We KNOW I’m on break from college cause ya bish is reading for fun again!!!!! (Atm: The Martian by Andy Weir— VERY GOOD!!!)

How Long Could YOU Survive a Job Shutdown? This Simple, Reassuring Tactic Can Help You Prepare

The partial government shutdown has had a serious impact on 800,000 federal employees, including those with essential jobs who are required to work without pay. A quick look at news and social media (especially at Twitters #ShutdownStories) reveals tales of anxiety and sometimes outright terror. If we arent affected ourselves, an all-too-human reaction is to avert our eyes from the misery, silently thanking Deity Of Choice that we arent government employees. Wed do much better to take the shutdown as an object lesson. Even if we dont work for Uncle Sam, we cant truly know that our own employment is rock-solid. We cant predict layoffs, illness, or our companies closing down or being sold to a new owner who slashes personnel by one-third. However, theres a way to prepare for such crises. Its called a Financial Fire Drill, and its both simple and crucial. The FFD is a focused look at essential expenses and how you might cover them during a no-work period, plus a list of resources that answer all the what-ifs. Sound scary? On the contrary! Its liberating as heck to determine how little you could get by on if push comes to shove: If I lose my job or theres another shutdown, we could actually get by on as little as $1,000 dollars a month until times were better. A healthy emergency fund is useful for such an occasion. Some money wonks suggest you have three to six months worth of expenses saved; others insist you need a years worth. While thats a fine theory, it isnt always possible. Besides, the whole point of having the EF isnt just to spend it! Its there in case of emergencies that cant be covered any other way. And if it took more than three months to find a new job or recover from your illness, youd still have bills to pay and no more financial cushion. Thats why a financial fire drill is multifaceted. Rather than relying solely on the money you already have, it gives you a range of strategies. How Much Do You Need? Start your FFD by determining your households absolute baseline expenses in four categories: food, rent/mortgage, utilities, and essential debt service (things like child support and your auto loan). Baseline is the key word here. For example, if you currently pay extra on your mortgage, youd stop doing that temporarily. Luckily, food is the simplest (although not always the easiest!) thing to cut back on; during a crisis youd nix meals out temporarily and switch to basic (but still healthy and delicious) home cooking. As for utilities, consider whats essential. Cable television isnt really a baseline expense, for example you could do without for a few months. If you keep your house overly heated or cooled because you like it that way (versus because someone in your home is medically fragile), then it would be time to look for ways to cool off naturally or to stay warm while turning down the thermostat.(This isnt punishment. Its prudence. Its smart use of available resources and, maybe, a little bit of short-term sacrifice for the sake of your future financial goals.) Add up the baseline expenses and youll have the number you need to beat. If you can come up with that amount every month, youll manage. Finding the Funds Now that you know how much you need, where will you get the dollars? Best-case scenario: Your household has another income source that will mostly or completely cover those essentials. Obviously this would be super-double-awesome, but it probably isnt going to happen in every case. Not everyone can apply for unemployment. (I cant, because Im a private contractor.) If you dont know whether youre eligible, find out. Then bookmark the U.S. Department of Labors CareerOneStop page, so youll be ready to file if necessary. The page also has links to employment and training programs and other useful information. One of the most important things to note is how much you could expect to get if you qualify. Ideally, it would be enough to cover your monthly baseline. But even if it is, thats not the end of your financial fire drill. Pulling in Extra Dollars Going from month to month on just-enough can mean serious anxiety. Were doing OK now, but what if the car breaks down and I cant job-hunt? For this reason, your FFD needs to include ways to bring in extra dollars. A part-time or occasional job (side hustle) is one way to do it. Websites like SideHusl.com and 1099Mom.com are a good place to start. They have job possibilities you might never have imagined. While the gig economy has its issues, it can be a godsend to those in temporary straits. Driving for Lyft or Uber can take a toll on your vehicle beyond, but some say the pay and tips can be lucrative. Non-gig-economy jobs could be available near you, too. Now before you need one start investigating possibilities like delivering pizza, taking on a newspaper route (theyre screaming for drivers where I live), or working in retail or food service. If youve got a college degree, you could look into becoming a substitute teacher. Applying takes time due to the need for a background check, so look into the requirements now. Start by contacting the school district to see if the demand is high. Or create your own income stream. Let it be known through friends and on social media that youre available to walk dogs, babysit, clean houses, or whatever youre good at doing. Tutor kids or teens in math, Spanish, or whatever subject you know well. (Pro tip: Find out what tutoring goes for in your area, to keep from undercharging.) Fix up the spare room nicely and look into options like hosting guests through Airbnb and Homestay.com. Fun fact: If you rent part or all of your primary residence for 14 days or fewer in a year, you dont have to pay taxes on the money you earn. Really! See Chapter 5, page 18 of this Internal Revenue Service publication for the details. Finally, take a hard look at what you own. Make a list of what could be sold on LetGo.com or OfferUp.com if worst came to worst. Listing Possible Resources The unemployment website mentioned above is just a start. The Benefits.gov site features more than 1,200 state and federal benefit and assistance programs. One you really need to learn about is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the new name for food stamps. Each state has a different process, so take some time to learn about yours. For example, you might be required to provide your childs birth certificate got any idea where it is? Feeding America has a food bank locator. Take a minute to look for local resources, and either bookmark the locator or make a list of whats available nearby. Another excellent resource is 211.org, a clearinghouse for social services. Put it on your list of places to call when things get hairy. However, no single resource is all-encompassing; fledgling or hyper-local organizations might fly under even 211.orgs radar. For that reason, be prepared to ask this question of any agency you wind up contacting: Are there any other resources that could help someone in my circumstances? Anyone with student loans should learn about forbearance and deferment. The U.S. Department of Education tells more in this article, which also offers information on student loan consolidation and income-based repayment plans. If youve just been laid off youre likely to be frozen with shock, fear or rage; learning more about your options now, when youre calm, is a good idea. Cut Some Costs, on Paper As noted earlier, youd cut back on extra mortgage payments and meals out. Brainstorm some other ways to pare down expenses. If push comes to shove, you could suspend that gym membership, cancel your cable service, put a temporary halt on529 plancontributions, throttle back on your kids extracurricular activities, cancel any subscription services, re-think the way you entertain yourselves, and look for better deals on cellphone service. An optional (yet recommended) tactic is to do some real worst-case scenario planning. Would it be possible to find a cheaper place to live? If so, could your buddy with a truck help you move vs. your having to rent a moving van? Speaking of friends: If the tough times lingered, would a friend rent you a room vs. your getting an entire apartment? Would really good friends take turns letting you couch-surf? Maybe your sister would take temporary custody of your cat or your cockatiel until you could afford to feed both the pet and yourself. Perhaps you could hire yourself out as a live-in nanny, to avoid having to pay for housing at all. (I know a young woman who put herself through college that way.) Finally: If youre carrying even a little bit of consumer debt right now, make it your mission to vanquish it as soon as possible. Paying interest is a horrible idea even when times are good; paying extra money out when theres no money coming in is infinitely worse. Yay! Youre Done! Now: What to do with all this information? Why, you put it into a folder (real or virtual) and file it away under Hope This Never Happens. Nobody wants to think about losing some or all of their household income. But better to think about it now than the day when your boss greets you by saying, Clean out your desk or your doctor calls and says, We need to talk. Relatively few schools burn down each year, yet we have fire drills anyway. Its part of keeping our kids protected. Give your finances the same kind of care and forethought by starting your own financial fire drill today. Award-winning journalist and veteran personal finance writerDonna Freedmanis the author of Your Playbook for Tough Times: Living Large on Small Change, for the Short Term or the Long Haul and Your Playbook for Tough Times, Vol. 2: Needs AND Wants Edition. More byDonna Freedman: https://www.thesimpledollar.com/financial-fire-drill-how-long-could-you-survive-a-job-shutdown/

