How can I prove my worth, retain my job (or move to a better one) and balance ALL my family’s needs (if there is one), including:  housing, transportation, saving for education of young, child care if necessary, and keeping my kids out of drugs and away from gangbangers, etc.

Also, (easier said than done)– how much of my personal integrity do I have to compromise to stay in my job?  How much of my wages (if that applies) are now, or will be in a flash, garnished for child support of my ex?  How much time off work do I need to handle family court cases when my ex wants custody?   Or suppose, NONE OF THE ABOVE, but my co-worker’s ex is pissed off, and has a gun and bulletproof vests (applicable in particular, it seems, for beauty salons).

(that was a reference to an “event” in a divorce action):

Scott Dekraai pleads not guilty to Seal Beach salon killings

Family and friends of the eight people who were shot to death at Salon Meritage in October crowd the courtroom but remain quiet during the hearing. Scott Dekraai, the suspect in the killings, does not look at the crowd.
January 19, 2012|By Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times

Scott Dekraai is flanked by his public defenders during his arraignment… (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles…)
The man accused in the largest mass murder in Orange County [Southern Califonia] history pleaded not guilty Wednesday to shooting and killing eight people at a Seal Beach beauty salon, including his ex-wife.

Scott Evans Dekraai, wearing a mustard-yellow jumpsuit, his hands handcuffed in front of him, said nothing during his brief arraignment before a courtroom crowded with emotional family and friends of the victims of the Oct. 12 shooting spree at Salon Meritage.
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Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Dekraai, who was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday on eight counts of murder with special circumstances and one felony count of attempted murder.

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Dekraai is accused of entering the salon wearing a bulletproof vest under his clothing and carrying multiple guns.

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Dekraai’s ex-wife, Michelle Fournier, worked in the salon, and Dekraai allegedly shot her before turning to other salon customers and employees and opening fire.

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Court records show Dekraai and Fournier had been in a bitter custody battle over their 8-year-old son.

There are I bet few neighborhoods where incidents, of not of this magnitude, of similar character, have not happened.  I found it personally very hard to handle going through my own difficulties (during and after the marriage) — while all around me, women, and sometimes men, and sometimes children, were at a certain level, dropping like flies, or disappearing on overnight court-ordered custody exchanges.

While I myself didn’t disappear on such a change, for all intents and purposes, one time, both my children did — and issue which was never resolved legally.  The situation simply “timed out” and the vacuum still exists where they were.  I used to write expressively about it, but now, no longer can… I feel that continuing to “feel” in that place would result into turning into some sort of zombie — so I write like this, and seek to alter the landscape, for my kids (and other kids’ and their parents’) sake.  I was working at this time — had business relationships, clients, friends, and associates — many were families with small children.  I had to drop out of that situation and go into crisis // damage control mode, and it did affect the immediate community.  These are also public costs (courthouse expenses).

The same weekend my kids went “MIA” (though we all knew who had them) another mother and woman in California also went “MIA” in a high-profile case– and unfortunately she was later found in a shallow grave not far from the place of “co-parenting” custody exchange.  The murderer pled-down the charge for telling the authorities where he buried her.  Here are some of his excuses which, thankfully, didn’t get him out of a jail sentence:

Reiser recited a litany of maladies he said his wife had, including a chemical imbalance caused by an increase in oxytocin and Munchausen by proxy syndrome, in which a parent makes up illnesses in children in order to gain sympathy from others. He also compared himself to Moses killing a slave master and hiding the body in the sand.

Authorities have said there was no evidence Nina Reiser had the disorder or had abused her children.

Smith [Jury foreman] said Reiser did little to garner sympathy from jurors, especially the women on the panel who “quite frankly were like, ‘Screw you,’ ” as Reiser made clear his hatred for his wife.

There are solid reasons some are wealthy and others are poor; among the reasons are different behaviors of the wealthy, some of them picked up from their upbringing (including schooling).

Another reason some are poor includes that the wealthy want it that way and through influence on government (and the corporate models available) are adept at stacking the decks (picking winners and losers, historically) — and also making “deals” that are not good deals for the common people who simply “work.”    Like auto, bank, savings and loan, or any other type of “bailout.”

