Today I have come to the conclusion that my executive compensation and its various bonuses are not enough to guarantee that my spoiled children can't destroy the wealth I have amassed in the first generation after my passing. To remedy the situation, measures must be taken.
Banks are using a little-known tactic to help pay bonuses, deferred pay and pensions they owe executives: They're holding life-insurance policies on hundreds of thousands of their workers, with themselves as the beneficiaries.
Banks took out much of this life insurance during the mortgage bubble, when executives' pay -- and the IOUs for their deferred compensation -- surged, and banking regulators affirmed the use of life insurance as a way to finance executive pay and benefits.
Towards this end, I have decided that is is prudent for me to profit off your deaths.
The insurance policies essentially are informal pension funds for executives: Companies deposit money into the contracts, which are like big, nondeductible IRAs, and allocate the cash among investments that grow tax-free. Over time, employers receive tax-free death benefits when employees, former employees and retirees die.
This should not be taken as an encouragement to die early, especially if you are tirelessly pursuing the good of the company by working 80-hour weeks, but we do encourage you to keep yourself posted on the market situation and the retirement schedule of the senior executives so that you may pick the most opportune moment to croak.
Though not improper, the practice is similar to what is known as "janitors insurance," an insurance-on-employees technique that has long been controversial. Critics say the banks' insurance contracts are a way for companies to create tax breaks for funding executive pensions. And some families have complained that employers shouldn't profit from the deaths of their loved ones.
Haters may hate but it's tax free so don't hate the playa, hate the game, yo.
What's that?
As an incentive to get employees to consent to being covered, some companies offer them a small portion of the death benefit. But the coverage may end when they leave the company.
In December, Irma Johnson accidentally received a check for $1.6 million, from Security Life of Denver Insurance Co., payable to Amegy Bank. According to a lawsuit Mrs. Johnson filed in February in a Houston state court, in 2001 the bank told her husband, Daniel Johnson, a credit risk manager who had survived two brain surgeries, that he was eligible for supplemental life insurance of $150,000, if he signed a consent form authorizing the bank to purchase an insurance policy on his life. Four months later, the bank fired him.
Mr. Johnson died from a brain tumor at age 41 in 2008. His widow and two young children received no life-insurance benefits, which the bank had canceled when Mr. Johnson left. Mrs. Johnson says her husband was cognitively disabled when he signed the consent form.
A spokeswoman for Amegy Bank, a unit of Zions Bancorp, declined to comment on the suit, but said, "Participation in Amegy's BOLI plan was completely voluntary; employees consented to participate."
Compensation time! I suppose this was more hilarious before states ATTEMPTED to change the laws on life insurance to require your consent. But efforts to rein in the practice largely have been unsuccessful, including the most recent rules Congress enacted in 2006. The rules limit companies to buying life insurance to just the top third of earners, who must provide consent. But the rules don't apply to life-insurance that employers bought before the August 2006 rules, which cover millions of current and former employees.
Companies would just take out a secret life insurance policy on you and bet on your death. Do you suppose it's a company-wide policy or that the people taking out the insurances are like "Heh, I bet Robert from accounting will die before retiring."
Maybe that's why they're planning an employee deep sea diving retreat or other dangerous activities instead of that open bar holiday party at the local hotel lobby.
The insurance industry is the first industry that needs to be completely eradicated. It's required by law that you need car insurance. I understand the logic. There's a lot of people out there that are too silly to worry about putting money aside in the event of a car accident to cover the damages of your car as well as whoever you hit and fucked up. But the whole system is beyond screwed. I'm pouring money into this fund month after month and in the end of the year I don't get any percentage back from it.
Insurance is suppose to be a "In case shit happens" fund. Well, if it doesn't happen then I should get my money back. Much like these abusive methods of taking out insurance policies on your employees. It's a real risk that you'll lose someone important to the business and you company may suffer, but to fuck them over in this method and take it out on them without telling them... Sheeeeeit, that's just wrong all around.