The Biggest Secret. SSSHHH! We already know it, though.

Firstly, this was supposed to be a tweet. Secondly, I think I’ve realised I’ve got to limit how much I seek out evidence for the matters my heart knows too well already, by watching these heartbreaking documentaries about contemporary British life. The ridiculous thing is, most people on earth would KILL to have our problems, and just learning about the problems of the privileged (us) makes me cry and breaks me up inside.

___

I watched another BBC doc about homeless people in Cardiff, and I felt like I was turning inside out. I tasted that reality only just a year ago but thank $reality I was able to pull myself back from the brink, even though I could hear Prince’s guitar playing coming from the brink which was very enticing.

How… How can the 6 people who own 60% of all the wealth… how can those people live with themselves? People always say “ignorance is bliss” OK maybe in the 70s and earlier but they cannot FAIL to see the misery now, even if it’s just a flicker, or a glance out of their tinted Hummer windows. How do they keep their children indoctrinated? Children normally rebel! Where are the rich kids stealing mummy and daddy’s banking details and paying for 1000 new hospitals in Africa? Do these people only make friends with other super rich cunts? In a way, doesn’t that make them like cancer? Sticking only with other poisonous elements that are killing the host? If I was a can-Sir-sell, I couldn’t look an antibody in the eye, either.