So, we must ask the right questions for our time (2013) — not for the industrial age.  Ask the right questions for an entrepreneur or investor, even if you have the ability and job title of a fantastic employee.

Make a decision to sort (accurately, but quickly) and label (accurately, but quickly) information that deluges your mind and thinking (and/or tune out the static) and come, habitually  (accurately, but quickly) to a good business decisions — for yourself — on what to do with that

And if the decision* was “invalid” or “trash” or “unprofitable,” then you don’t hang out in that mental neighborhood, unless there is good cause.

(Your gut also knows this; and over time that gut will be a very fine indicator — but not without some of the self-discipline, motivated by a goal or personalized mission, preceding it.  I believe that if we have had honorable and intrinsically good conscience and purpose in life (destroying others, waging wars, and sending their kids into the street, or into orphanages, not being one of them), that gut instinct for life, will work for, and not against us — individually, and from their socially.  It will show what’s commonsense in a given situation.  It may not always be socially “reasonable,” and many times isn’t.).

OK, let’s go over this again — I saw just ONE company — Daimler — and learned something from its positioning right now.  Here’s how it handled Chrysler, which situation has helped Michigan, as a state, become renowned for Detroit as a byword for a rough place to be in.

They are reduced (or simply chose), for financial success, to sending SWAT teams into single mothers’ homes to extract disabled children in order to drug them, in an attempt to get more kids to serves as live subject matter for the pharmaceutical industry — of course that’s a reference to the MaryAnn Godboldo case.  Clearly something is really out of whack up there.

This 2010 article (I searched “Car wars // Detroit”) says, that after about three decades of the Japanese “chewing through the US markets like termites (Toyota, Honda, Nissan),” it’s replacement timing is down to the “industry average” while the Europeans are focusing on the higher-end vehicles.  Even so, Chrysler (now owned by Fiat — see below) is below industry average, but might get a little pizazz if the Italians have anything to do with it.

I brought up Detroit because Chrysler comes from Michigan..  There was a DaimlerChrysler for a while….

This 2011 blog article in “The Economist,” a British magazine I think” “Urban Economics:  No Dawn for Detroit“

Feb 2nd 2011, 21:35 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

ECONOMISTS have been reading Detroit its last rites for years now. In 2007, economists Ed Glaeser and Giacomo Ponzetto explained how changes in technology destroyed the city’s business model, based on the returns to industrial agglomeration. In remarks made while in Stockholm accepting his Nobel prize for work on (among other things) economic geography, Paul Krugman declared that the carmaker bail-out was at best a temporary salve, and that Detroit’s car industry was doomed.

== (it then points out to decreasing unemployment in various auto sectors, by city) ====

How wrong could the economists be? There’s just one, little problem. Here’s total employment for the Detroit metro area over the past decade:

The long decline continues. Well, then why has Detroit’s unemployment rate fallen so much? Part of the reason is that the household survey, used to compute the unemployment rate, shows a better employment performance for Detroit over the past year. But the other part of the story is a steady, dramatic decline in the labour force. Since 2007, about 100,000 workers have left the Detroit labour force. And despite the real improvement in the economic outlook over the past few months, the bleeding goes on.

What points should we take away from this performance? Well, it may or may not have been a good idea to step in and rescue the carmakers, but the critics who pointed out that it would not save Detroit were right. This should have been obvious at the time, given that it was widely agreed that putting carmakers on a firmer footing would involve drastic cuts to their labour forces and rationalisation of production facilities.

A second point follows from this: however strongly America’s manufacturing sector rebounds from the crisis and benefits from global rebalancing, it’s unreasonable to think that rising manufacturing employment can do much to absorb labour market slack. Manufacturing has only grown less labour-intensive over time, and the truly labour-intensive industrial jobs will seek out markets abroad where labour costs are far cheaper than in America. Just as economists pointed out before and during the crisis.

It would be too early to write off the Detroit area entirely. As you can see, nearly 1.7m people continue to work in the area. But if Detroit is to thrive again, it will have to discover new and growing industries that depend for their success on the kinds of benefits firms now derive from urban proximity.

