Quite a few months ago I did some searching and asked why my Chase credit card was not receiving any credit line increases. In fact it was getting denied when I would request them.
My credit score is in the 780s.
The card had a $1,600 limit.
Because it was so low, I would use it, pay it off, then use it again.
Like many pointed out on here I was using it as a debit card, and to Chase's eyes I didn't need an increase.
What they didn't see if I would use my other cards whenver the charge was over or came close to $1,600.
At the suggestion of this sub, I stopped using my card like a debit. I would only pay it off ONCE A MONTH, AFTER I received my monthly statement.
After 4-6 months of this, I received an automatic increase to over $10,000!
Didn't even have to ask. And it came quite quicker than I imagined.
Pretty happy I no longer have to swap cards around and worry about balances being at limit.

Like the title suggests...
I'm currently entertaining the idea of purchasing a Scania 164G 580 V8, maybe to turn into a wrecker of some sort, or a show truck, but I am unsure as to what transmissions this trucks came with when new. Do these trucks have both automatic and manual gearbox options? Or is it purely manual? If it did come with an automatic gearbox, what specs does the box have?
I've googled this stuff, but I can't find any concrete info about this kind of thing, hence me asking here.
Any assistance would be appreciated! Thanks for viewing!

I am a 26-year-old fit male (178cm, ~70kg, do calisthenics, wall climbing, running regularly, not drinking, not smoking, not on any medications) having issues with a bounding pulse. I have a normal heart rate (~50 when sleeping, 60-80 during the day, 187 was the largest I have measured during running) and normal blood pressure (110/70, sometimes it goes slightly over 120, which is "elevated"), but, for more than a year, I can feel and see my pulse when resting.
How it started: More than a year ago, I was really stressed. Many things added up, including family issues, a lot of work to do, finishing exams for the master's, starting a PhD, I was not sure what career path to choose, and preparing for my first public speech at a conference was also frustrating. That was the time when it started. I started to notice my heartbeat when resting, and then, at meetings, when I had to pay attention to others, I was entirely distracted by my heartbeat. I felt it mainly in my temple and neck. The strongest pulsation was the night before my conference presentation. I had a flight at night and arrived at my apartment, but there was no receptionist. As it turned out, there was an automatic check-in system, but my department (who booked the accommodation) forgot to forward me the email and the code. It was hard to reach anyone at night, but the awkward situation was solved after an hour. In addition, I was already nervous because I had never been to a conference, had never had to do small talk in English, or had never given a presentation to a lot of people in English. That night, I had difficulties falling asleep. All I could hear was my heartbeat, and the pounding in my temple was the strongest I had ever felt, which, of course, also increased my nervousness. Since then, although not that profound, I feel my heartbeat when resting.
After a while, I started to feel the pulse in my chest and some arrhythmias as well. I went to my GP, who sent me to a cardiologist. They were not really concerned about the pounding heartbeat, only the arrhythmias. My heart rate and blood pressure were normal, and the echocardiography and electrocardiography showed nothing. Then I had a Holter monitoring and had some NSVTs near bedtime that I could feel precisely. I was told to take magnesium, which made sense as I exercise regularly, and I always had muscle twitching basically all over my body. Since I take magnesium supplements, the arrhythmias and muscle twitching are gone, so I consider this matter closed.
I did some blood tests but found nothing worrying. As always, my total cholesterol and LDL are around the top, while the HDL is around the bottom threshold of the acceptable region. I have also checked for lipoA and apoB, as strokes have appeared among my ancestors, but they were also in the normal range. My morning serum cortisol was slightly elevated (789.4 nmol/L). My TSH was also slightly elevated (6.840 mIU/L), while free T3 and T4 levels were normal (which might be subclinical hypothyroidism, but I do not show the other symptoms).
This year was much less stressful. I tried to pay attention to not be anxious (I even started to meditate, although it did not go well, as all I could focus on when I calmed down and closed my eyes was my heartbeat). However, I can feel my pulse bounding ever since. (maybe it always was, but I have never attended to it before)

• I feel it in my chest, neck, and head (sometimes in my temple, sometimes in my eyes as well).
• It is the strongest after I wake up, before I go to bed, or when I am resting in general.
• Sometimes, during sports, I feel high pressure in my head in specific positions (handstand or back lever, but even in less demanding positions such as the child pose in yoga) when my head is below or in line with my center of mass.
• It is also visible. For example, when I lie down, the pulsation is clearly visible in my chest and stomach (even when standing, but not that strong). I can also see it in the mirror on my neck. When I dive into the water, my heartbeat generates concentric waves starting from my chest (especially after diving into cold water after the sauna).

