This is a wonderful and necessary change to existing laws.
So it looks like this post doesn’t work in mobile. Here’s the text of it for those who are having trouble:
NEW YORK — Justin Bainbridge is 27 and works two jobs, but he wasn’t allowed to start saving money for his future until a few months ago.
Bainbridge has Down syndrome, and like other people with disabilities who receive government benefits, he can’t have more than $2,000 in savings. If he does, he would start to lose those much-needed benefits. But a new type of savings vehicle is giving Bainbridge, and others, a chance to save more cash.
Known as ABLE accounts, they let people with disabilities and their families save up to $14,000 a year without losing benefits. The accounts, which were made possible by a law signed two years ago, are operated by individual states and are similar to 529 college savings plans. So far, 16 states offer the plans and about 10 more are expected to do so this year. Most of the states let non-residents sign up. Each state has different rules or maintenance fees, with some charging as much as $15 every three months.
Disability advocates say the accounts are badly needed, since people with disabilities were forced to spend extra money to avoid losing benefits. With ABLE accounts, money saved can be used to buy anything that helps the life of the person with a disability, such as rent payments, school tuition or groceries.
“I’m saving for a new couch,” says Bainbridge, who shares a two-bedroom apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, with a friend.
Since June, he has put away more than $1,800 in an Enable account, the ABLE program run by Nebraska. He makes about $5,200 a year from his part-time jobs, one folding towels at a gym and another collecting movie tickets at a theater. But he still needs his monthly Supplemental Security Income cash benefit to help pay his rent and live independently, says his mother, Kim Bainbridge, who also stashes away money for him in the ABLE account.
“I can finally save for him after 27 years,” she says.For years, disability advocates have tried unsuccessfully to increase the $2,000 savings limit, which hasn’t been changed in nearly three decades.“It kind of shackles you to a life of poverty,” says Christopher Rodriguez, a senior public policy adviser at the National Disability Institute in Washington.The idea for ABLE accounts came about a decade ago from parents of kids with disabilities who were frustrated that they could not easily save money for their children. One of those parents, Stephen Beck Jr., spent years advocating and lobbying for a law. Beck unexpectedly passed away in 2014, just a few weeks before President Barack Obama signed it into law. To honor Beck, the law was named The Stephen Beck Jr. Achieving a Better Life Experience Act.His widow, Catherine Beck, is using an ABLE account to put away money for their 17-year-old daughter Natalie, who has Down syndrome and wants to go to cosmetology school to work at a nail salon. The Becks were able to easily save money for their eldest daughter, who does not have a disability. But for Natalie, they had to create a special-needs trust that required hiring a pricey lawyer to set up.“Her savings has not grown like her sister’s has,” says Catherine Beck, who lives in Burke, Virginia.To qualify for an ABLE account, the account owner must have had a disability before their 26th birthday. Anyone can put money in it, such as family or friends. If the account goes above $100,000, the person with the disability will lose monthly government cash benefits until it drops below that level again. Medicaid health benefits are never affected, no matter how much money is saved. Money can be invested in index funds and earnings are not taxed.“For the first time a lot of individuals will be able to work, save money and get some growth out of it,” says Adam Beck, director of MassMutual Center For Special Needs at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
When the person with a disability dies, Medicaid can claim any leftover money as payback for health care paid after the ABLE account was opened. Since each state has different rules and fees, the ABLE National Resource website has a tool that compares the programs.Matthew Shapiro, who lives in Richmond, Va., and works to promote the state’s ABLE program called ABLEnow, says finally being able to have some savings helped reduce his money worries. The 26-year-old, who has cerebral palsy, uses a power wheelchair to get around and unexpected repairs can be costly. He travels sometimes for his business, 6 Wheels Consulting, which helps educate companies and organizations on disability issues.“Being a person with a disability is expensive,” says Shapiro. “These accounts are so much needed.”
YES YES YES HALLELUJAH
*SOME people with disabilities.
This is cool for those people, and I’m so glad they’re being implemented. More every year!
But I’m still fucked!
Rules vary by state but you can be disqualified based on a number of criteria, one of which is your age at the time of onset of your disability.
For all that I’ve looked into, which is every ABLE program open to people nationwide, you have to have been 26 or younger. You have to be able to PROVE it started before then, meaning someone like me who has been symptomatic since childhood but was never diagnosed, is shut out.
Also, the money in these accounts can ONLY be used for approved expenses, usually related to the disability. So someone like me who has relatively few expenses directly related to my disability because you don’t need things like wheelchairs and access ramps for being bipolar, it won’t help, because it doesn’t necessarily allow you to buy things like food, clothing, pay for car repair, pay for house repairs, or any of the other daily or emergency expenses a disabled person might like to save for.