Then again, I'm not sure I feel entirely sorry for them. Bank employees know exactly who they're working for. It's like the conversation from Clerks about the contractors who worked on the second death star in star wars. They knew the risk in taking the job, fuck them if they get fucked over.
This Site Under Construction - Tearing Down Geocities
When I was a younger lad I was a computer geek. I would be fucking around on the computer by age 11-12. Sure, most of that was just me playing video games and being completely giddy that I had access to a 425mb hard drive. That was the day to praise the computer lords. I feel old now that you can fit that all on a flash drive you put into a simple digital camera.
Well Yahoo, you finally did it. You went ahead and killed Geocities. Oh, I'm sure no one even used Geocities anymore but back in the early days of the internet you would be hard pressed to find someone who didn't have a Geocities site. Sure, most of the time they only had the stupid construction animated gif and no other content, but it was home.
What am I saying, everything was shit. Unlike the modern day internet where everything is still shit, but only with a lot more spam. That and todays internet looks a lot nicer. Overhauled with a sleek design. It was like a J.J. Abrams film. Only with a lot more questions answered. Because shit, if you can find DragonballZ fanfiction, you should be able to find any answeron the internet.
It was like a requirement that if you had a GeoCities account it had to look like total and absolute ass 100% of the time. Perhaps it's about time that GeoCities finally bit the dust. It was the boil on the ass of the internet since the mid 90's and it's finally dead. We need some funeral march midis all up in this sumbitch.
Though maybe I need to mourn the loss. Aww, there goes all 15 websites I made in middle school... What will ever happen to my guestbook that I begged everyone to sign. It was a method to show how much of an e-penis you had to show off how many different guest were at your Salior Moonfan page.
My embarrassing past will be buried in the depths of the internet forever. Thank heavens. It's alright though. I'm sure crappy web page design lives on with Myspace. All we can do is hope that people continue to use customization options distastefully.
I know what you're thinking, Midis seem so hilarious now but they were the soundtrack to my childhood. I remember the first time I heard an actual MP3 I flipped my shit. For all my computer life prior to that I just heard terrible Midis of popular songs. With only a couple of mbs per song, how could you turn them down?
The day I figured out how to write a javascript rollover, that my friend, was a glorious day. Xoom was also a place that I remember trying to sign up with, but their banner ads were even more garish than angelfires. I'm sure both of those places are now gone as well. Just think of this tragic loss. Thousands of unexplored consipracy theories have forever been lost to the human/reptilian knowledge.
WELCOME 2 MAGNUS1_E'S AWESOME SITE FOR STONERS NO COPS ALLOWED U HAVE TO TURN BACK NOW BY LAW ANY ROMZ YOU DOWNLOAD MUST BE DELETED W/IN 24HRS CLICK >HERE<>HERE< style="cursor: pointer; width: 532px; height: 24px;" src="http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/5756/bloodbare0k.gif" alt="" border="0">
Why the fuck they would always redirect you to Disney.com when you didn't accept the terms of the site or the warning of the website, I do not know. Actually I do. It's cause Disney was a safe place. Something that you don't normally find on the internet anymore. Everywhere is just about as not work safe as you can possibly find.
I'm sure I'm going to date myself but who remembers the first time you found out Hypermart offered 25mb of space and subdomain for free? I do, and it seems like archive.org did a better job of archiving Hypermart sites than it did with GeoCities. Of course, GeoCities made me live in a neighborhood or something stupid, something I'll never forgive them for.
WELCOME TO MY FAMILY WEBPAGE
Maybe it was time to grow up. It's bizarre to think that there are people out there still making webpages with Angelfire and Tripod. I mean, just saying the word "Lycos" makes me laugh. I also laugh at how many angsty gothic teenage poems that are gone forever now. Time to grow up for all those things. Remember the dancing baby?
Um, yeah. Speaking of the dancing baby. What the fuck was up with that? I never understood the "hilarity" of the dancing baby then or now. I never understood the "hilarity" of Ally McBeal either but that's the 90's for you. People insisted that I watched them both as I would someday maybe "get it". I still doubt I will ever understand it. That and the Hamster dance. It may not piss me off as much but it sure as hell belongs in a museum.
