8 ms·

Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife

43 points by uptown 10y ago

baldfat 10y ago
This is 100% about MetLife cutting its business in America (No more life insurance polices). Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? I hated the way everyone treated Charlie Brown and I disliked everyone, including Charlie Brown. I have felt this way since I was 5.
- jameskilton 10y ago
  Go read the original Peanuts strips. They weren't about entertainment, they were a look into bullying and the depressing life of Charlie Brown. (please forgive linking to Kotaku but I enjoyed this article http://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 http://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473)
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Go read the original Peanuts strips. They weren't about entertainment, they were a look into bullying and the depressing life of Charlie Brown. From his phrasing that seems to be the parent's problem. They would probably like the lighter, more fluff and less serious Peanuts better.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    Back in the day, comedy and art had a lot of curmudgeon, sardonic characters, losers etc.. Try reading 'Andy Capp'. They just don't allow such zaniness anymore. Everyone has to be happy and PC. Think Annie Potts in Ghostbusters: "Ghostbusters, waddya want?"
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Peanuts was pretty dark even after Snoopy was introduced. Snoopy no more killed Peanuts than comic books killed literature.
- ta9090 10y ago
  I've never been able to tell if the following strip is authentic, or if it's a dark reinterpretation: http://www.actsofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Peanuts-Cry.gif http://www.actsofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Peanuts... Edit: tvtropes suggests it's real, and it has a pleasant followup, although I'm not sure the followup fully offsets the initial effect.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Indeed, that seems pretty authentic.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Interesting on the life insurance thing - wonder why they'd want out of the market? Is this a first of more to come? Hm. Regarding Peanuts, you're not alone in finding the strip a bit off-putting. I tried many times to 'get it' like the advice booth, but between the janky art style and not quite finding the strip speak to me, it's not a personal classic. By comparison I got a lot more mileage out of The Far Side.
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    Interesting on the life insurance thing - wonder why they'd want out of the market? Is this a first of more to come? The secret sauce to making life insurance work is the time value of money. An insurance company takes in relatively small premiums from its customers, then invests that money over decades. The result is a death benefit that is considerably larger in nominal terms than the sum of moneys paid in. This method has worked for life insurance for decades, even centuries. But central banks have upended it. Now some sovereign debt even has negative interest rates. Of course, there are alternative investments, such as equities and real estate, still available. But they are riskier and far more volatile than bonds held to maturity. Low interest rates together with low inflation make it very difficult for life insurance companies. Just another example of collateral damage from ZIRP.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      Well put, I don't do life but have plenty of experience with P&C and some professional coverage lines. Law of large numbers type stuff makes sense, and if their actuaries don't see it happening, then yeah get out! Totally in agreement with you that ZIRP's downstream consequences are significant, and, I believe, distasteful in the context of global markets.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  Brother, let me tell you about my childhood sometime.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? I hated the way everyone treated Charlie Brown and I disliked everyone, including Charlie Brown How can you dislike Charlie Brown? Peanuts was a great comic, because it's so true-to-life, though I guess it does water things down some (humans are really much, much, much bigger assholes to each other IRL).
- cafard 10y ago
  The strip was around for a very long time. I suppose that it may have run out of steam after some number of years, maybe after the middle of the 1960s. That it has outlasted its creator by so many years, I attribute to the human aversion to novelty at breakfast.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Pretty much every comic strip ever that goes on long enough runs out of steam. Even Doonesbury, which evolved over the years as the characters aged, was IMO pretty much ready to call it a day when the daily strip ended. But, yeah, most of the standard daily comic strips that have been recycling basically the same material for decades are pretty much there to satisfy a morning habit.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Peanuts is not a happy strip. It's about childhood. Sometimes that's happy, but childhood isn't fundamentally happy. The genius of Peanuts is that it shows all of that: Happiness, sadness, depression, existential questions, and so many other things. They're emotions that we can identify with, because they may not be happy, but they're real things that we all experience, even children. I don't know why you dislike they characters, that's your choice. But in answer to if I find Peanuts depressing: yes, I do. It's optimistic sometimes, but it's not happy, and it's not supposed to be. Or maybe I'm just completely mad.
  - kylec 10y ago
    As a child, I never really understood Peanuts or its appeal. If Peanuts is about childhood, it's from an adult's perspective.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      True. Although I actually did enjoy Peanuts as a child, it's very much from an adult perspective. Calvin and Hobbes is definitely the other side of that coin: childhood from a child's perspective.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  > Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? Well, yes, but it could be worse. Matt "Simpsons" Groening had really depressing strips ('Akbar and Jeff' and 'Life in Hell') in the early years in the free newspapers.
geuis 10y ago