Some allow funds to be used for limited living expenses or education for the young. (Because fuck old people who want to go to school.)
I do not dispute that these accounts are helpful, but these are NOT a cure-all, or even a long-term solution, they are a stopgap measure, and what is truly necessary is a TOTAL overhaul of how we handle disability benefits nationwide.
I am concerned that articles like the above make it sound like this is helping most/all disabled people, when that could not be further from the truth. I’m afraid it will make nondisabled people think “Ah, it’s all taken care of then!” and ignore the monstrous issues still present. I’m afraid it will make lawmakers sit back and say “We’ve taken care of the people who REALLY need it, which is young people. Everyone else can get fucked.”
WE STILL NEED HELP.
PLEASE ADVOCATE FOR US. PLEASE ADVOCATE FOR EXPANDING THESE PROGRAMS.
If you require kids to go to school by law, they shouldn’t have to pay for anything at all to be able to go there. They shouldn’t need to pay for food, books, a laptop, anything that the school gives you. If a child has to pay in any way to attend school, it’s a failure of our government to provide proper funding
This also includes transportation to and from school.
This should also include accessibility, aids and assistance for disabled children!
The worst part: You just know some deeply unpleasant person is reading this and concluding that the solution is to stop requiring kids go to school.
Princess Bride themed restaurant. Waiters say “as you wish” after taking your order.
Finish the Fezzik in an hour, your meal is free.
Come in a wheelbarrow, your meal is 10% off.
Every so often the hostess will say “bye bye boys, have fun storming the castle!” as people are leaving.
Miracle Max’s Cure for the Mostly Dead is on the menu and its a giant chocolate cakeball.
The servers will sometimes switch your wines after distracting you.
They sell Anybody Want a Peanut Brittle at the door.
“There are a shortage of perfect chicken breasts in the world. Twould be a pity not to order these.”
“Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. I’ll be your server.
Prepare to dine.”
Instead of “large,” you get an item of unusual size.
People on their anniversary get to listen to a recitation of the mawidge speech.
The kitchen door says “Brute Squad.”
When servers bring drinks to your table, they casually mention one of them might have iocane powder in it.
On certain nights, you can engage the bartender in a battle of wits. If you win, you get a free drink. Beware – the bartender is a Sicilian.
If you can recite Westley’s “To The Pain” speech or Vizzini’s part from “Battle of Wits” from memory, you get 10% off.
The dessert menu is called The Gate Key. The servers all say there is no gate key. If you respond with “Fezzik, tear their arms off,” they’ll produce it with a reply of “Oh you means THIS gate key.”
They forgot the part where the ambulance actually stopped to let the cat in
oh good I was worried
What a good cat. What a kind cat. How can anyone not love cats they are so good and loving.
they also forgot the part where they only found the baby because masha was screaming her head off bc she knew this baby was in danger. she went around outside the alley the next morning and yelled at passerby until she got one to follow her to the baby. she kept him warm all night and then made sure someone found him. she was adopted after this bc she was a stray and is in a loving home and is a hero
Seriously though it would have been so easy to have canon gay characters in the Harry Potter series. All this stuff that JK Rowling said about not having enough time or would distract from the original trio is nonsense. Case in point:
Seamus gave a great roar of delight then ran to give Dean a lung crushing hug before pulling him down into a desperate kiss that was hungrily returned. Harry supposed ‘best friends’ was no longer an accurate description of the pair.
or:
There were duels all over the stairs and in the Hall, Death Eaters everywhere Harry looked. He saw Alicia and Katie share a passionate kiss before they raced down the corridor to join the battle.
or maybe:
“Did I know in my heart of hearts what Gellert Grindelwald was? I think I did, but I closed my eyes. I chose to be blinded by my love for him. A choice that has haunted me ever since”
or perhaps:
As Harry entered the great hall he walked past Lavender and Parvati who were sitting opposite the latter’s twin with their bodies pressed close together while their hands held the others in a death like grip that showed no signs of ever being let go.
or even:
“Albus Severus” Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear him, who tactfully turned to talk to Oliver and Marcus as they waved off their own three boys.
See all I had to do was just add in a sentence or not even that and suddenly ….. wow a gay character. That wasn’t too hard now was it JK.
