it's such a nice day...

Your position was just referred to as employment. Independent contractors do not have employers; they do not have employment. Congrats, your contact at this company just provided evidence that you were illegally missclassified.

This contact is claiming that you have set hours you’re obligated to fulfill. Unless a work task can only be done at a set time for practical reasons (i.e. you’re an audio freelancer paid to support a live event that occurs at a particular time and requires a certain amount of pre-show setup), a company cannot set an independent contractor’s work hours. This is further evidence that you were missclassified.

The whole exchange establishes that the company is interpreting an employer-employee relationship rather than expecting a service. Discipline and potential for firing (you cannot fire an independent contractor; no longer purchasing their service is not equivalent) establish that this person views themselves as a manager. Independent contractors cannot have managers.

This one text exchange could:

Get you back pay for the full duration you’ve worked there, to bring you up to the compensation that an employee would have gotten

Get you back compensation for lost benefits that an employee would have gotten

Get you back pay for the additional self-employment taxes the company should have covered

Get the company to pay back taxes to the government

Get the company to hire everyone who performed a similar role, or face further penalties and fines

A win would encourage the rest of their missclassified workers to sue for the same, or give them leverage to demand a better deal

Cardiovascular system: Okay, we need some exercise if we're going to keep working in the future!

Joints: You... you want to EXERCISE? Do you have any idea how precarious things are around here?

Musculoskeletal system: We've got an injury here -- you need to treat it with an anti-inflammatory or it's going to get worse. Not acetaminophen, like ibuprofen.

Digestive system: WTF NO you can't DO that to me I will suffer FOREVER!

Musculoskeletal faction A: Something is wrong and we are going to scream endlessly unless you adapt the way you move to Weird Strictures X.

Musculoskeletal faction B: So about Weird Strictures X. We object strenuously. We're going to revolt now.

2. Even if they could an autistic child is better than a dead one

The reason the government refuses to even entertain student loan forgiveness is because of something called SLABS. What are SLABS, you ask? Good question. Because the world of finance really does not want you to know this! SLABS are Student Loan Asset Backed Securities. Sounds like a bunch of confusing terms that regular people can’t understand, right? It’s supposed to.

A lot of you were too young to remember what happened in 2008, and what exactly the crisis was that brought the entire economy to its knees. 1 million people lost their homes. It’s because the mortgage industry was taking the mortgages (loans) that individuals opened, split them into tiny little pieces, bundled them together with other tiny little pieces of other people’s loans, and sold them off. A huge industry was created that not only bought little pieces of people’s mortgages, but also made bets on whether or not those underlying securities (pieces of mortgage loans) would fail or succeed. It didn’t take long before the bets on the loans outsized the actual loans themselves - sometimes by a magnitude of thousands.

I know this is complicated, but hang in there. Here’s Selena Gomez in “The Big Short” to explain that betting a little better: 

Okay, so you’ve got lots of people betting on mortgages. See what happens next, is that the banks run out of qualified people for mortgages. There’s only so many people who had jobs that paid them enough and credit scores high enough to be deemed worthy. But they want to keep their cash cow going! What to do?

Of course, the way this problem was solved, was to hand out mortgages to everyone like free T-shirts. No job? No credit? No way to pay that mortgage we just gave you? No problem. They were making more money on the bets than on the underlying loans. They didn’t give a shit if you defaulted. They were making money on you whether you paid or not. And they didn’t care if you destroyed your life and your credit and your family because the financial industry was raking in massive piles of cash by selling and betting on people’s home loans. Eventually the house of cards came tumbling down, there was a massive foreclosure crisis, the industry was found to be operating completely fraudulently, and a million people lost their houses. Large financial institutions received a bail-out that we the taxpayers paid for. The individual families who got exploited and fucked? Got nothing.

So what does this have to do with student loans? Excellent question. The same thing that happened with mortgage loans being split into tiny pieces, bundled, and sold off has also happened with student loans. These bundles are called SLABS. Student loan asset-backed security. But wait! “Asset-backed”?? What asset? The asset is ostensibly...your degree.

