…for the record…I like to think I try to abide by the promises implied in the things I say…particularly when I guess nobody made me say them…& I might be able to claim that arguably my saying anything in these & not reverting to the one true path of the lurker & just reading stuff & yelling at the tv & the radio like a bona fide angry old person is a path it may have taken some shoving to get me down…but nobody told me to open my big trap & claim I could put my money where my mouth is & provide less scrolling on your sanctioned day of rest than I managed yesterday…so I guess I owe some apologies…particularly if this ends up being late as a result
…that’s the thing about “interesting times“…they tend not be restful…maybe that’s why we call them times of unrest
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/covering-white-house-fortified-war-zone-n1226251
…but it’s sunday…& I don’t know about you but I feel like some rest would be a welcome thing…so let’s see if we can’t find some things that sound like they’re at least headed in the right direction
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/04/man-who-drew-bow-arrow/
…I mean…it’s a good start, right?
The central feature of Trump’s presidency: False claims and disinformation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/protests-reckoning/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/voices-of-america-unemployment-crisis-coronavirus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/05/may-2020-jobs-report-misclassification-error/
…then again…guess it depends who you listen to
…or…& I’m not sure why anyone would want to…you could keep listening to #teamfullofshit
…& that’s why I like to think of him as bilious barr…the lowest bar of all
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/06/06/dc-protests-saturday-george-floyd/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/06/06/white-house-fence-protests-dc/
…don’t get me wrong…one of my favorite album titles of all time is this one
“it’s not who you know, it’s whom you know”
…but that’s because I spent too damn long studying just what the english language is capable of if you treat it right not to have a healthy respect for knowing the rules
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/protests-black-police-chiefs/2020/06/06/story.html
…as someone told me at a formative age…you need to know the rules for it to mean something when you break them
…& there are some people who shouldn’t get to plead ignorance
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/donald-trump-vote-by-mail-fraud-florida
…but sometimes perspective is a hard thing to come by
…which is fair enough, I guess…so I’d understand skipping over these kinds of things…they don’t put my mind to rest, I know that…but all the same…when & as you’re feeling up to it…it’d be nicer to think there’s some answers out there for this stuff
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/militarized-police-troops-protest/2020/06/04/story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/virus-family-homelessness/
im not doing news today… and i just remembered me roots
fuck netflix…i can watch what i want
man…. torrenting shit sure used to take longer back when i started
…well…obviously it would be unseemly to suggest that particular form of civil disobedience were in the same league as some of the stuff in the news…but what can I say…if it’s in a worthy cause
…& that is a hell of a cast?
its pretty good lol
the humor is dryer and darker than i expected
but im okay with that
holy shit…i did not know this excisted
aaaaaaand mailordered… feels rude to torrent that one
Welcome to the resistance … GEORGE W. BUSH? Fuck, forget the darkest timeline. We are officially in Bizarro World now. Or the Upside-Down. Depends on your age and frame of reference.
But you know what kills me? Jeb Bush is “mulling over whether to support Trump.” Bitch, he called you everything but late for dinner and you’re still rolling over? Just change your name to Marco Rubio, Jr. and be done with it.
My unemployment claim saga: Anyone else in for the sequel?
In our last installment we found me frustrated and timed-out from NY State’s UI portal, which is about as easy to access as one of those Escape Room party games that were popular for about two months last year.
Last week I tried again and got shunted down the freelancer passageway, which led me to believe that they had some info on me. My previous attempts led me into all kinds of “It’s 1970 and you work one job at a corporation so here are 11 screens you need to fill out.”
So this was great. I had two main sources of freelancer employment and they seemed to know about the first one, so I filled out info about the second one. I didn’t see any option to include info about another revenue source. I submitted my application and it was approved!
Problem is…well, many problems. I’m supposed to be getting a letter (!) informing me of benefits I might be receiving. Why they can’t post this on the portal I don’t know. We don’t really get USPS anymore, especially not with the just-lifted curfew, because even a year ago what mail they decided to deliver didn’t show up until 9 pm. I got a follow-up email asking me to certify for my benefits, so I did. There’s other stuff that’s wrong with this. Very ambiguous language about not claiming back in the middle of March, which is true, but where did that come from. “Effective Days.” I’m really most concerned about the $600/week pandemic assistance but there was something about 0 effective days. Meaning I haven’t claimed for it and will be getting a backdated windfall, or I’m not eligible for it?
