Purity
Explanation
This comic satirizes the concept of "purity" in academic and professional fields -- the idea, popularized by the famous XKCD comic among others, that some disciplines are more "pure" or fundamental than others (with mathematics and physics at the top).
In the first panel, someone asks a red-haired woman: "So why do you want to go into quantitative finance?" She responds: "The purity." Her interviewer is surprised, and she elaborates that while some people go into physics for utility, and others want to go into math "with no practical application," she wants "to go into a field with negative utility."
She explains her reasoning: "I want to create trading algorithms that siphon money from pension funds through marginal improvements in processing speed and spend the extracted wealth on improving resource extraction." In other words, she wants to use her mathematical talents for high-frequency trading that actively harms society -- extracting value rather than creating it.
The interviewer asks: "Have you considered weapons development?" She responds: "But those weapons could be used for good."
The joke inverts the "purity" hierarchy completely. In the traditional ranking, "pure" fields are those with no practical application (pure math being the "purest"). This character takes the logic one step further: if being removed from practical application is pure, then being actively harmful is even purer. Weapons at least have a possible positive use (defense), but quantitative finance that drains pension funds has no redeeming application whatsoever -- making it the "purest" field of all. The comic skewers both the snobbery of academic purity rankings and the moral emptiness of certain financial industry practices.