This is also a great reference for all my anons who ask how to go about introducing more queer background characters.
draw stick figures. sing off key. write bad poems. sew ugly clothes. run slowly. flirt clumisly. play video games on easy. you do not need to be good at something to enjoy the act. talent is overrated. do things you like doing. it’s ok to suck
jesus christ yall dont play video games on easy oh my god
You never play a video game on easy no matter how hard it is to get through.
my least favorite thing that happens on this post is people who support it- except when it comes to the thing they’re good at
gamers say “never play on easy”
artists say “sing off key but for the love of god no stick figures”
singers say “all this but if you can’t sing keep your mouth shut”
you know what? i know your type. you’re all jerks & you’re not fun to be around.
have fun jacking off to the concept of superiority at your wet blanket convention. i’ll be over here actually enjoying myself
It really is a hard idea to stick to, Nonny, I totally get it.
Here are the things that help me keep the hope alive (settle in, folks, I’m about to go on a tangent):
First, S1 & S2 (and I’d argue at least some of S3) were so well done, crafted with such care by everyone involved. Gatiss and Moffat are such fanboys it is ridiculous, and I don’t think we should forget that we fell in love with this show and these characters in the first place thanks to them.
Second, I personally think it’s par for the course for show runners to keep fans in the dark. I know Mofftiss are sometimes arseholes in how they go about it, but they obviously need to keep the element of surprise (especially if they’re doing something that is truly groundbreaking and never-before-seen-on-tv like they claimed they were ::cough:: Johnlock ::cough::). They can’t tell us what they have planned, and this is not unique to these writers, this show, or the BBC.
Third, I think that the show is following a five-act structure. We’ve witnessed the good times, and now this is the crisis/conflict stage, after this comes resolution/happy ending. Read more about how this is a 5 act show here in @toxicsemicolon‘s most recent meta.
Fourth, there are too many coincidental loose ends that can’t possibly be accidents, like in HLV – Molly tells Sherlock after he is shot: “It’s not like it is in the movies. There’s not a great big spurt of blood and you go flying backwards.” Yet that is literallyexactly what happens to Mary when she is shot in T6T (the very next episode). Why would they do that unless they want to raise red flags for the viewers. It was almost comical how overblown Mary’s bullet wound was, and that was on purpose. So… why?
Same thing with the skull painting. The same painting has been a prominent mainstay of the flat at 221b for 3 seasons/series and suddenly in S4, it glows and changes colors and sometimes is completely black. Why? Mofftiss claims that it’s budget constraints with the original painting’s artist, but in the same exact series they were able to afford to film two helicopter scenes and rent an Aston Martin? I don’t buy it. There’s a reason.
Ever since I discovered meta I’ve been sure that there is something more meaningful coming.
If nothing else, there are too many coincidences to be accidental. Just a few examples (I could go on for days… don’t tempt me)
In TLD, Culverton Smith says (of getting away with murder) “You don’t build a beach if you want to hide a pebble; you just find a beach!” and then in the very next episode, Mycroft tells Sherlock about Eurus while flashing back to a beach covered in pebbles (which they shipped in for that scene) and then holding a pebble, which he drops onto the beach. Read more in @finalproblem‘s amazing meta here.
In TFP, the patience grenade explosion in 221b was powerful enough to blow John and Sherlock out a window (and according to Mark Gatiss, “boop they’re fine” cuz they bounced off the thin awning of Speedy’s cafe, which must also heal burns and scrapes and bruises but whatever), but it didn’t burn paper or half the things in the flat. It DID, however, destroy John’s chair. The chair that they replaced it with? John’s chair from TAB. From Sherlock’s 1800s mind palace. Arwel Wynn Jones has confirmed this.
Here’s a solid list of questions that @snycock came up with for Sherlocked UK that either prove that the whole cast and crew went through some sort of collective insanity for TFP, or there’s something more coming and things don’t make sense for a reason (which is what I think)
“The Lost Special”
“Mirrors” (where one character stands in for another in a scene, like Molly for John, or Culverton for John, etc.)
Imagery of both burning/fire and drowning/water
Check out my tags for more meta, it’s incredible what this fandom discovers. Most of my meta is tagged under #hope for s5 #what fresh fuckery is this #I believe in mofftiss
Ok, I’m starting to get incoherent and my browser just crashed all my tabs so I’ll leave it at that. The meta rabbit hole is deep and wide and curvy and I could probably fill a book filled with just links to other people’s brilliant findings.
I guess the main takeaway I want to leave you with is this:
I don’t think two men who cared so much about this show for so long would chuck it into the toilet for no reason. The same brilliant minds that gave us villains like Moriarty, Culverton Smith, and Magnussen suddenly giving us an improbable two-dimensional psychopath in Eurus makes no sense. TFP itself makes no sense in about 100 different ways. And I don’t think any of that was an accident.
