WaltDisneyWorld would not let me post my travel thoughts, so posting here for others.
Firstly I want to say that I've been visiting Disney world since regularly for 40 years and I know all the parks and the history very well. In the early 2000's I lived in Windermere directly behind the Magic Kingdom and was a annual passholder. I'm also a Disney stock holder, so I follow the financials of the company and am aware of most if not all of the management decisions that have been made regarding the revenue of the parks and cost of running them. My hope is that this channel is monitored by Disney management personnel and some of my observations from an experience standpoint will fall on (mouse) ears.
I now live in Texas and have not been to any of the Disney parks for many years, so I was eager to take my 9 year old for her birthday to see the new attractions that everyone has been talking about this week (5/28 - 5/31). I had some old park hopper tickets that I was able to update to the new card system, which I immediately found complicated and arbitrary. I received several plastic cards to replace the paper tickets I had, but I could only determine what each of the cards had remaining on them by looking up each cards serial number using the Disney "Experiences" app. Now if you use Genie+ or Lighting Lane pass, every ride you go on requires you scan either your card, phone, or as I later discovered my iWatch if I paired it with the "Experience App". This required me to constantly pull out my card which quickly grew tiresome. My daughter saw everyone with a LED mickey wristband, which I learned was called a Magicband. I found out that it could be used to scan her into the rides and had an added benefit of playing a little audio clip on gold character statues around the park, and vibrated during fireworks, so I bought the cheapest one @ $35. A smart move by Disney to solve a problem with another upsell that they created in the first place.
I'm a software developer, so most technology does not usually confuse me, but the design of the "Experiences" app is pretty bad. It's very hard to get the information you need, the features are categorized poorly, not explained well, and navigation is redundant and unintuitive. I really don't know how the average family makes heads or tails of it. I think that the feature that I utilized the most was the Cast Member Chat, because they were the only one that could make any sense of the extensive rules and restrictions that have been added to all the parks and access. I leaned on the Disney ticket agent who was a 26 year Disney employee veteran to help setup which parks my daughter and I were interested in. I had to purchase an additional child's single day ticket ($5 off the $179 adult ticket) so I had the ticket agent set that up as well. The ticketing process is so confusing that even the 26 year Disney employee had a problem with the setup that I'll explain later.
The first day we went to Epcot for the Guardians Coaster, Ratatouille, and the Frozen ride what I had not seen before. I was told that to reserve the Guardians ride, I needed to get on the "Experiences" app at 7am to reserve a virtual queue in line. I loaded the app at 6:55am and kept refreshing until at 7 the screen switched to "Press to enter the Virtual Queue" button appeared. In the 4 seconds it took me to read the text on the page, the app told me that the virtual queue was already full and I would now have to wait until 1pm to try again or buy a lighting lane pass for $36 for the 2 of us. I wanted to park hop to Magic Kingdom and you are required to be in the park at 1pm to try the queue again so I simply bought the lighting pass to get it over with rather than spend my vacation pulling out my phone out and checking my watch and queue status all day.
Just as a FYI, I was successful queueing the next day for Tron, by using the same technique but hitting the "Press to enter the Virtual Queue" immediately, a process that I estimate took me 2 total seconds. Doing so I received a queue group of 72 which resulted in our group being called at 2:45pm in the afternoon. Needless to say I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth as I had to be on my phone at 7am every morning with mixed success and then even when I was successful I constantly had to check my phone to see where I was in the queue to avoid missing our place. Even my 9 year old was so annoyed by my phone obsession and eventually suggested that we only check the phone after we get off a ride.
We had to scan our fingers on the initial check in, which I'd heard about to lock our tickets to us. As a privacy advocate I'm not super excited about this, nor the idea that I cannot easily swap users of the card to another family member at my choosing, but I'm sure that others have expressed these concerns so I won't elaborate further. We were staying at a Disney Resort, so we arrived at the Epcot back entrance exactly at 8:30am to rope drop Ratatouille. Apparently that was everyone else's idea because the outdoor line queue for Ratatouille was already at 35 minutes when we arrived. When we did get on the ride, I was very underwhelmed with the presentation and felt that the quality of what I had known Disney to produce had severely dropped. I had to wear 3D glasses on a practical dark ride that moved in parts from 3D projection screens to small room breaks that had no characters or effects which required my to constantly remove and again put on the glasses to see anything clearly. As far as I could see there were no animatronics or real characters within the practical scenes and the 3D screens were dark, poorly aligned when attempting to create false parallax, and frequently distorted. Overall it reminded me of a rip-off of the Spiderman ride at Universal that was made about 10 years ago.
I bought 2 Genie+ passes in addition to the $36 Guardians Lighting Lane passes, so that added another $100 to our park tickets. As soon as we got in the park I made a Genie+ reservation for the Frozen ride, but the first available slot was 1:45pm, so I guess that's a popular one too. Since we had some time to wait for our 11:15am Guardians Lighting Lane reserve, we walked around world showcase, which was pretty much how I remember it and walk over to the new Moana water thing. I've probably been to Epcot about 200 times so I thought I knew my way around pretty well, but when I got the old communicore fountain area I got completely lost by the labyrinth of narrow paths and hidden turns. It seems Disney's original rule of designing a park to lead the patron to the next focal point has not been adopted by the current designers. The moana experience was wedged in between the restrooms between The Land and Living Seas pavilions, which was an odd choice when it seems they could have put it where the old communicore fountain was to both add tropical beauty to that previously dull area as well as implement an impressive water feature. As it is installed now, the experience is hidden, cramped, and overall does not really communicate the naturalist messaging that the numerous signs in the pathway claimed to resemble.
There was also a new choke point that was introduced between Spaceship Earth and the Land where the only path on that side of the park was about 12 feet wide. A great idea now that every other family either has a double wide stroller or electric scooter taking up even more of the pathway than they used to. I also noticed this at Hollywood Studios in the new Galaxy Edge area. Not sure why the current Disney design team thinks the paths in the parks should narrower than they were before, but my assumption is that it's a cost saving measure.
We made it on the new Guardians coaster with our lighting pass, and I appreciate that we did not have to wait in the regular queue and got on the preshow portion of the ride in 5 minutes. I thought the ride was ok, not great with heavy use of video projection in both the preshow and ride. The extent of practical effects was a giant planet that you rotate around which seems flat and unrealistic. For a ride that is supposed to be the new high standard of Disney Imagineering, it seems that a nearly completely reliance on some projection screens in a dark coaster seems cheap and uninspired. Does anyone remember the giant glowing future city at the end of World of Motion? How did we go from that to this?
We finished Epcot at the Frozen ride, which was lackluster with no story, cheap animatronic character that had disturbing glowing projection faces with dead stares. Not that the Norway ride was that great, but it at least and some interesting scenery, a troll with fiber optics and a drop with the Miniature practical Storm and Oil Rig which were slightly memorable. To replace it with a bunch of flat, black light painted wood panels to recreate one of the highest grossing animated modern era Disney films seems uninspired and unimaginative. I mean they couldn't even design an interesting mirrocrystal room for Elsa's Ice Palace that would make you feel like your are in a much bigger and impressive space?
The next day we went to Hollywood Studios and I paid another $44 for both of us to go on Rise of Resistance and $70 for 2 more Genie+ passes, so another $114 in addition to the cost of the park tickets. We did Tower of Terror first which thankfully has not been redesigned and still holds up over the years, even though I think the drops have been reduced and shortened, a change I'm sure my 9 year old did not have any objection with.
We made our way over to the new Pixar area which I found to be very garish and infantile, more like if McDonalds designed a theme park, not Disney or Pixar. The wait for Slinks coaster was already 90 minutes at 10:30am and even though we had the Genie+ pass, it was not available so we skipped it. On another note it was already 94 degrees and there is no shade in most areas of the new areas of this park other than some haphazardly placed umbrellas on the sides of the path that guests huddle underneath. It's like the park designers have never visited Florida in summer or simply don't care if anyone bakes in the sun.
We made it to the Star Wars area and I found it very confusing and mazelike. I never knew where I was, as the other areas I mentioned there were multiple choke points in the paths in a area that proved to be the most crowded in the park. The detailing of the buildings and nature features seemed cheapy executed and fake. They didn't really remind me much of the Star Wars universe and would barely hold up in an episode of the Mandalorian. My favorite experience by far was the Millennium Falcon ride where my daughter and I got to pilot the ship which was a dream experience. Even the queue area of this ride is amazing with the level of detail and nostalgia that I would expect from a E-Ticket Disney Ride.
Rise of the Resistance was fine, not worth $44, containing more of the poorly executed fake projection screens effects and motion vehicles traveling though cheaply constructed Empire/Order hallways. I'm also 95% sure that the Kylo Ren animatronic at the end is the recycled from the Wicked Witch from Great Movie Ride. I feel like the animation was even recycled.
Last day we went to Magic Kingdom with the intention of riding Tron and Snow White Mine Train. I bought Lighting Lane passes for both rides adding another $66 ($26 for SN and $40 for Tron) to the tickets. I again got up at 7am to enter the virtual raffle for the Tron queue, and discovered that I could now add my daughter to the queue group. I immediately contacted a Disney chat agent who discovered that the helpful Disney ticket agent who I purchased a single day ticket to Magic Kingdom had put in the wrong date for our visit. By doing so, it effectively made my daughter ticket ineligible for virtual queues (and may have not granted her access to the park for the day I paid for). Thankfully the online agent was able to change to date so I could actually use the $175 single park ticket that I bought the night before I intended to use it.
Snow White was well done and fun, sort of a combination or Matterhorn and Barnstormer. I did notice that it also contained the cheap animatronic characters that had disturbing glowing projection faces like the Frozen ride. Is it that really that hard to maintain facial articulation on audioanimatronics? Disney did it since Carousel of Progress and the projection faces seem like a huge step backward.
Tron was what I was most excited about being envious of the Tokyo version. The building that houses Tron is impressive and clearly designed to be a key feature to draw guests in with an extended walkway and LED effects on the scaffolding. I was able to reserve a virtual queue for the day, so I reserved a 10:00pm Lighting Lane pass. I preferred the night ride, as there was more constant immersion with indoooutdoor areas of the coaster. I thought the reclined ride cars were unique and well done if not a bit uncomfortable. They are slightly constrictive how they hold you in and I noticed that a child in the car in front of me was restrained to tightly and started to have trouble breathing screaming for help from her parents by the end of the ride, which was unsettling, so consider asking for the last car that does not have this type of restraint for little ones. The ride again was plagued with projection screens inside the ride in lieu of practical effects and reminded me or Guardians. We also bought a Diecast Tron lightbike with LEDs in the giftshop and upon getting home the bike was made in China, was broken and did not illuminate.
After all the travel, tacked on cost of all the addons, special ride passes, and the inconvenience of the highly restrictive and expensive park tickets and the cheaper quality of the rides, I don't feel like Disney offers a good value or exceptional experience anymore. I actually felt bad for families with several kids that clearly were spending thousands of dollars for a vacation that honestly felt more like a job most of the time. I also noticed cast members that were either rude, impatient, or audibly complaining about their job position, shift, the heat, or anything else that an average worker would complain about. I understand that Disney employees are regular people and not robots, but previously I always felt that Disney employees were extremely proud to be working at Disney World and it reflected in how they treated guests and it added to the magic. Now I just felt like I'm was six flags and everyone was just counting the minutes until they could go home. I'm glad that I could take my daughter and have the experience with her, but I will not be returning to Disney World any time soon as it seems that the company and how they value the guest experience has diminished significantly from what I remember.