Stop linking to articles hosted on sites with paywalls.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bluetidepro 10y ago
  I made note of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12752043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12752043 If you just google the article name, you get the same article via Google with no paywall. Quite silly. ha
  - coldtea 10y ago
    There's a "web" link on each article on HN to do just this.
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Note that WSJ cookies you, so if you've already clicked the direct link, you'll need to incognito, then click on the "web" link to bypass the paywall (and I've heard some say that that doesn't always work, they may track IP addresses as well).
bluetidepro 10y ago
Slightly off topic: When I click this article link via HN, the article gives me a paywall. Ugh. However, If I then copy and paste the article title into Google ("Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife"), I get the same exact link but WSJ doesn't paywall the user from Google. *smh Is that a common practice with news sites? ...seems kind of silly to me. EDIT: Wow, derp. I never realized the HN link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall. Thanks for the insight, everyone!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- emidln 10y ago
  Yes. If you click on comments first, there is a link at the top labeled "Web" that does the Google search for you.
- kenny_r 10y ago
  A recent feature of HN actually uses this trick. If you look on the comments page for any article, there's a series of links: "flag | hide | past | web" and so on. The link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall. I agree it's very silly.
  - bluetidepro 10y ago
    Wow, did not know that was what the web link did! Thanks for the insight! Really appreciate it.
- detaro 10y ago
  Google penalizes sites that don't show the same content the crawler saw to to users clicking links, so if you want your content to be indexed and high in the rankings you have to give visitors from Google the full articles. Nobody else has the market power to do that, so links from all other sites lead to the paywall.
  - 10y ago
benmarks 10y ago
And here's some content not behind a paywall: http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/goodbye-snoopy-metlife-rebrands/306363/ http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/goodbye-snoopy-metlife...
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  Also http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/20/metlife-fires-snoopy/92452986/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/20/metlife-fires... (Via the web link on top of the page, there's other news pages if you don't feel like sneaking into the WSJ through the Google stable door.)
snowwrestler 10y ago
> The decision to hive off the U.S. life insurance operations—into a new company called Brighthouse Financial—happened because of strategic and regulatory reasons. Company officials have said the new company will be small enough to avoid federal designation as “systemically important” and thus should be able to sidestep potentially stiff capital rules. This is a key paragraph and it should be understood that this is an intended effect of the regulations. The "Dodd-Frank" bill that was passed in the wake of the financial crisis gave the Federal Reserve new responsibility and authority to regulate "systemically important" financial institutions of any industry. These are the companies that would come to mind when you think "too big too fail." Prior to this bill, the Fed only had authority over commercial banks. If a company gets designated as "systemically important," it has to meet higher capital ratio requirements and other extra regulatory hurdles. This is to (try to) make it less likely that the company will fail. But it will obviously have an impact on financial performance. Some companies--like GE and now MetLife--instead choose to downsize their financial operations to get them under the "too big to fail" line. This has the same effect as if the federal government "broke them up"--but it was accomplished via incentive instead of direct action. The potential downside is that large companies do have some financial advantages, and foreign companies don't have the same regulatory requirement. (Their U.S. subsidiaries do, but not their business overseas.) Thus, over time we might see capital flow out of the U.S.
- tvanantwerp 10y ago
  Reminds me of when I lived in Copenhagen. There were laws against businesses being opened on Sunday. But if your store was small enough, you were exempt. And so I regularly saw two or three tiny and separate H&M stores side-by-side with each other.
  - jbpetersen 10y ago
    I was not expecting HN to make me think about the potential for unwavering capitalism to be adorable.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    It's a bit different because they're actually selling (parts of) that business unit – a holding is evaluated as single entity. Oh, and H&M frequently does small shops in locations without such laws as well. They often have separate stores for men/women/children or along segments of style (i. e. stores with only formal menswear). It could be marketing, availability of retails space or an attempt to remain flexible. It's also not too hard to make such laws airtight, or to leave some details to the executive branch which can react much faster.
markm248 10y ago
Bastards
user5994461 10y ago
The article is blocked by paywall for me, even when coming from google.com
levicole 10y ago
Am I the only one disappointed that this means Snoopy won't be in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
Another old-timer loses his job, probably not going to land another gig anytime soon. Hopefully can draw a pension. "People familiar with the matter said the most-recent contract was signed in 2014 and costs MetLife $10 million to $15 million a year." That's peanuts.
jonathankoren 10y ago
I'm glad they've finally stopped selling life insurance and retirement annuities to children.
gjolund 10y ago
I guess business news = hacker news now.
Spooky23 10y ago
Modern marketing and iconography is so bland. The new MetLife logo looks like a feminine product.
D-Coder 10y ago
I found the title of this article misleading — clickbaity. "Fired" suggests that Snoopy did something that cost him his job. The company changed direction, and Snoopy was no longer needed. Snoopy was laid off, or rightsized, or something. Not fired.

