Who here has work?

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I ask because I’m tired of feeling pretty well shut down by my family due to lack of job/world experience when it comes to ‘debate’.

Mostly how badly ACA fucked everyone, that anyone on welfare are ‘worthless lazy motherfuckers leeching off the government but can afford a new fucking car,’ and other variations of.

Yet at the same time insist I shouldn’t feel like I’m being attacked due to being disabled.

Frankly I see disability and social security as linked hand in hand. You want to axe social security because scammers supposedly filing for jobs they have no hope of getting just to have unemployment, or get rid of help for the elderly ‘because their families should be able to take care of them,’ and I can gurentee you that people will look at the the disabled and go ‘fuck them they are leeching from MY money I do not want to provide for the dead weight of the country. Get their families to care for them.’

On the other hand they do feed that those without families to rely on should get help…

Then again my stepdad maintains that white people are a new minority where we can’t this that or the other. Yea. Sure. That goes well past ‘people bleating white male privilege are going too far’ and just into straight out wtf territory.

I love my family. I have seen great acts of personal generosity and a firm belief that people should help their neighbor but at the same time ai can neither square how their mindset works nor can I figure out how the hell I am so different.

Then again look at me. This account has my name all over it.

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Work? Like, actual regular paid employment?

Not for many fucking years now. Not likely to get any either.

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The ACA helped me leave a low-wage, dead-end job and start a business. There was no way I’d have able to afford the full cost of insurance out-of-pocket. Leaving that job means that I left that position open for someone else. I also pay more tax as my income rises, and spend twice as much as when I was employed (i.e. the profits I live on, combined with my business expenses). That’s a pretty good return on investment for a couple year’s insurance subsidies.

Earning a paycheck and not taking government subsidies doesn’t make you self-sufficient. It just means that you’re dependent on the wealthy instead of the state. And all those burger-flippers and data entry clerks who took advantage of the ACA? If you’re so self-sufficient, see how long you can live without the services they provide. Its in your interest to invest in your countrymen because their welfare is tied to yours.

People don’t see this because they’re living on their own little suburban islands with large screen TVs showing them all the products that they’re supposed to own, the lifestyles that “everyone else” seems to enjoy. Are people really dying from treatable illnesses because they’re so stupid and lazy that they’re unable to provide for their own medical care, or have we, as a culture, become so self-obsessed that we’re unable to empathize with the people we meet every day?

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Yeah, I have the same kind of experience with my parents and in-laws to a certain extent. Particularly with my FIL – it’s possible to have plenty of black friends and still believe the Fox News narrative about black people, or to praise the German healthcare system while talking about how the ACA is going in the wrong direction. Narratives. I think also there can be a willingness to be charitable and supportive in personal life, but a dislike of big government. Again, that’s often based on a fairly unexamined narrative.

I do freelance work, but I’ve been having trouble being consistent over the last while. Last year I told my project managers about my neurological issues, since it was getting too difficult to explain the inconsistency (I don’t accept work if I’m not sure that I can complete it in time and to a good standard, and sometimes I just couldn’t trust myself). They were actually very supportive, and I’ll be able to take time off if I need to. I don’t know whether I’ll have been replaced by then since I don’t have any fixed positions, but I need to find a way to make my work more sustainable in the long term. Maintaining consistently high standards when my energy levels and mood fluctuate so much is not easy.

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The big thing is for them the ACA has failed spectacularly. My sister has lifelong medication due to seizures, my eyecare (which is mostly getting glasses every few years, but i go too infrequently because to be honest? my glasses WITHOUT insurance would be easily $900 a pop if not more plus cost of the exam and so on, and mom’s had a history of ongoing medical issues. Our insurance rates went through the roof as a result of ACA, so i understand their anger. Ditto with my little brother. ACA happened and just… christ.

So their anger i can get. They see an increase in how much they pay for worse service.

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How do you know that happened as a result of the ACA?

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Correlation at the very least, and assumed causation because of the company documentation my stepdad got

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My insurance rates went up every year before the ACA as well. Was that Obama’s fault too?

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Well whether rates triple with no really obvious incident to point at as ‘ah this happened and now they want us to psy more’ …

I’m not saying right or wrong. I am just saying facts as I understand them make my family’s anger an understandible thing.

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Not entirely sure what this is about but… I have a job and do my best to support my family and also help out some others.

ACA was a trade-off compromise that made some things better and others worse. It hasn’t fucked everyone, but it certainly hasn’t solved all of our problems in that area.

Disability is a mess, whether you’re officially blessed by the state yet or not. If you’re not, you have to run the gauntlet of bureaucratic red tape which is excruciating and can take years. Once you get it, Social Security routinely fucks up their accounting resulting in a series of exchanges like:

“We should have paid you more so we’re giving you a lump-sum payment to fix it.”
“We paid you too much last month so you now owe us. We’re deducting from your check.”
“We should have paid you more so we’re giving you a lump-sum payment to fix it.”
“We paid you too much last month so you now owe us. We’re deducting from your check.”
[repeat ad nauseum]

And of course, none of their numbers ever add up, and the dates on their paperwork never match up. So it’s a total mystery WTF they think they’re doing.

Likewise, the insurance companies’ software usually doesn’t work properly. Something that should be as simple as clicking a checkbox takes months to resolve and piles of paperwork.