Do you have any ideas about what can be behind this? Maybe stress, something with my TSH, or perhaps all of it is normal, but I started to attend to it after my arrhythmias.

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Tags:[Industrial](),[Equipment](),[Manufacturing](),[Product matters](),[Equipment performance]()

This article was written by Chevron technologists in collaboration with industry experts and global thought leaders. 

https://preview.redd.it/868wv05xyb0d1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a1d4417debcff4d7caaf5909e2fea523206f4ef

This article was written by Chevron technologists in collaboration with industry experts and global thought leaders. 

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I'm not sure of the state of my ATF levels (small leak on 1 atf line for a while) and it's more complicated than it has to be to check it, would draining all the atf from a drain plug and refilling with 6 quarts of mercon VI be okay to do? I saw online some mechanics saying in some scenarios it is better to not change ATF if it is dirty because the dirt makes the transmission have a grip on the stuff in the fluid... How dirty are they talking? The reason I have concern is once the drain plug is out you cannot really stop it from flowing, it's too late... I haven't done an ATF change yet, but my car (the amount I traveled after buying the car) has been driven 18k so it isn't like I necessarily ignored the changes, however I have no information on the history of the car. I think the last owner at least kept up on most of the oil changes at least due to how clean the engine works considering its age. What are the odds of screwing up my transmission by doing a drain and refill? I'm concerned that idk the level the atf is bc it is sealed and I have a minor leak in 1 of the lines so eventually the all the fluid will leak and I have had a little bit of Jerking here and there which tells me I am probably low but I don't want to over fill it

Introduction:
In the realm of agriculture, the right equipment can make all the difference. Farmers worldwide rely on robust, efficient, and high-performing tractors to cultivate their lands and ensure a bountiful harvest. Among the trusted names in the agricultural machinery industry, Swaraj Tractors stands tall as a testament to quality, durability, and outstanding performance in the field. Let's delve into what makes Swaraj Tractors a preferred choice for farmers across the globe.

A Legacy of Innovation:
Swaraj Tractors, a brand under the Mahindra & Mahindra umbrella, has a rich history dating back to the early 1970s. Since its inception, the brand has been at the forefront of innovation, consistently introducing cutting-edge technologies to meet the evolving needs of the agricultural community. One of the key factors that sets Swaraj Tractors apart is its commitment to understanding the challenges faced by farmers. The company consistently invests in research and development, resulting in a lineup of tractors that seamlessly blend power, efficiency, and modern features.

Quality Craftsmanship:
Swaraj Tractors are synonymous with quality craftsmanship. Built to endure the rigors of the field, these tractors are constructed using high-grade materials and undergo stringent quality control measures. The brand's manufacturing facilities adhere to international standards, ensuring that each tractor leaving the assembly line is a testament to precision engineering.

Durability That Withstands Time:
In the unpredictable world of agriculture, durability is non-negotiable. Swaraj Tractors are designed to withstand the toughest conditions, from challenging terrains to long working hours. The robust build and sturdy components contribute to the overall longevity of these tractors, making them a wise investment for farmers looking for equipment that can stand the test of time.

Performance that Exceeds Expectations:
The heart of any tractor lies in its performance, and Swaraj Tractors excel in this aspect. Equipped with powerful engines, advanced transmission systems, and responsive controls, these tractors deliver unmatched performance in the field. Whether plowing, seeding, or harvesting, Swaraj Tractors ensure optimal efficiency, allowing farmers to maximize their productivity.

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Understanding the diverse needs of farmers, Swaraj Tractors come equipped with a range of farm-friendly features. From comfortable cabins and ergonomic controls to precision farming technologies, these tractors are designed to enhance the overall farming experience. Swaraj Tractors empower farmers to work smarter, not harder, contributing to increased yields and improved livelihoods.

Conclusion:
Swaraj Tractors has established itself as a reliable companion for farmers, offering a perfect blend of quality, durability, and performance. As agriculture continues to evolve, the importance of having a trustworthy tractor becomes paramount, and Swaraj Tractors stands tall as a symbol of unwavering commitment to the farming community. With a legacy built on innovation and a vision geared towards the future, Swaraj Tractors remains a driving force in the agricultural machinery landscape, providing farmers with the tools they need to cultivate success in every field.