Firstly I want to say that I've been visiting Disney world since regularly for 40 years and I know all the parks and the history very well. In the early 2000's I lived in Windermere directly behind the Magic Kingdom and was a annual passholder. I'm also a Disney stock holder, so I follow the financials of the company and am aware of most if not all of the management decisions that have been made regarding the revenue of the parks and cost of running them. My hope is that this channel is monitored by Disney management personnel and some of my observations from an experience standpoint will fall on (mouse) ears.
I now live in Texas and have not been to any of the Disney parks for many years, so I was eager to take my 9 year old for her birthday to see the new attractions that everyone has been talking about this week (5/28 - 5/31). I had some old park hopper tickets that I was able to update to the new card system, which I immediately found complicated and arbitrary. I received several plastic cards to replace the paper tickets I had, but I could only determine what each of the cards had remaining on them by looking up each cards serial number using the Disney "Experiences" app. Now if you use Genie+ or Lighting Lane pass, every ride you go on requires you scan either your card, phone, or as I later discovered my iWatch if I paired it with the "Experience App". This required me to constantly pull out my card which quickly grew tiresome. My daughter saw everyone with a LED mickey wristband, which I learned was called a Magicband. I found out that it could be used to scan her into the rides and had an added benefit of playing a little audio clip on gold character statues around the park, and vibrated during fireworks, so I bought the cheapest one @ $35. A smart move by Disney to solve a problem with another upsell that they created in the first place.
I'm a software developer, so most technology does not usually confuse me, but the design of the "Experiences" app is pretty bad. It's very hard to get the information you need, the features are categorized poorly, not explained well, and navigation is redundant and unintuitive. I really don't know how the average family makes heads or tails of it. I think that the feature that I utilized the most was the Cast Member Chat, because they were the only one that could make any sense of the extensive rules and restrictions that have been added to all the parks and access. I leaned on the Disney ticket agent who was a 26 year Disney employee veteran to help setup which parks my daughter and I were interested in. I had to purchase an additional child's single day ticket ($5 off the $179 adult ticket) so I had the ticket agent set that up as well. The ticketing process is so confusing that even the 26 year Disney employee had a problem with the setup that I'll explain later.
The first day we went to Epcot for the Guardians Coaster, Ratatouille, and the Frozen ride what I had not seen before. I was told that to reserve the Guardians ride, I needed to get on the "Experiences" app at 7am to reserve a virtual queue in line. I loaded the app at 6:55am and kept refreshing until at 7 the screen switched to "Press to enter the Virtual Queue" button appeared. In the 4 seconds it took me to read the text on the page, the app told me that the virtual queue was already full and I would now have to wait until 1pm to try again or buy a lighting lane pass for $36 for the 2 of us. I wanted to park hop to Magic Kingdom and you are required to be in the park at 1pm to try the queue again so I simply bought the lighting pass to get it over with rather than spend my vacation pulling out my phone out and checking my watch and queue status all day.
Just as a FYI, I was successful queueing the next day for Tron, by using the same technique but hitting the "Press to enter the Virtual Queue" immediately, a process that I estimate took me 2 total seconds. Doing so I received a queue group of 72 which resulted in our group being called at 2:45pm in the afternoon. Needless to say I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth as I had to be on my phone at 7am every morning with mixed success and then even when I was successful I constantly had to check my phone to see where I was in the queue to avoid missing our place. Even my 9 year old was so annoyed by my phone obsession and eventually suggested that we only check the phone after we get off a ride.
We had to scan our fingers on the initial check in, which I'd heard about to lock our tickets to us. As a privacy advocate I'm not super excited about this, nor the idea that I cannot easily swap users of the card to another family member at my choosing, but I'm sure that others have expressed these concerns so I won't elaborate further. We were staying at a Disney Resort, so we arrived at the Epcot back entrance exactly at 8:30am to rope drop Ratatouille. Apparently that was everyone else's idea because the outdoor line queue for Ratatouille was already at 35 minutes when we arrived. When we did get on the ride, I was very underwhelmed with the presentation and felt that the quality of what I had known Disney to produce had severely dropped. I had to wear 3D glasses on a practical dark ride that moved in parts from 3D projection screens to small room breaks that had no characters or effects which required my to constantly remove and again put on the glasses to see anything clearly. As far as I could see there were no animatronics or real characters within the practical scenes and the 3D screens were dark, poorly aligned when attempting to create false parallax, and frequently distorted. Overall it reminded me of a rip-off of the Spiderman ride at Universal that was made about 10 years ago.
I bought 2 Genie+ passes in addition to the $36 Guardians Lighting Lane passes, so that added another $100 to our park tickets. As soon as we got in the park I made a Genie+ reservation for the Frozen ride, but the first available slot was 1:45pm, so I guess that's a popular one too. Since we had some time to wait for our 11:15am Guardians Lighting Lane reserve, we walked around world showcase, which was pretty much how I remember it and walk over to the new Moana water thing. I've probably been to Epcot about 200 times so I thought I knew my way around pretty well, but when I got the old communicore fountain area I got completely lost by the labyrinth of narrow paths and hidden turns. It seems Disney's original rule of designing a park to lead the patron to the next focal point has not been adopted by the current designers. The moana experience was wedged in between the restrooms between The Land and Living Seas pavilions, which was an odd choice when it seems they could have put it where the old communicore fountain was to both add tropical beauty to that previously dull area as well as implement an impressive water feature. As it is installed now, the experience is hidden, cramped, and overall does not really communicate the naturalist messaging that the numerous signs in the pathway claimed to resemble.
There was also a new choke point that was introduced between Spaceship Earth and the Land where the only path on that side of the park was about 12 feet wide. A great idea now that every other family either has a double wide stroller or electric scooter taking up even more of the pathway than they used to. I also noticed this at Hollywood Studios in the new Galaxy Edge area. Not sure why the current Disney design team thinks the paths in the parks should narrower than they were before, but my assumption is that it's a cost saving measure.
We made it on the new Guardians coaster with our lighting pass, and I appreciate that we did not have to wait in the regular queue and got on the preshow portion of the ride in 5 minutes. I thought the ride was ok, not great with heavy use of video projection in both the preshow and ride. The extent of practical effects was a giant planet that you rotate around which seems flat and unrealistic. For a ride that is supposed to be the new high standard of Disney Imagineering, it seems that a nearly completely reliance on some projection screens in a dark coaster seems cheap and uninspired. Does anyone remember the giant glowing future city at the end of World of Motion? How did we go from that to this?
We finished Epcot at the Frozen ride, which was lackluster with no story, cheap animatronic character that had disturbing glowing projection faces with dead stares. Not that the Norway ride was that great, but it at least and some interesting scenery, a troll with fiber optics and a drop with the Miniature practical Storm and Oil Rig which were slightly memorable. To replace it with a bunch of flat, black light painted wood panels to recreate one of the highest grossing animated modern era Disney films seems uninspired and unimaginative. I mean they couldn't even design an interesting mirrocrystal room for Elsa's Ice Palace that would make you feel like your are in a much bigger and impressive space?
The next day we went to Hollywood Studios and I paid another $44 for both of us to go on Rise of Resistance and $70 for 2 more Genie+ passes, so another $114 in addition to the cost of the park tickets. We did Tower of Terror first which thankfully has not been redesigned and still holds up over the years, even though I think the drops have been reduced and shortened, a change I'm sure my 9 year old did not have any objection with.
We made our way over to the new Pixar area which I found to be very garish and infantile, more like if McDonalds designed a theme park, not Disney or Pixar. The wait for Slinks coaster was already 90 minutes at 10:30am and even though we had the Genie+ pass, it was not available so we skipped it. On another note it was already 94 degrees and there is no shade in most areas of the new areas of this park other than some haphazardly placed umbrellas on the sides of the path that guests huddle underneath. It's like the park designers have never visited Florida in summer or simply don't care if anyone bakes in the sun.
We made it to the Star Wars area and I found it very confusing and mazelike. I never knew where I was, as the other areas I mentioned there were multiple choke points in the paths in a area that proved to be the most crowded in the park. The detailing of the buildings and nature features seemed cheapy executed and fake. They didn't really remind me much of the Star Wars universe and would barely hold up in an episode of the Mandalorian. My favorite experience by far was the Millennium Falcon ride where my daughter and I got to pilot the ship which was a dream experience. Even the queue area of this ride is amazing with the level of detail and nostalgia that I would expect from a E-Ticket Disney Ride.
Rise of the Resistance was fine, not worth $44, containing more of the poorly executed fake projection screens effects and motion vehicles traveling though cheaply constructed Empire/Order hallways. I'm also 95% sure that the Kylo Ren animatronic at the end is the recycled from the Wicked Witch from Great Movie Ride. I feel like the animation was even recycled.
Last day we went to Magic Kingdom with the intention of riding Tron and Snow White Mine Train. I bought Lighting Lane passes for both rides adding another $66 ($26 for SN and $40 for Tron) to the tickets. I again got up at 7am to enter the virtual raffle for the Tron queue, and discovered that I could now add my daughter to the queue group. I immediately contacted a Disney chat agent who discovered that the helpful Disney ticket agent who I purchased a single day ticket to Magic Kingdom had put in the wrong date for our visit. By doing so, it effectively made my daughter ticket ineligible for virtual queues (and may have not granted her access to the park for the day I paid for). Thankfully the online agent was able to change to date so I could actually use the $175 single park ticket that I bought the night before I intended to use it.
Snow White was well done and fun, sort of a combination or Matterhorn and Barnstormer. I did notice that it also contained the cheap animatronic characters that had disturbing glowing projection faces like the Frozen ride. Is it that really that hard to maintain facial articulation on audioanimatronics? Disney did it since Carousel of Progress and the projection faces seem like a huge step backward.
Tron was what I was most excited about being envious of the Tokyo version. The building that houses Tron is impressive and clearly designed to be a key feature to draw guests in with an extended walkway and LED effects on the scaffolding. I was able to reserve a virtual queue for the day, so I reserved a 10:00pm Lighting Lane pass. I preferred the night ride, as there was more constant immersion with indoooutdoor areas of the coaster. I thought the reclined ride cars were unique and well done if not a bit uncomfortable. They are slightly constrictive how they hold you in and I noticed that a child in the car in front of me was restrained to tightly and started to have trouble breathing screaming for help from her parents by the end of the ride, which was unsettling, so consider asking for the last car that does not have this type of restraint for little ones. The ride again was plagued with projection screens inside the ride in lieu of practical effects and reminded me or Guardians. We also bought a Diecast Tron lightbike with LEDs in the giftshop and upon getting home the bike was made in China, was broken and did not illuminate.
After all the travel, tacked on cost of all the addons, special ride passes, and the inconvenience of the highly restrictive and expensive park tickets and the cheaper quality of the rides, I don't feel like Disney offers a good value or exceptional experience anymore. I actually felt bad for families with several kids that clearly were spending thousands of dollars for a vacation that honestly felt more like a job most of the time. I also noticed cast members that were either rude, impatient, or audibly complaining about their job position, shift, the heat, or anything else that an average worker would complain about. I understand that Disney employees are regular people and not robots, but previously I always felt that Disney employees were extremely proud to be working at Disney World and it reflected in how they treated guests and it added to the magic. Now I just felt like I'm was six flags and everyone was just counting the minutes until they could go home. I'm glad that I could take my daughter and have the experience with her, but I will not be returning to Disney World any time soon as it seems that the company and how they value the guest experience has diminished significantly from what I remember.

I recently got accepted to Vanderbilt for CS as a junior from UF after being rejected from my top choices, Cornell, Duke and Northwestern. Vanderbilt was the school I was most unsure about when applying, but decided to apply none the less. Looking at this from an objective standpoint, is it worth leaving UF, where I'm done with my CS degree and now double majoring in math to head to Vanderbilt for the better undergrad name as well as network? Extra information, I'm getting great financial aid at both so the costs will be very similar.
Leaving would obviously be a little inconvenient as I'm from Florida and will lose many board positions in clubs, but I'm great at making friends and I'm confident I can find a support system quickly.
I'm interested in founding a startup, or joining big tech as a SWE if the startup never works out. Thinking about consulting too if that could be a good exit opportunity if I find SWE too mundane. Thanks

Aii so boom. i live in SE right now, and there’s like maddd rich white people moving in. Like MADDD rich white people. Like not even on no racist shit. I don’t got a problem wit poor white niggas, they been in DC forever. but RICH WHITE niggas, they different. They be lookin at you different, acting scared of you, and like they be changing the whole scope/look of the hood. luckily my family was blessed to get a good apartment and wages, but i know niggas who don’t it got like that and had to move to fucking Florida and Wack ass Pennsylvania and shit.
I been doing things to try to slow it down, like throwing water at em from out the window, following and pretending to chase them to scare them, and occasionally shiestying up and hit and running on some.
Is there anything I can do? Like i don’t see my neighborhood , being majority working class POC for much longer. I just wanna look out for my ppl fr. Can anyone give me tips and their stories on how to slow this shit down?

In ‘21 I purchased a Dodge charger scatpack at 49k msrp, 50k sale price, total ended up being $59k with taxes incl financed. 2% apr. $780/mo or so. Initial insurance was $280/mo. for full coverage. I’m in Florida.
Fast forward 3 years, the cars got an iffy record unfortunately. Stolen twice within 3 years and had to file claims, shot my insurance up to $450/mo. which I’m still okay with price wise.
Recently in November I ran over a small object on the road which damaged my front bumper. Not knowing what to do and taking my mothers immediate advice, I called insurance to file a claim… Big mistake. They added an ‘accident’ to my cars history, and on top of that they only had to pay out $215. The bumper repair was dirt cheap.
Now my term expired and I’m getting quoted a mininum of $700/mo. Insurance due to the ‘accident’ (as my agent mentioned) That’s ridiculous to me, my insurance is basically the same price as my car now due to my ignorance.
I’m currently lost on what to do. So far I took the car in for an appraisal, and the first dealership I went to I was offered 32k for it. Kbb offered 30k. It’s got 24k miles on it now. Still owe 32k on it as well so I’d be 0.
I was thinking of trading in the car for a random used or new one that’ll get me from point a to point b, until my insurance drops significantly, then getting into another fun car in the future. I really only drive for pleasure and drive about 8k miles/yr. Or biting the bullet for the next 6 months and seeing what happens to the price then… A friend of mine suggested switching to state minimum for a while although I don’t think that’s possible with a financed vehicle
Any and all suggestions are appreciated

Credit card charged off from 4 years ago, currently have 3 credit cards with same entity. Back in the day no judgment was entered against me. Going to open a Savings account with same bank, will the charged off affect my savings account? I understand with no judgment they cant garnish wages etc. Just want reassurance from experts here. thanks!

