of the building in every city in the world now.
The Life insurance industry specializes in traps that don’t get sprung for decades… and by then it’s too late to fix. Whole life was their first one. Universal Life is the newer model, and it’s even sneakier.
Finally we’re getting up to the 1970s, and people were starting to notice that when their fathers died, after working 45 years and paying steep WLI premiums for almost that long, faithfully every month, their poor elderly mothers were receiving a relatively tiny Death Benefit check that would only help her for a year or so, despite ol’ Dad having paid the Insurance company serveral times that amount over the years, and were getting mad. In fine capitalist tradition, some of these angry people even formed companies to compete and run these shady insurance companies out of business, by the simple method of explaining to people what a horrible rip-off Whole Life Insurance was, and replacing their WL policies with Term Life (and getting them to invest the difference they were saving in premiums in proper investments for their retirement).
Now they’ve yet to succeed in running ALL those crooked companies out of business (but a lot of them have shrunk and merged with each other to survive, resulting in far FEWER crooked old Ins companies, at least). This “Buy Term and Invest the Difference” approach by the young and honest companies was really hurting the old one’s profits, so they came up with a new con, one that made it sound like they were using the same, helpful method… but they aren’t.
A quick note on the original (and only proper Term Life insurance: as its name suggests, it has a fixed term, ideally ending close to the point when you no longer need to HAVE insurance. So if you have about 30 years until retirement, you should be set up with 30-year term. Once in place, the premiums you pay will stay the same for all 30 years. However, if you have a shady life insurance agent who is aware you know “Whole Life is bad, Term is good” he or she may try to set you up with 10-year renewable Term insurance for 30 years. That’s 3 blocks of 10-year insurance, and every time the term is up, the cost of your premiums is recalculated based on your new, older age, and possibly also some new health problems that have developed since, and your premiums will go up (often almost double) each time. Kick that agent out of your house.
Finally (I’ve said that already, haven’t I?) here’s how Universal Life functions:
Your premium payment is being used to pay for two things: a Term insurance policy, and some investment into the stock market (via an investment fund of some description, not directly buying stocks). Thus, it superficially resembles the “buy Term and invest the difference” approach used by the young companies that has been taking all their customers, all in a single product. Unfortunately, that’s where the resemblance ends. The investments aren’t very good ones, (sometimes even in funds the insurance company also runs, so they’re practically using your money to invest in themselves) but that isn’t the worst problem. The Term insurance is “1-year-renewable-Term”; Term insurance with a term so short it’s absurdly useless. The cost of this insurance policy goes up, every single year, without fail. Say your premium in the first year was split 50/50 between paying for the insurance policy and buying new shares in your built-in investment for your retirement savings.
The premium is a pretty high number (say $500/m) but it seems justifiable because you’re both protecting your family’s income AND saving for your retirement (just in case you DON’T die early).
Year two, the payment is being split 55/45. Year three 60/40. Year four, 65/35, and so on. Eventually (let’s just say it’s year 10) you reach a tipping point where the rapidly increasing cost of insurance is 100% of your premium. No new money is going into your retirement savings. This would be a great time for the company to contact you and let you know your retirement plans have ground to a halt… but they won’t be doing that.
Year 11, the cost of insurance is now 105% of what you are paying in premiums, so to get that extra bit of money to pay for it, they start dipping into that retirement savings account. The ratio is now 105/-5, and your retirement savings are shrinking instead of growing, because they’re using them to pay for this absurd life insurance policy that grows in cost exponentially.
Years continue to go by. You’re now 5 years away from when you hope to retire, depending on that savings plan built into your Universal Life policy, as the agent who sold it to you promised.
NOW they decide to contact you. They inform you that the cost to insure your life now greatly exceeds the premiums you’ve been paying, and if you want to stay insured (and since your spouse/family is still dependent on your paychecks to eat, you kinda do) then your new premium will be triple what you were paying up until last year. Will that be by check or direct deposit please?