So with that, perhaps we should have a moment of silence for Geocities. You made a fool out of us all letting us think that we were ever capable of creating a website. Let alone think that anyone would care to look at our creations. I mean, shit. Look at me right now. Typing this out like anyone is going to read it and care about my daily rantings.
DAMN YOU, GEOCITIES! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
So with that, CLICK ON THE WIZARD TO SEND A MAIL TO US!!!!!!!!!
For a long time we all wondered why MTV still went by that name if it hasn't bothered to show any M's for a long time now. With the state of the music industry the way it is, perhaps it's better that any of those music videos are left without visual representation.
But this lead me to sit and watch some of their programing. What did they decide was more important or cheaper to broadcast than music videos? Oh my. The result made my brain hurt. I quickly had to turn the channel. No longer could I bare witness to the horrors that MTV was showing. Sadly I went out of the frying pan and into the fire with that bold move of the channel up button as I landed on SpikeTV.
It had been too long since Spike TV replaced whatever other channel was on before it. Being that I'm a television nut I should know this answer. Sadly I do not. A quick wiki search not only found the answer. TNN was what this once was. I can't remember a single program on it. What was on it now though was MANswers.
This leads to the ultimate question. Is unapologetic capitalism or unapologetic misogyny more offensive/counterrevolutionary?
In one corner is My Super Sweet 16: MTV's program about rich young girls and the parties that they have for their 16th birthday, which can reach into the six figures.
from Wikipedia: My Super Sweet 16 is an MTV reality series documenting the lives of teenagers in the United States who usually have wealthy parents that throw huge parties for their coming of age. Parties include the quinceañera (a sweet 15), the sweet 16, and other birthdays including a My Super Sweet 21 (which was brodcasted during MTV's Spring Break party) and My Super Swag 18. The show premiered on January 18, 2005. The opening theme is "Sweet Sixteen" sung by Hilary Duff. The show, while popular, has also received its share of criticism for its portrayal of the girls as rich, spoiled brats.Though the teens are required to perform some acts that are not in their normal behavior, most of their actions are due to their personalities.
MANswers: Spike TV answers questions that matter to guys. These are inevitably thin excuses to get background shots of scantily clad women. While I'm not opposed to scantily clad women and seem to have made my fair share of blog post regarding the subject in the last few weeks, I get that sex sells.
Although MANswers is dumb and terrible in its aggressive progragation of sexist stereotypes, my super sweet sixteen actively attempts to humanize and celebrate people who live lives of utter entitlement, lifting them up as an exemplary role models. Furthermore, super sweet sixteen is aired on MTV, a channel which still has incalculable cultural clout both here and abroad, ensuring that it will have a much wider-spread impact. You can write a fucking dissertation on this shit.
If they did the show right it could inspire some amazing class hatred. I'm not sure you can actually read how much my blood boils when I hear a sixteen year old say the following:
Has anyone seen keys to the vip?
When the revolution comes, she'll be first against the wall. MANswers just makes me roll my eyes and shut off either my brain or TV if the motor skills haven't already failed. I should note that MANswers is a bargain-basement show. It's really low budget. I'm guessing it cost something around $5,000 to produce one episode, while Super Sweet Sixteen clearly has that same amount spent on the fucking cake alone.
MANswers is actually hilarious in how absurdly macho it tries to be. If it was an actual person you would question if they don't like cock and taking it up the ass. It's the closet friend who pounds beers and acts all tough to cover up the fact that he loves show tunes.
There's also a terrible way the narrator of the show tends to emphasize random words in a sentence by saying them much louder and sounding like a complete idiot. Simple sentences like "WHATS inside your BALLS" just comes across as comical in that manner.
How WOULD a set of jugs behave on a girl who was BOUNCING on a trampoline on the moon?
I did not make that one up.
How would they bounce in space?
