#HE ESSENTIALLY LOSES HIS PENSION | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

contentment-of-cats · 1 year

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The Card Game at the End of the Galaxy.

They got the Lady as repaired as one could hope. The damned whales apparently used the refined Clouzon fuels to come back here to die after spawning. The Chimaera's crew had been too busy dying or with damage control to see the beasties having it off in hyperspace. Grace and Little Gods only knew if she'd hold together making the jump, but with the materials of other crashed ships, they'd been able to put her back together.

Shipwide Communication: All Hands

ALL ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL INDICATED FOR COLD SLEEP HAVE RECEIVED THEIR THORACIC PORTS AND BACTA TREATMENT.

PREPARATION FOR NON-EMERGENCY COLDSLEEP:

Your groups will be called by MOS and rank. Do not wait in the medbay corridors.

No food after 00:00 - clear liquids only. Take the intestinal prep at the same time.

At 06:00 leave your quarters wearing the hooded jumpsuit provided. Your possessions will be stored away for you.

In the staging area wait to be called with your group. Please do not bring anything with you such as datapads, reading material, or your personal comlinks.

We will soon be home.

They will soon regret it.

Long live the Empire.

CMDE Albus Marinith, ISD Chimaera FLAG, 7th Fleet,

GADM Mitth'raw'nuruodo, ISD Chimaera FLAG, 7th Fleet

They were good soldiers and sailors of the Empire, and rather than await a lingering death from starvation and thirst - or eating dead whale meat (barf) - his Humans got to work. Thrawn, of course, didn't know this. He was in and out of coldsleep, medbeds, bacta tanks, and surgery. His Humans were as determined to save him as they were to get home. They were shocked silly when three crones suddenly appeared on the auxiliary bridge, and the Three Mothers almost joined their sisters before Thrawn stopped them.

They had something to offer - and they wanted something in return.

A way to communicate with the galaxy far, far away. A way to rally the resources needed to return home. The hyperlanes were purgill migration routes, the purgill one of the oldest species not just in the galaxy, but in the universe, and a species eating itself out of existence. They came here to spawn, then die, their bones filled with Clouzon, the ships that ran on it the only way for them to get home. With a ring based on the old Jedi fighter hyperspace rings, the Chimaera could fly again. It would take the Mothers back to Dathomir, and the crew of the Chimaera back home.

It was go time.

They found a way to mine the bone belt, then vaporize the bones in a plasma engine, collecting the gasses. The Chimaera's chief engineer's last act had been to shut down the core with his bare hands in a breached engine room. In the weeks that it took to minimally refuel, the air turned stale as vital systems starved. Then, nursing the core back to full power - and holding their breath - engine by engine, they fired the Gemon-4 ion engines and moved slowly into the atmosphere.

Thrawn awoke just in time for the descent.

More devilry, but it could not be helped. Three rickety old hags weighed against the remaining Chimaera crew.

So they are here now, his loyal crew. Almost all sleep in their stasis units in the catacombs. The Chimaera is vacuum tight and as spaceworthy as possible. Bridger will be stranded.

Hammerly shuffles the cards, the chrono counting down to 00:00. Pyrondi has a pile of worthless chips and heckles Lomar and Agral that she's cashing in when they get home. Yve doesn't do goodbyes, and is sitting this one out. Marinith is finishing his last commands and a glass of his Corellian whisky.

Thrawn brings a bottle and takes a seat. "Deal me in, Flag Captain Hammerly."

"Ready to lose your pension, sir?" Pyrondi chirps with her characteristic confidence.

"Hold onto your chips, Commander Pyrondi." Card games such as Five Card Fool Me involve strategy as much as luck. "Remember last time."

She tried to bluff the table with a pair of deuces and fooled everyone but him.

They talk about what they're going to do when they get home. Some of the acts involve improbable uses for Bridger's head, but most are typical leave activities. They talk about visiting family, partying, indulging in food and drink, or hobbies.

"What are you planning to do, sir?"

"Apparently, Commander Lomar, I need to plan on posting your bail." Thrawn let a small smirk flit across his face, making the others eye their cards nervously. "Don't worry about the courts martial. I've had enough of them that I can talk you through."

The runup to coldsleep has seen some remarkable behavior in the name of stress relief, and Thrawn has long looked the other way on fraternization. Waking up in a pile of warm and naked Humans has been comforting these past months. They have never disdained his injured body, and many bear scars from horrendous wounds of their own.

Five minutes to 00:00, Hammerly puts the cards away and kisses them all farewell. Lomar and Agral follow. Marinith looks in and bids him goodnight. Yve's farewell is personal, warm, and heartfelt. Pyrondi tidies the room and Thrawn can feel her reluctance to leave.

"I'll look in on you in a few hours."

She nods, not trusting her voice, and goes. Thrawn would never betray her confidence that coldsleep terrifies her. They've all had the drills, starting with the academy, but this is going to be for a very long time. They don't have enough consumables for the length of time they'll have to wait. Thrawn and a core of stormtroopers will remain awake, with a few officers and specialists to wake when the Eye of Sion arrives.

The prep for non-emergency coldsleep is unpleasant, but he noticed them cutting back on rations and increasing fluids. When he looks in on Pyrondi, as promised, she's pale and fatigued in the aftermath. A weak smile from her and he enters, placing the do-not-disturb on the doorway. He's going to miss her as she sleeps. He will miss all of them. His Humans.

He stays until 06:00, going to medbay and finding everything ready. He nods at the medic to begin.

"Commander Agral, report to medbay."

"Commander Yve, report to medbay."

"Commander Lomar, report to medbay."

"Commander- Commodore Marinith, report to medbay."

Pyrondi is last, and it is for his own selfish purpose. Marinith gives him a knowing look.

The body, reactivating from a cold start, goes through hell. Hibernation sickness can last for weeks if one is not properly inducted. First come the scans to make sure of an empty digestive tract. A protective drink goes down, eye and nose drops are administered, a mouthpiece put in place. Then the thoracic port is hooked up to the infusion pump. There is nobody to see as he takes Pyrondi's hand. She's a good officer, one of his very best.

"Anesthesia in three, two, one. Commander, count backwards from ten."

"Ten. Nine. Eight. S-sevix. Fi-"

Pyrondi's eyes haze, close, and are then delicately taped to protect them. The mouthpiece and airway tube are placed, then her exposed face covered with bacta patches. It doesn't look like her any longer. Thrawn starts to tuck her fingers into the mitt, then looks at the other four caskets waiting, lights blinking. It's not a Chiss custom, but he presses his lips to her warm fingers.

"I'll see you soon, Commander Pyrondi."

He tucks her hand back in, straightens and nods at the medic.

"Coldsleep prep dose underway… now." He can't see the warmth drain from her face, but he can see her in infrared when he blinks his nictitating lid. She changes until her body gives only a cold blue signal. "Patient is stable. Beginning induction."

He waits. She or one of the others waited for him - there every time he woke up.

"Induction successful for Pyrondi, Commander, Senior Weapons Officer, female, twenty-six years of age."

The casket closes, carbonite gas filling the space, the light flashes and then settles into a steady red.

Thrawn nods to the medic, one of the few crew members left awake.

"We'll take good care of them, sir."

"Dismissed."

When the troopers come to take the five caskets, Thrawn turns and walks away.

Now all he has to do is wait.

#thrawn #ahsoka #do i really need a spoiler warning?#isd chimaera #hammerly #pyrondi #agral #yve #marinith #chimaera crew

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thatscarletflycatcher · 9 months

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I might be interested in that “Sherlock writers/producers power trip” stuff 👀

Calling it a power trip was a bit dramatic of me XD but I do think the creators of Sherlock had a... weird relationship with the character of John Watson. He gets two different and incongruous characterizations, and I don't understand the rationale behind it.

The most clear example of this for me is how this changes between the Unaired Pilot and A Study in Pink. The Watson of the UP is self assured, practical, intelligent, competent, moral (if somewhat grim and with a veneer of darkness lurking beneath the surface) and mature. The Watson of ASIP is insecure, impractical, rather dumb, extremely loyal to a person he just met for no reason, a failure of a petticoat chaser, and essentially an adrenaline junkie. And these are two versions of the same story.

On the UP, the first meeting between Sherlock and Watson is marked by Watson's curiosity and earnest admiration about Sherlock's deductions; the same scene in ASIP shows us Watson being taken aback by Sherlock's behavior. When they are at the scene of the crime and Sherlock asks Watson if he's aware that he's speaking his appreciative remarks out loud, UP Watson just calmly asks if that bothers Sherlock; ASIP!Watson hurries to apologize. And in general he hesitates, apologizes and feels out of place much more across the latter version.

In the UP, what "cures" Watson's limp is that he notices that something has gone wrong with Sherlock's attempt at dealing with the cabbie, and he jumps to go help/save him. Watson is a doctor, his vocation in life is centered around helping and saving people; his psychological symptoms are caused by a sense of purposelessness, as he's been discharged after being wounded, and lives on a military pension. Now that he has met Sherlock and realized the ways in which Sherlock is self-destructive, he has found new purpose. ASIP, by replacing this for a foot-chase, replaces this element of characterization (intelligence, moral fiber, decisiveness) with... John is just an adrenaline junkie -and doubles down upon this through Mycroft words, and by removing from the ending scene the lines where Sherlock calls Watson "my doctor", and Watson tells Lestrade off by reminding him that Sherlock must eat if he is to be useful in future. In both versions we have the set-up of the gun Watson keeps in his drawer (that he may come to use to kill himself) and the payoff (that he ends up using to save Sherlock's life); but whereas in the UP it is of a piece with the characterization I mentioned above, in ASIP it feels like a leftover they couldn't remove because it was so deeply baked into the plot.

The framing of Watson's killing of the cabbie is also different between UP and ASIP: in the UP, we only see Watson leaving the restaurant, then the cabbie dying, and "realize" with Sherlock who the shooter was. It is implied that he guessed where the cabbie was taking Sherlock, called the police, made a detour to pick up his gun, and then headed to Baker Street where he chose the vantage point of a house across the street, from which he watched the cabbie and Sherlock, and waited till the last possible moment to shoot, in case bloodshed could be avoided. This shows that he can keep a very cool head under pressure, that he underwent military training and it stuck, and that he is moral and practical, grounded and efficient.

ASIP!Watson picked up his gun after his interview with Mycroft -the implication that he means to use it as protection/defense for Sherlock and himself from... MI5/6. Now that does give some credence to Mycroft's insult that Watson is brave, but bravery is what people say when they mean stupidity. You were in the army, Watson! You should know better! (the Mycroft subplot also includes two painfully awkward attempts at hitting on one of Mycroft's underlings, a woman clearly much younger than him. As I was saying, Watson loses maturity between the UP and ASIP). Watson then only follows Sherlock and the cabbie because of the phone setup that had been previously solved by Sherlock (so no application of intelligence here), does not think of calling the police, and then we watch him desperately searching for the room where Sherlock and the cabbie are, then when he casually lands on the room across that one, he screams Sherlock's name to the top of his lungs, and as he is not heard, he ends up shooting the cabbie as a last desperate effort. No planning here, no cold head, and some very stupid decisions (had the cabbie been armed for real, and he had stumbled into the room or been heard, chances are one or the two would have ended up injured or dead).

I think the contrast between the two versions of this other scene showcases this really well:

ASIP: Sherlock: are you alright? Watson: Yes, of course I'm alright. Sherlock: you just killed a man. Watson: Yes, I... That's true, innit? (pause) but he wasn't a very nice man.

UP: Sherlock: you are alright? Watson: of course I'm alright. Sherlock: you have just killed a man. Watson: I've seen men die before -good men, friends of mine-; 'thought I'd never sleep again. I'll sleep fine tonight.

The unaired pilot plays more with setting up a "dark side" to Watson; his profession as doctor makes him mainly caring and helpful, but it can also make him clinical and detached at points; I don't think it is a coincidence that Donovan tells Watson to take his distance from Sherlock because "One day just showing up won’t be enough. One day we’ll be standing round a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one who put it there", but by the end of the episode the police is standing around on a crime scene for which the killer was... Watson. This last thing, again, carries over into ASIP because it couldn't be taken out without breaking the plot, but has been removed from the rest of Watson's characterization in the episode. Mind you, I don't think "exploring the dark side of John Watson's personality and maybe turning him into a villain or a conflicted antihero" is a good idea, but it was set up in one, discarded, and not replaced in the other.

I could write another post with the differences in the characterization of Sherlock between the two tellings of the story, but exploring that here would make this answer way much longer than it needs to be. I'll summarize it by saying that UP Sherlock is written to have some complementarities with UP Watson: Sherlock is rather juvenile/childish, too focused on "the game" to take care of himself, assess risks or evaluate how his behavior affects others. He has a hard time understanding the feelings of others, and that coupled with an enjoyment of tricks and disguises and games is what makes him difficult for other people to deal with. Basically, Sherlock is very intelligent in a rather theoretical, detached way, whereas Watson is a grounding presence because he's full of common, practical sense. ASIP Sherlock is... an asshole. It's not that he doesn't understand the emotions of others, he despises them. It's not that he's reckless, it's that he's super cool and dangerous (and suddenly is a master of combat what). He's basically a sort of pop culture übermensch?

The ASIP characterization for both characters dominates series 1 and 2 of Sherlock, and develops through two main dynamics: one is the "Watson as a silly wife in a bad 1950s sitcom", that is particularly intense and weird in The Blind Banker (which, in all fairness, was not written by mofftiss).

The first Sherlock-John scene in TBB is a juxtaposition between Sherlock having a skilled fight at the flat, while Watson is failing miserably at... checking out groceries. The following scene is poor silly woman Watson with her his silly little homemaking problems cannot understand the huge work and problems her husband Sherlock tackles when she's not looking. Watson is worried about having money to pay the necessities, Sherlock cannot be bothered to mind such pedestrian things.

This depiction of Watson as """"feminine"""" (derogatory) pops up here and then. He gets kidnapped three times for just being... careless (again, doctor, yes, but war veteran and human being that has been kidnapped before). It may not sound like A LOT, but when you consider the whole series is just 14 episodes, of which one is a short and another happens exclusively inside Sherlock's head... well...