Outrageous! (You object) It was hard enough to pay that already high UL premium for the last 25 years! You can’t afford TRIPLE! That’s like a mortgage payment (and you’re still paying off your actual mortgage). Give me my retirement savings (you insist) I’m going to another insurance company!
Oh dear. Unfortunately the retirement savings plan portion of your Universal Life policy was consumed to pay for the constantly escalating cost to insure your life. It’s all gone, every penny. That’s why we’re calling you. You can still cancel your insurance police with us, but do consider that, since you’re now in your 60s, getting a new insurance policy at this age is going to cost you something pretty close to what we’re now asking you to pay us regardless of whom you go to… and honestly it doesn’t matter to us if you cancel your policy at this point, considering how much money we’ve been given buy you over the last 25 years ($150,000, using our example numbers) all of it profit, since we won’t be paying anything back to you in the form of a savings plan that’s empty, or a death benefit for a policy you’re cancelling. Mind you, you can still try and keep this Life Insurance policy active for a few more years if you like… but it’s still that every-year-renewable-term, so after this large jump to triple cost, it will continue to be more expensive every single year, so you’d probably have to go deep into debt or empty any other savings you might have to pay for it… And quite frankly unless you’ve got cancer and a reasonable expectation to die within the next few years (about the only way the death benefit payout could be more than keeping up with the huge premiums would now cost… if barely) it’s a sunk cost fallacy to continue the policy for even one more year.
To summarize (good lord this got long) Universal Life is designed, deliberately, to self-destruct after a couple decades of accepting high premium payments from their clients, and to avoid paying back anything at all of what they promised on the day you signed the paperwork. It is a trap you won’t see closing on you until it’s much to late to escape it.
I remember hearing (but cannot confirm) that several large US insurance companies were taken to the Supreme Court to answer for this blatant (if insidious) scam, and were forced to pay billions in fines. However, since the product makes those companies 10s of billions PER YEAR… they just paid the fine and continue to market it to people to this day.
By comparison, Whole Life is simply a very bad deal; paying a lot and getting only a little back. Universal Life is an outright con (though technically not, due to years of successful lobbying, actually illegal.)
I apologize for the length, but the fact that UL is so complicated a trap it takes this long to explain it properly is part of how they keep slipping it by people (well, that and outright lying to their face).
Explaining how the Collateral Mortgage con works shouldn’t be quite this long. Anyone still want that explanation? Banks now try to use this for every new mortgage, and aggressively suggest it even when renewing new mortgages to existing clients, so if you every try to buy a house, or are still paying off your current one, there’s a good chance you’ll encounter it.
(Poop. I messed up the bolding syntax at some point. 😐 )
“How Insurance Works, a.k.a. Satan’s Insurance Agency” would make a great webcomic,
but would it be comedy or horror?
@rewinn
It’d be pretty dry, if accurate. Also, Life Insurance, and finance in general, doesn’t lend itself to very interesting visuals. Drawing people holding iPads, number charts… the very occasional graph might be the high-points.
I feel like it would be 50 panels of a character standing in the frame, lecturing that wall of text I wrote yesterday.
And there are people who wonder why insurance is regulated. There are. I used to know them. They were idiots.
Thank you for the time. I used to work for an insurance company. And that sounds credible.
Geko, you better get up here, the inmates are running the asylum again!
They never stopped running it. I have no ability to curtail the crazy!
Blue and purple ties. What is this madness?
Well, the ‘blue’ tie is really just a bluish shade of purple. (RGB 55 0 102)
We should’ve guessed something was up when Sesame Street hired a vampire to teach counting.
Then they brought in that demon to teach calculus and things got ugly!
I wonder what key assets are being sold off…wonder how much it’d take to close a deal for a Circle of Hell…
Selling stocks to buy Kewpie dolls, I’m guessing.
I love the reference to Old Scratch. Very Stephen Vincent Benét of you, Professor Gecko.
I wish I knew who that was so I could nod and agree.
He wrote the classic short story “Devil and Daniel Webster”, where Old Scratch must debate the famous lawyer and orator for the soul of a farmer.
Oh. Now I know!