So everyone needs an advocate, someone like Hermes from Futurama who enjoys (or at least doesn’t mind) cutting through the bureaucratic red tape to get agencies and companies to do what they were supposed to do in the first place.

For people stuck in that situation, (aside from getting an advocate skilled in bureaucracy) I recommend trying to learn some web development, design, or marketing/social-media skills. Because those jobs don’t require a degree, can often be done as a remote worker, and on your own hours, but they are real jobs, not work-at-home scams, and they also pay quite decently. Not everyone wants to do that stuff, but it can pay the bills. There are probably other equally suitable paths that I’m not aware of.

Re: the family, keep trying. It’s easy to give up and fall into the trap of “there’s nothing I can do”, and if that’s all they ever hear from you, then they probably won’t be pleasant. But if you are actively pushing on the agencies and insurance company and trying to learn/apply new skills, and trying to get a job, that’s something and they may be more amicable.

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I wish it were that simple. Every time I bring up learning a skillset that leaves me not dependant on the government and let’s me work from home so i can still help, college gets brought up and it gets ugly.

To be blunt I can understand the knee jerk that ‘oh they just want to keep you chained down.’ I take the view they have already seen me fail badly and would rather not risk more years of having to fight to benefits reinstated when we’re already on an edge as family.

I an not sure on the wisdom of this but time and again they have reacted… Hostility to thee idea of me and employment.

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Not to sound like a broken record, but do you have a library near you? Library jobs are amazing and do not necessarily require a college degree. You can totally learn on the job and work your way up the ladder. I believe some of the BBs peeps are currently employed as librarians but I can’t quite remember who (@Jilly I think)?

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A mile walk from me actually but no they are not hiring. They are also not currently taking volunteer work either. Great ides though, sensical and sane. Thanks for constantly chipping in.

Reason I made topic is the constant ‘debate’ between me and family tends to break down because I have knowledge/experience gaps that makes them discount anything I say as naive.

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My insurance rate was rising as well. That had nothing to do with the ACA; the entire point of the ACA was to keep things under control. Unfortunately, with the public option and opportunity to buy into Medicare taken out thanks to the Republicans, the major reasons for insurance companies to be competitive were removed. So your insurance could keep on skyrocketing. It just happened to be skyrocketing while the ACA was taking effect.

I’m in Massachusetts, which served as the direct model for how the ACA was set up. “Romneycare” works really well. It lets me buy into group and public plans that, as a small business owner, keeps my healthcare affordable.

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I think you have that arse-backwards. Employers depend on the work that earns the workers’ salaries, and generates the profit they claim by benefit of their position as owners of the means of production. And then they (generally) do everything they can to avoid paying the taxes that should go towards keeping their workers healthy and maintaining the public infrastructure they depend on.

Fuck the wealthy. Nobody depends on them. We don’t need them.

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Just based off of what I’d seen I can understand why my stepdad blames ACA. That he blames Obama for the idea you can’t medicare however…

The takeaway is my family isn’t stupid. They have data in front of them that is fairly suggestive. They do not fox ‘news.’ They DO however Facebook and their Facebook is full of hardliner rhetoric.

The big problem is ‘debating’ with them feels pointless. I keep trying because as another poster pointed out, to not do so means they win.

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according to myths this was a phone conversation between some survey agent and the receptionist of a former employer

Q: How many work at $facility?
A: I don’t know how many work here. But employed are around 400.

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Library jobs are hard to get because just about everybody wants one. You can apply, just dont expect to get the job.

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Both statements are true of our situation as it exists now. Employers depend upon workers to generate profit for them to extract, and to that end they create conditions of economic dependence upon the private sector job market—“small government,” tax loopholes, barriers to social mobility, etc. Conservatives have essentially been infantalized into believing that they need to pander to the economic needs of their employers. They don’t have to be the dependent ones in that relationship, but they make themselves dependent upon the wealthy and confuse that with self-sufficiency.

But I agree with you that that’s a dynamic that we can and should break out of. I envision a more peer-to-peer economy where people work from home, collecting royalties on the products/services they have designed for the machines that replace menial labor; where you charge your electric car from the solar panels on your roof; and where we skim off the top to provide everyone with a universal basic income. The whole discourse right now is all about “job creation” when it should be about reducing the work week and distributing the surplus.

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I beg to differ, and yes, I’m a librarian. Proof of bun below, taken as a joke for a friend, whilst I was in a hotel room at a librarian conference recently.

Like any job, availability of said jobs much depends on whether you are geographically mobile. If mobile, then, yes, you can get a library job. After 10 years out of the field, my now-husband, then sinful-live-in-lover, landed a job as an assistant director at a public library in the Mississippi Delta. But, he was able to move.

If you are not able to move, there are many things you can do to make yourself marketable to libraries. My husband is now a library school professor and we both work with soon-to-be professionals looking for work.

I will caution you, however. I went into librarianship with a preconceived set of notions about what it would be, mostly based on lovely personal experience and yes, movies. It is not like that. So, if you are really interested, I’m happy to discuss off list. Just message me.

bun.jpg720×960 84.1 KB

EDA: I clearly need an eyebrow wax. Don’t judge me.

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