"My son grew up knowing his parentage and history. And I'm proud of that." -Veronica Vasquez, Mother of Henrique
"He's weird. But I love him." -Miguel Vasquez, brother of Henrique

Name

Henrique Aaron Vasquez

Nickname

Henry

Heritage

Son of Vulcan, Legacy of Mars

Age

14 ("And a half." -Henrique)

Birthday

July 17, 20XX

Identification

*Male , he/him , bisexual

Appearance

The boy is tall for his age, at 5'11", for sure. His mocha colored skin has pink burn scars in many places, interestingly enough. His hair is a reddish brown with burnt toast colored ends. His eyes are a deep, dark brown that appear orange in the light. There's a star shaped birthmark on his neck and a large mole right between his eyebrows. His septum ring is a copper color that compliments his skin color well. He always wears the fire pendant his mother made him, it's a special keepsake (especially since he kind of ditched her in a way for wolves) he always appears tired (though he isnt) and his hands are covered in callouses.

Personality

"He's a very serious young man. But when he has a soft spot for you..? That smile comes right out." -Veronica Vasquez
Henrique is very set in his ways and is a very hard worker. He doesn't give up and seems colder when you first meet him. He cares deeply for his family and friends, but cares not about hid physical appearance. He gets angry often.

Style

"Physical Appearance doesn't matter. Not to me, anyway." -Henrique Vasquez
*He's usually caught wear darker, warmer colors. Things like black, red, brown, orange, mostly in darker shades. 90% of the time, he wears dark jeans, a large, baggy hoodie or shirt, and tunic style shirts. He always wears the same shoes: dirty steel toed boots. His hair is unkempt and messy, though it's actually brushed. He has a pair of aviator goggles that he constantly wears, either on his face or ontop of his head. He has an apron that he keeps folded up in his pocket. Henrique constantly wears leather bracelets; and a hairtie around his wrist to be ready.

Powers

-Passive:
(Passive powers from beta powerlist)
-Active:

Background

Henrique grew up in Florida with his mother and older half-brother, Miguel, where he went to a private school focused on engineering and building. He was always aware of his heritage/parentage, though he didn't care much. It was just another useless fact about himself that he found boring. His mother always was telling him things along the lines of "you're destined for great things," and whatnot, but Henrique just brushed it off. He would rather just build things and listen to his hard rock music. That was the routine. Wake up, go to school or whatever, come home, grab a drink, then right out to his workshop in the garage. When he wasn't following routine, he was at his best friend's house. His best friend, Corey, just so happened to also have a workshop of sorts, where the two would work into the night on random projects. Once, they built an entire (small) train. If he wasn't with Corey, he was with Ollie and the two usually spent their time cooking and eating. Then? On his 14th birthday, Henry started hearing noises. He was curious, went to explore, and wound up training with Lupa. And now, here he is, at Camp Jupiter.

Family

"Henrique Vasquez has a small family,simple and cozy." - Henrique's shop instructor, Mr. Davis
Veronica Vasquez - Mother, 38, lover of all things blue, good relationship with her sons, divorced
Miguel Vasquez - Half brother, 17, good relationship with Henry, sportsy kid
Baxter - dog,, Grew up with Henrique as his primary caretaker and friend, 3 years old, Dalmatian, loves to cuddle up to Henrh at night.

Extras

Conundrums:
"My son is amazing, but he does have his.. issues." -Veronica Vazquez
-He grew up with diabetes, but he deals with it well and handles his own medical care for it. He's never needed his mother's help with it.
-henry's left leg, thigh and down, is a prosthetic and 99% of the time he walks with a cane, it was how he was born.
Habits:
~Nail Biting (nervous)
~Hair Chewing (Childhood habit)
~Excessive Goggles Cleaning (embarrassed or flustered)
~Hard white knuckle grip (Angry or nervous)
~Cane tapping (Nervous)

Friends

Corey - best friend, engineering shop partner
Ollie - lunch table buddy, the two are prosthetic buddies as well [his arm]
Julia - Has a crush on Henry, Corey's sister

Favorites

Food : Tamales
Drink : Black Coffee
Band : Rage Against The Machine
Color : Burnt Orange
Place : His Workshop
Song : Killing In The Name
Animal : Dalmatians
Style : Steampunk

Present Time

Henrique's arrival at Camp Jupiter's 'doorstep' was not too far from what he expected. He didn't have high hopes for it anyway. Lupa sure wasn't much help in getting there, and he'd only gotten to sit when riding the bus if he'd lifted his pant leg so that someone would let him sit. Stupid people with their, 'Go give your grandma her cane back, kiddo,' bullcrap. If a guy's got a cane, just give the poor guy a seat. Or atleast don't be a bitch about it. Henrique stood, or, leaned, near the camp's main building, fidgeting with a few cogs he'd been carrying around. This place is almost as weird as the wolf house, Henry tells himself silently, eyeing the passing people. He grasped his cane and righted his stance, well,, as right as his hobbling stance can be.

Full Comments

No. I would not have sex with a man who raped trafficked women 🤮 (8 child comments)

Many women willingly choose sex work

And many don’t. How is the John to know? He doesn’t. So in his mind he should understand that he could be raping every “sex worker” he “hires.”

What an unhinged take.

Yeah, how crazy to not want to rape people. Wacky.

Assuming that all sex workers are unwilling and being trafficked IS unhinged behavior. Exponentially more people are trafficked for non-sex labor than sex work, but I never hear a peep about it from the sex work pearl clutchers.

This post wasn’t about trafficked people who are doing other types of forced labor. So, why on earth would I talk about that? I also didn’t mention oranges or eyelashes…because the post wasn’t about that. Want to talk about football…for no reason?

Because there are FAR more women being trafficked for domestic and sweatshop labor than for sex?

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Never. If the woman needs payment then she doesn't really want it. A man willing to fuck someone who doesn't enthusiastically desire them is not a good person. If you can't find someone who wants you just go without... (50 child comments)

This is wildly untrue, and a gross outlook. The fact that most the comments have support for sex workers, while demonizing people who pay for sex is just wild to me.

Consent is only legitimate if there is NO external pressure, not social, not physical nor economic. Consent requires enthusiastic desire, payment is used to make up for a lack of desire. It's funny to me that people understand UN workers demanding sex for aid or cops demanding sex in exchange for nor charging someone is unequivocally rape but if you put "cash" in for the word "aid" it's suddenly fine? You cant BUY access to an equal, and you don't need to buy access to someone who actually wants you. Sex is not a right, if you can't make someone desire you and trust you enough to want to fuck you then just...don't have sex. I have been celibate for years long stretches and I was perfectly happy (even though my libido is crazy high).

This is ignorant and immature. Consent does not require enthusiastic desire... love doesn't even require that. The reasons two people have sex can vary drastically, sometimes it's boredom, or to bear children, not simply desire.

Boredom is still motivated by a desire for sex and that person. Sex where the woman submits to please the other person or for procreation is a carryover of patriarchy and perpetuates unethical attitudes about sex. Women (and all people) should only have sex they want enthusiastically, even if their intent is to make a baby or just entertain themselves...

Wow, your detached. Your telling women how to have sex... and that not being enthusiastic about it means their wrong? Sex while bored has doesn't require enthusiasm, it's just something to do, sometimes it's just to go through the motions to be busy. Doesn't mean consent wasn't given. I have literally been the target of bored sex on many occasions and I didn't initiate. Just consenting doesn't equate enthusiasm in any way. He'll, I've had reluctant sex, I just didn't have a reason not to. I still consented, and had zero enthusiasm.

Your veiw is very patriarchal. I'm saying no one NO ONE should have sex they dont want. Being dissociated from the pleasure of the act is how we end up with women getting raped. Consent must be Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic and Specific. Just submitting isn't actually consent.

That's even worse, your still dictating what others should be doing based on your ideology. Your judging everyone that is other. Not even for doing actual horrible things, like coerce or rape. It's so gross that you can't see this... You can consent and dissassociate, see trophy wives. And don't seriously sit there and tell me there arent women who WANT that relationship, but don't even love them. It's for their money. And women can totally want that independent of the influence of the patriarchy. I'm not even judging!!! Im not saying its healthy, but its not wrong. Run your race! Love your way. I dont know why you think it's so WRONG of people to not be enthusiastic about sex, and how that has fuck all to do with giving consent. It's a gross unfair judgment.

It's not an ideology to want women not to have sex they dont want. That's all. If women (or men) decide to get into relationships for money and security I may find it distasteful but it's not unethical as long as everyone is honest. But rape culture needs to die, we need to destroy it, we can't do that if men still find sex with ambivalent women acceptable

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Absolutely not ..Men like that are RUINED and have a totally different concept of women love and and Sex. (That is if you're expecting to be in love. ..) a Fling ? Well I would check for germs first. .Arrive with Lab tests 😏😁 (24 child comments)

This is gross. More providers require safe sex practices than people just hooking up. Sex workers aren't dirty and diseased. 😑

There's no such thing as truely safe sex for women. Crabs and Herpes can be contracted even with condom use. I myself have religiously used condoms and still got HPV, all it takes is one broken condom and HPV can be dormant and undetectable for years. I have been tested yearly since I was 16 and was vaccinated and still had to have a colposcopy and LEEP procedure, men aren't even trsted for HPV... Also, any sex practice where fluids are exchanged or go onto a womans body is inherently unsafe, standard practice for bodily fluids is gloves, gown, mask and goggles, and most places can't even fully enforce condoms because of male demands and financial incentives to engage in unsafe practices (because of male demand)

Don't disagree. But that's a "someone had sex" thing not a "someone paid for sex" thing. Now if this were a "would you guys date a non-virgin guy?" thread, I'd have said the same as you

Yeah. All sex is a risk so my point is why assume risk for someone you don't even desire? Like you might as well only have sex you really want, that's worth the risk with a trusted person who has been tested and cares about your consent

True. And sometimes that's a client. But also I spent time getting physio and had to take the whole day off from my day job. Because despite my very ergonomic setup and attentiveness to stretching, my desk job has now come with it's own painful injury. From sitting. Like sex, work is not perfectly "safe" and harms the body. We all go to work and we do it to get paid. Sometimes that work is sex. Like any other job. And personally, I've never yet had to go to the physio for sex work injuries. Bills and capitalism is injurious, not sex work.

Sex isn't like other forms of activity. Carpal tunnel isn't equivalent to rape. Non consentual work is awful, non consentual sex is rape...they aren't the same, at all. And a crick in your back isn't really the same as a torn asshole or a stroke from being "consentually" choked out in sex. Women in prostitution have more PSTD than soldiers in war zones, that's not exactly like an office job. .

Personally, no. (70 child comments)

Yeah, absolutely wouldn't date someone who thought of women as objects to satisfy his sexual urges. No man who respects women would ever do that.

So do you not support legal sex work? For example Germany has a very well regulated industry, and even some places such as Thailand have places where STD testing, fair wages, and non-slave-worker are the standard. Part of supporting women in this business is acknowledging that some men/women will be partaking in this.

The vast majority of German sex workers are either doing it for drugs or because they were brought in from other countries and are being forced into it. Just because it's legal and regulated doesn't mean it's good.

Sources? I can smell the BS a mile away.

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/07/PE22_277_228.html Just look at this. Plus it is a well known fact that most prostitutes are not doing it out of the sheer joy for it

This has nothing to do with anyone on drugs just the number of legally registered sex workers in a country.

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As a woman who was in the sex industry on and off for two years, hell motherfucking no. (90 child comments)

[deleted]

Surely you can appreciate the irony of this

You can’t buy consent. The sex worker doesn’t want to sleep with you. She is forced to have sex against her will or she can’t pay rent, eat, live, etc. All sex without consent is rape. You are basically saying “you were raped and don’t want to date a rapist? How ironic”. Like get a grip on reality

Wouldn't that depend a little on the context? For example in countries with plenty of employment opportunities and a developed welfare state there becomes a point where its more of a choice than coerced. Otherwise wouldn't all jobs be inherently slavery?

No girl ever would want to be touched by a guy she doesn't want to be with. The ppl who fall in that line of work are usually those who need money or dealing with trauma/abuse/manipulation. And I can only imagine the mental, emotional and physical anguish of having someone use your body repeatedly. It's disgusting how some guys see throwing a couple of 20s their way justifies the treatment they get.

I'm in the aerial dance community, which includes pole and thus a lot of sex workers as instructors/classmates. I feel being around sex workers casually has opened my mind a lot, so I appreciate seeing this reply as I wasn't sure of my opinion. I guess it's a good reminder that sex workers are mostly wonderful people (every group has exceptions), but this is more about the people who seek sex-work out.

I will always support sex workers and advocate for their rights. They are amongst the society’s most vulnerable. The people paying for sex however? Despicable people who can rot in hell.

Making a group's customer base into criminals/outcasts is discriminating against that group.

It really isn’t? Like if I refuse to buy things made by child labor that doesn’t mean I’m discriminating against children. And I can absolutely advocate for the rights of children exposed to child labor and villainize the people using child labor at the same time.

It means you're discriminating against children who work to survive. And taking away their ability to survive. You might think starving children is an acceptable price to pay to remove child labor from the world though.

Are you actually on crack?[...]Like do you actually think contributing to the exploitation of a vulnerable group helps liberating them?