I haven’t received a dime yet so I’m waiting for the first payment. Once that comes through I’ll know I’m fully in the system and then I’ll start disputing if I feel I need to.
Quite honestly, as a freelancer by choice, $10 a week would have been more than I could have imagined a year ago. But this is more work than I ever did in my professional life.
Ugh, what a PITA. I hope it comes through for you sooner than later. Good luck!!!
…reading that I was reminded of something that various conversations over the years incline me to believe is a persistent irony…not that I don’t actually have considerable amounts of sympathy for your situation & hope that by the end of it all you see some sort of return on the time you’ll have invested by then
…but some people like to maintain that there is a portion of society who are (apparently as a matter of inclination & personal preference that at some point we started referring to as a “lifestyle choice”) what they like to refer to as “professionally unemployed”
…some of those people also like to talk about things like “oppotunity cost”…& lover of irony though I may be…I simply can’t find it in me to believe any of the ones I remember talking to have navigated those sorts of systems from a first person perspective in the past (though my guess is that more than a few might be at the moment) or I think their working definition of that “professionally unemployed” thing might have sounded a whole lot different?
…so, speaking for myself I’m certainly interested in hearing how you’re faring with that process
There are the professionally unemployed, but not so much in America. You then transition downward into what meager assistance even supposedly liberal, generous states like NY provide as social benefits.
When I got laid off I wasn’t young but very far away from retirement. I’d been working for so long in a particular niche industry and had hired so many freelancers over the years I thought, “I could do this.” My industry was growing but new companies were not taking on full-time employees, the world was turning freelance. Fine with me. At the time I got laid off I was sitting in a cubicle smaller than a bathroom stall (one of my buddies, similarly situated, measured this and reported the results. He was gone the next day.)
Meanwhile, a few years before, I had seen the future and it was Work From Home. My company demanded that everyone show up in their bathroom stall cubicles but when we all had offices we bought an apartment, loft-ish, and had contractors in and I re-created my own office knowing that amount of Manhattan real estate couldn’t last forever for this office drone. It’s 10′ X 10′, with huge floor-to-ceiling cabinets behind it, shelving above the desk, and the desk itself is a wall-to-wall table custom-built at 38 inches high because I’m 6″4″ .
Within this lair is room for the loyal hound’s crate, so he hangs out with me, and in the old days it wasn’t uncommon for me to be working away at 3 AM on a Thursday and he’d be awake to provide moral support.
But sadly all this work has ground to a halt temporarily. So that’s why I filed. I got my first W-2 at the age of 15 (very part-time) so I’m raring to go.
Another aspect about filing for benefits as a freelancer is, “Has your source of income closed because of COVID-19?” No, they’re still in business, but everyone’s WFH but there’s little work for them and no spillover work for the freelancers. There’s no real way to express this on the UI portal.
If only I could call someone and talk about this. There’s nothing anyone at the NY State Department of Labor could do to amend my file, and they’ve been accepting 1 call in 1,000 for the last three or four months, so I’m going to ride this out.
Just sharing some of the art that’s been popping up this week.
I’ll be catching more, as I walk Lil around the neighborhood, but I figured y’all might *not* be seeing as much of the beautiful things, amidst all the wreckage that’s happened;
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Wm6wjh1Y4hB1aP7y6
The birds & the “Love Mpls” are on the front of the Uptown Theater, the BLM-backgrounded picture of George Floyd is on Stella’s, and the flowers & other paintings are on the front of Pourhouse.
There’s a kick-in-the-gut beautiful painting of George’s daughter, a couple blocks in the other direction, that I’ll try to catch tonight (It’s powerful in daylight, too. But with the way the building it’s on is lit at night, it’s simply stunning, because it’s so bright & clear in the darkness, that it practically glows).
…thanks for those…would indeed be great to see more of that sort of thing…when you get a chance, obviously
James Bennet is out at the NY Times!
The bedbug infestation couldn’t chase him away, but he finally screwed up enough to get shown the door. Maybe his hires Bari Weiss and the Bedbug can join him.