This is now a potentially bigger problem than even the housing crisis in 2008: because back in ‘08, if you defaulted (stopped paying) on your mortgage loan, there was a physical asset to seize: your house. You can’t seize somebody’s English degree if they stop paying. This is why it’s nearly impossible to discharge any student loan debt, ever: because the industry making money off of student loans is making outsized bets that are larger than the underlying assets. Just like in 2008. If student loans were forgiven across the board, the ripple effect would capsize the domestic economy. Your $20,000 in student loans? Could represent $2 million in bets made on that loan.

This has already become an enormous hot potato between financial institutions as student loan repayment was paused during the pandemic. Suddenly there’s no payoff for these bets institutions are making on your student loans. There’s also no collateral they can repossess. What they thought was a profitable bet to exploit students and keep people in wage slavery forever, is shakier and shakier. When it finally bursts and goes tits-up, you can bet that the people who bought tiny pieces of your loans and then gambled it away will be the ones receiving a (tax-payer funded) bail-out. Not the students. And it’s already starting to go tits-up.

"Mel Robbins (who is also ADHD) talks about 54321-go. She wrote a whole book on it, but its mainly as soon as you think of something or have / want to do something, you count down from 5 to 1 then MOVE YOUR BODY TOWARDS WHAT EVER IT IS YOU NEED TO DO before your brain can talk you out of it. There loads of neuroscience why this works and before I was diagnosed I used this technique all the time. From getting out of bed, to getting a shower, to reading, stopping scrolling, stopping watching tv to literally everything if I needed to. I still do. It really helps me. And like you say, once you get started its okay, and then the dopamine kicks in. She did a talk on it, I think if you google it will come up. Also, tyrosine and theanine is good for me too. Hope this helps."

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I looked it up and I'm going to try it.

Source

basically the whole idea behind grunge was "fuck consumerism, fuck capitalism, fuck beauty standards and gender norms and the fashion industry. do not give a fuck about what you look like or, alternatively, intentionally look like shit. refuse to buy into beauty standards and refuse to participate in fashion trends and literally just wear the cheapest, comfiest, most practical clothes you can get your hands on (preferably second hand so as to say fuck you to corporate) and then wear those clothes until theyre literally falling apart. dont obsess over hygiene; not everything has to be squeaky clean."

and since the birthplace and capital of the genre was seattle (a northern lumberjack town), the clothes that were cheap, comfy, durable and practical around there were flannels, beanies, and big, second hand blue jeans. docs were notoriously cheap at the time, and so were military surplus boots, so thats what the bands wore, essentially. in protest against fashion, beauty standards and capitalism.

then people started wearing the same clothes as the bands and then (as with every counter culture before them) the fashion industry decided to create a cleaner, less subversive version of that. so they started selling the anti-fashion, anti-consumerist look as consumerist fashion.

fast forward to 2014 and you see people wearing an all brand new outfit consisting of black skin-tight jeans that you cant move in and that are ripped before theyre sold and dont last more than a year, $500 docs, expensive "flannels" that are too thin to be warm, a $100 beanie and on-fleek makeup that cost more than those bands lived off of at the start of their careers, took hours to apply and finally a paper thin nirvana shirt sold for 50 bucks and worn without any idea what anything but "sounds like teen spirit" sounds like (which isnt a grunge song btw; its a satirical pop song made to mock the kind of music that it is). all of it bought from hot topic or H&M and made by child slaves in china or taiwan. so, like... actually the complete opposite of what grunge is supposed to be. completely against the values of the subculture. it would literally be more grunge to wear dirty sweatpants and a second hand baseball cap than the shit being sold today.

so, yeah. grunge is supposed to be "i literally do not give two shits about how i look" and yet... and YET....... the fashion and beauty industry totally butchered it.

just,,,, why