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For me it would depend on context. I would have a very different view of, say, passport bro sex tourism, vs someone who was going to a specific fetish provider like a dominatrix or something similar. (82 child comments)

To each their own but both of those scenarios are horrifying to me, the first indicates a very objectified idea of women's bodies, the second indicates a relationship with intimacy, sex (and likely porn) that is opposite to my worldview (paraphillias are almost never singular and men who engage in them are often porn users, both absolute deal breakers for me as a radical feminist). But far be it from me to shame a woman willing to take that on, a lot of women don't believe in female pleasure focused sex or believe in transactional sex, so they would have no issues with any of it.

There are plenty of women who happily and healthily engage in a wide range of safe consensual kink, both with men and with other women. Your use of the word paraphilia is a little peculiar. You seem to be equating participating in consensual kink with a psychological disorder. I hope you are aware that they are not the same thing.

Mfing 60s backwards ass mindset. Next she's gonna ironically call anyone with a kink a degenerate or deviant, and not in the funny meme way.

Way to invalidate a perspective different from yours

Cuz it's backwards ass bullshit. Sorry not sorry.

It just seems off to pretend kink culture isn't built on a misogyny foundation

"There are ethical ways to pay for sex" Um, how? Do you think it's ethical if the woman is dong to because she has to provide for her family? or make rent? or has a drug addiction issues they need to support. The amount of women who do this work "for fun" is MINISCULE. There's always a reason - money. How is that ethical? The only reason she's sleeping with men is because she needs to to survive. that's not a choice.

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No. I think having payed sex shows a mindset about sex and women's bodies that I'm not compatible with. (29 child comments)

Do you think the same applies to men who don’t want to date sex workers?

No, on the condition that the worker keeps their personal and professional lifes apart.
Men buy sex for pleasure. Women sell sex for money. They are not symmetrical.
You can be a bartender at a pub who doesn't enjoy alchohol. But the costumers who pay for drinks do enjoy them.
Sometimes sex workers have a hard time keeping things apart and might bring some attitudes related to the trade into their personal lifes. In this case I think it's perfectly justifiable to be off put.
In reality the attitude towards sex is seldom what deters men from dating SW. It has more to do with notions of sexual exclusivity. Some workers practice non-monogamy for this reason, since non-mono men are likelier to have less of an issue with this.

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No. He thinks of women as products (28 child comments)

and she thinks of men as customers

You aren’t dating the sex worker though. Someone that views sex as transactional and will stick their dick in anyone is too impulsive and of low morals. This is not someone I would date and I definitely could not build a life with someone like this and that’s no matter if they pay or don’t pay.

and what of a woman who sells her body for money? Are they of low morals too?

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I'm starting to think sex work abolition might not be a patriarchal problem... (49 child comments)

I'm finding kinda baffling how women should be able to be sex workers without shame but if someone is a costumer apparently they are considered less by the same persons...?

I don’t consider them less than. I just don’t want to date them. I also didn’t date single parents or people without a job. They are perfectly good people and I respect them but would not choose to date them. Waste of everyone’s time.

Having a preference isn't a problem. My comment was referring to the general dehumanisation I'm finding in the average comment of this thread, and the judgemental tone reserved to only the male part of the deal

You can't buy consent.

For real. These comments are so shallow, dehumanizing, and insecure.

Women thinking men and women who engage in transactional agreements in adult health regulated environments are gross and disgusting, untouchables vs hooking up with strangers at college/ bars/ god knows where lol … interesting read nether-less

You can't buy consent. The notion is fucked up. Use critical thinking.

And sex workers sell services and their consent can be revoked at any time. Just like your consent to the conditions of your job. Or your sexual encounters. Weird how that one works.

I come from a place where I bet you 95% of sex work, playing very safe, is non consensual, coerced, due to extreme necessity or fucked up views on their sexuality due to family abuse. And because of this, a lot of their customers (who are aware of this issue) are not precisely “clean” in their perspective of women.
Now to the point. The 5% sex worker who are there for likeness to their job is not risking any morals. BUT the man who hires is risking the service comes from slavery/abuse. The fact that he agrees with just minonon-research speaks volumes of the man, not of the few legal sex workers.

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As long as they’re safe, consensual (and please don’t give me any “SWers sell consent” BS; I’m friends with enough SWers to know that language only harms them), and treat them well, sure. I’d be concerned if they speaks in a derogatory way about the SWers they hired or about SW/SWers generally. But if they’re on the level, fine. [...] Edit— The comments here have been truly disappointing. Criminalizing clients will criminalize SWers. If you want to advocate for SWers and help them translation out of SW (cause y’all hate SW so much), advocate for fair access to banking (many lose access to banking due to the same morality clauses that denied unmarried women accounts), social media (so many SW can’t have accounts!), and decriminalization/de-stigmatization across the board. You could literally contact your legislators instead of getting mad about it on Reddit. (39 child comments)

I don’t want him to treat sex with me as a commodity to be bought no matter how positively he viewed his experience.

Is he offering you money or another form of payment? If not, how is it inherently different from paying a masseuse for specialty services when you could give him a back rub to further your intimacy and bonding. This attitude is placing sex on some sort of arbitrary pedestal as if it’s either overly sacred (in which case, hope you’ve never had a random hookup) or dirty (which I hope isn’t your take).

I don’t want him to think buying me something like a purse is going to make me want to have sex with me. I’m personally not interested in hookups so nothing is hypocritical about what I’m saying.

But you wouldn’t devalue someone for having a one night stand. You would devalue someone (or assume bad things about them) for paying a sex worker who… knows what they’re doing.

I just don’t like adding the exchange of money to something that should only be about desire in my opinion. One night stands are inherently about mutual desire which isn’t guaranteed with a sex worker who’s doing so for money.

Massaging someone is NOT on the same level as having sex. What the actual fuck. That's a disgusting comparison. Not even close.

Again, arbitrary and culturally conditioned on the idea that sex is somehow sacred beyond any other bodily activity. The only reason you see it as different is patriarchy placing value on women not having sex.

The few women out there who do sex work by true and free choice: more power to you. They are a minority, a very small one. Most sex work is forced, usually by a man, onto a woman, with varioua means. Most of the time it won't be "shackle you to tje bed" kind of foced. But there are many ways to traffick someone without doing that. Any discussion about sex work has to account for this fact. Sex work is not like any other jobs because the vast majority of it is forced. Secondly, sex is more intimate and personal than a massage. That's a pretty universal social rule of our world. It might be a socially determined rule (tho i really would not call it arbitrary) but SWs live in the same society you and I live in. They have not fallen from another dimension where having sex for money is the same as laying bricks for money. They are likely to be affected from it in a similar way than other women. So that makes their exploitation (for the 80% that is exploited) even worse.

So I hope you're super against casual sex too! Insert under capitalism aren't all jobs exploitative?

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We bought a house the end of December 2023 that's turned out to be unliveable without a complete replacement of the septic system. This is going to come out to 30-40k roughly, partially due to the landscape of the area. There was no note of any issues on the inspection report or in our contracts, but it is something the sellecontractor had to be aware of.
We can't afford a 40k loan on top of the mortgage and other expenses unfortunately which means we're just pumping the current septic all the time trying to hold out. It's actually begun to leak sewage into the ground at times now!
There's obviously no real equity in the house yet, maybe a couple thousand. It's an rural loan in Tennessee. If we walk away, what's going to be our best option for that - foreclosure, short sale, deed in lieu - and are we likely to get hit with a deficiency judgement with wage garnishment, etc? Is there a better option than walking away at this point?

Hi Reddit,
So I’m trying to rebuild my credit and read that court judgements happen and some people don’t know they have them, so I decided to go online and pay to view my court records. It looks like I have 2 judgements against me. The one proof of summons service I bought, still need to buy the other one, has the first name of a person I don’t know with my last name. It states they were my sibling, which I don’t have a sibling older than me, it says they were about 20 years older than me. The other thing is that the service address is not the house address I lived in, the house number, street number, city, and zip code are all wrong. Also, this summons was served in CA but during that time I was not living in CA.
So far no wage garnishment has happened. The case was filed in 2020, service of summons states I was served in December 2020, judgment was awarded around Feb 2021, and I see they filed for Write for Enforcement in March 2024 but don’t see it’s been granted.
Is it easy to dispute this and vacate the judgement to stop any garnishments? I don’t have the money to pay right now, but I’m most likely going to call the collections agent in the near future to try to negotiate a smaller amount and a pay for delete. Or should I just call the collections agency to try to negotiate with them before they possibly start garnishment.
EDIT:
I just purchased the other Proof of Summons of Service for the second judgment, this one was awarded this year, and everything is wrong too. It states I received it by verifying my name, but the address is completely wrong and I’ve never lived there or in that city for that matter.