I am not one for negative reviews as I typically feel if I have a bad experience, it is just a bad day. However, this company has shown a pattern of poor care for its customers as well as lack of support in general. I opened my first checking account with them when I was 14 years old, and am now 26. I have had a personal checking and savings account with them for the last 10 years and opened a credit card with them 2 years ago. I have since decided that this is not the bank for me mainly due to a complete lack of customer service.
First of all, this bank began charging me maintenance fees on my checking account of nowhere a few months ago, so I tried to call. I sat on the phone punching #s for hours trying to get a human on the phone to see why this was. Not possible. So I visited a branch and they treated me like I was unimportant and could figure out my problems myself and was told to “go find the answer on google.” Eventually a banker met with me who said that since I was no longer a “student” I would be charged maintenance fees. Understandable, except I am a student. I pulled up my transcript and everything for this guy and he continued to tell me his hands were tied and he could not help. Fine, but kind of annoying.
So I get a credit card with bank of america, my first credit card mind you, and I’m enjoying earning rewards on my card and gaining cash back. I am person who prefers simplicity so I immediately set up autodraft/autopay to pay the statement balance each month. However for my first payment they drafted the statement amount twice from my BofA checking account. Not cool. I did not have that much in my checking account. Overdraft fee. I try calling to get help, again on the phone for multiple hours and unable to speak with a human. I go to a branch (different than the one in my last experience) where I am again told to call customer service or “use Erica, their AI chatbot,” so I leave and go to a different branch where someone finally helps me, but still is unable to refund the double charge OR the overdraft fee. They said, “it will just remain on your credit card as a statement credit so you won’t have to pay the next one.” Fine, but really annoying.
So Im a few months out from this I am getting married and we decided to bank with Chase (who is amazing on the customer service side by the way). I now have a checking account with Chase that is my main account, so I want to autodraft/autopay my BofA credit card with my chase checking account. Well, BofA makes that nearly impossible. I cannot figure out how to have BofA draft the exact statement balance due each month from my checking account automatically. I spend a few hours on google/reddit/etc trying to figure it out, which should not be hard considering I work with computers every day. However, I do not find a solution so I travel to a new BofA branch (not one I have been to before) and explain the situation that I would like to set up autodraft from a Chase checking acct. They tell me they cannot help with credit cards in the bank and I need to call customer service. Not falling for that again. So I go to ANOTHER new BofA branch that I have never been to and ask the same question. One lady does help me and says all I have to do is go to Chase bank to have them set this up because it is a problem on their end. So I do that. And Chase tells me that BofA will not share info with other banks to allow them to see amount due through the Chase bill pay feature. So I give up
A month later I have some free time and I am in a different city so I schedule an appointment with a BofA banker to see if we can revisit the credit card issue. I am helped! He calls customer service himself with me there, somehow gets a human on the line in only 5 minutes, and they send me an email how to setup my Chase checking acct as a “pay from account.” However these instructions do not work because for some reason my account is not eligible to be set up online and I must mail a voided check to bank of america headquarters before they can consider my account for enrollment. So I ask the banker if I have to use this BofA credit card to maintain it and he tells me he’s pretty sure I will receive notice prior to an closing of my credit cards, contrary to what redditors have shared, so I take his word for it and try to set up Autopay. Well I give up again.
So a few days later I am tired of this bank and decide to close my accounts and switch everything to chase. I made an appointment at ANOTHER new branch, so I am well travelled to the Bank of America Branches within South Carolina/North Carolina. I tell the banker I am closing and leaving BofA, she asks why, I tell her that their customer service is not very good and that bankers have little-to-no power to help with hardly anything an everyday customer may need. She tries to convince me to stay. I say no. I get her to close my checking and savings account and she tells me they can give me cash (the remaining balances in these accounts). I run my credit card scenario by her in a last ditch effort to get it figured out, but she cant help, and another banker overhears us talking, says “I am really good with credit card stuff, let me help you.” So I go to his office, explain everything, and he says he cant help me. Shocker. So I take my account closure statements across the foyer of the BofA branch and hand them to the teller to finally cash out and leave this place forever. He cannot accept my withdrawal. Somehow in the time between my talks with the first banker and the time I reach the teller 15 feet away their computer system has gone down. The teller informs me that the accounts have already been closed so there is no way to get the money out at the moment. All 4 branch bankers are behind the counter with him running through how they can service me and you know what their solution was? “Give us a call back every few hours to see if we have figured out a solution.” NO. I will NOT ever try to call BofA again. I am giving you my phone number to call ME once you have a solution. So I leave, and receive a call later that day because the teller tells me they are closing soon and he needs me to return to discuss my options. I drive back to the branch. He tells me I have 2 options: 1) have the checks mailed to me once BofA figures out how to solve this issue Or 2) come back first thing in the morning to follow up and hopefully figure it out. I am not going to trust BofA to figure out anything at this point so I decide I am going to return in the morning, and every day after until they fix this . At the moment they have no solutions, so I will see if they dreamt some up overnight tomorrow! I will update again as the story unfolds
TLDR: Bank of America is absolute Trash