Magnussen literally calls Watson Sherlock's damsel in distress in His Last Vow. His feelings upon discovering Sherlock is alive in The Empty Hearse are treated as over-reaction by Sherlock, Mary and the narrative. In general the whole Mary arc is filled with this sense that Mary and Sherlock relate to each other and understand each other and cooperate with each other on a level that Watson can't reach, and he's therefore relegated most of the time to a figure to be protected from both truth and evildoers, and then to give Rosie to, because man carrying a baby emasculating or something? (Sherlock's single interaction with Rosie is about his trying to reason with her, but he never touches or holds her, and she virtually disappears as a being once Mary dies).

This concept of Sherlock as idealized pop culture übermensch and Watson as a failure of a man takes the rest of the time a strange tone of aggressiveness, not only in the occasions in which Watson beats up Sherlock (A Scandal in Bohemia, TEH, The Lying Detective), but in smaller ways in Watson's pointed acting like he's not interested in the case or in explanations... and his dating women for apparently no other reason that to try and stick it to Sherlock (which makes it extra out of nowhere when he's not only so deeply affected by Sherlock's death, but that he tells to his grave "I was so alone and I owe you so much". Wait, what? You've spent most of your time being annoyed and feeling threatened by this guy).

Watson's relationships with women is also part of the weirdness of his characterization. He dates several of them one after the other in what seems an effort to show Sherlock that at least in this he's more competent than him; he doesn't seem to really care considering he mixes up their names and neglects them. However, the series also wants to make him also a very awkward and poor flirt with no standards (like trying to get the therapist in The Hounds of Baskerville, starting an emotional affair with a woman who just smiled at him on the bus, gets very mad at a tabloid calling him confirmed bachelor), and that the women that DO actually get into stable relationships with him think him beneath them one way or another (the series makes a pointed joke about how his girlfriend in The Great Game won't have sex with him or make him breakfast, Mary uses him first as a cover and then calls herself the best thing that happened to him as a joke while he's very seriously trying to propose to her). It rounds up again to that subtle "not man enough - feminine" undercurrent.

Then there's Watson's general incompetence. On my first draft of this answer I had written a list, episode by episode, of all the times Watson is being sent on wild goose chases, makes mistakes that no one with his background should, stumbles upon clues by sheer dumb luck, is generally useless, and his ideas are treated as extremely dumb, but it was very long and boring. So here are the ones I found to be the most notorious examples:

In TBB, he does not comment that left-handed people do in fact learn to shoot with their right hand (he is himself a left handed person who does that as established in ASIP); on that same episode he daftly stands by with a paint can and gets caught by the police and can't say anything to defend himself despite the high unlikeness of his being.... a street artist (his worrying about the charges is, again, framed as silly.)

He leaves the witness they need and who is in danger, alone, so he can go "help Sherlock" (which meant just... running out of the scene so she could get killed).

Watson's date is better than him at the brawl that happens at the circus somehow. He cannot tell a delivery guy from a ninja and gets kidnapped. He's scared witless because an old lady is pointing a gun at him (HE'S AN AFGHANISTAN VETERAN).

In TGG, Watson has kept the gun with which he killed the cabbie (against UP, and also, you know, incriminating evidence). Watson, a doctor whose CV specifies surgery, is jumpscared and upset by a head in the fridge.

In ASIB, he doesn't even know how to punch properly. The guy who is an ace with a gun in ASIP, is reduced and held at gunpoint like nothing here, and contributes nothing while badass Sherlock and Irene kick the goons asses. Falls for a dumb seduction trick because he's an idiot. Cannot tell apart real shock from Mrs Hudson just pretending.

In The Sign of the Three, Sherlock realizes Mary is pregnant before Watson, WHO IS A DOCTOR does.

These characterizations I have been talking about are very dominant through series 1 and 2, but then something curious happens on s3: without any warning or connection, the series starts acting like the characterizations of the UP have been the show's characterizations all along.

It begins with Sherlock's characterization; he's back and itching to see Watson, not realizing that he would have moved on in two years. Mycroft tries to warn him to break the news softly to him, but Sherlock doesn't understand; all he can think about is what a lark it will be to show up out of nowhere! There's no real meanness in it, just childish joy. This goes on through TsotT, with his anxieties about his speech, his difficulty to prepare and deliver it and following through the ceremonies, his surprise and emotion at being chosen as best man and called Watson's best friend, his promise to keep Mary safe and his efforts to save Watson in s4, and even his realization about Eurus' emotional needs in the series finale.

Not that the original ASIP characterization doesn't show up here and there again and again, through things like Sherlock's edgy comments about religion, his complete distraction and lack of attention at Rosie's baptism, his mysoginy and use of Jeaninne in HLV, etc.

Same happens with Watson. The narrative keeps doing its mockery thing, and will lay VERY THICK the whole "Watson is just an adrenaline junkie" with Mary's secret and how Watson married her because he's attracted to danger and that makes it all his fault somehow... it will also show Watson being bored by his job at the surgery. BUT the main storyline of the Sherlock-Watson relationship only makes sense through the UP characterization. It is, in fact, spelled out loud in TsotT: Sherlock solves puzzles, Watson saves lives. The back-cases of the episode show Watson being intelligent, competent, and helpful, specially as a doctor. Sherlock believes that he's been saved by Watson through their friendship. The case at the end is solved through both Watson's saving of lives and Sherlock's solving of puzzles (we are even shown that Watson has another friend! who is also a recluse!). Watson is at peace in his relationship with Harriet. We are even shown that Watson is secretly drinking more alcohol during his bachelor bender, to not disappoint Sherlock's calculations about his alcohol tolerance, and so "ruin" his fun and the work he put on it.

This goes on through HLV as well; Watson gets some PTSD flashbacks, then manages firmly and competently the "rescue" of Isaiah Whitley, and even shows some of that colder and a tad cruel side that was hinted in the UP. He has authority enough to make Mycroft leave when he tells him to. He's in on the plan to reveal Mary's past as a spy, and even later on is the one to suggest Sherlock puts a tracker on her before she drugs him and leaves, which shows both practicality and foresight. He even jokes with Lestrade about Sherlock being like a baby!

Even though The Abominable Bride only happens in Sherlock's mind and therefore doesn't really count towards Watson's characterization, it is worth noticing that in it Watson is so much more involved in monitoring and containing Sherlock's drug problem than he has proven to be till that point (sure, Watson got Molly to test him in HLV, but nothing came of it, and the treatment of the matter in TLD is even worse).

The only way to make some sense of The Six Thatchers and TLD, Watson-wise, is to play along with this idea of Watson as supremely practical, competent, and mature. His being rather checked out about Mary (he spends the whole morning (9 hours) of what seems to be one of his free days just proving with a balloon that Sherlock doesn't need him, while his wife is dealing with a very young baby, for example), and his emotional affair are to be understood not as part and parcel of the character we've seen through series 1 and 2, but as a moment of weakness of the character they say he is in s3.

It's not just the only way to understand not only his intense guilt, but the way the narrative tries to present the infidelity as "well, it is what it is, we are all human" down to Sherlock telling Watson that even Watson is human. That's not what Watson actually is, though, through most of the series. He's a callous, violent, horny idiot, which the narrative calls human, and that's the resolution of the opening scene of TLD about things being wrong and being able of calling them wrong. They are just what they are and we are all human.

The finale is all about Sherlock and Eurus, and so Watson's development ends here.

And the thing is, that I would have liked to see much more of the potential the characterizations in UP showed. That would have been an interesting dynamic. I think the casting of Martin Freeman for Watson was great, and that he elevates whatever he's in (yes, even The Hobbit movies), but was ultimately wasted, and for what?

Maybe it is that the BBC demanded those changes to bring in a lighter tone and comedic relief. Maybe they really wanted a sort of loose remix of House M.D. (which is what the Sherlock-Watson dynamic is most of the time in this show) instead of the Sherlock Holmes adaptation Mofftiss wanted to make. Maybe only after the show became wildly popular they were allowed to do what they wanted that way. But it was too little, too late, and mixed in with a steep decline of the quality of the writing of everything else.

Even within the limits of that generous reading of what happened, it is still stories they wrote and signed, where what could have been a compelling character with many interesting things to explore, from an actually accurate portrayal of PTSD (and not the "actually it is civilian life that is giving him PTSD because he's an adrenaline junkie, surprise!), and a war injury and physical disability being taken seriously, to his grounding role in Sherlock's life, a development of his deductive abilities, a more equal and complex relationship with Mary... we got an idiot whose function in the plot most of the time was narrative punchbag and high contrast to Sherlock's übermensch.

And that's such a pity.

#ask #apesoformythoughts #sherlock #sherlock meta #listen this isn't anywhere near as coherent and polished as I wanted it to be #but I've been working on this reply for so long #I have reached the #it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be posted #stage of things #and for that I apologize #and will be happy to clarify/discuss specific points

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winterxgardener · 6 months

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Hey! I wanted to let those who may not know that the first story in today's episode had quite a few more updates they didn't get to. It wasn't attached to the one reposted, so they might not have seen it. A LOT went down.

I sent @winterxgardener a rundown summary of what else happened, but if those of you are curious, they are u/Scared-Weakness-6250. There are about seven or eight more updates.

It's a bit of a read, but also very interesting if you felt like you wanted more to the story.

I wished they had seen it as it would have been cool to hear their thoughts and reactions. Maybe they could do an episode called "Updates We Missed" or something like that going through previous stories and the updates that came after the episodes were taped?

Anyway, I hope all of you are having a great morning, noon, or night!

Kudos to @thisisatakenusername for updating us regarding the first story for the Reddit story. Whoa! Be prepared; it's a lot of information to handle. ⬇️

Basically the OP installed a lot of security measures and put in cameras and signs. They ended up cutting through the massive lock with an angle grinder and broke in. The police and the property manager came and caught them and they thankfully didn't resist arrest or no charges could have been dropped.

The damages were $5000. He planned on suing them for damages and especially the money they made off renting it illegally. The parents pretty much want nothing to do with the place now and OP understands but is sad because it was originally intended for them.

He ended up getting a sincere apology from the two brothers in law and it really meant a lot to OP. One of the brothers had to pay for both their bail and they were able to pay for the damages but not OP's legal fees. He assumes this only happened once they realized how f*cked they were

They basically were going to do anything and everything to make sure it goes away because they could lose their jobs as one of them has security clearance. They made an agreement for no contact and a lot of other legal stuff and things ended up working out ok. The actual break in event was a mess for OP as he was away with his wife’s family and didn’t have their phones on them for a bit.

One of the two families ended up having their truck repossessed and had to pay to break their lease on their SUV. They were $125k in debt on high interest credit cards, no home equity and two personal loans that were probably under false pretenses to begin with

The dad refused to help but the mom eventually caved. The parents had no house payments and lived off social security and pensions with a small emergency fund. That sister finally got to them, they ended up needing to borrow a car from them that could barely hold them and their three kids and the parents were paying for their groceries and the car insurance

They also filed for Class 7 bankruptcy and technically have nothing at stake if they break the agreement, so he is hoping they don't end up reaching out

The other brother-in-law also lives separately from his wife and kids because he is done with that family dynamic which I honestly don't blame. That sister was the one pressuring him to do everything and never wanted any part in it.

He is finally able to go there worry-free and his parents have also enjoyed it. It seems it is all behind him now

I tried the best I could to sum it up and left out some other details like meetings with his lawyer and the DA's office up at the house, but that is essentially what happened.

Me after reading it:

#smoshblr #smosh reddit stories #updates

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newstfionline · 2 years

Text

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Miami faith community strains to help new exiles, migrants (AP) A few days after selling all she had to flee Cuba with her three children on a crowded boat, Daneilis Tamayo raised her hand in praise and sang the rousing opening hymn at Sunday worship in this Miami suburb. “The only thing that gave me strength is the Lord. I’m not going to lose my faith, whatever I might go through,” she said later, sitting on a mattress in one of Iglesia Rescate’s classrooms. She and her children, ages 16, 8 and 3, have been sleeping in the church’s improvised shelter since the promises of help made by her contact in the United States turned out to be “all lies.” In the past 18 months, an estimated 250,000 migrants and asylum-seekers like Tamayo have arrived in the Miami area after being granted only precarious legal status. It often doesn’t include permission to work, which is essential to building new lives in the U.S. The influx is maxing out the migrant social safety net even in Miami’s faith communities. Miami’s faith leaders and their congregations remain steadfast in their mission to help settle new migrants. But they’re sounding the alarm that the need is growing unmanageable—and could get worse without federal reforms providing permanent legal status and work permits.

4 Americans kidnapped in northern Mexico, officials say (AP) Four U.S. citizens have been kidnapped after gunmen opened fire on their vehicle in the northern Mexico border city of Matamoros, the FBI said. The four had entered Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, on Friday and were travelling in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates. The FBI San Antonio Division office said in a statement Sunday that the vehicle came under fire shortly after it entered Mexico. “All four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men,” the office said. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for the return of the victims and the arrest of the culprits.

A generation of Venezuelan children know only struggles (AP) Valerie Torres’ mother has tried to shield her from the worst of Venezuela’s protracted crisis—the deadly protests, the sick people begging for help, the malnourished children with protruding ribs. At school, her teachers don’t even broach the subject. But just shy of her 10th birthday this month, the girl is perceptive beyond her years. She knows her fourth-grade classmate lied to their teacher saying he forgot a book at home when in fact he was still saving up to buy it; that neighbors, friends and even her grandmother have all fled the country in search of a better life; that her mother is bringing home fewer groceries. Valerie is part of a generation of Venezuelan children who know only a country in crisis, whose lives so far have been spent amid hardship and under the government of a single president, Nicolás Maduro, who took the reins a decade ago Sunday when his mentor, Hugo Chávez, died of cancer.

Unions vow to shut France’s economy down amid pension battle (AP) Roads blocked, oil refineries disrupted, planes grounded and trains halted—unions are threatening to shut down France’s economy this week in what they hope is their toughest riposte yet to President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age. The first actions are expected Monday, as truckers are being urged to block major highway arteries and interchanges in go-slow actions dubbed “escargot” operations. Unions plan an open-ended strike on the national rail service starting Monday evening. The government is bracing for the biggest disruptions Tuesday, when strikes are expected across multiple sectors and protests are planned in cities across France against the retirement bill. The reform, which would raise the official pension age from 62 to 64 and require 43 years of work to earn a full pension, is currently under debate in parliament.