43 points by uptown 10y ago

This is 100% about MetLife cutting its business in America (No more life insurance polices). Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? I hated the way everyone treated Charlie Brown and I disliked everyone, including Charlie Brown. I have felt this way since I was 5.

jameskilton 10y ago
Go read the original Peanuts strips. They weren't about entertainment, they were a look into bullying and the depressing life of Charlie Brown. (please forgive linking to Kotaku but I enjoyed this article http://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 http://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473)
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Go read the original Peanuts strips. They weren't about entertainment, they were a look into bullying and the depressing life of Charlie Brown. From his phrasing that seems to be the parent's problem. They would probably like the lighter, more fluff and less serious Peanuts better.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Back in the day, comedy and art had a lot of curmudgeon, sardonic characters, losers etc.. Try reading 'Andy Capp'. They just don't allow such zaniness anymore. Everyone has to be happy and PC. Think Annie Potts in Ghostbusters: "Ghostbusters, waddya want?"
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Peanuts was pretty dark even after Snoopy was introduced. Snoopy no more killed Peanuts than comic books killed literature.
ta9090 10y ago
I've never been able to tell if the following strip is authentic, or if it's a dark reinterpretation: http://www.actsofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Peanuts-Cry.gif http://www.actsofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Peanuts... Edit: tvtropes suggests it's real, and it has a pleasant followup, although I'm not sure the followup fully offsets the initial effect.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Indeed, that seems pretty authentic.
6stringmerc 10y ago
Interesting on the life insurance thing - wonder why they'd want out of the market? Is this a first of more to come? Hm. Regarding Peanuts, you're not alone in finding the strip a bit off-putting. I tried many times to 'get it' like the advice booth, but between the janky art style and not quite finding the strip speak to me, it's not a personal classic. By comparison I got a lot more mileage out of The Far Side.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Interesting on the life insurance thing - wonder why they'd want out of the market? Is this a first of more to come? The secret sauce to making life insurance work is the time value of money. An insurance company takes in relatively small premiums from its customers, then invests that money over decades. The result is a death benefit that is considerably larger in nominal terms than the sum of moneys paid in. This method has worked for life insurance for decades, even centuries. But central banks have upended it. Now some sovereign debt even has negative interest rates. Of course, there are alternative investments, such as equities and real estate, still available. But they are riskier and far more volatile than bonds held to maturity. Low interest rates together with low inflation make it very difficult for life insurance companies. Just another example of collateral damage from ZIRP.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Well put, I don't do life but have plenty of experience with P&C and some professional coverage lines. Law of large numbers type stuff makes sense, and if their actuaries don't see it happening, then yeah get out! Totally in agreement with you that ZIRP's downstream consequences are significant, and, I believe, distasteful in the context of global markets.
jschwartzi 10y ago
Brother, let me tell you about my childhood sometime.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? I hated the way everyone treated Charlie Brown and I disliked everyone, including Charlie Brown How can you dislike Charlie Brown? Peanuts was a great comic, because it's so true-to-life, though I guess it does water things down some (humans are really much, much, much bigger assholes to each other IRL).
cafard 10y ago
The strip was around for a very long time. I suppose that it may have run out of steam after some number of years, maybe after the middle of the 1960s. That it has outlasted its creator by so many years, I attribute to the human aversion to novelty at breakfast.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Pretty much every comic strip ever that goes on long enough runs out of steam. Even Doonesbury, which evolved over the years as the characters aged, was IMO pretty much ready to call it a day when the daily strip ended. But, yeah, most of the standard daily comic strips that have been recycling basically the same material for decades are pretty much there to satisfy a morning habit.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Peanuts is not a happy strip. It's about childhood. Sometimes that's happy, but childhood isn't fundamentally happy. The genius of Peanuts is that it shows all of that: Happiness, sadness, depression, existential questions, and so many other things. They're emotions that we can identify with, because they may not be happy, but they're real things that we all experience, even children. I don't know why you dislike they characters, that's your choice. But in answer to if I find Peanuts depressing: yes, I do. It's optimistic sometimes, but it's not happy, and it's not supposed to be. Or maybe I'm just completely mad.
- kylec 10y ago
  As a child, I never really understood Peanuts or its appeal. If Peanuts is about childhood, it's from an adult's perspective.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    True. Although I actually did enjoy Peanuts as a child, it's very much from an adult perspective. Calvin and Hobbes is definitely the other side of that coin: childhood from a child's perspective.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? Well, yes, but it could be worse. Matt "Simpsons" Groening had really depressing strips ('Akbar and Jeff' and 'Life in Hell') in the early years in the free newspapers.