That link to “the kinds of benefits” is to another (October 2010) article (by a Harvard Economics Professor, go figure….) called:

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The Information Economy Powers Wage Increases

By EDWARD L. GLAESER

Yes, the wonder county of 2009 appears to have been New York County, that is, the borough of Manhattan, wherewagesgrew by a stunning 11.9 percent, according to theBureau of Labor Statistics. National wages rose only by an anemic 0.8 percent, and only 19 areas had wage growth above 3 percent.

Most counties detailed by the bureau showed wage declines over the year. The biggest loser was San Mateo County, in California, where wages dropped by 17.7 percent. While California’s unemployment rateremains at 12.4 percent, the idea-intensive economy around San Francisco Bay, like Manhattan, appears to be holding up quite well.

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This matches a post-1990 pattern in which the incomes of initially richer areas have risen more quickly.

As a result, the earnings gap between the nation and either Manhattan or Santa Clara County has become enormous…

Far from knocking New Yorkers down, the recession seems to have made them more prosperous, on average.

The bad news is that more money has been earned by fewer people. The rise in the incomes of these coastal cities has not been accompanied by increases in the number of employed people. Employment in Manhattan dropped by 1.7 percent over the year and employment in San Francisco fell by 3.1 percent. …

Another source of worry is that the rise in earnings was led by New York City finance, whichexperienced a whopping 22.7 percent increase in weekly earnings from 2009 to 2010.

Many of us hoped that the recession would provide an opportunity for New York to become a little less reliant on its dominant industry, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

These wage gains are only the latest bit of evidence confirming that America’s economic future depends on its information-intensive cities. Our country is never going to be able to compete with Asia as a producer of ordinary manufactured goods. If the products are old, then they will be produced where costs are lowest. Our economic eminence depends on continually coming up with new ideas in software, biotechnology and finance.

A second implication is that America’s future depends on its schools. This recession has also emphasized the enormous handicaps facing less-skilled Americans.

Seriously — the Auto Industry is a Big Deal.  So here’s what happened to Chrysler, as I said, it was auctioned off, more than once:

“On This Day in History”  May 7, 1998 — Daimler-Benz announces purchase of Chrysler Corp.

On this day in 1998, the German automobile company Daimler-Benz–maker of the world-famous luxury car brand Mercedes-Benz–announces a $36 billion merger with the United States-based Chrysler Corporation.

The purchase of Chrysler, America’s third-largest car company, by the Stuttgart-based Daimler-Benz marked the biggest acquisition by a foreign buyer of any U.S. company in history. Though marketed to investors as an equal pairing, it soon emerged that Daimler would be the dominant partner, with its stockholders owning the majority of the new company’s shares.

For Chrysler, headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, the end of independence was a surprising twist in a striking comeback story. After a near-collapse and a government bailout in 1979 that saved it from bankruptcy, the company surged back in the 1980s under the leadership of the former Ford executive Lee Iacocca, in a revival spurred in part by the tremendous success of its trendsetting minivan.

The new company, DaimlerChrysler AG, began trading on the Frankfurt and New York stock exchanges the following November. A few months later, according to a 2001 article in The New York Times, its stock price rose to an impressive high of $108.62 per share. The euphoria proved to be short-lived, however. While Daimler had been attracted by the profitability of Chrysler’s minivans and Jeeps, over the next few years profits were up and down, and by the fall of 2003 the Chrysler Group had cut some 26,000 jobs and was still losing money.

In 2006, according to the Times, Chrysler posted a loss of $1.5 billion and fell behind Toyota to fourth place in the American car market. This loss came despite the company’s splashy launch of 10 new Chrysler models that year, with plans to unveil eight more. The following May, however, after reportedly negotiating with General Motors about a potential sale, DaimlerChrysler announced it was selling 80.1 percent of Chrysler to the private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management for $7.4 billion. DaimlerChrysler, soon renamed Daimler AG, kept a 19.9 percent stake in the new company, known as Chrysler LLC.

By late 2008, increasingly dismal sales led Chrysler to seek federal funds to the tune of $4 billion to stay afloat. Under pressure from the Obama administration, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2009 and will enter into a planned partnership with the Italian automaker Fiat.

Interesting how that plays out on a large stage…