Living in 'stealth' homeless

A couple years back, someone posted a hilarious drawing to a reddit thread about stealth homeless living (I think), saying something like:

'I heard you like beds, so I put your bed inside a bed.'

https://t3hwin.com/bed-room-inside-a-bed/

I couldn't find the original thread, but found the pic. Some people commenting on the thread were not homeless, but got excited by the idea of 'stealth' living. When you don't really need to...

On victim mentality

I don't think of myself as a victim. Nobody specifically set out to do me harm. 'It's just business.' People have acted in their selfish interest in unethical ways at my expense. I could blame racial prejudice, flawed education institutions, corrupt employers. But they are indifferent to me specifically. I haven't encountered individuals with a personal agenda to go out of their way to ruin my life. Maybe you have. So I don't feel like a victim. Someone would have to be personally responsible in damaging my life for me to feel that way.

On what to do with life when neither happiness and death are within reach.

Devote your life to something bigger than yourself. Death is a certainty. Shift the mindset away from 'will this fix my problem and make my life happy' to 'what kind of place do I want to leave behind.' Simply existing, without any cause, is pointless suffering. Accept pain as a part of living we cannot escape, so we might as well put it to good use.

Conservatives hate liberals for 'ruining America' but have only themselve to blame for being out-competed

Differences between liberal and conservative values.

• What he respects in a man:
  
  Conservative: his physical size and strength, dominance
  Liberal: his money and ability to draw attention

• What he uses to justify his entitlement :
  
  Conservative: religion beliefs, church
  Liberal: education, university

• When push comes to shove, his threat of this allows him to 'defend his rights' when what he is actually doing is 'taking by force':
  
  Conservative: guns
  Liberal: lawyers
  

This is why you can't take away gun rights from conservatives. To them, that would be like what taking away all legal rights means to a liberal. To render an individual completely defenseless and powerless to ensure his own survival.

---

Conservative men hate liberal men for being and appearing physically weak, feminine, and for not exuding dominance.

They believe liberal male weakness is the reason women, gays, Jews, Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims, and on and on and on - basically any group of people besides themselves - the White Christian American - have 'taken over' and 'ruined' the country.

But liberals didn't destroy America. Liberal states are prospering from being inclusive of racial diversity. Their success comes from embracing progress. The White conservative camp has suffered due to its own inability, because it can't out-compete other races and it refuses to adapt.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. - Charles Darwin

The Trump movement is supported by the White Christian conservatives, whose alpha status in America has diminished and are scared. They fear having Mexicans and Blacks take over as property owners, business owners. They're afraid of having the tables turned on them and becoming subservient to minorities, or China, or any group besides themselves.

Progressive policies in developed cities have benefited from opening up opportunities to a broader, deeper pool of human talent and skills. The nation made advances in equal rights, tolerance, diversity - allowing minority groups to gain the job market and out-compete white nationals because they accept working for lower pay, less benefits, under harder conditions, and undesirable hours.

But White Christian conservatives have not adapted well to change. They have not brought more value to the plate to match their competition, yet their self-superiority beliefs have stayed the same. They can't compete on a global scale, and as a consequence they see their status in their own society decline, as jobs go overseas to fiercer more desperate competitors, as the Mexicans come in to work the jobs they won't, as minorities settle into their neighborhoods and infuse different cultures, languages, networks - worlds in which they have no power.


Conservatives have a misunderstanding of 'morality' to wholly equate to religious rules. That is to say, it is right because God said so and because it is written in the Bible. They think it is that simple.

It is a closed-minded hypocritical attitude that their Lord and Master is always right, and the group that serves their master is justified in condemning or 'teaching the error of their ways' to outside groups for holding different beliefs.

Conservatives want themselves to remain the masters of American society, not through equal competition with the Mexicans and Chinese, not by grit and mettle that built America and its people once prided itself in - but through hate, persecution, intimidation, religious hypocrisy, and corruption - the very evils that founding fathers cast off England to escape and establish a nation that 'opposed free hearts, free foreheads' (Tennyson) meaning to set your free spirit and body bravely, willingly, and without bitterness against the hardships that face a great endeavor.



Making America withdrawn inside its borders and protective of its declining 'racial superiority' will not make it 'Great Again'. The reason America became great in the first place was because it welcomed all men of talent and put them to use, regardless of their nationality, race, or religion!

Denying those most desirous and willing to sacrifice, to endure hardship, and to contribute to our country access into our borders will not make them go away. The competition will not rest, simply because we put a blindfold over our eyes. They will go where they can, to other countries, to our competitors, making them strong while we grow weak in seclusion.

Trump will not make anything Great or ever has. He is a entirely a showman, a con. What has enabled him to win the support of flyover America is to tap into an overwhelming insecurity of White conservatives over their loss of power. Trump feeds them the message they want to hear, to make them FEEL great.