geuis 10y ago

Stop linking to articles hosted on sites with paywalls.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bluetidepro 10y ago
I made note of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12752043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12752043 If you just google the article name, you get the same article via Google with no paywall. Quite silly. ha
- coldtea 10y ago
  There's a "web" link on each article on HN to do just this.
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Note that WSJ cookies you, so if you've already clicked the direct link, you'll need to incognito, then click on the "web" link to bypass the paywall (and I've heard some say that that doesn't always work, they may track IP addresses as well).

bluetidepro 10y ago

Slightly off topic: When I click this article link via HN, the article gives me a paywall. Ugh. However, If I then copy and paste the article title into Google ("Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife"), I get the same exact link but WSJ doesn't paywall the user from Google. *smh Is that a common practice with news sites? ...seems kind of silly to me. EDIT: Wow, derp. I never realized the HN link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall. Thanks for the insight, everyone!

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
emidln 10y ago
Yes. If you click on comments first, there is a link at the top labeled "Web" that does the Google search for you.
kenny_r 10y ago
A recent feature of HN actually uses this trick. If you look on the comments page for any article, there's a series of links: "flag | hide | past | web" and so on. The link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall. I agree it's very silly.
- bluetidepro 10y ago
  Wow, did not know that was what the web link did! Thanks for the insight! Really appreciate it.
detaro 10y ago
Google penalizes sites that don't show the same content the crawler saw to to users clicking links, so if you want your content to be indexed and high in the rankings you have to give visitors from Google the full articles. Nobody else has the market power to do that, so links from all other sites lead to the paywall.
- 10y ago

benmarks 10y ago

And here's some content not behind a paywall: http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/goodbye-snoopy-metlife-rebrands/306363/ http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/goodbye-snoopy-metlife...

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
Also http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/20/metlife-fires-snoopy/92452986/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/20/metlife-fires... (Via the web link on top of the page, there's other news pages if you don't feel like sneaking into the WSJ through the Google stable door.)

snowwrestler 10y ago

> The decision to hive off the U.S. life insurance operations—into a new company called Brighthouse Financial—happened because of strategic and regulatory reasons. Company officials have said the new company will be small enough to avoid federal designation as “systemically important” and thus should be able to sidestep potentially stiff capital rules. This is a key paragraph and it should be understood that this is an intended effect of the regulations. The "Dodd-Frank" bill that was passed in the wake of the financial crisis gave the Federal Reserve new responsibility and authority to regulate "systemically important" financial institutions of any industry. These are the companies that would come to mind when you think "too big too fail." Prior to this bill, the Fed only had authority over commercial banks. If a company gets designated as "systemically important," it has to meet higher capital ratio requirements and other extra regulatory hurdles. This is to (try to) make it less likely that the company will fail. But it will obviously have an impact on financial performance. Some companies--like GE and now MetLife--instead choose to downsize their financial operations to get them under the "too big to fail" line. This has the same effect as if the federal government "broke them up"--but it was accomplished via incentive instead of direct action. The potential downside is that large companies do have some financial advantages, and foreign companies don't have the same regulatory requirement. (Their U.S. subsidiaries do, but not their business overseas.) Thus, over time we might see capital flow out of the U.S.

tvanantwerp 10y ago
Reminds me of when I lived in Copenhagen. There were laws against businesses being opened on Sunday. But if your store was small enough, you were exempt. And so I regularly saw two or three tiny and separate H&M stores side-by-side with each other.
- jbpetersen 10y ago
  I was not expecting HN to make me think about the potential for unwavering capitalism to be adorable.
- matt4077 10y ago
  It's a bit different because they're actually selling (parts of) that business unit – a holding is evaluated as single entity. Oh, and H&M frequently does small shops in locations without such laws as well. They often have separate stores for men/women/children or along segments of style (i. e. stores with only formal menswear). It could be marketing, availability of retails space or an attempt to remain flexible. It's also not too hard to make such laws airtight, or to leave some details to the executive branch which can react much faster.

markm248 10y ago

Bastards

user5994461 10y ago

The article is blocked by paywall for me, even when coming from google.com

levicole 10y ago

Am I the only one disappointed that this means Snoopy won't be in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

Another old-timer loses his job, probably not going to land another gig anytime soon. Hopefully can draw a pension. "People familiar with the matter said the most-recent contract was signed in 2014 and costs MetLife $10 million to $15 million a year." That's peanuts.

jonathankoren 10y ago

I'm glad they've finally stopped selling life insurance and retirement annuities to children.

gjolund 10y ago

I guess business news = hacker news now.

Spooky23 10y ago

Modern marketing and iconography is so bland. The new MetLife logo looks like a feminine product.

D-Coder 10y ago

I found the title of this article misleading — clickbaity. "Fired" suggests that Snoopy did something that cost him his job. The company changed direction, and Snoopy was no longer needed. Snoopy was laid off, or rightsized, or something. Not fired.