Russia’s population nightmare (Economist) A demographic tragedy is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women outnumber men by at least 10m. War is not the sole—or even the main—cause of these troubles but it has made them all worse. According to Western estimates, 175,000-200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded over the past year (Russia’s own figures are lower). Somewhere between 500,000 and 1m mostly young, educated people have evaded the meat grinder by fleeing abroad. Even if Russia had no other demographic problems, losing so many in such a short time would be painful. As it is, the losses of war are placing more burdens on a shrinking, ailing population. Russia may be entering a doom loop of demographic decline.

In liberated Ukraine city, civilians still pay price of war (AP) In this war-scarred city in Ukraine’s northeast, residents scrutinize every step for land mines. Behind closed doors, survivors wait in agony for the bodies of loved ones to be identified. The hunt for collaborators of the not-so-long ago Russian occupation poisons tightly-knit communities. This is life in Izium, a city on the Donets River in the Kharkiv region that was retaken by Ukrainian forces in September, but still suffers the legacy of six months of Russian occupation. Ukrainian civilians were tortured, disappeared and were arbitrarily detained. Mass graves with hundreds of bodies have been discovered and entire neighborhoods were destroyed in the fighting. Izium is a gruesome reminder of the human cost of the war. Six months after it was liberated, residents say they continue to pay the price. In this city, everyone has a mine story: Either they stepped on one and lost a limb or know someone who did. The mines are discovered daily, concealed along riverbanks, on roads, in fields, on the tops of roofs, in trees. “We have an average of one person a week with wounds” from mines, Dr. Yurii Kuzentsov said. “I don’t know when I will ever go to the river or the forest again, even if our lives are restored, because, as a medical professional, I have seen the consequences.”

A month after quake, survivors need shelter, sanitation (AP) One month after a powerful quake devastated parts of Turkey and Syria, hundreds of thousands of people still need adequate shelter and sanitation, and an appeal for $1 billion to assist survivors is only 10% funded, hampering efforts to tackle the humanitarian crisis, a United Nations official said Monday. The Feb. 6 earthquake and strong aftershocks have killed more than 46,000 people in Turkey, destroyed or damaged around 230,000 buildings and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless—making it the worst disaster in Turkey’s modern history. The U.N. estimates that the earthquake killed around 6,000 people in Syria, mainly in the rebel-held northwest. About 2 million survivors have been housed in temporary accommodation or evacuated from the earthquake-devastated region, according to Turkish government figures. Around 1.5 million people have been settled in tents while another 46,000 have been moved to container houses. Others are living in dormitories and guesthouses, the government said.

Bathhouses in Asia are in hot water (Washington Post) For almost 75 years, Tokyo’s Daikokuyu has been a community establishment where locals strip off, wash away the dirt and grime of everyday life, and then have a long soak together in big overflowing tubs. Generations of Japanese frequented their neighborhood bathhouses, sweating shoulder to shoulder in spirit of a tradition called hadaka no tsukiai, or “naked communion.” Now, bathhouses face a new, double existential crisis: Many bathhouses struggled or closed during the covid pandemic only then to be hit with huge heating bills, thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “The past few months have really been unbelievable,” said Daikokuyu’s third-generation owner Takuya Shinbo. With record low temperatures hitting Tokyo this past winter, he had to shoulder more than double last year’s cost to keep the water warm through cold nights. Daikokuyu’s monthly gas bill has more than doubled—from just over $5,000 in January last year to more than $12,000 in January this year. Compared to hard-hit European countries, Japan and Korea have seen relatively small hikes in energy prices resulting from the war in Ukraine, but the increased bills remain a daunting obstacle for already struggling bathhouse businesses in both countries.

South Korea Exporting Billions in Arms (NYT) A year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war has spurred a global effort to produce more missiles, tanks, artillery shells and other munitions. And few countries have moved as quickly as South Korea to increase output. Last year, South Korea’s arms exports rose 140 percent to a record $17.3 billion, including deals worth $12.4 billion to sell tanks, howitzers, fighter jets and multiple rocket launchers to Poland, one of Ukraine’s closest allies. But as South Korea expands weapons sales globally, it has refused to send lethal assistance to Ukraine itself. Instead, it has focused on filling the world’s rearmament gap while resisting any direct role in arming Ukraine, imposing strict export control rules on all its sales. South Korea’s wariness stems in part from its reluctance to openly antagonize Moscow, from which it hopes for cooperation in imposing new sanctions against an increasingly belligerent North Korea. Countries throughout Latin America, Israel and others have also declined to send weapons directly to Ukraine.

Afghan women, divorced and remarried, now considered outlaws under Taliban rule (Washington Post) After her stepfather sold her into marriage at the age of 13 to support his drug habit, the young Afghan woman fought for years to escape an abusive husband. She eventually fled his home, secured a divorce and remarried, she recalled. Now, under Taliban rule, she’s suddenly on the run again, at risk of imprisonment for adultery. Under the previous government, this woman from western Afghanistan could get a divorce by testifying that her first husband was physically abusive, even though he refused to appear before the judge. But under the Taliban’s draconian interpretation of Islamic law, her divorce is invalid and, as a result, so is her second marriage. Former judges and lawyers estimate that thousands of Afghan women who earlier secured divorces without a husband’s consent are now in danger under Taliban rule, facing potential imprisonment and violent reprisals.

Lebanon adopts ‘dollarization’ as currency, economy crumble (AP) With the Lebanese economy in shambles and its currency in free fall, small businesses spend much of their time trying to keep up with a fluctuating exchange rate. Now they are increasingly leaning on one of the world’s most reliable assets—the U.S. dollar—as a way to cope with the worst financial crisis in its modern history. The Lebanese pound has lost 95% in value since late 2019, and now most restaurants and many stores are demanding to be paid in dollars. The government recently began allowing grocery stores to start doing the same. While this “dollarization” aims to ease inflation and stabilize the economy, it also threatens to push more people into poverty and deepen the crisis. That’s because few in Lebanon have access to dollars to pay for food and other essentials priced that way. But endemic corruption means political and financial leaders are resisting the alternative to dollarization: long-term reforms to banks and government agencies that would end wasteful spending and jump-start the economy.

A new generation of Palestinian fighters is rising up in the West Bank (Washington Post) A Palestinian militant named Mohammad Abu Dhraa strode boldly through this city’s roughest refugee camp last week with an assault rifle on his shoulder, an entourage of young men following in his path. The day before, Abu Dhraa had taken part in an hours-long gun battle with Israeli soldiers who raided Nablus’s city center, one of the deadliest confrontations here in years. Fighters like Abu Dhraa are not tied to a party or a political ideology. But they have easy access to guns and are committed to the fight. In their youth and independence, they represent a new kind of threat—not only to Israel but to an ever-weaker Palestinian Authority, run by unelected men in their 70s and 80s. In earlier generations, Palestinian political factions ran the brigades during street fighting against Israel. Now, cells of teenagers and young men in their early 20s from the neighborhood are calling the shots. It has been nearly 20 years since the last Palestinian intifada, or uprising. And while the dynamics have changed, observers say, the fundamentals are the same—occupation, despair and relentless violence. Across the West Bank, “the widespread public frustration and desperation is there” for another Palestinian uprising, said Tahani Mustafa, an expert with the International Crisis Group. “I think it’s going to be a lot bloodier, far more diffused, far more fragmented.”

#headlines #news

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mariacallous · 2 years

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As the winter chill hits and the energy crisis starts to become very real, it is hard to shake off the feeling that not only is suffering becoming normalised in this country, but those in power have an ever-decreasing interest in easing it.

Few examples are starker than the news that the NHS is trialling “heating prescriptions” to give to people who can’t pay their soaring energy bills. Some patients need electricity for disability equipment, such as ventilators, wheelchairs and feeding tube pumps. Others need to put the heating on to ward off stiff arthritic joints or to ease breathing. Warmth and electricity used to be human rights – now they’re medicine.

In his autumn statement earlier this month, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, pledged to target cost of living support to “the most vulnerable”. “British compassion”, he said, would be at the heart of government policy during these difficult times. Reality is turning out to be quite different. Those who rely on the state pension or benefits may have been given a reprieve with their payments being uprated with inflation, but they must get through a cold winter before the 10.1% rise kicks in next April. Even when it does arrive, thanks to historically low benefit rates, the increase won’t come close to covering the essentials.

Meanwhile, the government has promised additional energy help next year in the form of a cost of living payment of £900 for households on means-tested benefits, but only £150 for people on disability benefits. According to the money saving expert Martin Lewis, these unequal rules mean that thousands of disabled people and carers on particular benefits will miss out on £650.

That the government has chosen to tighten eligibility for the warm home discount, so that half a million households – many of which will include disabled people – could lose this support, just as energy costs spiral, is an insight into how much their pledge to protect “the vulnerable” is worth.

Talk to community groups and charities, and the impact of mounting bills is already showing. Over a third of families with seriously ill and disabled children have cut back or stopped using life-saving disability equipment because of rising energy costs, according to the charity Contact. Of those, 40% say this is making their child’s health worse.

Meanwhile, the Royal National Institute of Blind People reports that blind and partially sighted people are not turning on their specialist lighting, despite needing it to move around the home safely. The disability charity Scope tells me it has heard from disabled people who are considering turning off the personal alarms that are meant to trigger help if they fall, as they can no longer afford to run them. Many are already cutting back on showers; their disability means it takes longer for them to wash and each minute costs more money. Others have been forced to give up their personal assistants who help them get dressed and go out, as they had to choose between electricity and independence. Some admit they are feeling suicidal.

If this is ministers protecting “the most vulnerable”, we can only imagine what hurting them would look like. Just like when George Osborne utilised the term during the 2010 era of austerity, the “most vulnerable” narrative has never been about the government helping people in need – but excusing the fact that they aren’t. The myth is perpetuated that some people in life are inevitably vulnerable, a stagnant group created by nature rather than a government’s political choices. It conveniently shifts responsibility away from ministers, suggesting that, say, a wheelchair user is unable to live a full life because of their disability, not because the government is withholding necessary support.

Away from Westminister, the truth is that millions of people in the UK don’t know how they are going to make it through winter. The news that the poorest people will end up shelling out nearly a third of their income by next spring just to pay fuel bills shows how unsustainable all of this is. A GP’s prescription pad will not patch up the holes in the welfare state.

It is not fearmongering to suggest that without sufficient support this winter, people are going to die. Even without energy bills rising, nearly 10,000 people in the UK perish every year from living in a cold home; human beings frozen in their own front rooms.

An upcoming Christmas campaign to encourage the public to switch off their energy to save cash will help some families be more energy efficient, but it is little use for disabled families. If you use a ventilator 24/7, “cutting back on energy” is not an option.

It is only real action from ministers that will make a difference. There are solutions, such as an energy social tariff that provides a discounted rate for disabled and low-income customers, or bringing forward the one-off energy payments to this winter, and increasing the support given to those on disability benefits. The recent story of Kate Winslet donating £17,000 to pay for the electricity for a little girl’s life-support equipment reveals the alternative: energy companies collecting bloated profits, while desperate families beg for help.

Every disabled child should be able to keep their oxygen running through Christmas. No one should have to skip dinner to keep their wheelchair charged. These are hardly radical claims, nor ambitious ideals. They are the bare minimum that any wealthy society should be striving for, and a threshold Britain is bleakly failing to meet. This is the truth no minister will admit: if anyone is “vulnerable” this winter, it will be because this government has failed to help them.

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mark-londin · 1 year

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back to shore

Lieping coin is a fraud trap after chicken coin and happy coin. If you lie still, pies will fall from the sky, and you can earn a lot of money by opening your pockets. This is a good thing, but this kind of good thing should only happen in the sky, and it is rare to hear it in the world. It is true that there is no struggle, no life, and you can sit on wealth without labor, and everyone wants it. But apart from the blessing of the family's merits, the rest can only be deceived by a glib mouth. Apart from this, there is no third path to follow. Therefore, lying flat currency is Guo Wengui's glib mouth to deceive the world, and the ant comrades only have to pay for it. It is absolutely impossible to lie flat and live like Guo Wengui's billionaire. Therefore, comrades-in-arms, whether it is chicken coins, happy coins, or lying flat coins, the only one who benefits in the end is Guo Wengui, who earns the hard-earned money and pensions of the Ant Gang, and is overjoyed to have the last laugh Guo Wengui was the only one. And the ant comrades who danced with Guo Wengui and were tricked by Guo Wengui into losing their underpants eventually became a joke after dinner. Look at Runtu in the bitterly cold place of Wimberney, and then look at Xia Chunfeng, who divorced his wife and lived alone in bunk beds in a motel, ate cold bread and instant noodles, but never changed his mind and hoped to fly on a Xibi rocket. , Mourn its misfortune, anger its indisputable. In yesterday's live broadcast, Guo Wengui said frankly that Seventh Brother really can't tell everyone about the benefits of lying flat coins. If he tells everyone, everyone will definitely not be able to sleep for a week. Guo Wengui’s words are wrong. Once the lying flat coin is born, a group of brainless and passionate ants will definitely wake up laughing in their sleep, instead of the so-called insomnia. This is an essential difference. But from this, the swarm of doubts and lawsuits and reports will eventually arrive as scheduled. Nowadays, there are more and more people who are not interested in investing in Xibi and are enlightened. It is reported that some of the comrades-in-arms of Xi Farm in Russia have made it clear that they are unwilling to sign the so-called proxy holding agreement, and Guo Wengui is very angry about this. But this trend and trend are destined not to be reversed, and the mouths of Xibi liars will only get bigger and bigger. One day, the Xibi Building is bound to collapse completely. It is self-evident that the FBI, SEC, and CFTC are prosecuted by the rule of law. Up to now, the dirty matter of GTV has not been resolved by the SEC, 85 million US dollars has not been paid, the PAX case has not stopped, and the debts and fines of more than 200 million are still floating in the air. Trapped in the jungle of Xibi's slander, Guo Wengui, who doesn't know what's good or bad, and who doesn't know whether to live or die, has a big brain and wants to spread the matter of Lipingbi. Dear investors, there is no return of capital and profit for Xibi investment, and it has been locked for three years, and the lying flat currency will be swept away again. After being fooled once, it will step into the same river again. It is really impossible. It's better to go back.