More is coming. When the Garridebs story is finally free of copyright, we’ll get our resolution. I don’t know which theory I believe but there are so many… that Eurus shot John and TFP is his dying hallucination, that Sherlock is still in his mind palace (possibly since HLV, or even earlier), that the whole thing is us seeing events through John’s blog (which was commissioned by the BBC yet often conflicts with canon), alibi theory… who knows. I’m happy to point you toward more meta, but I think the blogs I mentioned above and some of the links should start you on your way. Once the evidence starts to stack up, it’s clear… we don’t have the whole picture yet.
all of that, plus when was it moffat said, “if you aren’t reading the subtext, hell mend you”, was that in the run up to TAB? Or at SDCC the summer before s4? Possibly @skulls-and-tea has the receipt in “creator quotes”. Even as i endured my one time watching s4, i could tell that it was awash in subtext, even if i didn’t know what it meant yet. Sure enough, the stalwarts here are teasing it out. Let go of the surface reading, look under the hood, pull it apart, that’s where the juice is.
Also, the 5 act structure is not only increasingly clear from the overall arc of the show so far, but is hinted at consistently in every set of five anythings in the individual episodes. Look at any set of five*, and compare them to the series. This story is structured up the wazoo, there is not a wasted or a random second anywhere in it, not one “throwaway” line or scene, it’s like a fractal, even small fragments contain the pattern of the whole. the more “sample size” we have, the more consistent that is, even including bizarro mirror world s4. we’re at the “grandpa, why did you read me this” stage of the princess bride. (go watch that if it’s been a while, and also the tjlce video on tpb!) Or Han Solo about to be frozen in carbonite, but just before “i love you; i know”. The dementors are loose and nobody has conjured a patronus yet. But we’ll get there, or it will be their failure, not ours.
*IE, the five suicide/murders in ASIP, the five pips in TGG (a double set, the hostages and the cases), the five tasks in TFP, etc.
There are also a lot of threes, lines or situations that recur three times, etc. Again, consistent to the point where if there are two of something, we can be watching out for the third one. @callie-ariane ’s transcripts are a great resource for “l clueing for looks”.
Thanks for this very comprehensive stack of evidence @88thparallel – compiling all this is a really great work and very useful!
In addition to all this, there are two details in S4 that I would go so far as holding for proof, not just evidence:
These things didn’t ‘just sort of happen’ – that’s impossible. Which means they’re there for a reason. Casual viewers won’t pick up on them, though; their appearance are way too subtle for that. Which means they’re there only for the obsessive fans to discover, the ones who go through this show picture by picture (us 😊).
So, a heart monitor and an MRI scanner. And where do these two clues lead us? They lead us directly to a hospital, the only kind of place in the world where these items exist on a regular basis. Which is one of this show’s many recurring themes. Not a coincidence, then.
So, the question here was: Do these writers really know what they’re doing? Yes – I think they very definitely do. In detail, they absolutely do. And that leaves us with only two remaining options: either they’re the epitome of cynics, who willingly spend millions of pounds and years of their working lives just to mock their own audience – especially the most passionate part of their fans. OR there’s more to be expected, most probably at least a fulfilling of the five act structure (if not more).
And @sarahthecoat, I love the fractal imagery! And since we’ve already had The Sign of Three, I think it must be time for “The Set of Five”. 😉
yep. And of all the medical equipment they could have referenced, they chose a HEART monitor and a BRAIN scan. You can pretty much go through the show episode by episode at this point, and sort characters, props, colors, whatever, into either the brain column or the heart column. Consistent patterns, over and over. The opposite of random. YES s4 was crazy and ugly and hard to watch, but if you take a close look at s3, it’s crazy and painful too, just dressed up prettier. And we’ve been teasing out the subtext for years, so much of what was utter nonsense on first viewing, has fallen into place subtextually. S4 builds on what we learned so far, and takes it that much farther. That much crazier and harder to look at, but still part of the pattern. S3 gave us drinks code, firmed up phone=heart, stairs code, started us looking at vehicle subtext, water & fire, dogs & cats, theatricality, all of which have been vastly developed in s4. Just about any stone you turn over has subtext under it. Every place there’s a line that “doesn’t make sense” on the surface, there’s a thread to pull out more subtext. No wonder it takes years to write these, they are not just formulaic procedurals. its mind boggling.
so this just occurred to me, if phone=heart across the series, is there another object that =brain? We have mycroft=brain in a lot of places, and john or a john mirror=heart. But is there anything that corresponds with phone?
Could the symbol for the brain be the skull painting in 221b? The one that was just fine and dandy and iconic until it was inexplicably* all fucked up and glowing and black and obviously NOT RIGHT and NOT THE SAME?
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 