X. Paternalism Without Father
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The Managerial and Professional Elite as a Ruling Class
As even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of “entitlement,” which takes inherited advantages for granted, gives way to what clinicians call “narcissistic entitlement” - grandiose illusions, inner emptiness. The advantages the rich confer on their children dwindle down to money alone. As the new elite discards the outlook of the old bourgeoisie, it identifies itself not with the work ethic and the responsibilities of wealth but with an ethic of leisure, hedonism, and self-fulfillment. Although it continues to administer American institutions in the interests of private property (corporate property as opposed to entrepreneurial property), it has replaced character building with permissiveness, the cure of souls with the cure of the psyche, blind justice with therapeutic justice, philosophy with social science, personal authority with an equally irrational authority of professional experts. It has tempered competition with antagonistic cooperation, while abolishing many of the rituals in which aggressive impulses formerly found civilized expression. It has surrounded people with “symbolically mediated information” and has substituted images of reality for reality itself. Without intending to, it has created new forms of illiteracy even in the act of setting up a system of universal education. It has undermined the family while attempting to rescue the family. It has torn away the veil of chivalry that once tempered the exploitation of women and has brought men and women face to face as antagonists. It has expropriated the worker’s knowledge of his craft and the mother’s “instinct” for childrearing, and has reorganized this knowledge as a body of esoteric lore accessible only to the initiated. The new ruling class has elaborated new patterns of dependence as effectively as its forebears eradicated the dependence of the peasant on his lord, the apprentice on his master, and the woman on her man.
I do not wish to imply a vast conspiracy against our liberties. These things have been done in broad daylight and have been done, on the whole, with good intentions. Nor have they arisen as a unified policy of social control. Social policy in the United States has unfolded in response to a series of immediate emergencies, and those who make policy seldom see beyond the problems at hand. The cult of pragmatism, moreover, justifies their unwillingness or inability to make far-reaching plans for the future. What unifies their actions is the need to promote and defend the system of corporate capitalism from which they - the managers and professionals who operate the system - derive most of the benefits. The needs of the system shape policy and set the permissible limits of public debate. Most of us can see the system but not the class that administers it and monopolizes the wealth it creates. We resist a class analysis of modern society as a “conspiracy theory.” Thus we prevent ourselves from understanding how our current difficulties arose, why they persist, or how they might be solved.
Progressivism and the Rise of the New Paternalism
The new paternalism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, found political expression in the progressive movement and later in the New Deal, and gradually worked its way into every corner of American society. The democratic revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, culminating in the Civil War, not only did away with monarchy but undermined established religion, landed elites, and finally overthrew the slaveholding oligarchy in the South. The revolution gave rise to a society based on individualism, competition, and the pursuit of the main chance. It also generated demands for further change, which came to a head in the period immediately following the Civil War. Having destroyed slavery in the name of free labor, the leaders of the democratic movement inadvertently encouraged northern workers to ask for the freedom to control the terms of their work, not merely to sell their labor at ruinous prices. The logic of democracy demanded the confiscation of Confederate estates and their distribution among the freedmen; it demanded woman suffrage; it demanded, in short, a more sweeping reorganization of society than its leaders had contemplated. Seeking merely to free property from its feudal and mercantile restrictions, bourgeois radicals in the 1860s and early 1870s found themselves confronted with an incipient attack on property itself, from which most of them recoiled in horror.
After the collapse of reconstruction and the radical agitation associated with it, American liberalism no longer spoke for the artisan, the small farmer, and the independent entrepreneur - the “producing classes” that had been the backbone of the democratic movement. Faced with unrest at home and with the spectacle of the Paris commune abroad, liberalism now identified itself, in the words of E. L. Godkin, with “the more well-to-do and observing classes.” It undertook to reform society from the top down - to professionalize the civil service, break the power of the urban machine, and put “the best men” into office. When such measures failed to stem the rising tide of labor militancy and agrarian radicalism, reformers brought forward their own version of the “cooperative commonwealth” in the name of progressivism: universal education, welfare capitalism, scientific management of industry and government. The New Deal completed what progressivism had begun, solidifying the foundations of the welfare state and adding much of the superstructure as well. In industry, scientific management gave way to the school of human relations, which tried to substitute cooperation for authoritarian control. But this cooperation rested on management’s monopoly of technology and the reduction of work to routines imperfectly understood by the worker and controlled by the capitalist. Similarly the expansion of welfare services presupposed the reduction of the citizen to a consumer of expertise.
American progressivism, which has successfully countered agrarian radicalism, the labor movement, and the feminist movement by enacting selective parts of their program, has now lost almost all trace of its origin in nineteenth-century liberalism. It has rejected the liberal conception of man, which assumed the primacy of rational self-interest, and has installed in its place a therapeutic conception which acknowledges irrational drives and seeks to divert them into socially constructive channels. It has rejected the stereotype of economic man and has attempted to bring the “whole man” under social control. Instead of regulating the conditions of work alone, it now regulates private life as well, organizing leisure time on scientific principles of social and personal hygiene. It has exposed the innermost secrets of the psyche to medical scrutiny and has thus encouraged habits of anxious self-scrutiny, superficially reminiscent of religious introspection but rooted in anxiety rather than a guilty conscience - in a narcissistic rather than a compulsive or hysterical type of personality.
Liberal Criticism of the Welfare State
The new modes of social control associated with the rise of progressivism having stabilized capitalism without solving any of its underlying problems - the gap between wealth and poverty, the failure of purchasing power to keep pace with productivity, economic stagnation. The new paternalism has kept social tensions from assuming political form, but it has not removed their source. As those tensions increasingly find expression in crime and random violence, critics have begun to ask whether the welfare system delivers all it promised. The system, moreover, has become more and more expensive to operate. Even those who remain loyal to the underlying premises of American capitalism have begun to express alarm about the mounting cost of maintaining it. Proposals to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed income or a negative income tax have gained a sympathetic hearing. In his book on old age, David Hackett Fischer argues that a national inheritance system, whereby a gift of capital at birth would accumulate interest and provide for the citizen in his old age, would prove “cheaper than present arrangements.” The modification or abandonment of the welfare system now presents itself not as a Utopian dream but as a matter of sound business practice.
The health and welfare industries, which have done so much to promote the new paternalism by professionalizing activities formerly carried on in the workshop, the neighborhood, or the home, have themselves begun to harbor second thoughts about the results of their own labors. Members of the “helping professions” have begun to question the efficiency of the public institutions and welfare agencies that monopolize the knowledge formerly administered by ordinary citizens - the hospital, the mental asylum, the juvenile court. The medical profession, after upholding the hospital as an indispensable alternative to the family, now begins to think that patients might be better off if they were allowed to die at home. Psychiatrists have been speculating along similar lines, not only because existing facilities are overcrowded but because they have failed to achieve the high rates of cure once predicted with such confidence. Lawyers have begun to criticize the courts for removing “neglected” children from their homes without evidence that such children suffer serious harm and without proof that institutionalization or transfer to foster parents provides any solution. Even the school’s claim on the child has begun to give way to parental claims. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the Supreme Court ruled that Amish parents have a right to keep their children out of the public schools. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” the court said; “those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
Even with the best intentions, however, those who criticize the welfare state within the assumptions underlying a capitalist economy cannot bring themselves to confront the revolution in social relations that abandonment of the welfare system would require. Liberal criticism of the new paternalism resembles the “humanization” of the workplace, which tries to give the worker the illusion of participation while leaving management in undiminished control. The attempt to mitigate the monotony of the assembly line by allowing the worker to perform more than a single operation does not alter the condition that degrades work - the monotony of the assembly line by allowing the worker to perform more than a single operation does not alter the condition that degrades work - the monopoly of technical knowledge by means of which management designs all phases of production, while the worker merely carries out the bidding of the planning department. Recent proposals to modify the welfare system suffer from the same kind of limitation. Thus a study of the family commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation takes issue with the conventional assumption of parental incompetence while leaving unchallenged the definition of parents as consumers of professional services. Kenneth Keniston and the other authors of the Carnegie report, conscious of belonging to “an emerging consensus,” hold that parents “are still the world’s greatest experts about the needs of their own children.” They recognize that many of the agencies ostensibly ministering to the family have undermined the family instead. The parental “malaise,” according to Keniston, lies in “the sense of having no guidelines or supports for raising children, the feeling of not being in control as parents, and the widespread sense of personal guilt for what seems to be going awry.”
The rehabilitation of parenthood, it appears, implies an attack on professionalism and the welfare state. Yet Keniston stops well short of such an attack. He takes for granted the family’s dependence on experts and seeks merely to regularize and regulate this relationship. “Few people would dispute that we live in a society where parents must increasingly rely on others for help and support in raising their children.” The family economy has disappeared; children represent a financial liability rather than an asset; the school has taken over the family’s education functions; and the medical profession has assumed most of the responsibility for health care. These changes, according to Keniston, leave parents in the position of “executives in a large firm - responsible for the smooth coordination of the many people and processes that must work together to produce the final product.”
This line of analysis leads to the conclusion not that parents should collectively assert their control over childrearing but that federal policy should seek to equalize the relationship between experts and parents. Yet Keniston’s own reasoning shows that parents occupy a position closer to proletarians than to executives. As things now stand, according to Keniston, “parents have little authority over those with whom they share the task of raising their children”; they “deal with those others from a position of inferiority of helplessness.” The obvious reason for this is that the state, not the parents, pays the bill for professional services, or at least signs the paychecks. (The citizens, as taxpayers, pay in the end.) If parents organized and hired their own experts, things might be different.
It goes without saying that such solutions do not commend themselves to members of the policy-making establishment. Measures of this kind are too closely associated with populism, localism, and residual resistance to centralized progress. They have become doubly objectionable, and for reasons the force of which even enemies of the establishment must acknowledge, in the wake of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville battle of the late sixties, when “community control” degenerated into reverse racism and education into racial propaganda. Yet the alternative to community control is more bureaucracy. Instead of confronting the choice, liberal reformers try to have things both ways. While advocating an expansion of government services to the family, a federal guarantee of full employment, improved protection of children’s legal rights, and a vastly expanded program of health care, they propose to strengthen “parent participation” in all these programs. They treat the ascendancy of experts as an unavoidable condition of industrial society, even when they seek to qualify they ascendancy of experts as an unavoidable condition of industrial society, even when they seek to qualify this ascendancy by improving the position of consumers. They assume that the requirements of a complex society dictate the triumph of factory production over handicraft production and the ascendancy of the “helping professions” over the family.
Bureaucratic Dependence and Narcissism
Recent studies of professionalization show that professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services. The evidence of professional self-promotion can no longer be dismissed by reasserting the sociological truism that “modern society involves the individual in relations … that are vastly more complex than [those] his ancestors … had to content with.”
The family’s dependence on professional services over which it has little control represents one form of a more general phenomenon: the erosion of self-reliance and ordinary competence by the growth of giant corporations and of the bureaucratic state that serves them. The corporations and the state now control so much of the necessary know-how that Durkheim’s image of society as the “nourishing mother,” from whom all blessings flow, more and more coincides with the citizen’s everyday experience. The new paternalism has replaced personal dependence not with bureaucratic rationality, as theorists of modernization (beginning with Max Weber) have almost unanimously assumed, but with a new form of bureaucratic dependence. What appears to social scientists as a seamless web of “interdependence” represents in fact the dependence of the individual on the organization, the citizen on the state, the worker on the manager, and the parent on the “helping professions.” The “consensus of the competent,” as Thomas L. Haskell refers to the professions in his study of the professionalization of social science, came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.
As retributive justice gives way to therapeutic justice, what began as a protest against moral oversimplification ends by destroying the very sense of moral responsibility. Therapeutic justice perpetuates childlike dependence into adulthood and deprives the citizen of legal resources against the state. Formerly law rested on an adversary relation between the state and the offender and acknowledged the superior power of the state by giving important procedural advantages to the defendant. Medical jurisprudence, on the other hand, implicates the offender in his own control. Relieved of moral responsibility when certified into the sick role, he cooperates with the doctors in his own “cure.”
The psychiatric critique of the law, like the therapeutic attack on authority in general, makes a virtue of substituting personal treatment for the impersonal, arbitrary authority of the courts. Thus a specialist in the sociology of law, acknowledging his intention to “substitute scientific therapies for legal sanctions - for ‘justice’” - once deplored the irrationality of legal procedures: “There is in the concept of justice an element of ‘fate’, which is absent in the concept of scientific treatment. The offender simply gets what he himself initiated…. Society as a whole is blameless. The criminal himself was the one who chose.” Whereas “the lawyer’s way of handling a human problem is typically non-scientific,” therapy treats the criminal or patient as a victim and thus puts matters in their proper light. The shift from “sin” to “sickness,” according to this writer, represents the first step toward “the introduction of science and personal reactions [into] human conflicts” and to the recognition of social problems as medical problems, in which “cooperation with the therapist” becomes “probably the most critical problem for the deviant.”
Medical justice shares with enlightened childrearing and pedagogy a tendency to promote dependence as a way of life. Therapeutic modes of thought and practice exempt their object, the patient, from critical judgment and relieve him of moral responsibility. Sickness by definition represents an invasion of the patient by forces outside his conscious control, and the patient’s realistic recognition of the limits of his own responsibility - his acceptance of his diseased and helpless condition - constitutes the first step toward recovery (or permanent invalidism, as the case may be). Therapy labels as sickness what might be judged as weak or willful actions; it thus equips the patient to fight (or resign himself to) the disease, instead of irrationally finding fault with himself. Inappropriately extended beyond the consulting room, however, therapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning of the capacity for self-help - in the categories used by John R. Seeley, between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence. “What says ‘you are not guilty’ says also ‘you cannot help yourself.’” Therapy legitimates deviance as sickness, but it simultaneously pronounces the patient unfit to manage his own life and delivers him into the hands of a specialist. As therapeutic points of view and practice gain general acceptance, more and more people find themselves disqualified, in effect, from the performance of adult responsibilities and become dependent on some form of medical authority.
The psychological expression of this dependence is narcissism. In its pathological form, narcissism originates as a defense against feelings of helpless dependency in early life, which it tries to counter with “blind optimism” and grandiose illusions of personal self-sufficiency. Since modern society prolongs the experience of dependence into adult life, it encourages milder forms of narcissism in people who might otherwise come to terms with the inescapable limits on their personal freedom and power - limits inherent in the human condition - by developing competence as workers and parents. But at the same time that our society makes it more and more difficult to find satisfaction in love and work, it surrounds the individual with manufactured fantasies of total gratification. The new paternalism preaches not self-denial but self-fulfillment. It sides with narcissistic impulses and discourages their modification by the pleasure of becoming self-reliant, even in a limited domain, which under favorable conditions accompanies maturity. While it encourages grandiose dreams of omnipotence, moreover, the new paternalism undermines more modest fantasies, erodes the capacity to suspend disbelief, and thus makes less and less accessible the harmless substitute-gratifications, notably art and play, that help to mitigate the sense of powerlessness and the fear of dependence that otherwise express themselves in narcissistic traits.
Our society is narcissistic, then, in a double sense. People with narcissistic personalities, although not necessarily more numerous than before, play a conspicuous part in contemporary life, often rising to positions of eminence. Thriving on the adulation of the masses, these celebrities set the tone of public life and of private life as well, since the machinery of celebrity recognizes no boundaries between the public and the private realm. The beautiful people - to use this revealing expression to include not merely wealthy globetrotters but all those who bask, however briefly, in the full glare of the cameras - live out the fantasy of narcissistic success, which consists of nothing more substantial than a wish to be vastly admired, not for one’s accomplishments but simply for oneself, uncritically and without reservation.
Modern capitalist society not only elevates narcissists to prominence, it elicits and reinforces narcissistic traits in everyone. It does this in many ways: by displaying narcissism so prominently and in such attractive forms; by undermining parental authority and thus making it hard for children to grow up; but above all by creating so many varieties of bureaucratic dependence. This dependence, increasingly widespread in a society that is not merely paternalistic but maternalistic as well, makes it increasingly difficult for people to lay to rest the terrors of infancy or to enjoy the consolations of adulthood.
The Conservative Critique of Bureaucracy
Criticism of the new paternalism, insofar as it remains imprisoned in the assumptions of political liberalism, objects to the cost of maintaining a welfare state - the “human cost” as well as the cost to the taxpayers - without criticizing the ascendancy of the managerial and professional class. Another line of attack, which singles out bureaucracy as the overriding evil, arises out of a conservative idealization of old-fashioned individualism. Less equivocal in its opposition to bureaucratic centralization - except when it comes from right-wingers who denounce government regulation of industry and still plead for a gigantic military establishment - the conservative critique of bureaucracy superficially resembles the radical critique outlined in the present study. It deplores the erosion of authority, the corruption of standards in the schools, and the spread of permissiveness. But it refuses to acknowledge the connection between these developments and the rise of monopoly capitalism - between bureaucracy in government and bureaucracy in industry.
“The general historical conflict between individualism and collectivism is dividing mankind into two hostile camps,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in his study of bureaucracy. Capitalist free enterprise, he argued, rests on the rational calculation of profit and loss, whereas bureaucratic management “cannot be checked by economic calculation.” Extended beyond its legitimate domain of law enforcement and national defense, bureaucracy undermines individual initiative and substitutes “government control for free enterprise.” It substitutes the dictatorship of the state for the rule of law. Free-market capitalism, by turning labor into a commodity, “makes the wage earner free from any personal dependence” and detaches “appraisal of each individual’s effort … from any personal considerations.” Bureaucratic collectivism, on the other hand, undermines the “cool rationality and objectivity of capitalist relations” and renders the “plain citizen” dependent on the “professional propagandist of bureaucratization,” who confuses the citizen with his “empty catchwords” and esoteric obfuscation. “Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.” But under socialism - and “there is no compromise possible between these two systems,” according to Mises, “no third system” - the “way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.”
This argument suffers from the conservative’s idealization of the personal autonomy made possible by the free market and his willingness to concede enormous war-making powers to the state, so long as they do not interfere with “private” enterprise.” It cannot explain the spread of bureaucracy into industry itself. “The trend toward bureaucratic rigidity is not inherent in the evolution of business,” according to Mises. “It is an outcome of government meddling with business.” Such is his reply to the liberal argument that the inexorable trend toward economic concentration gives rise to a growing gap between ownership and control of the corporation, creates a new managerial elite, and calls into being a centralized state as the only agency capable of controlling it. The liberal analysis itself, however, needs modification. It is not the “divorce between ownership and control” that has created the managerial oligarchy but the divorce between production and planning. Having achieved a complete separation of handwork and brainwork, management monopolizes technical knowledge and reduces the workers to a human machine; but the administration and continual elaboration of this knowledge require an ever-growing managerial apparatus, itself organized on the principles of the factory with its intricate subdivision of tasks. Studies of progressivism and the New Deal have shown that government regulation of business often arose in response to the demands of businessmen themselves. Regulatory agencies draw most of their personnel from business. Neither the regulatory nor the welfare policies of the state rest on “an implacable hatred of private business and free enterprise,” as Mises claims. On the contrary, regulation controls competition and stabilizes the market, while the welfare system socializes the “human costs” of capitalist production - rising unemployment, inadequate wage scales, inadequate insurance against sickness and old age - and helps to forestall more radical solutions.
It is true that a professional elite of doctors, psychiatrists, social scientists, technicians, welfare workers, and civil servants now plays a leading part in the administration of the state and of the “knowledge industry.” But the state and the knowledge industry overlap at so many points with the business corporation (which has increasingly concerned itself with every phase of culture), and the new professionals share so many characteristics with the managers of industry, that the professional elite must be regarded not as an independent class but as a branch of modern management. The therapeutic ethic, which has replaced the nineteenth-century utilitarian ethic, does not serve the “class interest” of professionals alone, as Daniel P. Moynihan and others have argued; it serves the interests of monopoly capitalism as a whole. Moynihan points out that by emphasizing impulse rather than calculation as the determinant of human conduct, and by holding society responsible for the problems confronting individuals, a “government-oriented” professional class has attempted to create a demand for its own services. Professionals, he observes, have a vested interest in discontent, because discontented people turn to professional services for relief. But the same principle underlies all of modern capitalism, which continually tries to create new demands and new discontents that can be assuaged only by the consumption of commodities. Moynihan, aware of this connection, tries to present the professional as the successor to the capitalist. The ideology of “compassion,” he says, serves the class interest of the “post-industrial surplus of functionaries who, in the manner of industrialists who earlier turned to advertising, induce demand for this own products.”
Professional self-aggrandizement, however, grew up side by side with the advertising industry and must be seen as another phase of the same process, the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism. The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer. Thus the medical and psychiatric assault on the family as a technologically backward sector went hand in hand with the advertising industry’s drive to convince people that store-brought goods are superior to homemade goods. Both the growth of management and proliferation of professions represent new forms of capitalist control, which first established themselves in the factory and then spread throughout society. The struggle against bureaucracy therefore requires a struggle against capitalism itself. Ordinary citizens cannot resist professional dominance without also asserting control over production and over the technical knowledge on which modern production rests. A reassertion of “common sense,” according to Mises, will “prevent man from falling prey” to the “illusory fantasies” of professional bureaucrats. But common sense is not enough. In order to break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution of their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own “communities of competence.” Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead.
In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody - in the guise of personal “growth” and “awareness” - the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse. The will to build a better society, however, survives, along with traditions of localism, self-help, and community action that only need the vision of a new society, a decent society, to give them new vigor. The moral discipline formerly associated with the work ethic still retains a value independent of the role it once played in the defense of property rights. That discipline - indispensable to the task of building a new order - endures most of all in those who knew the old order only as a broken promise, yet who took the promise more seriously than those who merely took it for granted.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc/1935/05/marxism.htm