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distilled-prose · 3 years

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Tumblr Tag - five shiny happy warm and fuzzy things about myself

as tagged by @purplemonkeysexgod69 11/03/21 (I was tempted to take PMSG up on his threat to himself write about me, just to see what he'd come up with. But I had second thoughts - second thoughts being a euphamism for significant foreboding.)

1.) Up until a few months ago, when our move from Virginia to South Carolina became essentially all consuming, I would take a couple of hours early every Saturday morning and go through my list of followers to see if anyone wasn't getting recognized, or recognized sufficiently, for their posts, particularly their writing. I think everyone needs encouragement. (Lately it's been kinda hit or miss, though.) 2.) From the mid 1990s to the early 2000s I drove a lot for my work. I'd often pick up hitch hikers. More often than not I'd buy them lunch or dinner. On several occasions I'd pay for a hotel room when it was late at night and we'd have to go different directions. I felt like God was using me as He might use an angel. It was extremely gratifying. 3.) I hate losing friends, even the anonymous ones made here on these pages. Maybe someone out there knows what happened to these folks: Coffeeincashmere Commonhouseplants Gyp Snomis I really miss their stories, and definitely their attention. It would please me greatly to find them again. 4.) While I only have ever had one (former) employee thank me for protecting their pension, as a hospital administrator I worked hard to make certain all my employees had the opportunity to get the best return for the investments they chose. It wasn't in the job description, of course. But being able to improve a person's rate of return even one percentage point, when compounded over a forty year career, made (perhaps is still making) a HUGE difference in their retirement accounts. 5.) I've been blessed with friends and opportunities beyond anything I deserve. I've seen the Milky Way stretch from horizon to horizon in the desert night, acompanied by friends and stars too beautiful to describe. I've helped deliver babies, listened to the last breaths (and thoughts) of spirits who are now without bodies. God has graced me, suspended in a clear deep blue autumn sky, shooting across aqua waves with sand sharks and dolphins, cheered on by ghosts as I barreled through 26.2 miles. There have been mystical experiences, mundane occurences made magical by friends, and even a couple occasions when I have actually heard the voice of God. And I can't get any happier, shinier or fuzzier than that. and I'd like to tag the following folks to list the five things that make them most pleased with themselves: @alostdog @artinwood54 @deborah202 @dragonfly-wishes @fireflies-and-whiskey @fireflieswithin @gowherethereisnopath @pocketfullofposies @thelovelymazza6 @yo-imagino

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dreamylyfe-x · 3 years

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I love your meta! How do you think things would've changed for the Gallaghers if Frank had actually died at the end of s4? For the younger ones especially: Carl had a good relationship with Frank at that point and if Debbie still got pregnant that could get dark. I'm not sure how it would change things for Ian or Fiona or Lip. I know this is kinda out of your meta wheelhouse so feel free not to answer! But since I saw s4 I've been kinda curious and wanted to ask someone! Thank you!

Hey! Thanks for this. It's been fun to get asks about other Gallaghers.

Frank, though. Man. I'll try to be generous, because my gut response is "life gets easier".

But... It probably does? Like I can't quite figure out what happens the US, but as it happens, I lost a parental figure when I was 19 and the other people considered his legal progeny were 11, 13 and 17. We did get money from his unused pension. Otherwise, my observation of that (zero stars) experience is that it hits hard to lose someone that essential when you aren't truly an adult yet, and the younger you are, the more foundational an experience it is. And I imagine it would be the same for the Gallaghers.

So for Liam and Carl, there's going to be a strange disservice in not truly knowing who Frank WAS. They haven't hit the point Debbie has (and Debbie is only barely there and it might be a lot of bravado) where they understand who Frank was. So the experience of losing their father is going to cascade. The fact is, in an overburdened family with a lot of kids, attention is scant. So their emotional needs around this situation probably won't get due attention.

Buuuut... Well. In my experience, the loss of a parent is really traumatic for everyone and even when you aren't living a Shameless life, when EVERYONE is traumatized, everyone is in need and no one is a great source of support. Most of that needs to accessed externally, so it kinda becomes... V and Kev. Maybe one of Fiona's less terrible boyfriends is a help. But in general, they are still just processing one more trauma and maybe this one has a side-effect of creating a little stability. Frank being gone would remove some of the instability because he wouldn't be around to undo things or create problems. Monica might come back less. Sheila might stick around and help Fiona. Sammi would probably be completely out of the picture. Liam doesn't necessarily get into the fancy school... but he also doesn't get kicked out, either. There certainly wouldn't be Frank defrauding one of the kids for his own purposes. They wouldn't suddenly have an unstable pregnant therapist asking them if their father was going to support her and her six babies. It would just be less chaotic. Though: Still plenty chaotic.

As a viewer, though, one thing I've always observed is how completely Frank lifts out of the show. The Extra Hot Great podcast has a term for it -- The Pierce. Named for Pierce Hawthorne on Community, this is the character who you can remove from the show and nothing really changes on the canvas. Frank was somehow both Shameless's lead and its Pierce. Particularly once Sheila is gone. He gets that new liver, but he doesn't use it to start contributing to the family. He does some stuff for Liam, but it usually ends up a zero-sum-game because he screws it up eventually. And hey, if Frank isn't around being a nightmare, maybe Liam gets to know his other relatives better. Surely that would be beneficial to him.

One thing I can't help thinking about is Fiona at the end of season three telling Frank that, if he can't stop drinking now, then he really did never give a shit about any of them. Frank proves her right. Which is a bummer. But it also proves to be the truth. I think it's harder to lose your parents when you're a kid vs. older in life. But it's easier overall to have parents who give a damn. And if a parent is actively making your life worse, then you probably are ultimately going to be better off not living with that day-to-day, even if it does hurt a lot.

#asks #tw: parent loss #tw: death #Frank Gallagher #shameless season 4 #thank you for asking!

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lanaisnotwool · 4 years

Video

youtube

421 - 401K Rip-Off

https://moneyripples.com/2020/09/11/421-401k-rip-off/

Are 401K’s a good idea?

Is it possible that you are worse off with a 401K?

Where can you invest instead?

Chris runs the numbers to see what happens if you invest with a 401K. It is catered for you and is filled with the information you need to make the right decisions and making a ripple effect to the lives of others.

Listen to our Podcast here:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/07/30/421--the-401k-ripoff

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Hello, my fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles. Your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a wonderful show. A show that is for you, and it’s about all of you. Those of you that work so hard for your money. And you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now! You want to work because you want to not because you have to. You want to have that cash flow. That freedom. That prosperity. Today! Not 30 or 40 years from now, but right now, to be able to have that life that you love. To do what you love while you can still live. While you still have life in you. And it’s not just about having your own life of comfort and ease and freedom, which is amazing, but it’s about so much more. It’s about be able to create a ripple effect to the lives of others. Because as you prosper, you can use your blessings to bless the lives of others too. And that is a ripple effect. I’m here to create guys. Thank you for allowing me to create that ripple effect through you. And thank you again for bingeing, for sharing with others, for creating conversations, right? Because the only way to elevate your success is to elevate your conversations of success as well. And guys, you guys are doing an amazing job. Thank you so much for being a part of this and allowing me to create a ripple effect through you.

As a reminder check out our website, MoneyRipples.com Well, not only do we have the great e-book, Beyond Rice and Beans, that you can download for free, which will help you find money. Especially if you’re looking for a cash and be able to use and be able to create more freedom. There’s also great blogs. There’s even videos of this very episode being posted as well. So check that out. As well as our YouTube page. So check those out!

Today, guys. So again, I get this all the time because I get it. When the rest of the world is telling you to believe one thing, and you’re trying to do something different. It’s hard to break that pattern, right? Hey, we’re witnessing this in the world right now. There’s debates going on and between majorities and minorities and everything else, and it is creating a lot of debate, but the one thing you don’t see, many people debate is actually in the realm of money, right? When it comes to money, most people would agree going with the mainstream advice. It’s spend little, save a lot, save it in your mutual funds like your 401k is and get that employer match because it’s “Free Money”

Stay out of debt! You know, do all these things that you’re supposed to be doing that should somehow create freedom. Like guys, it has not worked! Period. Now you might think that somehow it has worked. Now, we might look back to grandparents generations, but understand is that there’s a ton of workers, funding, their social security and other things. They had pensions. We don’t! They have their pensions right now. There’s school teachers right now out of pensions, like running out of money. There’s States that are bankrupt right now. Government workers that aren’t getting the things that were given to us even few decades ago. And right now it’s relying upon you to create your own freedom. You cannot rely on anyone else. You cannot trust the government will have a decent amount of cash for you to use. It’s really up to you. So what’s been the answer of course, over the last several decades? It’s been the 401k, right?

I’m here to tell you the 401k is a Big Fat Lie! Now, granted. Does it do what people think it does in the sense that you defer taxes? Yes. You can have employer matches, which is like having free money. Yes. By the way, that’s just means that they’re just not paying you as much, just so you know. You know, it’s just a benefit, the company benefit of the add on, they just take it away from your salary anyways. All of these things, you know, is it essentially a real tool or a vehicle? Yes, it is. It’s a tax code that started back in, you know, back in the Carter era, right in the late seventies and by about 1980 and so on. Even though most employers didn’t really implement it, at least for the average worker, usually by the mid eighties, you start to see the average workers getting offered 401ks.

It became more mainstream. Now you have to ask yourself first and foremost, why does this thing becomes so big? Right? Why did people just keep using IRAs? Or why don’t we keep, you know, why don’t we start making roth IRAs more popular? Since that’s been around now for 20 years. More than 20 years. You know, we’ve had that for a while, but why aren’t people going crazy about the Roth? Now there’s some people that say it’s great, but the truth is you can’t save enough into a Roth. Can you? $6,000 or $7,000 a year is not enough to retire on. It’s nothing. It’s a ridiculous rule that you have the Roth IRA that kind of loses it. You’ve got things like life insurance out there that we talked about before. That is tax free, much like a Roth. It’s the same kind of taxation, but you can dump it a lot more.

But even then guys, if you’re trying to rely on a product to get you there, it won’t do it! There is no one single financial product that any financial advisor will offer you or your employer wall for you that will get you to financial freedom. And that’s what we are talking about today. Specifically, I’m going to focus on the 401k and why it’s a lie. Now understand that when it came out into the Carter era, taxes were much worse. Now there’s an article that one of my good friends sent and he sent it to me. He said, Chris, you should check this out. Very interesting. It’s actually an article in Bloomberg about 401k dated back on July 21st. Now this article, I’m not going to quote from it completely because even as I was reading it, I started to see some inaccuracies. The basic premise is pretty interesting.

Some of his solutions were different. He was talking about changing the 401k to be more flexible. More rules. I’m not opposed to that, but it doesn’t really answer the basic question. But he did bring up some good points about what happened when it started. So for example, the points that were good, right? And by the way, I know these are bad points and not only was it bad, I decided to look at the comments, which is never a good idea. If you want to stay in a good mood. When you look at the comments and people are railing into them saying, Hey, this was inaccurate. This was inaccurate. Right? But even with those inaccuracies that decided to go back and use some of those arguments, people were debating about, well, yeah, tax were higher, but medium income was lower. So I said, great. Let’s pull up the historical bureaus and find out what the census said, you know, on those things.

So anyways, I took a trip back in time to figure out what it really was. So here’s the first thing he said, the Marshall tax rate was higher in 1980, which is true. Your tax rate could be anywhere. It was taxed by just, but get this. We have eight tax brackets right now, right? In the federal income tax. The lowest is 0%. Of course. The highest is 37%. That is the highest bracket possible. Now you don’t get tax all that. It’s a scale that goes up, right? So as you hit each income bracket, that portion of that income bracket is taxed at that rate. So for example, right now missing, I’m not exact on the number. So I just closed them off, but you can get, basically get taxed 0% from like zero to about 18,000 bucks, right. Per year. So you have 18,000 or less of income.

You’re not even getting a tax on the federal side. State, maybe, but not on the federal. Then jumps up to like 10 and then 12 and so on. You know, so the top tax bracket for the median income today, by the way, the median household income today is about $78,500. So the top tax he even hit is 22%. By the way, the tax is owed as of 2020. If you make 78,500 on the federal tax, I’m not talking about the state taxes. Federal tax, you’ll pay 10,332 bucks, which is just over 30% of your income. Your total income. In 1980, the median income was 28,220 bucks. And this is across all races. I found out that white races were actually much higher. It was like 51,000. And I thought that was really interesting to see how it’s such a bigger discrepancy back then. I’m not surprised, but still pretty surprising how much the average white household was making was about 51,000.

But the median household income with all races, just like I did with 2020 was 28,220. Now with all the tax brackets, I did all the math on it. The tax, your taxes owed would be $5,663. So just over half of what you would have you paid today for the median income. The difference is though it’s about a third of the income, right? So that total percentage that you would have paid taxes back in 1980 was 20%. And also here’s the thing. The top tax bracket in 1980 was 70% with zero to 70%. With 16 brackets along the way there. So your top tax bracket even at the median household income, which wasn’t a lot 28,000 bucks, right.

Was still in that 32% tax bracket. That’s the bracket you’re in. The top bracket. So that’s where you’re paying more. So of course, if you’re looking for ways to reduce your taxes, why not find something to give you a tax deferral. In hopes that you would live on less. Here’s a faulty premise of course, is that even if you started saving in 1980, let’s say you have saved for the last 40 years. And I know some of you have. The problem is you’re probably noticing you’re not in a whole lot lower tax bracket today, are you? You know, maybe you earn a decent income, but income goes up with inflation, right? So of course the inflation you’re still having to make more. Now, granted right now is a lower tax bracket, for sure. So if you happen to retire today and you’ve been saving for awhile, you might be pretty happy.