MANswers is simply hilarious in its overcompensating ur-macho-ism, like 90% of what spike airs. It is basically a parody of itself. Naturally the objectification of women is prevalent and unwelcome, but the market base of the channel is its own fucking parody so the pull of a show like MANswers approaches nil, and can be viewed safely as the hilariously innocuous drivel it is, mocked thoroughly with each frame.
super sweet sixteen, done by anybody else but MTV, would be a scathing documentary of the insipid entitlement of the children upper-middle to upper-class bourgeois families, the product of two generations overexerting themselves to give their children "everything they deserve", resulting in the cultural decay and lavish opulence of the parties... but, since it's MTV, it is instead a glorification of materialism. and if you want the patriarchy angle covered, think of the color schemes, detail to dress and strict social coding, "daddy's little princess" (almost never mommy's), etc. etc.
"wow wouldn't it be cool to be that rich some day? just look at all that cool shit!" basically no different from medieval fairy tales about princesses in that respect.
Points go to Super Sweet Sixteen to being worse for humanity.
More video proof of how much total shit this show is.
I guess I should look at the other side of this coin here. While MANswers satirizes gender roles it doesn't do it well. The only show that effectively satirized gender roles was the Original Man Show. Maybe it's because I have a penis and I don't see any glass cieling when looking into a career that I can't judge MANswers as the total crap that it is. It certainly shouldn't dare use the name of Science for anything it does.
The show acts as if it's giving you facts based on science and studies. The science goes about as far as surveys, and pretty much anything other that is complete crap. In one of the early shows they had a "nutritionist" come on and say "The beer belly is a myth because beer doesn't contain fat"
What store will she buy out now?
My Super Sweet Sixteen is horrible for promoting a culture of consumerism and entitlement but MANswers directly follows TNA impact, combining like a Voltron of pure shit to form the dumbest 3 hours of television you're likely to ever find. If your clicker ends up on the channel, it's way too late. You'll were dead before the words "Can you freeze your farts and smell them later? watch MANswers to find out!" was ever spoken.
I watched five minutes of MANswers once because I think star trek was about to come on and the big question they were saving for the whole episode was "When is it legal to video tape yourself having SEX with hot chix!?!" and apparently the solution is go to Italy, there it is legal to video tape sex without consent. Up next: How many TITS can a VAGINA BEER in the length of a FOOTBALL GAME
It really is like viewing the world through 13 year old eyes again. Which still makes My Super Sweet Sixteen much much worse because no one watches spike TV.
Look at his eyes. They are dead and empty.. imagine how bad the 16th birthday will be for him
If my son/daughter ever reaches the point where s/he expects a Super Sweet 16th Birthday Party, it will be a surprise helicopter ride to a fabulous exotic pacific island jungle where s/he will be dropped with a canteen, machete, and topographical map to the drop zone 50 kilometers away where, if s/he is present three days later, extraction will be available.
They should reformat the show into "My Super Working Class Sweet 16". The kids would be depressed and upset that they didn't get a new pair of bootstraps with which to hike themselves to the prom. they'd find out when and where a My Super Sweet 16 party is going on and crash it. Would this be worse than the Hills? No. nothing is worse than The Hills. Actually the hills doesn't inspire hatred in me so much as sheer perplexity. It's so BORING. why on earth is it so popular?? If only because it's a spinoff that is in turn spinning off yet another show. It's like a plague of blonde hair, blank stares, and pointless banal drama
I suppose both of these are going to be neck and neck against each other. Maybe I'm missing the bigger picture. Something for the kids. I'm going to also toss in a vote for Toddlers in Tiaras, a show about child beauty pageants that of course shows how much the girls LOVE it even though every episode has some six year old having a break down or completely not giving a shit about the whole experience compared to their fat mother.
A sample of the horrors
Oh yes.. the horror.. the horror.
I've yet to see a Toddlers and Tiara's show that doesn't take place in the South. Are these pageants really that big down there? While on TLC, let's talk about Jon and Kate plus eight. If you want to feel like your balls were cut off, turn it on and see how Kate berates the poor guy. Kate is a horrible person and she sucks the life and soul out of him. This has nothing to do with her being a woman, she's just a terrible human being.