Trump's rhetoric about himself and the boastful image he presents is what those Americans what to be able to say for themselves: that they are great, they are the greatest - and lots of people, lots of smart people - the best people are saying it. Never mind that many of them hate Trump. They think his attempt to dismantle the Mexican, Muslim, LGBT communities will restore White Christian Americans to their rightful position of power in society.



Instead, what will happen if we follow this route is that America will become increasingly backward and redundant. The wealth will be apportioned to the wealthy, while basic social services for the public are cut - healthcare, welfare, education, disability benefits. The average American will need to rely on faith and loyalty to a powerful master for grace and mercy, instead of having the support of social programs that empower him to work his own way toward prosperity.

The brain drain that keeps evangelical regions like Mississippi poor and segregated will spread. Our Christian faith-based schools will send our children's math, science, and reading proficiency sinking even faster. Highly talented people will leave the United States or decide not to come in. Competing nations will surpass our technology and edge us out of global markets.

Faced with a inescapable decline, unless we destroy our competitors, we will throw our chips in a preemptive last-ditch war against some non-specific and fictitious enemy on foreign soil. Whether we 'win' or not, our global presence will diminish and other nations will demand obedience to their coalition because we have thrown away our political clout, and our national resources to wage a war for our leader's personal ambitions.



This will happen because it has already happened with Bush junior. Yet conservatives admired him for the harm he did to this country, because during his office those conservatives temporarily FELT like their power in society grew.

When it was all over, they blamed his successor, and the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Muslims for all the negative repercussions of their vanity - debt, economic depression, unemployment. Because they don't quite feel as good about themselves, unless they set themselves as superior than someone else.

Definition of God

A university classmate said he couldn't say if God existed or not, because the very question was ill-posed. He said nobody has actually defined what 'God' is, even though people argue about whether 'God' exists all the time. He said that God was an ill-defined concept, that was is impossible to create a definition of God that was valid, and so there was no way to answer the question.

So to put the question of whether God exists on equal footing, I have created a formal definition:

lim_(power -> infinity) Man == God

It is easy to see that such a limit does not exist. I omit the proof and leave it as an exercise to the reader.

My classmate would say this is not a good definition, but I think it works just fine.
God created man in his image, so man returned the favor.

It's interesting that God is a creator. Creating is a distinctive capability that separates humans from other animals. It is fitting for our egos that God should create the universe as we would have done, rather than birthing the universe or hatching it out of a giant egg like origin myths from other cultures that have a deeper respect for nature.

Privatization of education is to segregate people by socioeconomic group and control them with religion

Betsy Devos wants to bring back teaching Christianity in schools through privatization. Why does she want to increase the power of the church this way? Because religion serves to control the lower class and to privilege the white property owning elite.

“Our desire is to be in that Shephelah, and to confront the culture in which we all live today in ways that will continue to help advance God’s Kingdom, but not to stay in our own faith territory,”
- Betsy Devos

“The church — which ought to be in our view far more central to the life of the community — has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity, the center for what goes on in the community,” Dick DeVos, husband

Pigs are not kosher, Dick DeVos says, so you could tell where the Jewish people influenced what the couple call "pagan" communities, because “the pig bones were gone.”"Our job is to figure out in the contemporary context — how do we get the pig bones out of our culture?"

- http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-education-trump-religion-232150

To Betsy, success in education is not whether the students perform better to academic standards, but whether children are taught to fall in line with religious commandments and schools make profit from a business perspective.

"For 20 years, the lobby her family bankrolls has propped up the billion-dollar charter school industry and insulated it from commonsense oversight, even as charter schools repeatedly failed to deliver on their promises to parents and children."

-http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-henderson/2016/12/03/betsy-devos-education-donald-trump/94728574/

Her bullshit about choice is really about segregating rich kids further from poor kids. We'll have a bad school to police the bad minority kids, an ethnic Christian school for honest working lower class that trains them to be obedient, and good schools for the wealthy Christian whites.

Schools will run their curriculum in the same tone that churches run sermons for adults. Scare the homeless, violent, and problematic drug abusers into reforming with the threat of hell, appease the honest mexicans, blacks, and asians with promises that Jesus died for them and they should be grateful to God for what they have, and reassure the affluent whites that their material and social advantages are the just outcome of living by God.