But if you’re saving today, this might be the worst time to try to use a tax deferred account. Because right now we are in the lowest tax brackets we’ve been in decades. You know, this is amazing! These are, the tax rates are awesome! Even better than when I started working. Why would I try to avoid paying taxes now and go for a future date when it’s likely to be higher? And here’s the thing, guys, even if the brackets remained the same because of inflation, you have to consume more money each year to live. If you do, guess what, you’re getting tax on it. By the way, if you’re trying to count on social security, yes, you can get tax on social security. If you pull out more than a certain amount per year, and that’s not a lot of guys, it’s not a lot. So that’s the thing is that right now, it’s just based on taxes alone. The concept was great back then, which was, cause there was high taxes. They’re trying to pay for crazy stuff.

Inflation was going through the roof. It made sense, right? It made sense to say, Hey, the tax rates are ridiculous. I’m likely to be in a lower tax bracket because there’s so many tax brackets. It’s not hard to get to a lower one. So it was easy to kind of contribute to that and lower your tax bracket. But you’re delaying that tax for the future. You’re not really saving any taxes when you do a 401k. In fact, you saved nothing. And remember your employer’s contributions are going in as well, tax deferred and they come out taxed. So that’s a big one right there. Now here’s the thing is that people will say, okay, Chris, got it. You know, what’s the alternative, you know, what about now? You know, what’s going on today? Like what would you recommend?

Here’s the thing guys, again, I’m never going to make blanket statements. I’m not going to make blanket recommendations. I’m not going to give investment advice on the show. That’s because it’s illegal. I can’t do it. Right? But let me give you an example of what can happen because here’s the other problem with the 401k that’s a lie. Now people think with a match, right? This is the other big argument I get all the time. They’re like Chris, does it match though? That’s like a 50% match. That’s like a 50% return or a hundred percent match. It’s like a hundred percent return. So guys, I decided to do some calculations. I said, let’s do it by the numbers. That was another criticism on this guy’s thing. They said they didn’t really go by the numbers. He’s right. He didn’t, he was giving more conceptual stuff. Again, this is why I’m not really sharing the article. Cause it’s not. It’s good, but it’s not great. Right?

It’s not something you’d take as gospel for sure. So look at this way, whenever I talk to people or say, okay, Chris, this is what I’ve been doing. They’re like, I maxed out my 401k. Now when we calculate that with the match, because the match doesn’t go over usually 5% 6% a year. Anyways, if you get a hundred percent, most like get a 3% match or something or 4% maybe. But I said, okay, let’s go for the top that I’ve seen. Usually I won’t see with employer contributions. I won’t see more than 25,000 going in per year. So that’s great. Let’s just say that’s the case. I’m going to run two different scenarios. One have a person that’s about 45 years old with a quarter million saved up in the retirement account. That’s maxing their 401k for the next 20 years. And then I got somebody who’s 25 years old, starting from scratch. Also maxing out their 401k.

Which most people don’t do when they’re 25, but I’m going to say somebody is staying cheap. They’re the ultimate ideal saver, right? And they’re saving for the next 40 years and earning this. Now here’s the another debate. People say, well, what’s the real return? You know, this is why he got, I’ve put the match into this equation, right? With the match. You know, the real rate of return the market is anywhere usually between 7.4% and 7.6%, depending on the day. That’s of course the average I’ve seen like a 30 year average over time. It’s not 10 or 12%, the S&P500 doing at best, right around seven and a half. As of right now, July to July 2020, July 1990 to July of 2020, we went from the first to the first it’s about a 7.47% average.

Now like a real rate of return, not 10 or 12, that’s makes a massive difference when you’re started looking at 20 or even 40 years down the road. I figured, okay, we got that. But remember, there’s also fees in 401ks. And this is something that I saw in those comments. People are like, Oh, I’ve got like 0.04% cause I use Vanguard funds and all that stuff. Here’s the deal, guys. The fees in a 401k, aren’t that bad and even said he’s like, Hey, if you can get outside of the 401k, your fees will probably be less. Right? But here’s the deal guys. Most people never get that. And especially if you have money to go in a 401k, your fees are at least 1% on average. That’s pretty typical. They’re just the administrative fees that are inside 401ks. 401ks by the way, have like almost 20 different fees they can charge you.

So, and they’re all embedded with them. They don’t really make them very public. They’ll make them easily known. This is why people say, Hey, the Mark has been up, but my money’s not going up. Right. If you’ve ever said that, especially if you’ve been in the market long enough, you’ve felt this or noticed it before. You’re like, Hey, the market went up, but my money didn’t. There’s something wrong. This is part of the reason, fees are coming out. So I actually went kind of on the high end. Usually I don’t see people netting more than 6% rate of return. I put this at 6.25, I bonus you a quarter percent because the truth is, my point still going to win out. Even if I’m overly liberal with these numbers. Right? And not even being conservative. I’m actually being liberal against my own point.

I’m playing devil’s advocate against myself. Right? So 6.25%. Again, guys, I know the numbers going out because I just know a few of the guys are going to try to run the numbers yourself. So this is why I’m doing this. So anyways, here’s the deal. So I took that person. I said, Hey, what if you’re 45 years old? You’ve got a quarter million in your 401k as of now, which I know there’s several of you that do around this time. You’re max funding it. You’re going in about 25,000 a year with a match. I’m assuming you’re making that 120,000 or so a year. If you’re making less, it’s less right. But I’m putting this up, you know, kind of on a more conservative end where somebody might be max funding this. So you’re getting in a total of 25,000 a year. At six and a quarter percent after 20 years, you will have about $1.84 million.

So you have nearly $2 million. Now you might think that’s a lot, but you got to understand. There’s another thing working against us, which is inflation. Now I went conservative on this number. Again, playing devil’s advocate against myself, but I just decided to make this a number of conservative. I put it at a 4% inflation rate. Do not trust the government says about what, you know, their consumer price index and the inflation rates are. They’re messing with those rates to slow down the increase on social security payments to you. You know? So they’re trying to let that money stretch and last longer, they’re manipulating those numbers in real life, though, if you notice your real life, it’s not too far fetched to say, you know, about every 10 to 15 years, you know, my lifestyle has to kind of double.

Like what I’m living on today. I’ve got to have about double that within 15 years. You know, if you’re living on $4,000 a month back in 2005, you’re probably living on about $8,000 a month now. Again, changing circumstances with the life that’s the thing with inflation is kind of weird. You can’t really count on it because life situations changes. It can go more or less, but I put it 4%. There’s debates that it could actually be like 6% or 7%. It’s more closer what it’s been. Since we’ve been taken off the gold standard back in the early seventies. So anyways, I put it at 4% just to make it better. Here’s the key guys. When you’re looking at lifestyle, cause $1.84 million sounds great in 20 years. But when you look at the after inflation adjustment, that’s almost like having $840,000. So, and by the way, you haven’t paid taxes on this money yet. You still gotta pay taxes.

So say a quarter of that goes to taxes. You’re now left with about $600,000, right? And we’ll say 650,000. Again, I’ll be overly conservative on this number. 650,000. Here’s the key, again, financial buyers have taught this for years. Some people will say 4%. You can live on, right? That you’re not supposed to take out more than 4%. That’s an old number. That’s a number that worked before, back in the seventies. Most advisors that they’re, if they’re up to speed, won’t say more than pulling out 2% or 3%, especially with people living longer. So if you want your money to last, you want to pull out more than 2% or 3%. So what if you pulled out 3% of this after inflation adjustment of 650,000, that means you have about $19,500 a year lifestyle living on. You have a quarter million right now, you max out your 401k for the next 20 years.

And that’s like, you know, that’s a lot, right? They were putting in like over 18,000 19,000 a year into your 401k only to live on about 19,000 a year after you’ve paid taxes. That doesn’t sound so great. Does it? What if you started brand new? What if you’re a brand new person coming in and you’re like 25 years old, starting from scratch. You start immediately max funding that 401k, just like everybody tells you, you do that for 40 years. Six and a quarter percent with inflation working against you. Well guess what? The ending balance is almost 4.4 million, but after inflation, it’s more like 900, just over $900,000. So when you live on that, and remember you have to take out taxes. So let’s say a quarter of that goes into taxes. You’re left with less than 700,000. Again, you’re living on about, you know, if you factor in 3%, you’re living on about 20,000 a year. It doesn’t get any better.

This is why I say that 401k is a lie! You can not retire of 401k alone. Roth IRA won’t get you there by itself. And you can’t put in enough to make it work. You know, you factor in, even with the 401k, even with the match, you’re max funding it, unless you’re making a half million a year and you’re trying to stuff at full, most likely you can’t even do it that way. No, you can’t even do that much. It doesn’t matter. After some point you actually get restricted IRAs too. Some of you might say, well, I’ll do a SEP IRA. So I can do more of my income. I know some of you I’ve talked to, you put in 50,000 a year. It doesn’t matter, guys. You’re putting in 50,000 a year. You just double that number. And by the way, when you’re putting in SEP IRAs, you’re putting in your own match.

So the truth is you’re not even getting free money. You’re putting in all your own money to then live on about 40,000 to 50,000 a year down the road. If that. You get my point here? Is that whatever you’re trying to max fund into it. If you’re lucky, if the market smiles and you just right, stays around the average, you’re lucky to maybe pull out the same amount of money you’re pulling in. So whatever you’re putting in that’s about what you can pull out. That’s not fantastic, guys. That’s actually seems ridiculous because you can say, wait, I can just take that money, save it. You know, I can save it. Just keep it certain, not have to gamble the stock market. Because if you do like what happened to my dad Y2K knocked his retirement downright before he retired. It postponed his retirement. 15 years guys. That, I mean, this is again assuming averages. This is not assuming what if the market crashes, what if you’re trying to retire next year? And the market crashed in the next few years. Are you going to wait another five years to retire? That’s what some are doing. That’s ridiculous. It’s crazy. It’s insane.

Now let’s look at the alternative. Cause you say, Chris, what’s the alternative. So, you know, we’ve talked about different things. So I took the example of like AHP. Again, never guaranteed, right? But American Homeowner Preservation, you know, you hear their ads on this radio sometimes. They’d pay 10% a year right now. So what if you did the same thing, but here’s the thing. You’re not getting an employer match. Right? So say that you won, you had the 250,000 sitting in your 401k. You cash it out, right? Well, you might be able to avoid the penalty depending on COVID and the cares act, right?

But at least with taxes, you’ve pulled that money out. Let’s say you lose 60,000 of that quarter million. You’re left with 190,000. Okay. There you are. You’ve got 190,000. You can invest it. So say you go and invest in there. Again, this is not a recommendation. I’m just using this as an example of numbers, right? So you get 190,000 leftover after you’ve paid your taxes. You only put in 14,000 a year, not 25,000 because there is no employer match. And because now you’re getting paid that money after taxes, you got to pull taxes out. So even though you might be paying like 18,000 19,000 a year into the 401K, because now you’re taking the money out. Now you’re getting taxed. So I’m actually putting you in what would be viewed as the worst tax scenario, right? Because negative tax pull, you know, not taking, putting the money into your 401k.

Now it’s just coming out. You’re using after tax dollars. By the way, yes, you could invest in AHP pre-tax or with IRA money. But I’m using this as after tax where you get taxed every year. On the grow. So not only did you get taxed on the money, you know, that’s of course you’d actually finally put in, but now the interest you earned, which is at 10% also gets taxed and you still have to fight inflation. But again, it’s at 10% a year, right? After 20 years, here’s the thing, the end balance is almost one and a half million dollars. And this is, using this sort of person that’s 45 years old, right? So that person that said, Hey, I had a quarter million put in 25,000 a year with a match. Now they got 190,000. They’ve put into something like an AHP type fund at 10% putting in 14,000 a year.

They’re just putting their 401k contribution now into this. At 10%, they actually have one really about $400,000 less than they had when you’re putting in the 401k. You might think, well, Chris, even though they made a better return because there’s less money to go in. Yeah. There, of course it’s less. But remember too, when you’re cashing out of that money from the 401k, you gotta pay taxes. So it kinda actually owns breaks even at that point. And, but, well, actually you might end up paying a little bit more in taxes. So you might actually be a little bit under at the 401k, but remember the 401k says you should only be pulling out no more than 3% a year, right? The difference is this is that, again it’s about cash flow. Not accumulating money and then trying to live off less in the interest. It’s cash flow. Because if you had almost one and a half million dollars and you’re getting paid 10% a year, guess what?

Now you’re not pulling off, you know, and now using the numbers, of course, using the, now I’ll use after inflation number. So I just gave you that before. After inflation adjustments about, you know, $667,000, right? So that’s about what you got in, you know, in real dollars after inflation. 667, but you’re being paid 10%. It’s like having $66,700 a year lifestyle. Versus what I just said before with about an, you know, what was that $19,000 lifestyle. So you’re more than triple the lifestyle. Why? Because even though the numbers are about this, end up about the same, the cash flow is way better because the interest that’s paying you, the cash flow that’s coming from that is at 10% and not at 3%. So that’s why you’re getting more than triple the money back. Right? And yeah, you’ll pay tax on it. But so what, like maybe after the other money, your stuff pay tax on that too.

So again, same thing. That’s the person that has got 20 years of retirement. Right? So understand you can now hit those numbers faster. I use the example with that person that’s fresh start. Brand new 25 year old, right? Starting from scratch. So they just put 14,000 a year to AHP or something that earning 10%, right? Well, they’re going to end with about 3.4 million, but after inflation, that’s only like 716,000. But once again, because even though it’s like at $716,000 type of thing after inflation, the lifestyle that you can have is your pull off 10% a year is 71,000 a year. Much better than going about 20,000 a year. Right? Once again, kicks the crap out of it because it’s about cashflow, not just about accumulating money. And again, like I said, the 401k, it has to work at the right timing. You have to retire just the right time.

Otherwise it could be worked wrong. You got to make sure that taxes don’t go up dramatically. I was just pretending the taxes were staying similar, which they may or may not. If taxes go up, you’re getting host on your 401k. And people often will tell me that, Chris, I don’t know if I was a betting person. I would say that taxes are likely to go up from now. And I say with the way they’re printing money right now, either they’re going to cause massive inflation, which if you cause even worse inflation, that means you have to pull out more money, which means still more tax. Or they raise tax rates keep inflation down. So then you now have more money coming out, either way you lose when you start using that 401k. Or an IRA or anything else. Again, there is no product that a financial advisor can offer that will get you to that freedom. To be able to get you to that number.