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]

Hi everyone, I've been look everywhere to find how to do that without any success. Basically I want to make one single layer with multiple driving routes entre under just like this: https://www.google.com/maps/d0/viewer?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=37.79204005414171%2C-93.57287263611437&spn=0.839115%2C1.663399&source=embed&mid=1szHf2nHFkPWx9VbZv85Fu974TjA&z=5
So I know it's possible. But all I can do is have multiple ''line or shape'' under the same layer. When I'm selecting ''add driving route'' it automatically creates a new, unique layer.
Any of you guy have an idea as to how I can do this? thanks in advance!
​

Hey folks!
I've been toying with this idea for a while now, and finally put together a decently detailed mockup in Figma to test it out.
The overall system involves an app, and some hardware which would manage the lights, water, and nutrient dispensing for different plants automatically based on "recipes":
https://www.figma.com/proto/UbNTkdUKS12qNT6r4RR3w8/Mockups---Profiles?node-id=58-129&t=wwTu0aHyNXtSRwk7-1&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=57%3A10
The flow would be to plug in the GrowPro system, connect it to your waterline and a liquid nutrient line, and plug your lights into it. Then you'd register in the app, find the device, set the "recipe" for whatever you're growing (or build your own recipe), and it would manage it all for you, along with timelines until maturity, water & electricity usage, etc.
Would love some feedback from the community here to see if it would even be a viable idea (already have functioning hardware and backend) before spending time actually coding the app
EDIT: You can hit "R" to restart the user flow in figma - the most interesting aspect would be the "New User" flow to get a general idea