They did a good trick with the world’s biggest secret. It’s a clever sort of secret, nobody actually doesn’t know what the secret is, but they never talk about it, and they never think about it.

Of course I’ll remind you what the Biggest Secret is. Here we go:

On Earth, there’s enough. On our planet there’s actually way more than enough.

Discovering oil really changed the wealth game for humanity. All that life, all that pure distilled life force just lying in the ground after millions and millions of years. We turned it into money, prosperity, and environmental meltdown. Of course, it’s us that have to deal with the latter, while certain families deal with the “stresses” of the two formers. It’s tough at the top. They spend entire University budgets just on the mechanisms that hide their true wealth from the fools.

We’ve been at this oil thing for a while. It’s impossible to really get figures but there’s easily £10tn in wealth that I believe could be liquidised tomorrow if the will was there.

On this planet, there is so much stuff, that we became greedy. Then, some people got extremely clever through their greed. The rest of us stayed greedy, and the worst part about that? It distracted us. We were scrabbling for pennies on the floor while they literally sold the floor and arranged financing terms for our air, our skin, our tears.

On Earth, there is abundance. There’s loads of everything, and we could even make more. In fact, we do make more every day.

Most of it gets wasted. And most of the more privileged in the world, enough to have a home and a job and things to live for, rather than just a will to survive - we GET wasted. The guilt is apparent in everything. In my adored electronic products that I know have deprived beautiful innocent people from their birthrights - probably caused deaths - so I can have a UNIX computer in my pocket, and still be miserable anyway.

On earth, there is loads of light. Loads of land, and loads of water. A huge proportion of us scrabble just to get enough untainted water into our systems, so we can digest, so we can hydrate, so we can live, in fact.

But where I live, we like to piss and shit in clean water. And we’re not even the top 1%. I wonder what they piss and shit in. Gold flakes suspended in baby tears?

Of course, we know what they shit in. And we know who’s gonna clean it up because our shift starts later! Basically, non white people, and the poor white people, who are not white by virtue of their destitution - we’ll clean it up.

Non-white isn’t a colour. Race, isn’t actually a thing. If we were different races, we couldn’t breed with one another. (Have you seen what happens when different colours breed? Terrific results. Of course… most of them are going to starve and suffer. For no reason.) So what is non-white? Non-white, non-straight, non-male in most cases - is a class. I’ve simplified things for my simplified attitude (I find it helps me sharpen my anger, and accept there is no one specific target, and often I am the recipient). There’s the Exploiter class. And there’s the Exploited class. And that’s it.

Thatcher told us in the 80s that class was a thing of the past. So the one thing we can be sure about is that class actually started meaning more than ever the moment she said that and probably a few years before. She was a deceiver. Thatcher wasn’t a good person. She didn’t do good things, and she used the “things I would like to be true are truth” definition of truth. She lied.

She made up new bad things to happen and catalysed the old bad things that were happening already. Then she told us that they were good things. And that the reason things seemed to be getting worse was actually our fault.

You are either fucked, or you’re in the top 1%, exploiting away with your Cartier watches, your sanitised suburbs, and your completely soulless eyes.

The Exploiters are Dead to the World.

On Earth, on the only home we’ve ever known, we definitely have a wealth that most of us can’t even fathom. (There are a lot of us who can’t fathom shitting in the clean water, and little cold cupboards full of fresh food that light up when you open the door, so fathoming is relative.) In fact… There is LOADS OF WEALTH.

The rich people at the top could feed, clothe, and house the entire world and STILL be the richest people in it afterwards. If they wanted. Why don’t they want it? Because they’re dead inside. Dead would. So they just whorde and CONsume, shove ever larger and luxuriant things into a tiny hole that just gets tinier and tinier and hurts more and more.

We live on an abundant planet.

There’s enough room.

There’s enough food.

There’s (more than) enough wealth.

Trillions, and trillions, and trillions.

So what’s missing? This must be an easy fix!

Is there enough love?

Yes, among us, of course there is. We know there is. We would have faded long ago without it!

In fact, there’s so much love that that’s why we’ve sort of let the Exploiters get away with it. There’s parts of us who think that one day, they’ll realise. “There’s still good left in them somewhere. They still have love in them somewhere. This world has hurt me but I still believe. They must do too.”

Love is blind, right? We’ve been waiting hundreds of years for something that will clearly never happen. They don’t care; they can’t even know how to.

As the wealth pied up and our health dried up. Hundreds of years.

So what’s the problem exactly?

There must be a deficit of love among the exploiters. They must be broken! Who broke them?