I can see several possible conditions from which this statement could reasonably arise: you slept through literature classes; you played when you should oughta been paying due diligence to your homework; you are so much younger than I’d expected; you ignored much which happened south of The Medicine Line.
So whaddaya know about the ongoing kerfuffle about the northern Ontario chromite mines? Huh?t
Might be all options.
“You are the proximate cause of all our woes…”
Isn’t that the point of Satan? His raison d’etre? Should he not be gratified to hear this?
…You have a point.
Did you …. plan that all the Conservative legislators would be talking about how Silicon Valley Bank failed because of its inclusion values and that they got away from “pure” business decisions?
Nope. Just convergent evolution.
Just don’t tell conservative legislators. They’re not big fans of evolution.
Being chaotic evil, they’re more like the cheering section for indiscriminate devolution. They’ve put vulture (or vampire, depending on the state of a venture) capitalists up as a front.
Well, it DID failed, and if it put inclusion values in front of actual risk assessment, it would easily be the reason.
It’s ok if you do charity using your own money. It’s not ok if you use other people money for that.
From what I’ve heard, any ‘charity’ or ‘inclusion’ or anything like that was nothing more than empty gestures. (This is Silicon Valley we’re talking about, after all.) Rather, it sounds like the failure was a combination of bad luck and overwhelming stupidity. Which is never a good combo.
By all accounts, its only inclusion issues was including too many treasury bonds in its investment portfolio and too many cash-hungry startups in its customer base.
Nothing to do with classical inclusion categories such as race, sex, national origin, preferred language or ability to draw webcomics.
You are a bank that has a clientele of almost exclusively long-term growth venture capital tech startups. These types of businesses look like great investments when the interest rate is low because long-term growth is as good as short-term growth. But when interest rates skyrocket, the “We’ll be profitable twenty years from now” model looks way less attractive. Then you sink all your funds into fixed bonds that will also nosedive in value if the interest rate goes up. And you don’t hedge them.
They essentially bet the farm on 23 – they purposefully put their entire existence on the line betting that interest rates could never go up. This is not how a bank operates. It’s how goofball crypto bros operate.
Yep.
Much could be said.
Satan’s in trouble.
But what are they going to do? It’s not their money.
Well, wait for it.
They say wasting money like it’s a bad thing.
Think of all the good that could be done with that money, all the sick that could have been healed and hungry that could have been fed…
you’re welcome.
Besides, those dolls have to be a sin against something. They have to be.
Wasteful tomfoolery is a KIND of evil, right?
Right!! Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.
I find this arc refreshing.
So continue on faithful storyteller.
I thank you for your vote of confidence.
Kewpie Doll collection – check.
Schnorf Doll collection – check.
Resident portrait artist (for Tracee) – check.
Tracee – check.
All things that Satan wastes his money upon…
You’re keeping track.
Likely paying a mobster to make a mayoral election look fair. — Check
Now hold on there about Tracee … she has her faults too be sure, and I have little doubt Satan puts more money into their relationship than a financial planner might prefer.
But it looks like Satan gets a lot in return. What’s money for if not to make you happy?
I do not think these three soulless bean-counters subscribe to your lovely philosophy, dear sir. 🙂
I have a hankering to witness Colin as Saint Patrick wacking Snakes with his stick again.
It is probably on Patreon, but Patreon has been fighting me lately 🙁
It’s here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/st-patrick-and-14976577
I’ve only got one thing to say about these 3…
“Tracee, they called you fat, ugly, and a fake blonde.”
They may be more formidable than they look.
“They called me what?”
Trio of Evil: “He lies. And here is a super modeling contract with a remain young and beautiful rider.”
Tracee: “……. Viagra doesn’t work for him and now, neither do I.”
“Saint Patrick was a holy man,
With strategy and stealth,
He drove the snakes from Ireland;
Drink a whiskey to his health.
But drink not so much whiskey that
You lose yourself and then
Forget the good Saint Patrick
And see the snakes again!”
Definitely channeling the spirit of Ireland.