I am NOT OOP, OOP is u/AdhesivenessMurky204
Originally posted to AITAH
AITAH for separating from my husband because he refused to get a vasectomy?
Thanks to u/queenlegolas and u/Direct-Caterpillar77 for suggesting this BoRU
Editor’s Note: added paragraph breaks for readability
Trigger Warnings: PTSD, mentions of abortion, domestic abuse, verbal abuse, sexual assault, rape
Original Post: April 28, 2024
My husband (28M, who I will call Jack) and I (27F) have been together for 4 years, we have 2 young children and I am pregnant again. I have been pregnant for what feels like most of our relationship. I got pregnant 4 months into our relationship. We got married a month before our daughter’s 1st birthday and ended up with a honeymoon baby. After our son was born, I talked to my OB and she put me on birth control and I have been taking it militantly.
My daughter is now 3 and my son is 2. A little over a month ago I discovered I am pregnant again, despite taking my birth control religiously. Abortion is banned in my state, and the pregnancy was discovered too far along to attempt to obtain one out of state. While Jack and I were nervous, we also love being parents and decided that 3 young kids would be a challenge, but 3 was a good number for us. Then we went in for the first ultrasound and got some unexpected news - it’s twins.
Things have been tough financially, and while we were stressed but excited for a third child, we were not expecting a third and fourth child. Beyond the finances, I am the primary caretaker and I know that twins is going to be a lot, three children under 5 is already a lot, but 4 children under 5 is going to be really really difficult for me. Physically, I am tired of being pregnant. I’ve been pregnant or breastfeeding the majority of our relationship. It’s exhausting, it feels awful, and I don’t recognize my body anymore.
Four children is enough. I don’t want more. I told Jack that I was done with pregnancy, I’ve been pregnant enough, I’ve been experimenting with different types of birth control for over a decade and I still can’t stop getting pregnant, abortion isn’t a valid option where we live, we need something more permanent. He agreed, and suggested an IUD, I told him no - if it did fail then it could cause an ectopic pregnancy which could kill me, especially where we live. I’ve had both control fail me multiple times already and I’m not taking the chance, so I suggested a vasectomy. He was not open to the idea, and was even upset that I suggested it and told me I should get my tubes tied. I told him a tubal ligation is a much bigger surgery and I could be recovering for weeks during which time I wouldn’t be able to work or take care of our 4 young children, but he could ice his balls for a day or two and be done with it. He told me that not getting pregnant was ultimately my responsibility, and topped it off by saying “that’s what your body your choice means, YOUR body, so YOU choose.” That’s when it went from a discussion to a full blown fight.
See, when I was 19 I had another birth control failure with my boyfriend at the time (who I will call Tom). I wanted an abortion, Tom did not because he was opposed. I told him I was getting the abortion since it was my body and my choice, and Tom said some horrible things to me, including threatening me. I broke up with him and got the abortion. In response, Tom ended up following me one night and attacking me. I don’t want to go into detail but it was horrible, and he ended up going to prison for a number of charges related to the attack. Not only do I have a number of scars and some long lasting physical effects, but I have PTSD as well.
Jack knows about my history and diagnosis, and has known from the beginning. I have a pretty prominent facial scar so I was upfront about it early on in our dating. Jack always presented himself as very pro-choice, so I was shocked that he would say that. I got really emotional and started crying and shouting, and it turned into a full-blown fight.
Eventually I said that birth control is a two-way street and so far I’ve been the only one managing it and he said “and now we have 2 kids and 2 more coming, great job.” I told him he sounded like Tom and he got super pissed, basically said how dare you compare me to him, and maybe he might want kids one day with someone who doesn’t compare him to her felon ex-boyfriend. I was stunned and horrified. I said “well then let’s not waste any fucking time,”then packed up myself and the kids and drove to my parents place.
It’s been about a week since the fight. I’ve spoken with Jack a few times and he has since apologized and said he was out of line and was speaking from a place of anxiety after finding out about the twins, but also that I said things that were out of line and it was wrong of me to insist he undergo a medical procedure. He said that can move on from the things I said and that he wants to see his children and be a family again. I told him no, that I didn’t want to “move on” from the things he said to me. I can’t just get over that and I think we need space apart. Jack was upset by this and while we talked I brought up getting a separation agreement to manage custody and finances while we figure things out. He did not like this suggestion, said we didn’t need to pull the courts into this.
I haven’t told a lot of people about what’s happening but my family and a couple close friends. My sister and best friend both think I should throw the whole man away, but my brother (who is the only other one married with kids) thinks that I’m being extreme for what sums up to a fight between two scared people who both said nasty things. My mom is trying to be supportive but is occasionally reminding me that I “don’t want to be a single mother of 4” and telling me not to let my PTSD drive my decisions, while my dad is being completely unhelpful (he thinks jokes are helpful - like calling me Doorknob because I “can’t stop getting knocked up”, telling me to let the oven cool down, real knee-slappers). I don’t know what to do. My kids are happy to be at grandma and grandpas house but they miss their daddy, I’m 4 months pregnant and already uncomfortable as hell, I wish I could go back to being a happy little family but I’m so hung up on the things he said in that fight. Am I destroying my family over one bad night? Am I being unreasonable for asking my husband to get a vasectomy?
Edit: I've noticed a lot of people recommending condoms. I have gotten pregnant with condoms twice. Our second child and my first pregnancy were both conceived using condoms properly (correct fit, put on correctly, single use, not expired, no breaks, etc). I do not trust condoms enough to not fail a third time. I know the failure rate is supposedly small, but it's not personally small enough for me. Edit to the edit: I'm sorry, I didn't expect so many comments so fast and I can't keep up with them. By the first pregnancy I mean the pregnancy with Tom. With Jack I was on the patch when I got pregnant with our daughter, condoms with our son, and the pill with the twins. So far I haven't ever suspected that Jack has tampered with our birth control and always presumed that I'm a fertile Myrtle.
I recognize the comments and just want people to know I'm seeing the suggestion. I'm not dismissing it, but the thought of it is deeply upsetting and has provoked a lot of anxiety. I just wanted to make it clear that if the suggestion is only based on the condoms, that the condom pregnancies were with two different partners. While I know I always used condoms properly with Tom, I do believe that Tom could have been fully capable of sabotaging the condoms.
AITAH has no consensus bot, OOP received mixed reactions of NTAs and YTAs
Relevant Comments
deepsleepsheepmeep: NTA. Your husband is though. Your body has already been through A LOT. A tubal ligation is a serious surgery and you are right about being out of commission for a while when recovering. If he is more concerned with an imaginary future wife than he is for you, I don’t think there is much hope for this marriage.
We have 4 close friends who all got vasectomies. None of them bitched about it like your wimp of a husband. We actually had fun vasectomy themed parties for them.
On the off chance he does end up getting a vasectomy, make sure to do the follow up appointments. One of the vasectomy fab 4 did not follow through and ended up with a post-vasectomy baby.