To Marxism, the determining contradiction in present-day society lies in the contradictory development of the social forces of production within the existing relations of production, or, otherwise expressed, between the increasingly socialized character of the productive process itself and the persisting property relations. In all forms of society, the general advance of humanity has been expressed in the development of the productive forces, i.e. of the means and methods of production, enabling ever greater amounts of use articles to be produced with an ever diminishing amount of direct human labor. This process is divisible into historical periods. In it, each stage simply mirrors the attained level of the continuously increasing forces of production and develops for them corresponding social relations. And as soon as a given set of social conditions no longer sufficed, without giving rise to great maladjustments in the social, economic and political spheres, to satisfy the demands of the new and growing forces of production, those conditions were overcome through revolutionary action.
All social development is based in the last instance on the process of interaction between social man and nature. The contradiction arising through human labor between being and consciousness, nature and man, leads to further and further development, and change in nature, society, man and consciousness. Within this great contradiction evolve, in the process of development, narrower social contradictions, which in their turn propel the progressive social movement along the path of revolution.
Since the development of the productive forces has throughout the past been bound up with the rise and decline of classes, past history must necessarily be regarded as a history of class struggle. Thus the development of manufacture under feudalism had to lead, at a certain level, to the overcoming of feudalism and to the birth of capitalist society; a transition which took a revolutionary expression in all the social domains.
The statement of contradiction, the materialist dialectic, the philosophic theory of Marxism and at the same time the law of all real movement, seeks in all contradictions their unity - without, however, for that reason, confusing those contradictions - and sees in the spontaneous movement of contradictions their abolition, i.e. their resolution in a third form, which again produces and must overcome its contradiction. Since the Marxist analysis takes capital as its starting point, capital becomes the thesis, of which the proletariat is the antithesis. The dialectical law of the negation of the negation leads to the synthesis. This can only be the communist society, which knows neither capital nor proletariat, since it has taken up or resolved them both in their concrete forms. This is merely the falling off of a social husk, and, being a product of historical property relations, it is only in capitalism that this husk can possess concrete reality. History, like all reality, is dialectical, hence limitless. Each problem possesses no more than historical character. Marxism does not present itself as something absolute, but as the theory of the class struggle within capitalist society.
Not only, from the standpoint of Marxism, is the contradiction between capital and labor the beginning as well as the end of present-day society, but the progressive development of that society is to be seen only in the growth and sharpening of that contradiction. Capital being the result of the exploitation of labor power, so with the growth of capital, that is, in the course of the human progress under way in this historical period, the exploitation of the workers must of necessity be more and more intensified. If the possibilities of the exploitation of labor power in the present system were unlimited, there would be no reason to expect an end of capitalist society. But with the growth of the proletariat, the class struggle also increases, since at a certain point of development the productive forces of the workers can no longer be applied capitalistically. At that point, the proletariat, of its own accord, develops into a revolutionary force, which strives for and brings about an overthrow of the existing social relations.
Marxism, which perceives in the existence of the proletariat the realization of the dialectical movement of society, bases its theoretical justification mainly on the laws of economic development in general, and of capitalism in particular. Capitalist relations of production are not solely determined by nature (land as a basis for labor) and human activity, but these natural conditions are also subordinate to the capitalistic social relations. The concerns of human beings are not regulated from the point of view of their needs as human beings, but from the point of view of capitalist needs for profits. The decisive factor in capitalist society is not the production of use values but of capital; the latter is the motive power of the productive machinery. This dependence of human welfare upon the private interests of the capitalists is made possible through the separation of the workers from the means of production. The workers cannot live except through the sale of their labor power. The buyers of labor power, who are at the same time the owners of the means of production, buy this power only in order to further their private interests as capitalists, without regard to social consequences.
We have seen that in all forms of society, progressive development is illustrated in the continual growth and improvement of the means and methods of production, enabling the output of an ever greater quantity of products with ever less labor. In capitalism, this same process expresses itself in a more rapid growth of the capital invested in means of production as compared with the capital invested in labor power. That part of the capital which is invested in means of production we call constant capital, since as such it enables no changes of magnitude; and that portion which goes in the form of wages to the workers we call the variable capital, since it adds, through labor itself, new values to those already present. In this way it is shown that the development of the social forces of production under capitalism is expressed in a more rapid growth of the constant capital relatively to the variable.
Capital, and hence its material form, the means of production and labor power, can, however, as already stated, function capitalistically only so long as this may appear profitable to the owners of the means of production. Coming into action only as capital, they must reproduce themselves as capital, a thing which is possible, on the capitalistic basis, only by way of accumulation. The surplus value, from which are derived the funds for accumulation, the additional means of production and labor power as well as the capitalists’ profit, is, however, nothing but unpaid labor. It is that part of the workers’ products which is not consumed by them but was taken from them. Now since the surplus value is derived exclusively from the variable part of capital, and if this variable part must continually diminish relatively to the advance of accumulation, then the surplus value must, with mathematical certainty, continually diminish relatively to accumulation even though it increases absolutely. This contradictory movement, by which with advancing accumulation the capitalistic rate of profit falls (the rate of profit is computed on the total capital, constant and variable) - a process denoted as the growth of the organic composition of capital - is, however, up to a certain point of capitalist development, not at all dangerous, since at a rather low stage of development the system is capable of accumulating faster than the rate of profit falls, or, in other words, to compensate for the fall of the profit rate by the growth of the actual profit mass. This possibility is, however, no less historical than all other matters.
Accumulation there must be, and the lower the rate of profit falls as a result of this accumulation, the greater must the accumulation be. When accumulation goes out, the crisis comes in; the solving of the crisis is possible only through further accumulation, and necessarily at a continually accelerated rate. At a rather high level of capitalist development, when the tempo inherent in accumulation requires the further advance of accumulation in such measure that the absolutely swollen mass of profit is too small in relation to those demands for further accumulation, then accumulation must of necessity come to a stop, and the boom turns to crisis. In other words, capitalist accumulation devours for its own purposes, by which all society is conditioned, an increasingly large part of the surplus value produced by the workers; and in spite of the growth of this surplus value, it must nevertheless, at a high point of development, prove insufficient to meet the demands of accumulation. This law of capitalist accumulation, the primary cause of which is to be seen in the contradiction between exchange value and use value, between capital and labor, is confirmed as an actual law by all empirical factors involved. If accumulation comes to a standstill, by reason of the fact that there is not enough surplus value at hand for its continuance, then that part of capital which is destined for but is at the same time insufficient to meet the needs of accumulation, lies idle and seeks in vain for profitable possibilities of investment. We are faced with the paradoxical truth that a shortage of capital gives rise to a superfluity of capital lacking room for investment. There is no lack of purchasing power, yet, in the capitalist sense, no use can be made of this purchasing power, since from this point of view it is meaningless, because unprofitable.
If accumulation is not continued, the situation must of necessity give rise to a general tie-up of human activity. The commodities destined for further accumulation can find no buyers. They lie unused, and from the over-accumulation results the general over-production of commodities; a circumstance which expresses itself in the closing and paralyzing of enterprises in all spheres of social life and hence in an enormous increase of unemployment.
The crisis also brings with it certain tendencies working to overcome it. The organic composition of capital is lowered by capital being destroyed through bankruptcies and devaluation. Through the export of capital and intensified imperialistic ventures, new sources of additional surplus value are created. Through general rationalization of working methods, further technical innovations in the productive process, cheaper sources of raw materials, as well as through the pauperization of the workers and the expropriation of the middle classes, etc., the quantity of surplus value is adapted to meet the demands of further accumulation. All efforts during the crisis serve to revive profitable capitalist operation on a lower price and value level. If this occurs, nothing stands in the way of a new upswing, which, however, after a certain time, as a result of renewed over-accumulation, necessarily turns off into a new crisis. These factors we call the counter-tendencies directed against the collapse of capitalism.
Like everything else, however, these counter-tendencies are of an historical nature. At a certain point of capitalist development, their effectiveness as factors in overcoming crises ceases. They become too weak in relation to the further demands of accumulation, or are already completely exhausted as a result of previous accumulation (for example, capitalist expansion meets its objective limits long before it completes its march over the globe). Furthermore, capitalist rationalization leads, as has been shown, to mis-rationalization, and the revolutionizing of technique, too, has its capitalistic limits. Neither can wages in the long run be kept below the workers’ cost of reproducing themselves, nor can the middle-class elements be completely expropriated. Monopolization further lowers the possibility for capital expansion, and imperialistic ventures grow more and more dubious. But regardless of how or when the counter-tendencies are neutralized, it is clear to the Marxist that capitalism must of necessity reach a point where the past cycle of crises gives way to the permanent crisis which capitalism is powerless to overcome.
This permanent crisis, or the death crisis, of capitalism is a crisis no longer restricted by any counter-tendencies - a crisis in which the tendency toward collapse runs its course. But even here we are not presented with a single act, but with a process, a whole historical period. In such an economic condition, the relative pauperization of the proletariat, which goes with the whole of capitalist development, is bound to become absolute, general and permanent. During the upgrade period of capitalism, wages rose, since the cost of reproducing the workers continually increased also, though in relation to what they produced, their portion was less and less. In the permanent crisis, their real living conditions are bound to grow worse, absolutely and uninterruptedly.
The condition of permanent crisis forms the objective basis of the revolutionary labor movement. The class struggle grows sharper and assumes more naked forms. On the other hand, the means of suppression employed by the ruling class are adapted to this new condition. While in the upgrade period of capitalism, “formal democracy” sufficed to permit the smooth operation of the social mechanism, in the permanent crisis capitalism has to take up with open dictatorship. In the place of “democracy” there arises, at a rather high stage of development, a political condition which today is called fascism. The fact that the ideological basis of fascism is formed by the impoverished middle class does not alter the fact that the fascist movement operates only in the interest of the now monopolized capital. Capitalist concentration, which goes on even in the permanent crisis, necessarily impoverishes also the middle strata of capitalists. The energies thus aroused within the middle class are engaged by monopoly capital for its own purposes. Parts of the petty bourgeoisie are granted concessions at the expense of the workers, though these concessions are only of temporary character.
By destroying the organizations and doing away with the limited “democratic” political liberties of the workers with the aid of the corrupted middle-class gunmen and the part of the workers under their ideological influence, capitalism thinks to secure its continued existence even during the permanent crisis. But even though, through terrorism, the workers can be politically atomized, their congregation in large masses is still necessary for industrial production. With the destruction of the old form of the labor movement, new forms necessarily arise; and since these forms are deprived of other means of expression, they must express themselves on the job itself, whereby their strength is increased a thousand-fold. The workers-council movement, the organizational form of the revolution, thus arises naturally out of the very conditions which capitalism has created. The permanent terror is at the same time the political schooling of the workers. So that in the proletariat capitalism not only produces its own grave-diggers; it has also to demonstrate to the proletariat how they can fight successfully.
Even though the workers in great masses may never attain a revolutionary consciousness, in order to live they are forced to take up the fight against capital. And when they fight for their existence under the conditions of the permanent crisis, this fight, regardless of its ideological quality, is a fight which can only turn in the direction of overcoming the capitalist system. Until the successful revolutionary overthrow, the proletariat lives in barbarous, constantly worsening conditions, and the only possibility of getting away from that is communism; that is, the overcoming of capitalist relations of production, the abolition of private property in the means of production, which is identical with the abolition of wage labor.
Marxism is not only a theory which sprung from the existence of the proletariat and its position in society; Marxism is the actual class struggle between capital and labor, that is, a social condition in which the workers, whether they will or not, whether they are conscious of it or not, whether they know Marx or not, are unable to act otherwise than in accordance with Marxism, if they wish to maintain themselves and thereby at the same time to serve the general progress of mankind. While Marx himself actualized the Hegelian dialectic, that is recognized the real, concrete movement as dialectical, Marxism can be actualized only by means of the fighting proletariat. A Marxist is not one who has mastered the Marxian theories; a Marxist is one who strives to actualize those theories. In a word: Marxism is not only a view of the world; Marxism is the living, fighting proletariat.