The whole show is basically a commercial. If Kate isn't insulting or berating Jon than she isn't being herself. If I was that guy I would have killed myself a long time ago. It's the only way out. Could you imagine child support on all those kids? She was the one tha thad serious trepidation about putting her kids on camera till the money started rolling in. The old saying of you can't buy happiness seems to be pretty accurate here.
Maybe it's better once you learn that Jon is allegedly melting down in real life and making out with wasted college girls at frat parties and living three hours away from Kate. I was honestly disappointed to not hear them declare separation at the end of the seasons finale. Next season may very well be called Jon-minus-Kate-and-8chat
She prides herself as one of the first female American Express Black card members in New Jersey.
um... yeah... society is doomed.
To be honest I think society's fucked enough now that television's really not going to influence many people into behaviors they're not already keen on anyway. People are just on edge and greedy in general at the moment.
If you want quality TV look to The Wire, The Shield or many other shows that aren't total crap. Most of all, just try to avoid taking that Dump of death
2008 was a year that started with a 2 and ended with 8. What many don't realize is that there was far more zeros between the 2 and 8 than previously thought were there. Yes, 2008 had a lot of zeros and losers in the mix. life's too short for hate but goddamn if there aren't a good number of things worth hating in this world. This list is just some of the top ones I can think of before I drink myself into a stupor.
The Detroit Lions: 0-16. At least those football players have a decent car factory to go work at... oh wait. never mind that.
The Chinese Olympic gymnastics team - While they wont the gold, they definitely weren't older than 16
John McCain - Completely sold out on every principle he ever stood for, and he loses anyway
Sarah Palin - While she brought us comedy, it was not worth dealing with hearing about daughter Bristol and her boyfriend Levi. Let's hope that she never leaves Alaska again
Vladimir Putin - Attacking Georgia? DICK MOVE! Oh wait, not OUR Georgia? Ok, carry on. I was worried about the Braves there.
Bill Kristol - Literally wrong on just about anything and everything
Katy Perry - I cant decide if katy perry is antifeminist or pro-feminist, but leaning towards the anti side because even if she's being "ironic" with painting homosexuality as a naughty thing that good girls don't do but see i'm naughty sometimes I hope my boyfriend doesn't mind, i don't think that's how its interpreted. Maybe Katy Perry is 4th wave postfeminist patriarchal bullshit
Robert Mugabe - 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000% inflation in 2008
Mikheil Shaakashvili - Provoked Russia and really, in mother Russia, Russia needs to provoke you.
Kwame Kilpatrick - As if Detroit wasn't enough of a laughingstock already.
Rod Blagojevich - Chicago Politics at its finest. Let me remind you, we got a President out of this place. This dude has brass balls.
Mormons - For Prop 8 and converting dead Jews
Joe the plumber - I hate this tool bag soooooo much
Lebron James - For making pro sports an even bigger joke
The Wire - For ending kinda crappy
The Shield - For play with my emotions
Republican Party - For knowing they were going to lose and doing it as gracefully as could be expected.
Time Magazine nailed both the best and worse person of the year... YOU!
Wall Street Investment bankers - all of them
George Lucas - For Indiana Jones and Nukes.. a combination that works by themselves, but not with each other
Steven Spielberg - Putting Aliens into Indiana Jones... and that Shila kid..
Rick Astley - As if it wasn't clear enough. Fuck you for that song.
George W. Bush - For doing absolutely NOTHING! Normally that wouldn't be a reason to be on a list. But in this case the leader of our nation should do something! ANYTHING! The 25% or whatever that still support bush - Seriously, why do you support him? That's like getting a bra for an A cup. No support needed!
And as always, the state of Mississippi. Why I don't know, but they always belong on a "worst of" list.
I can already tell you I see someone making the list for 2009......
Once was a writer, tho, you see words to your left, so I guess I'm still that to some degree.
You can find my scribbles and mind ranting on this and various other places as a means to keep the creative, satirical and costco talk muscles worked out.
Was once apart of the tv industry, but I'm sure the NDA's are still in effect so let's move on from that. Now I spend my time slinging beer and keeping a building in one piece.
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