OOP: Thank you, I feel like this is a lot of what has been so upsetting has been that he's thinking about some imaginary future wife when I'm right here, his actual wife, the mother of his children. It's like he's already imagining a future without me.

 
Update: AITAH for separating from my husband because he refused to get a vasectomy?: May 3, 2024
I didn’t expect so many comments and literally couldn’t go through them all. It seemed like the majority of people said I was NTA but I did get a lot of YTAs telling me I was trying to force him to get a medical procedure and telling me to get one instead. Besides already addressing my reasonings why I made my request in the original post (which I want you to read with real "per my last email" energy), I in no way am *forcing* him to have a medical procedure, but I am saying that I do not want to be with a partner who is not willing to be snipped. This is an issue of compatibility. The number of children you want, the methods of birth control you’re willing to use, those are issues of compatibility and a reason relationships end all the time. If he doesn’t want to be sterilized that’s fine, but then that means that we’re not compatible anymore, since it means he wants more children and I don’t. Beyond that there were some YTA comments and some DMs that were just nasty, calling me a murderer and saying my body is a cemetery. Sadly enough, I expected those types of comments, because I know there are a lot of Toms out in the world.
First I wanted to address a couple things that kept coming up, because last post turned into thousands of comments that all said about 5 different things, so to avoid my inbox becoming another echo chamber:

You’re 100% going to have a C-section anyway so just get a tubal while giving birth.

No, I’m not 100% going to have a C-section anyway. Twins are not an automatic C-section. With my birth history there is no reason to presume that a C-section is in my future. My OB agrees, and has discussed the possibility as doctors have to do but also said that based on my past two birth experiences, I'm a "perfect candidate" for vaginal delivery.
I also am not going to mince words: tubal ligations are *less* effective than vasectomies with a *much higher* likelihood of an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancy can *kill me*. In fact I got a PM from a woman who is a fellow fertile Myrtle who had an ectopic after a tubal. I am rejecting birth control options that, if they fail, would lead to my likely death. I don’t want to be pregnant again but I also don’t want to die and leave my children motherless, and in no way should anyone assume that traveling to another state to obtain an emergency abortion will continue to be an option in the future - we live in scary times, and Gilead is a real possibility. The comments seemed to have the vibe that people think that ligations are magically more effective than vasectomies and vasectomies are more of a whisper of sterility than an actual sterilization method so for those in the back VASECTOMIES ARE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN TUBAL LIGATIONS, FULL STOP. So I really need y’all to shut up about it.

Go to another state and obtain an abortion anyway.

I appreciate the personal offers to help I received in DMs deeply, but no. I’m in my 2nd trimester, which I know is still legal in some places, however I am at a point in my pregnancy where I personally as an individual do not feel comfortable obtaining an abortion, considering I would be *even farther* along by the time I could travel (which is not only finances, but logistics as well). I am 16 weeks pregnant now, these babies aren’t just clusters of cells to me anymore, and I’m not going to expand on that since it’s not up for debate.

Why not adoption?

With love and respect to everyone who has gone through adoption in all its aspects, adoption is absolutely not for me. This is a thought process I already went through 8 years ago, and now that I’m a mother and not a scared teenager I know it’s even less for me. I personally could not go through with it and come out the other side intact. Going through a full pregnancy, having my babies, and then being separated from them would break me.

Leave him and give him full custody of the twins

No. Because going through a full pregnancy, having my babies, and then being separated from them would break me. Jesus, some of y’all.

Just have a sexless marriage.

No. I love banging my husband, obviously lol. I don't want to be in a sexless marriage and anyone who has been to an abstinence-only high school knows that abstinence is not the way lol. There were a lot of comments assuming I would be perfectly fine withholding sex from my husband and having na dead bedroom, and I wouldn't. I have a sex drive. I'm going to want to bang my husband. Wanting to have sex with your spouse is *normal*.

What you would do about birth control if you divorced and dated in the future?