Hi Everyone. I'm in Florida and strongly considering Chapter 13 as I'm a decent wage earner who just can't keep up, especially after increases in property tax and insurance. I haven't lived here 1215 days - only 1003 - but as I understand it, there's still an exemption, but I'm confused as to whether it protects the equity or just the home value; I only have about $60,000 - generously - of equity after considering my 1st and 2nd mortgages. Thanks everyone for the help!

Firstly, remember that this was the top team in the regular season, swept the first round, and nearly swept the second round as well. Teams that make it to the conference finals are not shit. So, if you are a doomer, just remember that this team is objectively no joke. There are no flukes here.
However, what I want to highlight is that this team is the best comeback team in NHL history. I was surprised to learn that from one of the broadcasts. This is when you factor in the regular season and playoffs to date. Combine that with the periodic doses of magic we see from time to time, like the stadium series victory this year, along with Kreider's 3 goal performance against Carolina, along with Igor's incredible consistency after a subpar beginning to the season, and it feels different.
I'm not blind, i see what's happening against Florida, however I feel like we still haven't seen a boot on their throats until now. You take a special team with a little bit of that magic, and you dial up the pressure to level 10, and you watch what happens.
Every cup winning team is special. This team is special. We will win tomorrow; no doubt.

In the Deathly Hallows, Ron insists on not uttering the name 'Voldemort' after their near death escape from the Ministry. He clearly says in the book , ' It's like a jinx.....' without knowing that it actually was cursed. But his instinct, although based out of fear is so strong that it saved thier asses and later also prevents them from getting exposed when Ted, Dean and the goblins are taking refuge.
I loved this for his character. I have always considered multiple points of view proving useful because it helps me appreciate the gravity of situations relative to multiple people involved. In Ron's reluctance, it's shown how it's not always complete fearlessness and bravery which wins over. Fear's main objective is to help you be more alert and ready. He is also a really good reminder that they should not be in over their heads. They are only 17. Although none of them show signs of false confidence in their journey, his obvious displeasure and anxiety make it more believable that they are every bit scared as they should be for this battle that has been waged.