The top percentile must be a haze of dysfunction and pain. Imagine for a moment, how broken you’d have to be, how screwed your priorities must lean, if you could change things tomorrow, for billions of us. Billions of children. No skin off your nose.

Go on, imagine you’re an Exploiter. Can you do it? Can you work out a scenario where you wake up, check your bank balance, and don’t try changing things that very morning?

So. It’s a self-perpetuating system. Only the emotionally fucked, (or psychopaths, naturally) can be exploiters. Exploiters are emotionally dead. They don’t hate us. They just don’t know us, or themselves.

So they keep exploiting. They’re the ultimate consumers. Consuming our sweat, our blood, our organs, our love, our culture, our lives and STILL they want more, and STILL they can’t even bear the thought of us having any!

But it is we who actually make the wealth. It is the exploited who get up every day and make things better for the people around them - but mainly, for the people above them. At this point it’s just the way things are done.

But we’ve changed a lot of things in history that used to just be the way that things were done.

Occasionally, one of the exploited class gets flung to the top - like a lottery win or something. Some of us naïvely think “Yay! Now they will turn around, they will permeate the wall, they will let some of our wealth back!”

Except of course normally they’re dead, crashed in a new Ferrari into a tree on pills and weed and booze - within years. Why?

Because they didn’t realise that all of their old (exploited) friends would resent them for not helping out, and all their new rich exploiter friends… Well, they’re the worst.

So what choice do they have?

Kill yourself, or lose yourself and kill everyone else: become an Exploiter.

HOW do you solve a problem where the capstone of the pyramid owns all the bricks, and sees all that they rest on, all they steal from, whose wealth they revel in, and laugh at the generators and condescendingly talk about “hard work” to… and the “you can have anything if you only try” lie…  

WELL YOU DIDN’T TRY. >>>><<<<< DID YOU CAPSTONE?

They really don’t see it, because the Exploiters are dead… they don’t see it, don’t appreciate the invisible hand of starving billions that feeds them and rocks them to sleep every night. They feel entitled. This is the way it’s always been done. If you look at a capstone on the top of a pyramid, and he shouts down to you as you survey the wonder of the gigantic thing:

“I made this! I got up here all on my own!”

‘I didn’t ask you anything’, you think ‘and besides, what are you, 1 percent of that whole thing? How did you get up there, and how will you get down without help?’ you think some more. Best not to speak back - the capstone has an intimidating quality.

and from below, the slightest of groans -

“SILENCE!!… AND ALL OF THIS BELONGS TO ME!!! I MADE IT, IT’S MINE!”

What would you think? Would you believe the capstone’s frankly silly claims? It seems to me that the capstone is rather dependent on everything and everyone below him, staying bent over, staying petrified, accepting the terms that even a 5 year old could determine is a dodgy from start to - … from start to … “Wait does this have an end or what?”.

The dodgiest deal of all time.

“Sorry folks… there’s not much to go around - some of you will get some, but it won’t be easy. “

There’s loads. They lied. There is more wealth than you or I could understand. But we don’t need to understand. There’s no REASON or NEED for human beings to understand those levels of wealth that would embarrass even the Gods.

Because it’s supposed to be shared, it’s common, for common good, for common purpose, for common uni…ty.

So how do we fix it?

I’m not sure, although the answer must involve love.

But not:

saying love.

not:

tweeting love.

not even:

disjointed prose about love

not… fucking sexing love, even.

I’m talking about… d i s r u p t i n g   l o v e . violent love.

listen, you people at the top.

YOU CAN’T PRETEND YOU DON’T KNOW. WE KNOW YOU KNOW. YOU KNOW, WE KNOW, THAT YOU KNOW.

We don’t want to hurt U~.

We don’t want to hurt U, but in OUR world of the exploited, of the cheated, we actually have enough LOVE to turn blind eyes 2 one kind of violence and one kind of violence ONLY:

Self defence.

And the best defence is a devastating, world changing OFFENCE.

And how do we justify this self defence, and whom will we capture, attack, and bring back to life?

You, exploiters. Because the truth is, you’ve been murdering us, our sons, our daughters, our mothers, our fathers, our pasts, our futures, for hundreds of years. And you won’t stop till you have it all. But the world can’t work if you have it all. The Eco will fail. So we’re

Not Going To Wait Until The Last Minute Like You Probably Assumed We Would.

WE’RE COMING FOR YOU NOW.

#ViolentLove #DisruptingLove #SelfDefenseAgainstthe1Percent #DoNotSayUWereNotWarned #DoNotFindYourHumanityAtTheLastMinuteWhenWeComeKnockin #CosWeWillKnow #OnlyRealDefenseIsADeepHardBrutalOffense #WINTERISCOMING