I’m not thinking of dating anyone else right now, because I’m thinking more about saving my actual marriage instead of an imaginary relationship. And if theoretically I did, I would probably seek out a partner who was snipped or was ready to be to be honestly, or a woman. I’m bisexual so there’s a very good chance that my future partner wouldn’t have the right parts to knock me up anyway lol.

Jack is sabotaging your birth control

I clarified my methods in the original post (as per my last email), but I did want to address this because it came up a LOT. I don’t have reason to believe that Jack sabotaged my birth control. A number of other fertile Myrtles showed up and brought up they or their family members repeated pregnancies in the face of birth control, including tubals. Accusing my husband of reproductive coercion for no reason other than I keep getting pregnant is a big leap and a weighty accusation. I am not the only fertile Myrtle out there, there's a reason there's a whole term for it.

Your husband is a narcissist, abuser, psychopath, and he does no childcare

My husband and I historically have a really healthy and loving relationship outside of this fight. In fact, this fight is the first time we’ve really had a fight, we’ve only ever had little arguments that we’ve been able to talk through. He’s an active father, the reason that I do the majority of childcare is due to circumstance between maternity leaves, our job schedules and the fact that I breastfed my babies. Someone also presumed I’m the breadwinner, which isn’t quite true. Jack makes more than me, but we do not have deeply significant differences in our incomes. When he is home he does his fair share of cleaning and cooking (arguably more than me at times), and parenting. That being said, the things he said in the heat of the moment were deeply concerning, and we’re addressing that together.
So to get down to the nitty gritty of the real update: since the last time I posted, Jack and I have sat down together and had a real come to Jesus talk. I’m not going to go through the whole breakdown, but it basically boiled down to this: it’s the vasectomy, but it’s more than the vasectomy. It was wrong of me to compare him to Tom but it was wronger of him to weaponize my trauma against me in a very malicious way. The way he intentionally used the same language my abuser used in an effort to hurt me was not acceptable and damaged the trust between us. He agreed it was not acceptable and said that in the aftermath he was horrified and ashamed his own words, and that he (as an explanation and not an excuse) kind of snapped under the stress. Oh and what he said about his “next wife” was not an indication of him not being committed to me but was because he felt hurt and wanted to hurt me back. He has apologized numerous times and seems to feel genuinely bad about it.
As for the separation, I am still going forward with it. I need space and time and I need to take that before the babies come. I am still staying with my parents who, for the record, are not sick of me or the kids. We’re a tight knit family, I only moved out when I moved in with Jack, and my sister moved out about a year ago so they have been empty nesting, and my mom doesn’t like that we live “too far” (an hour) away. What I have realized with space and time is how deeply triggering it was, in a way that I cannot explain to those without PTSD from DV, those who know will know. It’s deeply unsettled me and I’m having a hard time “getting over it” so to speak. There is now a lot of fear of my husband that was never there before and it’s going to take a lot to repair that trust and sense of safety. I cannot make a decision while I’m in this space, and I am addressing this with my personal therapist. Overall, I told him that if he wanted to stay married to me I needed two things from him: marriage counseling and a vasectomy, and even then I still cannot guarantee him anything. He understands, but I do not know what will happen with the vasectomy right now, we focused more on talking about the fight, but he is very aware that it's now a dealbreaker. And we have a marriage counseling appointment set up for next week. I'm hoping that counseling will bring some clarity to the situation, and in the mean time for the next couple months I'm focusing on giving my kids lots of cuddles and preparing myself for two new babies to come into my world, with or without Jack.
Additional information from OOP on her relationships

OOP: I've been through a trial to convict my ex-boyfriend of trying to kill me because of an abortion in a deep red, deeply religious area. I've definitely heard worse things, and I typically have pretty thick skin. That being said, I am pregnant and pretty emotional, so it's not the best experience. That being said, I do appreciate the level-headed comments when I see them through the sea of comments kind of saying the same stuff over and over. I'm not reading a lot of them if what I can see in the comment notification starts off nasty, so a lot of it is just inbox white noise. My favorites are the ones that start off with "I'm not going to read that BUT..." and I just think lol same. Like you don't want to read my post but expect me to read your comment that was made without even reading the situation? lol nope. And there are a lot of people conflating "providing someone with a hard choice" with "forcing someone into a medical procedure" and it just makes wading through for the actually helpful comments more tiring. Thank you though, I very much appreciate the kindness. Sorry, I've gotten so much of the same nonsense I guess I needed a little vent lol.