Chapter list:
Chapter 20: Strangers and Walkers
3 months later:
Kenny was fishing on the river with John standing next to him, John had a satchel on the ground.
John had something to say. “You know it's nearly been a year since we came here?”
“Yeah, December now isn't it? Not hot anymore, now it's perfect here while up north it's cold winter.” Kenny replied.
“Yep, I'm keeping track. Guess being down here's paying off once more.” John said.
“Definitely, imagine being up in Ohio again, we'd be asking for a campfire inside a house instead of fishing here.” Kenny replied.
“You’re right about that though I didn't mind it too much before but I guess living inside does that. Kept the house warm when I could.” John explained.
Kenny wore blue shorts and his white shirt as the weather was pretty mild, not hot or cold. John wore black pants and had a red shirt.
Kenny felt something. “Might have a bite here, hopefully it's a decent one for us.”
Kenny eventually caught a fish. “That's a decent one, I'll take this fish back to the house.”
John agreed. “Yeah, that'll do us nicely. Let's go.”
He put the fish in a bucket they had and they walked back to the house.
Kenny put the bucket in the kitchen, he knew John would deal with it there. He wanted to go back outside on watch. “I'll just go out on watch.”
“Alright, keep an eye out for Jack, he's outside being a guard dog since that gives him something to do.” John asked.
Kenny watched for some time, eventually he did hear barking though, barking that's probably from Jack. He went inside to let John know
“Hey John, Jack's barking at something outside, we should check it out.” Kenny told him.
“Alright, I'll get my gun. You go out there and make sure things are okay, he doesn't bark at thin air usually.”
Kenny with his rifle ran over to where Jack was, It was out towards the fence out the front where there was a herd of walkers with some trying to get through the fence.
“Shit, walkers.” Kenny commented.
John soon came over with his pistol and was wearing a satchel. “Walkers? We need to deal with them because I don't like the idea of them breaking down our fence trying to get over it.”
“No shit. I don't want to die in a herd but we need to kill these things, gotta shoot them.” Kenny replied.
“Agreed. I let Christa know we were out so if she thinks we need help, we'll get it.” John said.
John then whistled to Jack. “Stay back!”
Kenny and John then started shooting the walkers, first on the fence but then the others too. This did attract more of them to get through but they were shooting enough. However they did need to reload and while they were, a walker managed to break part of the fence and push the rest down, getting through. Jack However ran to the walker and bit it's head while It was still crawling and then came back.
“Good boy. Alright Kenny, let’s get the last of them.” John said.
The two shot the last few remaining one by one.
Christa came over, she wanted to make sure they were okay. “You guys okay? I heard a lot of shooting.”
“We’re just fine, can’t say the same about the dead over there though.” Kenny said as he looked at all of the dead walkers.
“So you made a bunch of noise by shooting them all?” Christa questioned.
John piped in. “Yeah, as you can see there were a lot and they were at our fence breaking it down. Was not safe to take them quietly.”
“That’s fair, but this is why we need bows or something ranged that is quiet though.” Christa suggested.
Kenny wanted to make sure no walkers were going to come after being attracted by the noise. “We should keep an eye out for any walkers around who heard our guns, kill them quietly to make sure it is safe.”
John agreed. “I’ll see if Jack can pick up the scent of any walkers.”
“Alright, I’ll come with you as we should find them that way. Christa, you stay here for any, or fix things up if you want to.” Kenny replied.
“Sure, a lot of walker bodies to clear out anyway.” Christa said.
John took a leash out from his satchel and put it on Jack. “Let’s go, Jack should be able to pick up any walkers around, by what I’ve seen with Jack, they smell even more to dogs than us.”
They went right which was away from the side of the river and walked along the road. They could see the side opposite of their house didn't have too many trees and they could see it was rather clear however their side was kinda like the woods, plenty of trees for walkers and unwanted guests to hide within though that also included the Flordian bushes and plants. Jack then barked, a walker came through the woods onto the road and Kenny went over and stabbed it dead with his knife.
“We should look for walkers in the woods.” Kenny told John.
“I agree, it seems like they're coming from there. Can't see any on the other side.” John said.
They walked a little more and found a trail that started from the road into the woods. They had been there before so they knew where it went.
“Let's go along the path for a bit, then after we'll head back.” Kenny suggested.
“Alright, let’s go there.” John replied
They walked for a few minutes and found a walker ahead.
“I’ll get it.” Kenny said.
Kenny then walked up to the walker and stabbed it in the head before it could do anything to him.
“Nice.” John commented
They walked a bit more and found a path to the right, Jack seemed like he wanted to go that way.
“Jack wants to go the path up there. We should go that way for a bit then we'll head back. John said.
They walked on the path and found a campsite. It was familiar though as they had been there before but this time was different.
“I think someone has been here, it wasn’t like this last time we were here. We should take a look around.” Kenny said.
“Yeah, looks recently used. Keep an eye out for walkers too.” John replied.
Kenny took a look at the campfire, It had a pot of boiled water over it.
“Hey, someone's been boiling some water here so they must have been here today.” Kenny said.
“Alright, let's not stick around here for too long then. I found a box of food and some ammunition so someone's definitely here. No gun though, they're definitely out there somewhere.”
Jack barked, they didn't know if it was walker or human but they were ready.
A walker walked into the camp and Jack went into action to tackle It down and kill it.
“Good boy.” John said. Jack came back and got a pat.
“You think that was our person living here?” John asked.
“No, they'd be fresh. This walker is nearly as rotten as the first ones.” Kenny replied.
“Yeah, you're right. We should go unless you've found anything new.” John suggested.
Kenny looked at an empty water bottle. “Not unless you need empty water bottles.”
“No, my metal one is doing fine. Let's get out of here then.” John replied.
The two walked out of the camp along the path, they kept an eye out for walkers. They had nearly made it back to the road.
“Been no walkers so far, I think we're clear here.” Kenny commented.
“Yeah, good. Wonder if Christa had to deal with any.” John asked.
“Probably, walkers seem to love noise. Dumb things think anything making noise could be their next meal.” Kenny answered.
“Unless it's a walker of course but yeah.” John replied.
“Guess they’re not that dumb to eat each other.” Kenny said to him.
They kept walking and Jack seemed to get more careful.
“What is it? Jack must know something's around.” John said.
Then they saw someone come out from the trees holding a dead rabbit. It was an African American woman but not Christa.
“That's not Christa…” John said.
“No, I'm not. Who the hell are you people? Best not be any kidnappers.” The 160cm (5’3) tall woman of an average build asked. She also wore a white I love New York shirt along with grey cargo pants.
“Excuse me? Do we look like kidnappers to you?” Kenny said back.
“No, sorry. I just had to escape from some people yesterday, fuckers nearly got me. I can see you guys got the advantage over me anyway…” She then looked at Jack who looked ready to defend Kenny and John if she tried anything.
John introduced themselves. “Okay, let’s be calm. I’m John and here’s Kenny. Dog is Jack, just be friendly and he won’t hurt you. We aren’t kidnappers of anyone, that’s concerning news actually.”
Kenny was definitely concerned. “Yeah… we had a guy a few months ago who lost his girlfriend and it seems like she was taken. We can’t have kidnappers in the woods, that’s dangerous.”
The woman seemed to be calmer. “Okay, you guys seem like decent people then. I’m Tracy. What are you guys doing this way anyway?” She asked.
“We were here looking out for walkers. We had to use our guns earlier to kill a group of them.” Kenny explained.
“So that explains the gunfire I heard off in the distance. You guys gotta be living somewhere then right?” Tracy asked.
“Yeah, we do and we don’t want any unwanted guests ruining it. But what are you saying?” Kenny said.
“I’ve been on my own for a long time but I’m too worried about the assholes I had to deal with earlier. Can I come with you guys? I can pull my weight, got food right here.”
Kenny sighed. “What do you think John? I dunno, I know Christia wouldn’t be jumping up and down excited for new people joining.”
“I know but I think we should let her come with us. I mean what if the guys she is talking about are the same from a few months ago? It’s the right thing to do.” John replied.
“Alright then, you can come with us. Just let Jack get a smell of you first.” Kenny said.
“Yeah, Jack, she’s friendly.” John said
Tracy then let Jack smell her hand and gave him a quick pat. Jack looked a lot more happy now.
“Thank you. Cool dog when he isn’t half ready to tear me apart.” Tracy said.
“Yeah, Jack is not a dog to be on his bad side. Seen him take down walkers. But don’t worry, he’s an attention loving thing to friendly people.” John explained.
They were about to start walking but Tracy had to do something.
“Could I just get a few things from my camp? It isn’t much so I’ll be back quickly.” She asked.
“Sure.” Kenny replied.
She walked off.
“Guess it was only a matter of time before we found another person out here.” John said.
She then came back after a few minutes with a box and they started walking.
Kenny wanted some extra info. “So what are these people who attacked you? How far away was it? Best if we know.”
“Probably about 12 miles west of here? Didn’t seem like they came from the area though, they looked too much like people on the move.” Tracy explained.
“Alright, guess going to the town that way is too risky now. Did they follow you? If they have any idea then I don’t want to lead them right to us.” Kenny asked next.
“No, I ran through the woods. Nearly got nabbed by some walkers but that should have slowed them down so I could lose them. I don’t think they made much effort after seeing I wasn’t an easy target to catch.” She said.
“Hmmm, I’ll trust you. Kidnappings sound too familiar anyway, they might not be new.” Kenny said.
“What do you mean? What happened a few months ago?” She asked.
“We found a young guy on a looting trip, turns out some group took his girlfriend and we managed to confront one of them. They were going north but if they changed their mind they might be back this way…” Kenny said.
“Shit. That might be right.” She replied.
John had a bad feeling “Yeah, we should really be on alert now. If we see more signs of anyone like that around it could be trouble.”
“That RV’s staying ready to move then. Just in case we get another motor inn situation…” Kenny said.
“Yeah, keep it ready. But let’s stay posted home alright? We’ll be fine.” John said.
“I hear you.” Kenny said.
They made it back home. The walkers had been dragged away from the property and the fence had been partially fixed. Christa was waiting.
“Heya, we’re back.” Kenny greeted.
“Hey Kenny, I wasn’t thinking you were going to bring back someone living…” Christa said.
Tracy spoke up “Hey, you must be Christa. I don’t mean to be trouble or anything. Got something to cook for you all though.”
“Well, you’re useful at least. But Kenny, what’s going on with her? Is she just staying with us now?” Christa asked.
“She actually has information you should know. Yesterday she had to deal with some people who tried to kidnap her west of here and she wanted to be safer with us. We need to know whatever we can if there’s assholes around.” Kenny explained.
“If she’s telling the truth, that's bad news.” Christa said.
“Yeah it is, blame John for advocating to do the ‘right thing’ though.” Kenny explained.
“Of course John would, old man cares more about being nice than smart.” Christa said.
“I hear what you’re saying!” John yelled back out to them as he walked to the house with Tracy.
“You can count on that about him. But Tracy seems alright for now, we’ll see how she goes and our problem kidnappers. You think they could be the same from a few months ago?” Kenny asked.
“Shit, maybe but it’s a stretch. Lots of people who aren’t exactly friendly out there. Regardless, they are a problem we shouldn’t ignore.” Chirsta told Kenny
“No, we shouldn’t. Tracy said they looked on the move but if we get anyone too close that could make it dangerous to stay here and we’d have to leave before we get attacked. I know the last time things went that late we lost people… my family. I can’t let that happen again but we can’t just abandon a good spot either. We have been doing well here.” Kenny explained.
“You are right about that, it would be a shame to leave. Just keep in mind that being a bigger group isn’t necessarily safer, remember that with anyone we find. We have worked together well just being a few and anyone who doesn’t work out well will be a determinant to us. But who was it? Tracy seems capable and if she’s useful then I can’t say no yet.”
“Yeah, she seems like someone who can stick it out alone, hopefully that doesn’t mean she’s one of them loners who don’t care about anybody but themselves.” Kenny replied.
Tracy soon came back.
“Hey, what’s the chatter here?” She asked.
“Just talking about how things are.” Kenny answered.
“Sounds like it, including me. But hey, I get it, I'm new and I'd do the same.” Tracy replied.
“You'll fit in then, Christa here is wary of strangers.” Kenny said.
“Yeah, because it's the living you need to worry about, not the dead. We should all know that.” Christa explained.
“Yeah, I'm more worried about the people who attacked me than any old walker.” Tracy replied.
“We're no refuge shelter but I'm fine with the others letting you stay. You don't seem like trouble and if there’s people out there who are trouble then you can help.” Chirsta explained.
“Thank you, I haven't been in a group for a long time so I'm glad I found good people. Just been me on my own for the past couple of years.” Tracy said.
“All of us have spent time not in groups, this barely counts as one.” Chirsta replied.
“Ha yeah, you three and then me. I've come across other people before who were no trouble but some people are like the last group.” Tracy said.
Kenny knew that as he had met new friends and enemies in the world they were in.
“Yeah, we just came across John and now he's our pal for example. Also came across people who would kill you instead.” Kenny replied.
Christa wanted to get back to the house.
“How about we go inside? No reason to keep standing here.” Christa suggested.
They went inside and went to the dining table since it had room for them.
John also came and sat with them. “Lunch will be served soon, cooking right now.”
“Thanks John, how is that garden of your's doing? You know more than us about it.” Kenny answered.
“Pretty well, herbs are doing okay and got some vegetables for the cooler weather growing or even ready. I'm better with the weather here than I used to. Let me tell you that a lot changes coming from Ohio when It comes to gardening.”
Tracy was interested. “You have a garden? Would be nice to eat more than animals and whatever wild plants there are for once.”
“Yep, consider me the chef who also sources his own ingredients. Well, Kenny catches the fish, he Is a fisherman and not me.”
“Commercial fisherman before everything actually. If we had a boat I could even go out on the lakes not far from here. Would be nice to spend the day out anyway.” Kenny explained.
“I know where a boat is, I actually used it out when I was at the lake by the town east of here. I was no good at it though, had to go back to shore.” Tracy told him.
“Well, show us the way some day if nobody has taken it. Worst case it could also get us off the mainland if it's capable enough but can be moved.” Kenny said.
Christa glared at him.
“It was just an idea, we're not going out to sea. Though I do wonder if there's some island that's a safe zone out there. Walkers can go underwater but they can't swim as far as I know.”
“I don't think they can. But sometimes they surprise.” Tracy said.
“They sure do, I remember being up on an observation deck and I heard it partially collapsed, well I remember hearing shit outside that they were climbing it and the rest had to be taken down. I didn't see though, I was actually helping a woman giving birth if you'd believe it.”
“Damn, that's quite a story.” Tracy said.
Kenny sighed “Yeah… the baby made it. AJ, hope you're doing okay in Wellington.”
Some time passed and John handed out their meals. “Eat up guys, meal of the day.”
Tracy looked at it. “Wow, looks like the best prepared food I've had for a while.”
John was happy to hear it. “Thank you, you are our guest so enjoy it.”
They ate their lunch, there was enough thanks to both the caught fish and rabbit along with things from the garden.
Christa had something to ask. “John, you made sure the generator is off?”
“Yeah, made sure not to waste the gas.” John replied.
“Good, fuel is only going to get rarer. Need to keep some spare.”
They kept eating.
“Can't say we had rabbit and fish at once much.” Kenny commented.
“Well, you gotta eat what you get these days. Besides, we've all done worse.” John replied.
“Yeah, better than starving in some old motel for example.” Kenny said.
Tracy knew when it got bad. “I've had bad luck sometimes, an actual meal is something to appreciate.”
John had a question. “Your shirt? Are you from New York or have you just visited?”
“Back in 2000, my parents, brother and I went on a family trip. We all got shirts there, It was better times… even saw the Twin Towers and got a really good view of the city from the observation deck.” She told everyone.
John knew “Yeah… It was better times. Who knew the new millennium would be so bad? Attacks and then the end of the world as we knew it. Hah, that Y2K nonsense was nothing.”
They chuckled. Kenny commented. “Yeah, people fearing everything with a computer would just break and things would fall apart. The dead rising to eat us was the real end.’
John was hopeful. “I don't think this is the end, definitely the end of the old world but I'm sure some day things will be better, society will return.”
Kenny thought he had a point. “Actually yeah, if places like Wellington can survive then maybe that's true.”
Tracy didn't know. “Wellington? That's that?”
“It's a community up in Ohio near Michigan. It's safe with big walls, could always be an option to go back to if we wanted to move on. They were full already but they did say things might change after a while and that was a year ago. But we are good here, let’s keep making it work if no one ruins it.” He explained.
“Sounds nice, though I would not like the cold.” Tracy said.
“Exactly why we're down here. Besides, Florida is my home.” Kenny replied.
“Yeah, Florida is the place to be!” Tracy boasted.
Christa wasn't impressed. “Ugh, don't get all… nostalgic.”
“Aw c,mon, it's still great. The winters are nice for starters.” Tracy replied.
“I suppose so.” Christa said.
John got up and got what was left of the food “Anyone want some second's or extra? Whatever's left has a dog who is going to eat it.”
“Sure, I'll take some.” Kenny said.
Tracy did too “Yeah, I'd like some more please.”
They got some extra food. John then put some down for Jack to eat which he did rather quickly.
Tracy had a question. “So, what do you guys do? Other than finding strangers nearby that is.”
John answered. “We survive of course, but I make sure to have some card and board games and things to do. Gotta have things to enjoy for life to be good, especially these days.”
“That sounds nice, I can agree with that.” Tracy replied.
Kenny was glad. “Good, then you two will get along just fine.”
“Sure, anyone who agrees is part of the crew.” John replied.
John had another idea. “Should we go over to the lake tomorrow? Can scout the area out, maybe catch some fish to sort out food and find the boat Tracy mentioned? Could be something nice for us to do while being useful.” John asked.
“Sure, I was already on board with the boat anyway, good idea to check it out. Probably boats that are towable on the lake since it is shallow too.” Kenny answered.
Christa didn’t object. “Alright, It’s actually a decent idea. And if we have company outside then it is a good idea to check things out.”
Tracy of course was happy with it.
Kenny was happy with the result. “Sounds like we’re going out to Lake Okeechobee tomorrow. Anyway, I'll take watch outside.
Christa was grateful. “Thanks Kenny.”
Kenny was getting up after finishing his lunch but John wanted to go outside too. “Actually I’ll go too, let Jack out again and I’ll give him some exercise, works to keep myself fit anyway.”
“Alright, go play with your dog. Jack is a good guard dog to make anyone question coming here and we need that.
Kenny went outside and kept watch in case of anything. Could always be walkers or anything else around. Regardless, it was nice weather to Kenny so it wasn’t bad, he just hoped it would be the same tomorrow.

So I filed for chapter 7 on the 16th of this month (May) and I have my 341 meeting set to June 18th 2024. I'm going to try not to be long winded about this. I filed because a debt collector of which I made a payment agreement with ( title loan) got a garnishment against me and I couldn't afford to have my wages garnished. I moved to Florida to get sober in 2021 from MD and I have no one but myself to depend on. The car that the title loan was for is of high sentimental valve since me and my son "built" it and that was the last good memory I have with him so I wanted to keep it as something to give to him.
I have gotten 2 reaffirm letters from both Onemain financial and bridgecrest ( my daily driver). The one main isn't really that bad and gives me a way to pay off the debt which isn't too bad (155 a month 0% interest) but the bridgecrest one is horrible and keeping me at my current payment.
I've decided to sell the bmw ( onemain) and more than likely let genesis go (bridgecrest) but I'm afraid that I won't get approved for another car if I let the genesis go and I need to drive to get to work and doordash. I only have myself down here and if I finance another car I can afford 450 a month on the car.
To my question 1. Is my life over? Cause it feels like everything is being taken from me at this point. 2. What are the chances of getting into a similar car while my bankruptcy is open? ( the only reason is because my genesis has been the most reliable car I've ever owned and im dead set on getting another one) 3. How do I recover from this? 4. Does it actually get better?
I'm 40 and rebuilding my life after alcoholism ( 3 yrs sober)and I cannot go back to MD. I really want this to work out but I'm honestly terrified..........
Thanks in advance

TL;DR - Divorced now, but my mom is having wages garnished due to my dad filing taxes incorrectly while married and owing to the IRS. What can we do?
2016 - my dad inherited several thousand (100k+) dollars in 2016 when his father passed. When he filed joint (married) taxes that year, he incorrectly didn’t claim inheritance and owed $5k to the IRS.
My parents divorced in 2017 and my mom didn’t know that my dad still, as of 2024, hasn’t paid the IRS back and he now owes >$30k in penalties.
My dad doesn’t OWN anything - his house, car etc are under my grandparents’ name and he is no longer working. The IRS hasn’t been able to collect anything from my dad, so they are now garnishing my mom’s wages since they were married at the time of filing. This is causing extreme financial hardship for my mom while my dad gets away scot free living off investment income, to no fault of her own.

1. What can we do? Hire a lawyer? What kind?
2. My mom seems to think if my dad requests it, my dad can drop her off the debt. Is that possible?

Thanks for your help!!