You know, you have to be saving a ridiculous amount of money over a hundred thousand a year in hopes that you’re gonna make something. Or just live on a really cheap, you know, fixed income type lifestyle, right? Where you just try to do nothing. Don’t travel. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t visit grandkids. Just sit in your front porch and drink lemonade. Why? Not because you know, you want to, but because you can’t afford to go anywhere else and Lemonade’s on sale at the store. That’s why. This is the key factor here guys, is that it’s all about cash flow. And by the way, this is that 10% with tax with no tax advantages. If you do things like real estate, you can make better than that amount of money. And I’m not throwing those numbers out there. I’m staying on the low side. I’m basically going conservative with my point.

And I liberal against my point. Just to prove a point. Which is, is that there is a different world, a world of much better hope. If you look outside with the mainstreams, trying to pitch you and they’re selling you. And they’re selling you because they make billions of dollars in management fees off that. They want to keep the money in there forever. They’re the ones telling you to live on 2% or 3%. Why? Because then their money keeps growing. Their stock prices keep going up. Their CEO’s get keep getting paid more. They’re making more money because you’re not! And guys, that is one of the big reasons why I’m so passionately against things like 401ks, IRAs, which by the way, the government determines the rules and they can change the rules at any time. There’s no certainty. There’s no planning that can be done in those situations because you can’t maneuver with it.

You don’t even know what the rules are going to be like in 10, 20 years, how you, unless you’re retiring today, you have no clue. And even then they could change the rules. Look how they’re changing the rules on us right now because of a little virus, right? They’re freaking out. And they’re using that as a way to be able to change rules on us. We have a very different life today than we had six months ago. Wouldn’t you agree with that? Why couldn’t they change it on you? With the financial tools and things like that? The vehicles that they’ve been recommending. Of course they can. They need more taxes. They know where to go. They go for the people that are poor and middle class that don’t know what they’re doing. That are going and investing in these 401ks have zero tax advantages. And with the match, it’s just golden handcuffs.

You know, that little employer match does so little compared to the cost and the risk. But guys, just like you might’ve heard Robert Kiyosaki say, he says, the people that get the best tax breaks, the best tax advantages are the business owners or investors. If you’re in that category, if you get out of the employee mindset, you get out of that traditional mainstream mindset. Now you can actually have hope to break free. And guys, that is the kind of stuff that we’re talking about. Again, each of your situations are individual and different. I get that. Sometimes there are rare occasions, I think 401k works. Especially if you can pull money out right away. Like I get, I’ve had people get the match, pull the money out and go invest it on their own and they can work great. But, it is solo 401ks, by the way, guys, for those of you that are investors doing solo 401ks, I don’t trust those either because anything can change those rules and not to mention that we just don’t know.

I mean, plus if you get sued, I mean, there’s other issues that can happen there. You have assets they’re exposed that works against you in different scenarios. Either way, money getting locked up, get your money out of prison, get into a place that works for you. You guys want to know what that is. If you haven’t listened to show. There’s great examples of that. You know what, if you’re at the point you say, Chris, I think now’s the time I got to change my strategy. Shoot me an email. Say, Chris, what do you think about my situation? What do you think I should do? Just shoot me an email. [email protected]. And yes, I answer my emails. I shocked a guy he’s like, I can’t believe you keep telling me to email you. And I finally did it. And that guy, it was a slam dunk.

I was like, man, like, I’m so glad you actually had the courage to do it. Because for him it was like a 70,000 a year difference. You know, like a passive income that he could create from his current situation. I’m not saying that’s you, it could be, it might not be. But either way, if you think there’s a calling or a feeling with in you saying, I think now’s a time to do something different. The marks recovered. Maybe now’s the time to do something different right now. Why? While there’s still money in the market, you know, while the market’s still overvalued drastically, right? This might be the time. So again, if you have questions about that, shoot me an email. [email protected].

Guys, I hope this valuable. I hope you start to see why the 401k just cannot and will not work. And this is why I’m so passionate against it. Cause I’ve run these numbers over and over and over. And it comes up with the same results. Guys. You can’t expect to get something different when it hasn’t ever been different. This is how it’s been. This is why I left financial advising. And this is why I did something different. They gave me different results that got me to retire when other financial advisors can’t retire. And by the way, great question for financial advisors, ask them, Hey, did you get financially free off the advice you’ve been giving? Not from the commissions you’re earning, but actually from doing the things you’re telling your clients. And I can tell you honestly, I’m doing the things that I tell people to do as well. They don’t! They aren’t retired off that their mutual funds and their 401ks and IRAs. They aren’t! They are making money by selling you this lie!

This needs to stop now! This is why I’m here. This is a ripple effect I want to create. Guys, I hope you share this episode too. Share this other people. They need to know the truth. This has to stop! There are too many dumb pundits out there teaching this crap because people are putting money in their pocket, telling them, Hey, you do this. We pay you money. We will give you a little perks and benefits if you do this. So much money being thrown, at these 401ks and other plans. So you buy them and you buy a hook line and sinker. But the only person that loses is not the person telling you on the radio, right? Or on the TV or on interviews. Those people aren’t losing. The financial companies aren’t losing. It’s only you. This has got to stop. Guys, I hope this is valuable for you. Make it a wonderful and prosperous week and change your life now. It’s all about action and taking action to do something different. Do the opposite of what you’ve been told to do. Make it a wonderful week. We’ll see you later.

#Chris Miles #Anti-financial Advisor #Cash flow #Cash flow Expert #Debts #Entrepreneur #Financial Freedom #Money Ripples

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hong-kong-art-man · 4 years

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Money Loads The Gun, Joyce Cheng Pulls The Trigger—7 Money Notions On Earth

Lydia Shum(沈殿霞) is the most famous and loved female comedian in the history of Hong Kong. She passed away in 2008 at the age of 62. Her 33-year-old daughter, a popular singer, Joyce Cheng(鄭欣宜) will inherit her huge properties under Lydia’s will when she turns 35 according to newspaper. ‘How will Joyce spend the money?’ became a spicy discussion topic on social media.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential. Let me try to share some useful views on money—some are mine and some belong to others.

(1) Money is the car but you are the driver

Had it not been due to money, you would have been a mere window shopper in your life. Money is a car. It can take you to your destination but, like careful driving, the car must require your prudent control. Recklessness is the cause of a car crash. By the same token, careless spending may lead to you being in the red or even bankrupt. Buy what you need only. Only spend the money that you earned, not on any kind of overdraft facility from credit card, bank or money lender.

(2) Never watch like a hawk the money that does not belong to you

Some girls want to marry a rich man so that she can marry his fortunes together. Some young men like to keep tabs on the parents’ wealth so that he can be bequeathed one day. Some purposefully hang around with rich friends in order for curry favour.

Unless you are a ghost, to live in the dark shadow of someone with an ulterior motive will surely make you nervous, and finally lose yourself.

Never lie, steal, cheat or beg for the sake of enriching your own pocket, as the money will be cursed with an ultimate terrible fate upon you.

(3) The happiest and luckiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more

My generous friend said, “I am happy and lucky. I got enough for myself. There is no act better than my money, though not a lot, reaching down those in need and making them know that a stranger does care about them, like the way that I care about my family members. When the desperate people could feel the warm support, they realize that there is never a problem that can defeat sunrise.”

Another friend told me, “One great thing about donation is that the money which I gave away bring me back a more joyful meaning of it, and the money that I am keeping for myself somehow will become 10 times more! I am spiritually richer as a result.”

Money is like muck—not good unless it be spread.

(4) It takes 3 things for you to feel rich enough

I am not so divine as to say spiritual happiness brings more richness than money. I just want to opine that there is a quantitative definition of being rich, if you are already in possession of 3 things. You are then rich enough to call for a halt to your further hungry exploration for greater wealth. You should be contented when you have a flat for self-use, stable returns from some utility stocks which will give you a reliable pension and bank account savings which can help respond to urgent needs.

Before you retire, save; and after you save, retire! Real riches are the riches possessed inside, not just material luxuries. Those who appreciate your wisdom or character are the real friends.

(5) Ideally, spend most of the money before you die

It is fantastic to be able to spend the money that you have earned to enjoy the remaining years. The tricky challenge is that we do not know when we will die and how much money will be needed for the remaining years.

Two modern concepts are very attractive: lifelong elderly housing and ‘reverse mortgage’. The former is a kind of guaranteed accommodation by a developer to a senior till he dies, in consideration of a huge upfront lump sum paid by him. A reverse mortgage is a loan, secured by the mortgage of one’s residential property, that will enable a senior to receive a guaranteed fixed monthly sum till he dies. The loan typically does not require monthly mortgage payments and all will be settled at the time of death.

(6) Being ostentatious is a stupid way of spending money

Stupid or naive people are eager to put themselves on display. They spend money in a way that they beg to be looked at or they can look superior to others. More likely than not, these people have an inferiority complex and it causes them to over-compensate. They become overly concerned with how they appear to others and if this is taken to the extreme, it becomes a ‘neurosis’. It may also cause a person to be prone to behaviours intended merely to seek attention or compete with others.

(7) Don’t lose the things that money cannot buy by making money to buy

Money cannot buy 10 values: happiness, time, a good family, wisdom, respect, class, character, common sense, integrity and love. There are many people who are enjoying the above are actually quite poor.

With his almighty judgments, God is fair and will not make the rich get all.

Money is always a good servant but a bad master. You should rule your money. Money should not rule, if not ruin, your life by making you run like a broker in the trading hall of a stock exchange, always greedy and fearful!

MLee

Joyce Cheng MV acknowledgement-Neway Star Official Channel https://youtu.be/EbJhct_HTu8

Money Song (Sam Hui) acknowledgement: lifeisgood181 https://youtu.be/GppvbS2jXpY

Money, Money, Money (Abba) acknowledgement: ABBA https://youtu.be/ETxmCCsMoD0

Money makes the world go around acknowledgement: zeitdiebemagazin https://youtu.be/PIAXG_QcQNU

She works hard for the money (Donna Summer) acknowledgement: Donna Summer https://youtu.be/ci8uvhiU9LE

#Lydia Shum沈殿霞 #Joyce Cheng鄭欣宜 #Comedian #Money Lender #Bequeath #Curry Favour #Ulterior Motive #Money Is Like Muck Not Good Except It Be Spread #Lifelong Elderly Housing #Reverse Mortgage #Neurosis #Inferiority Complex #Money Is Always A Good Servant But A Bad Master

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

Text

Pluralistic: 24 Mar 2020 (Nebula Awards move online, Make America Well Again stamps, Data is the new toxic waste, Stock Jump, Grandparents Optional Party, Quarantine Book Club, the Party of Death, financial stability vs economic stability, quarantine vs workforce automation, bailouts and moral hazard, MIT's open source ventilator)

Today's links

This year's Nebula Awards will be held online: It's $150, and raising funds to bail out corona-shattered writers.

Make America Well Again stamps: from the artist who brought you the Trump Zero Cents stamp.

Data is the new toxic waste: It never was the "new oil" (my latest podcast).

Stock Jump: A ski-game that lets you play the stock charts of cratered businesses.

Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP: Terrified old people are the turkeys who vote for plutes' Christmas every four years.

Join me on the Quarantine Book Club: April 1, 3PM Pacific.

The Party of Death: It's a good time to buy exterminism futures.

Financial stability vs economic stability: Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.

Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis: Augmentation isn't replacement.

Bailouts and moral hazard: If we never teach big business, it won't ever learn.

MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator: Now in FDA testing.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

This year's Nebula Awards will be held online (permalink)

This year's Nebula Awards weekend is moving online, thanks to decisive action from SFWA and Mary Robinette Kowal.

https://www.sfwa.org/2020/03/22/announcing-the-transformation-of-the-2020-nebula-conference-and-covid19-relief/

It'll include "panels, solo presentations, conference mentorships, workshops, forums, chats, and virtual room parties (including a dance party hosted by John Scalzi)." Part of the proceeds will go to relief for sf writers who are in covid-related financial distress.

It runs May 29-31, including a livestream of the Nebula Awards banquet. Registration is $150 and comes with a year of access to archived materials and the SFWA Bulletin.

Make America Well Again stamps (permalink)

I bought some of Ben Hannam's Trump No Cents stamps in 2017 and never looked back. I still put 'em on letters.

Now he's got a Make America Well Again stamp, which you can lick (if you dare) and stick for the duration. Remember, USPS is profitable and unsubsidized and Trump's swamp-dwellers want to shut it down and replace it with donors like Fedex and UPS!

Data is the new toxic waste (permalink)

My latest podcast is a reading of "Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill?" — a column arguing that data was never "the new oil" – instead, it was always the new toxic waste: "pluripotent, immortal – and impossible to contain."

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/secure-futures-magazine/data-new-toxic-waste/34184/

Data breaches are inevitable (any data you collect will probably leak; any data you retain will definitely leak) and cumulative (your company's data breach can be combined with each subsequent attack to revictimize your customers).

Identity thieves benefit enormously from cheap storage, and they collect, store and recombine every scrap of leaked data. Merging multiple data sets allows for reidentification of "anonymized" data, and it's impossible to predict which sets will leak in the future.

These nondeterministic harms have so far protected data-collectors from liability, but that can't last. Toxic waste also has nondeterministic harms (we never know which bit of effluent will kill which person), but we still punish firms that leak it.

Waiting until the laws change to purge your data is a bad bet – by then, it may be too late. All the data your company collects and retains represents an unquantifiable, potentially unlimited source of downstream liability.

What's more, you probably aren't doing anything useful with it. The companies that make the most grandiose claims about data analytics are either selling analytics or data (or both). These claims are sales literature, not peer-reviewed citations to empirical research.

Data is cheap to collect and store – if you don't have to pay for the chaos it sows when it leaks. And some day, we will make data-hoarders pay.

Here's the podcast:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Here's the MP3:

https://ia801406.us.archive.org/9/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_334/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_334_-Data-_the_new_oil_or_potential_for_a_toxic_oil_spill.mp3

And here's the link to subscribe to the podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Stock Jump

Stock Jump (permalink)

Last week, those of us lucky enough to have retirement savings joined the rest of the world, because our 401(k)s all cratered and all the promising stocks (teleconferencing, guillotines) are all way, way overpriced thanks to panic buying by Republican Senators.

But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.

Enter Stock Jump, a ski-jump game whose courses are procedurally generated by the stock charts of shares from around the world.