OOP on wanting her husband to make a decision and be on the same page

OOP: I want to be honest with him about where I am emotionally because I want him to make an informed decision. While the vasectomy is a deal breaker, it's really my secondary concern. My primary concern is the way he acted during the fight and his intention exploitation of my trauma because he was mad and scared. I think that telling him "get the snip to stay with me" and then deciding to leave anyway because there are deeper issues and/or I don't feel safe anymore would be cruel. He deserves to have the full picture before he makes a choice, doesn't he?
If he doesn't want the vasectomy, that's his choice. It's not what I want, but it is what it is. If he wants to call it quits at 4 kids, then it is what it is and if he secretly wants to be the next Nick Cannon then it is what it is he should be free to do that. That is part of why I don't know where he is on the vasectomy right now and we didn't really discuss it much when we talked, I'm focusing on discussing the bigger issue for me which is trust and safety within the relationship. The only way for him to make an informed decision about whether or not he get a vasectomy is for him to have all the information about the situation. If that makes him want a vasectomy less, then it is what it is. It's not about making him want to have a vasectomy. It's about being on the same page.

 

DO NOT COMMENT IN LINKED POSTS OR MESSAGE OOPs – BoRU Rule #7

THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT OOP

Hey everyone,
Thinking on buying my first car, I'm from LATAM and well my specific country is very very expensive.
To make it short, planing on buying a couple of options:

1 Toyota Corolla Used 2021-2022 $26,000 USD Average Price. Basically only LE Trim. CVT

2 Toyota RAV4 2018 Automatic 4x2 2000cc (Non CVT, Real Automatic)

3 Toyota Yaris (For you North Americans we still got it!) 1500cc non-turbo, 4 disc brakes.

4 Hyundai Accent with IVT transmission (Is just a CVT with chains instead of rubber belts, arguably better) 1.5 non-turbo. Rear drum brakes.

5 Suzuki Vitara 4x2 GLX. 1600cc (Non CVT, Real Automatic)

The Yaris is the cheapest option, it has 7 airbags and is just what I need, cheap to maintain, good on gas, light and easy to drive.
"Problem" is... It's made by Daihatsu (Usually manufactured in Thailand or other South Asian Countries) Daihatsu was shutdown in Japan months ago but recently re-opened 2/4 factories so they are back in production. Toyota apologized and everything got re-organized management wise so seems to look up.
Car is very simple, nice enough to not look crappy and cheap. Inside is not the best but not terrible, but hey, it's a Toyota!
Does anyone have a 2023-2024 Toyota Yaris, also known as Vios/Ativ in other South Asia areas that could talk about reliability, issues, assembly and other subjects? Thanks a lot.
If you don't own a Yaris/Vios/Ativ, which one would you buy? I really don't need anything fast, I literally just need to go buy groceries at Walmart but I cannot drive a tiny egg car.

This car has been in my family since it was purchased, but not necessarily treated perfectly. Here are the specs:
2005 Toyota Camry LE
2.4 L 4-cylinder
5-speed Automatic transmission
365,000+ miles
It was in possession of a friend for a few months because I got a motorcycle. They fixed a couple things I'm not too aware of. Before they got it, I recently changed the spark plugs, coils, battery, starter, and alternator. However, it stalls sometimes and had to be towed to my parents house after my friend gave up on it. Before I got it, my dad replaced the head gasket, got the head milled, and I think some other gaskets that the kit came with. However, he's not extremely confident in the job he did, and as there is still an oil leak, it probably wasn't perfect. Unfortunately, this oil leak is getting onto the alternator which has forced me to replace it twice before realizing it. My dad also mentioned that one of the many bolts that fasten the head to the block snapped while he tightened it, so I'm not sure if that is extremely important or not.
I know that there will be other things down the road that must be fixed because it's so old and high-mileage, but my question is this: is it worth it to redo the head gasket, timing gasket, valve cover gasket, etc. and replace the belt tensioner, OR is there something deeper that I don't know that could ruin the engine? I don't know what makes an engine a loss, so I'm just checking to see if it's worth it to keep working on this, or to just give up and sell it for parts.
Thanks!

We have 3 2x5 raised flower beds lined up lengthwise. Our local nursery recommended a soaker hose since we don’t have any automatic irrigation system. The only soaker hose they had at our local Lowe’s is pretty rigid, we’re not able to zig zag it through the beds. Any recommendations on a good flexible soaker hose that will work in a tight space? We are zone 9a so we can’t rely on Mother Nature to give us any natural watering from April through NovembeDecember most years.