It's really fun! If you can see through the tears.

http://stockjump.sos.gd/

Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP (permalink)

A thread by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Making Light crystallized a thought that literally had me tossing and turning all night, about Trump's decision to risk the lives of ~20% of elderly Americans to goose the stock market.

https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016643.html#4402672

The thing I find baffling is how short-term this thinking is.

Not for Trump, of course, who is legendary for his view of life as a game of running across a river hopping from the back of one alligator to another before he can get his leg bitten off.

But for the right-wing establishment, whose whole schtick is "rationality" and "long-term thinking" and "self-control" (think of the gleeful repetition of the discredited Marshmellow Test and the rhetoric about the "poor life choices" that lead to single parenthood, addiction, and inadequate retirement savings or health insurance).

How is it that these self-congratulatory long-game-players can't see that murdering one in five American seniors is a self-limiting move when frightened old white people are the primary source of turkeys who can be counted upon to vote for Christmas every four years?

The right has an antimajoritarian, elitist agenda. Right-wing thought is essentially the belief that some people are destined to rule, and others are destined to be ruled over by their betters, and the world is best when the right people are atop the pyramid. Splits in the right are about who should rule: Dominionists want Christian men in charge; libertarians want bosses in charge, imperialists want America in charge, racists want white people in charge, etc.

Antimajoritarian projects struggle in democracies, for obvious reasons. When your platform is "only 1% of us should be making decisions" it's hard to win 51% of the vote. That's why the right focuses so hard on gerrymandering and voter suppression, and why the otherwise untenable coalitions — finaciers and young-Earth Creationists, say — persist.

But the biggest source of ballots in support of rule by elites is frightened people, especially frightened bigots who think that the elites will promote their interests ahead of the disfavored minorities (think: Dixiecrats).

So murdering 20% of the most reliable source of votes for elite rule is a farcically shortsighted thing to do.

I am terrified of a Biden candidacy not merely because I think his policies are poor, but because I think he is really bad at being a candidate, and will struggle to win.

But Trump murdering 20% of his base might just be enough to make him lose. It may be that while he could murder someone in the middle of 5th Ave and get away with it, he can't sentence 20% of US pensioners to gruesome deaths and get away with it.

I'm not gleeful at this prospect. I am totally aghast. I barely slept last night, waking up dozens of times with this genocide playing out in my imagination.

But I am incredibly surprised. How does the self-declared Party of the Long View not see that this is going to destroy it?

The stock market is circling the drain and obviously this is very distressing for the donor class, but almost no Americans own any significant stocks, because most Americans have NO savings. The idea that rescuing share prices by killing the elderly will get the turkeys out to vote for Christmas is clearly wrong.

For more on antimajoritarianism and the right, read Corey Robin's outstanding book, "The Reactionary Mind."

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1234117673316782082

Join me on the Quarantine Book Club (permalink)

I'm going participate in a session of the Quarantine Book Club on April 1 at 3PM Pacific, where we're discussing my book Radicalized. Tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

If $5 is a burden for you, you can get in free with the code ALLAREWELCOME.

Hope to see you!

The Party of Death (permalink)

In his 2017 book Four Futures, Peter Frase uses science fiction to sketch out four ways our society could go as capitalism ruptures, from communism to exterminism, this being the expression of bosses' fear and dependence on workers.

https://boingboing.net/2017/01/06/four-futures-using-science-fi.html

Frase posits a possible mass-automation event that makes workers superfluous (I'm skeptical of this: climate change guarantees 2-3 centuries of full employment, e.g., relocating every coastal city).

But in light of the Current Situation, he imagines a different form of exterminism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-economy-public-health-exterminism/

It's not just the GOP's willingness to murder 20% of seniors in the hopes of rescuing the Dow.

Plutes and their bootlickers have been calling for mass-deaths as a preferable alternative since the crisis first manifested, as when Tea Party founder Rick Santelli suggested "Maybe we'd be just better off if we gave it to everybody."

And of course, there was Boris Johnson and Dominick Cummings' plan to infect all of the UK to create "herd immunity." As Cummings said, "if that means some pensioners die, too bad."

Now Trump wants to potentially murder 20% of American seniors to rescue share prices, and the GOP is going along with him.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1242444277264740353

The Republicans have become the Party of Death, with establishment figures like Thomas Friedman providing ideological cover (""let many of us get the coronavirus, recover and get back to work").

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opinion/coronavirus-economy.html

Frase: "The ghoulishness of this strategy will become apparent when it is too late, when the hospitals fill and the health care system and the economy both collapse."

"Those in power will be held blameless, and those with wealth will sadly lament the foolishness of the lesser orders."

"Socialists have always insisted that human needs should take precedence over profit, that the stock market is not the economy, and that we need to utterly transform an economy that is immiserating working people and destroying the planet. That message will only become more urgent as our opponents across different parts of the ruling class come to the conclusion — mournfully for some, gleefully for others — that in the contest between loss of profit and loss of life, they choose death."

Financial stability vs economic stability (permalink)

Michael Hudson is a fascinating thinker, an expert in the history of debt and debt-forgiveness. See, e.g., this:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#jubilee

In a new interview, Hudson delves into that history: interest-bearing debt was invented in the third millennium BCE, and quickly kings learned that they had to have periodic debt forgiveness, or compound interest would render all debts unpayable.

https://digitalfinanceanalytics.com/blog/debt-and-power-with-michael-hudson/

Greeks and Romans did away with the practice, and so had to live with six centuries of debt-revolts, as ever-larger fractions of their populace ended up in a form of debt slavery.

Greek Democracy was created to allow commoners to serve in government and so vote to cancel debts. Roman emperors conquered Greece and did away with debt-cancellation, creating an increasingly unstable oligarchy.

That's not far off from where we are today. 90% of debts are held by the richest 10%, and these oligarchs own the political process and refuse to countenance debt-cancellation.

Obama promised to write down mortgages, but instead he bailed out finance, who kicked us all out and bought our houses out from under us, and then rented back to us. Since then, the Fed "has created $4.5 trillion of credit to support prices for real estate."

"The aim has been to make housing more expensive, enabling the banks to collect on their mortgages and not go under. Credit keeps the debt overhead in place, thereby keeping the financial system afloat instead of facing the reality that debt needs to be written down."

Trump's gonna do it again, giving $50b to airlines/Boeing. Since 2008, Boeing has spent $45b on buybacks. Trump's message: "Spend 92-95% of your income to buy your own hares, and the government will print money so you can do it again, because our priority is stock prices."

"Financial stability" is incompatible with "economic stability." Financial stability means never writing down debts so that the bad loans oligarchs made never turn into bad debts. Economic stability requires debt write-downs so that people can be productive.

Obama's bailouts increased big banks' Too Big to Fail status. That's why since 2008, "GDP per 95 percent of the American population is actually shrunk. All the growth in America's GDP has occurred only to the wealthiest 5% of the population."

Today, plutes "hope to use the crisis not to revive the economy, but to just pound it into debt deflation, leaving the debts in place while bailing out the banks and the landlord class."

Here's what "financial stability" looks like: "you have to pay this exponential growth in debt, [and] have less and less to buy goods and services."

Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis (permalink)

Automation-based unemployment has always been overhyped. Any work that robots take over merely frees up human workers for the 2-300 year project of climate remediation, including relocating every coastal city in the world.

But automation is also vastly overhyped. Take the oft-repeated claim that "truck driver" is the most common job in America, and first in line to be automated. It's just wrong.

First, because the BLS "truck driver" category includes long-haul truckers, delivery drivers, couriers, and dozens of other subprofessions, most of which are far, far away from being automatable.

https://hbr.org/2019/09/automation-isnt-about-to-make-truckers-obsolete

(More importantly, though: the most automatable category is long-haul driver, and an automated long-haul truck in its own dedicated lane is just a shitty train).

The overhyped nature of technological displacement is on perfect display during the pandemic quarantine. As many "low skilled" (which is to say, "low waged") workers withdraw from the workforce, the economy has ground to a halt.

So much so that the right is now prepared to throw 20+% of seniors into the volcano to appease the market gods.

The category error committed by automation-fretters is to confuse "automating a job" with "augmenting a worker."

"We know that robots are great at repetitive work. they can do that forever. What's not so great is anything with a human-centered context, a cultural context." -Julie Carpenter

https://www.wired.com/story/robot-jobs-coronavirus/

Bailouts and moral hazard (permalink)

It's been barely a decade since the USG bailed out big businesses and the fact that we're here again reveals some of the glaring failures in the last bailout. Any new bailout should correct those errors by putting restrictions on bailed-out companies.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-whatsapp/#peoples-bailout

There have been some good proposals on these lines, like those from AOC and Stephanie Kelton:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/21/most-dangerous-ghost/#peoples-bailout

(whenever I write about this in public, I'm inundated with angry tweets from sociopaths with "investor" in their bios)

We're running out of time to get this right. DC is so filled with money-hungry lobbyists that they can't practice adequate social distancing, and they're collectively seeking trillions in string-free public money for their paymaster.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/rule-number-1-for-government-bailouts-of-companies-make-sure-voters-and-taxpayers-share-in-the-upside

At a minimum, any bailouts should come in exchange for convertible corporate bonds that let the USG take an ownership stake in any business that fails to repay its public debts. That's a minimum, as is a ban on stock buybacks for bailed out companies.

We need very strict limits on lobbying by bailed out firms: "If we are not to finance our own bamboozlement, any company receiving bailouts must be required each month to file full reports on political contributions and lobbying expenditures to candidates and parties."

This goes for dark money contributions, including 527 funds, and corporate/exec contributions to trade associations and other lobbying fronts, think-tanks, and other political influence vehicles.

"Unlike last time, when Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke failed to give the public a serious share of the upside, the bailed out firms should be compelled to issue convertible bonds to the government."

"Those bonds should make the government the senior creditor to the firm for the value of the principal as long as the debt is unpaid…As firms and the economy recover, the shares can be sold on the open market, yielding a handsome return to the Treasury."

The right likes to harp about "moral hazard" as an excuse for cutting aid, to, say, single mothers ("It only encourages them"). But what about businesses that needed trillions in 2008 and now need trillions more? What lesson are we teaching them?

(Image: Alex Proimos, CC BY)

MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator (permalink)

At the end of last week, a crowdsourced design for an open-source hardware ventilator entered testing with the Irish regulator, a week after work began on the project.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/20/pluralistic-20-mar-2020/#oshw-breathing

Now, hot on its heels, an MIT open source hardware ventilator team has submitted its design to the FDA for testing and approval, under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority.

https://e-vent.mit.edu/

It eliminates many possible sources of failure by replacing an electric pump with a manual one, which can, in turn, be operated by a separate, very simple, Arduino-controlled system (which can be readily swapped out for a human hand if it fails).

As Hackaday points out, "Almost as interesting as the device itself is the comments people are leaving about the design."

https://hackaday.com/2020/03/23/mit-ventilator-designed-with-common-manual-resuscitator-submitted-for-fda-testing/

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Record sales up, P2P sales up — RIAA's story doesn't add up https://web.archive.org/web/20050822053404/http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5631698.html

#15yrsago Octopuses dressed up as sea coconuts sneaking on two legs https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/050321-14.html

#10yrsago Pooh vs Alien: Webcomics realize their full potential at last http://godxiliary.com/alienvspooh/

#10yrsago Airport worker caught photographing screen as female worker passed through naked scanner https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/24/airport-worker-warned-body-scanner

#10yrsago UK record lobby: democracy is a waste of time https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/corporate-lobbyists-no-need-for-democracy

#5yrsago How medical abortion works https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/medical-abortion/

#5yrsago ACLU sues TSA to make it explain junk science "behavioral detection" program https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-and-aclu-sue-tsa-records-discredited-behavior-detection-program

#5yrsago Randomized dystopia generator that goes beyond the Bill of Rights https://www.harihareswara.net/dystopia/

#1yrago Man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills, which the companies dutifully paid https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lithuanian-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-100-million-from-google-facebook/

#1yrago Chelsea Manning is being held in prolonged solitary confinement, a form of torture https://xychelsea.is/?page_id=28

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Tor.com (https://tor.com), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill? https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Upcoming appearances:

Quarantine Book Club, April 1, 3PM Pacific https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

Museums and the Web, April 2, 12PM-3PM Pacific https://mw20.museweb.net/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

#pluralistic

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years

Link

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 16, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

President-Elect Joe Biden is now 5.6 million votes ahead of Trump in the popular vote, with 50.9% of the vote to Trump’s 47.3%. And yet, Trump continues to maintain he won the election.

This afternoon Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris and President-Elect Joe Biden held a press conference outlining their economic strategy. They had just come from a strategy meeting with business leaders and union officials, and Biden seemed quite optimistic that the different groups had found common ground. In a notable change from his predecessor, Biden was transparent about who was at the meeting, identifying the attendees by name and position.

The plans Biden and Harris outlined essentially boiled down to what they had said on the campaign trail: they will bring jobs back to America by limiting federal contracts to companies in the country, support a $15 minimum wage, and support unions. Biden also reiterated that it is imperative for Congress to pass the Heroes Act, the $3 trillion coronavirus relief act the House of Representatives passed last May but which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refuses to take up. (“Heroes” stands for Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act.)

Biden reminded listeners that the states are in a crisis through no fault of their own, and they cannot fix it on their own, either. By law, virtually no state and local governments can operate with a deficit, while the federal government can. States have seen their revenues evaporate during the pandemic at the same time their citizens need robust unemployment and social-welfare programs, and so they need support through this temporary emergency. Last spring, McConnell rejected the idea of federal aid to states, and suggested that state and local governments should declare bankruptcy, something Republican leaders have advocated for a decade.

In a piece in The Atlantic last April, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush David Frum explained that state bankruptcies would not end state debt; they would permit a federal judge to restructure that debt. The federal judiciary has shifted rightward in the last ten years, so bankruptcy would allow a federal judge to impose Republican priorities on Democratic states like New York, states Republicans have little hope of controlling through elections. In such proceedings, the first things to go would be pensions and social welfare programs, while judges would protect bondholders, many of them wealthy people who pour money into the political action committees of Republican politicians.

So, refusing to pass a coronavirus bill offers an opportunity for Republicans to impose their will on Democratic-led states. Even in a best-case scenario, without federal help, states like New York must cut services or raise taxes to balance their budget, angering constituents in either case. But the process of driving states to that point means that Americans will lose their homes or their apartments, and be unable to afford food. And that is coming to pass. Today CBS News posted a video of thousands of cars lined up in Dallas, Texas, to collect boxes of food.

Once again, Biden urged all Americans to work together. “The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another is not due to some mysterious force beyond our control,” he reminded listeners. “It’s a conscious decision. It’s a choice that we make.”

Trump’s appointee at the head of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, still refuses to acknowledge that Biden has been elected. Since she is the one who has the power to decide when election results are clear enough to begin a transition, allowing Biden’s people to have access to staff at federal agencies and internal government information, Biden remains hampered in his ability to get his administration organized and ready to take over.

This bureaucratic limbo for a president-elect is unprecedented, but when asked about it today, Biden pointed out that Harris, who is still a senator, sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, so the team is not entirely without information.

He did warn, though, that it is imperative that his people be able to coordinate with Trump’s plan to distribute a coronavirus vaccine. Biden is not alone in this observation; public health experts and even members of Trump’s own administration are demanding that Trump permit contact across the two camps.

There was more good news about the vaccine today as Moderna announced that its vaccine appears to be 94.5% effective and lasts for a month when refrigerated at normal temperatures. (Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be stored in extreme cold, which will make it hard to transport.)

It means that it is likely that in January, when Biden takes over, the process of getting the vaccine to America’s more than 300 million people will be underway, and Biden noted that if the two administrations could not begin coordinating now, people would likely die. “If we have to wait until January 20 to start that planning, it puts us behind over a month, month and a half. And so it’s important that it be done, that there be coordination now,” he said.

Biden also called out the president for his inaction in the face of a pandemic that has now infected more than 11 million Americans and killed almost 250,000 of us. “The idea the president is still playing golf and not doing anything about it is beyond my comprehension,” Biden said. “What is he doing?”

Indeed, Trump has no public events scheduled tomorrow, as he has not for days now, but he has not been entirely inactive.

According to the New York Times, last Wednesday, international inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran’s uranium stockpile is now 12 times bigger than it would have been permitted to be under the Iran nuclear deal that Trump dumped in 2018. Last Thursday, Trump asked his advisers whether he could do something about Iran’s main nuclear site, but appears to have been talked out of military action as they warned a military strike could escalate into a bigger conflict.

Trump has, though, given the order to the Pentagon to begin to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing the number down to 2500 each by January 15, five days before Trump is set to leave office. Defense Secretary Mark Esper objected to this drawdown; Trump fired him a week ago and began to stock political positions in the Defense Department with loyalists.

Esper told the White House in a classified memo that the military chain of command, including himself, US Central Command leader Marine General Kenneth "Frank" McKenzie, and commander of NATO's mission in Afghanistan General Austin Miller, all objected to the drawdown because the conditions for withdrawal established in the US-Taliban agreement signed in February have not been met. Their concerns are that the removal of US troops will permit Taliban fighters to take control of the country, permitting terrorists to use it as a base.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley also objected to the withdrawal, and today, so did Republican lawmakers. McConnell said: “A rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan now would hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm.” Marco Rubio (R-FL) chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “The concern would be it would turn into a Saigon-type of situation where it would fall very quickly and then our ability to conduct operations against terrorist elements in the region could be compromised.”

Still, dominating the news tonight was another election story. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said in an interview that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Raffensperger if he could throw out all the ballots from counties that had a high percentage of non-matching signatures. This would mean throwing out legally cast mail-in ballots, an illegal request that Raffensperger said stunned him. Graham called Raffensperger’s characterization of the conversation “ridiculous.”

And yet, the same day that Graham approached Raffensperger, Trump tweeted about the issue of signatures in Georgia, saying “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state.”

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #election 2020 #Georgia #Raffensperger #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #The Psycho

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mexcine · 5 years

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Parasite (2019) review: A Tale of Three Families

The Academy Awards don't mean that much to me. Most years I see only a handful (at most) of the nominated films, and rarely do I have a dog in the fight. This year, I'd only seen part of one Best Picture nominee (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, losing interest about halfway through), but almost literally at the last moment (the afternoon of the day the Oscars were awarded), I watched Parasite.

I thought it was well-made and thought-provoking, and the awards it won were certainly deserved. It’s fascinating, nuanced, and entertaining. It’s slick and “accessible” to all audiences (although I suspect Koreans will pick up on aspects that others will not, similar to Roma). I'd read little about the film before I saw it, and have not read any critical analysis since then, so if the following repeats conventional wisdom, so be it. [Note: spoilers follow.]

There are many aspects of Parasite worthy of extended analysis, including the visual schema, the various references to the USA (including the two Kim children going by “Kevin” and “Jessica” in their positions in the Park household), and of course socio-economic class/conflict. However, I’ll focus here on the film’s depiction of family. Parasite is structured around three families: the struggling Kims, the wealthy Parks, and the family of the Park's housekeeper.

The Kims and the Parks each consist of 4 members: Mr. Kim, Mrs. Kim, grown son Ki-woo and grown daughter Ki-jung; Mr. Park, Mrs. Park, teen daughter Da-hye, and young son Da-song. The housekeeper Moon-gwang and her husband Geun-sae have no children. All of the major characters belong to one of these three groups; Ki-woo's friend Min appears briefly (and plays a key role in getting the plot started), and the Park family's chauffeur has a small part, in addition to some other minor characters.

The 3 families are presented in neither a wholly negative or positive light--any actions they take are done to protect or benefit the family, and are thus seen as justified. For example, Ki-woo essentially betrays his friend Min, who arranged for him to become Da-hye's tutor. Min does this out of friendship but he also trusts Ki-woo not to seduce Da-hye, because Min himself is romantically interested in her. Ki-woo almost immediately reneges on this promise (and pays for it later, getting bashed in the head with Min’s “scholar’s stone” gift). Later, the steps taken to remove the chauffeur (and replace him with Mr. Kim) and the housekeeper (so Mrs. Kim can take her place) are directly harmful to these individuals (whereas Ki-woo and Ki-jung got their positions with the Park family through deceit but no one lost their positions so the Kims could be hired). At one point the Kim family makes a passing reference to the chauffeur, assuring each other that he probably got "a better job," but they don't even try to do this when they engineer Moon-gwang's dismissal, and in fact utilise her potentially serious peach allergy to stigmatise her and thus achieve their desired outcome.

The first part of Parasite is structured as a humorous, "heist" story, as the Kim family schemes to improve their standard of living by obtaining positions in the Park household. However, the Kims are not robbing the Parks: they actually provide the services for which they've been contracted (well, Ki-jung is not exactly a qualified "art therapist," but she seems to get along with Da-song), and are not skimming from the household accounts or anything of this sort. As noted above, the means by which they secure their new jobs become increasingly dodgy, but the ultimate goal of their plan is not to defraud or steal from their employers.

As Parasite begins, Ki-Woo (aka "Kevin") seems set to be the protagonist, and he does ultimately have slightly more footage than his parents or sister, but the Kim family becomes a collective protagonist as the film goes on (with somewhat more emphasis given to Mr. Kim and Ki-Woo than to Mrs. Kim or Ki-jung, but a fair amount of time is spent on the whole family's interactions). It's never specifically stated what brought the Kim family to its current station in life: were they middle-class before, or have they always been living in a precarious economic state? Clearly, they are willing to work hard to improve their lot in life, but why can’t they find opportunities to do so?

The second family group in Parasite is the Parks. Mr. Park is a prosperous businessman, Mrs. Park occupies herself with her children and her social circle, Da-hye is cramming for her high school examinations, and Da-song is a hyper-active boy with a mysterious "trauma" in his past. Although the Parks pay handsomely for Da-hye's tutors, Da-song is the focus of his parents' attention. Is he, as Da-hye bitterly remarks, faking it? Later in the film, Mrs. Park orders a special dish (ram-don) prepared for Da-song; when he doesn't eat it, and Mr. Park also turns it down, Mrs. Park consumes it herself. Da-hye points out that she was never offered any: it's as if she doesn't exist. On the other hand, Da-hye seems to be a moody teen-ager who shuts herself up in her room a lot, so perhaps Mrs. Park simply forgot her daughter existed for a moment.

The Kims acknowledge the Parks are “nice” rich people, while making the observation that perhaps they’re nice because they’re rich. In other words, they can afford to be pleasant and generous, since they’re not in a frantic competition for their daily bread, unlike the Kim family (in one scene, Ki-woo practically begs for a part-time pizza delivery job). One trait of the Parks which ultimately has deadly ramifications is their fastidiousness. The Kims live in a crowded, roach-infested “semi-basement” that is literally flooded with sewage at one point, while the Parks live in a spotless modernistic mansion. Mr. Park is offended when his chauffeur apparently has sex in the back seat of the Park’s auto--not even in his “own” space, the front seat!--and leaves a pair of panties behind as evidence. Mrs. Park dons rubber gloves and uses tongs to pick up the underwear, and Mr. Park almost seems more upset by the unhygienic nature of his driver and the man’s violation of his (Mr. Park’s) personal space than by the act itself.

Mr. Park also remarks to his wife about Mr. Kim’s odor, comparing it to “boiling a dirty rag” and says he’s smelled the same thing on the subway. Young Da-song also detects and remarks upon the similarity of the personal odors of Ki-woo and Ki-jung, a breach of courtesy. During the birthday party massacre at the climax, Mr. Park grimaces when he has to move Geun-sae’s corpse to retrieve the keys to his car (it’s been previously established that Geun-sae’s subterranean life has resulted in an unpleasant body odor); Mr. Kim sees this and--having previously overheard his boss talking about Kim’s smell--is inspired to stab Mr. Park. Snobbish and classist to be sure, but believing “poor people smell bad” is hardly worthy of a death sentence.

The third family group in Parasite is revealed only in the second half of the film. Housekeeper Moon-gwang is fired when the Kim family convinces the Parks that the woman has tuberculosis, a contagious disease. Prior to this, the housekeeper is a neutral background figure, with no particular personality. However, she returns to the Park home and explains to Mrs. Kim (her replacement) that Moon-gwang’s husband has been living in a secret bunker underneath the house for several years. The shocked Mrs. Kim berates her predecessor but holds the moral high ground for only a few moments, until the Kim family full-employment conspiracy is revealed. This leads to conflict between the two under-class families, and ultimately to a protracted bloody denouement.

There are a few loose ends in the Moon-gwang/Geun-sae story. Possibly the Parks would not have hired Moon-gwang as a live-in housekeeper if they knew she was married (or wouldn’t have permitted her husband to live with her), and apparently her salary wasn’t sufficient to allow him to live alone (he’s unemployed, but then again so are the Kims as the film opens, and they have an apartment, shabby as it is). As noted earlier, I haven’t read any analysis of Parasite so I don’t know if the issue is raised at all (or raised and debunked), but there is a slight hint that Moon-gwang and her husband may be North Korean emigrants. In one scene, a manic Moon-gwang mimics a North Korean propaganda broadcaster, castigating the Kim family for their scheme to “defraud” the Parks; at another point, Geun-sae pointedly says he doesn’t qualify for a government pension.

Additionally, Moon-gwang indicates she’s been taking food to her husband and he’s been starving since she was fired, yet we see Geun-sae has the ability to enter the main house at will (in fact, he’s the “ghost” who traumatised Da-song several years before): why didn’t he simply do this (i.e., steal food from the pantry and refrigerator) when his wife failed to show up? In a clever bit of dialogue, Mr. Park earlier admitted Moon-gwang was a good housekeeper but she “ate enough for two people”--yet Moon-gwang indignantly tells Mrs. Kim she paid for her husband’s food out of her own salary. This changes the Moon-gwang/Geun-sae family dynamic: all the members of the Kim family contribute to their general welfare, Mr. Park is the (traditional, male) bread-winner in his family, but it’s Moon-gwang who supports her unemployed husband: he takes the dependent economic role of a child or a grown slacker offspring, living off his parent’s salary. Geun-sae is at once a pitiful and a weirdly creepy character, his long sojourn underground costing him his mental stability. He worships Mr. Park--who is (through the medium of Geun-sae’s wife) the "provider from up above," and his last word (to Park) is (in English) "Respect!" On repeat viewing, it appears Geun-sae deliberately attacked Ki-jung (after having already badly injured Ki-woo), since he then calls out "Chung-sook" (Mrs. Kim) and tries to stab her (but is defeated by the feisty Mrs. Kim, who runs him through with a sausage-laden sword).

Moon-gwang and Geun-sae wind up the losers in this three-way Korean Family Feud, killed by the Kim family; the Parks lose Mr. Park and possibly Da-song, while only Ki-jung of the Kims dies (although Ki-woo is badly beaten by Geun-sae, using the "scholar's stone" given him by Min). Why do the Kims "win"? Because, one might surmise, they're the family that is truly united--despite some occasional arguments, they stick together to the very end, whereas the Parks and Moon-gwang/Geun-sae are less cohesive, more dysfunctional, and have more "weak links" than the Kims--neither of the Park children is assertive and capable (a function of their age as well as their privileged upbringing--although Da-hye does step up to carry the injured Ki-woo to safety), and Moon-gwang and Geun-sae have no children (and Geun-sae is, as mentioned, somewhat emasculated by his living situation).

Parasite obviously deals with the issue of socio-economic class, viewed through a specifically Korean prism that outsiders are not privy to (What's the unemployment rate in Korea, etc.). However, equally important, the film seems to say, is family. The Parks aren’t obviously evil just because they’re rich, and their wealth doesn’t directly contribute to the misfortune that befalls them. Conversely, Moon-gwang loses her job and this removes the safety net she had been providing for herself and her unemployed husband: this is directly the fault of the Kim family. So, the underclass preys on itself, rather than uniting in solidarity?

I’ve now seen 4 Bong Joon-Ho films: The Host, Snowpiercer (I had some issues with the basic premise of this one), Okja, and Parasite. Parasite is the only one of these with no fantasy elements, which makes its themes somewhat more subtle, less didactic, and less overt. But the ideas are still there.

#parasite (2019)#parasite review #Joon-ho Bong #bong joon ho

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