Extremist hate and fear in our own people are the enemy, we are not enemies

the christian extremists among us are as dangerous terrorists as the islamic extremists among them
they want to convince everyone around them to fear, hate, and destroy the enemy as the only way to preserve oneself
they want the people who have no reason to kill each other to believe in fear and hate, and to fight a war just to prove that they are right
the people who hate and want to destroy islam are just as bad as the people who hate and want to destroy America

they say, those people hate us and don't want peace and only want to destroy our way of life and we have to destroy them before they destroy us.
the fear-spewing intolerant racists and religious self-righteous hypocrites that call for the destruction of the people who want to destroy us,
they want to turn peaceful tolerant people to be extremists like them, to become fearing vengeful hateful killers
they try to convince their own people that everyone on the other side is only interested in one thing, to destroy them

extremists on both sides polarize their own people into destroying the other at all costs at the expense of innocent civilians
they don't tolerate anyone who doesn't think their authority and dominance are God-given to them.
they are just mirror opposites of the enemy, no better than the people they want to destroy
they victimize only the weakest members of the other group, because they are cowards. and they use their own people to make war against the strong

a simple-minded country ultraconservative will tell you he is better than his enemy because he doesn't set off bombs and kill civilians
well his love of country ignores that his government trains and pays foreign terrorist groups to do that so he doesn't have to.
he will deny and fabricate justifications that it wasn't us, or they had to do it to stop a bad guy from doing far worse, or it was right for us to do it but when the enemy does it that's totally different.
his ego will latch onto any flattering explanation without a second thought, though he scours internet rumor and crackpot conspiracies tirelessly to expose the things he doesn't want to believe as lies
that the holocaust never happened, that the evils his own nature brought about are made-up stories spread by his enemies, his enemies were the ones behind it all

His mind only accepts simple, easy to understand, and feels-good-to-believe hypocrisy.
that God is on our side and the Devil is on theirs.

next time someone tells you, those people are our enemy and you have to destroy them, you look them straight in the eye and say
you are the enemy who is going to send me off to kill someone just like myself on their side, just because he was told to kill me by an enemy like you

Competition is a wasteful product of corruption, and fair practices result from collaborative individual contribution

At the outset anti-trust laws look like they function to perpetuate competition and that seems to suggest competition is the key to a healthy environment and that collaboration is bad. But the real value in anti-trust laws is to promote healthy collaboration and make companies earn their own bread - the same principle as each man producing what he enjoys with his own two hands.

Anti-trust laws prohibit companies from rigging prices and markets to earn profits without creating value. The way the law should enforce this, is by making each company work for its individual survival. Companies should not rely on other companies to sustain it with unmerited profit agreements. Because once a company no longer has to concern itself with the quality of its own output, or matching the benefit it receives by its individual performance... it no longer benefits from fair behavior and contributing to the collective - it benefits more for the company to leverage its position to gain more unmerited profit and to acquire more power not by production of value. Same as people.

When companies have to work for themselves to earn profit, it benefits them to make collaborations that are healthy for the collective market. Costs go down for companies working together and output cheaper, higher quality products. The key here is collaborative efforts must be for cooperating companies to mutually contribute the value of its individual product for another company to improve the other's product. It's supposed to be a team project where ideally everyone contributes equally and in diverse ways so the group achieves a greater presentation than any individual on its own.

In practice what happens is one or two people out of five have any competence to do the project, and they have to do more work for five people than they would on their own and the other three people fake having done work to contribute. But in an ideal world, companies will not partner with incompetent non-contributers if the playing field promotes fair play where each company earns by its product the profits it deserves. Anti-trust laws should be meant to allow the ideal team project collaboration, and prevent the corrupt mandatory team project with non-contributing companies in positions of power. The rationale for having anti-trust laws is not an argument against cooperation.

Corrupt people who want to abuse power and use others work for their own gain have disseminated a false perception that our need for anti-trust laws is because all good things come from competition and that their competing for power is beneficial when it is actually wasteful and harmful to the survival of the collective. The principle is false that companies best serve the population when they compete exclusively for their own profit. Corporate wars for dominance are a waste of resources to the consumers and the employees that sustain the industry. It is not the competitive process that needs to be protected, but process that 'the quality of my product determines the amount of profit I earn' that keeps things healthy.

Anti-trust law is actually an advocate that cooperation among companies is good - and therefore that cooperation must be protected from corrupt competitive companies looking out for themselves. A law to prevent corrupt companies from entering collaborations without actually contributing any work. To keep powerful companies from gaining unmerited benefit through arrangements instead of through the quality of their product.

Competition among powerful corporations is not good for the consumer. Competition reduces quality of product to bare minimum. McDonald's, Walmart are dominant and found everywhere because they are competitive - not because the product they offer is the highest quality. When companies are allowed to freely compete, the powerful companies become more powerful and care less about the quality of their product than eliminating their competition.

This perception that anti-monopoly is *for* competition is ridiculous. Anti-monopoly is *against* free competition, because competition strives to eliminate its competitors not keep them around!... The way anti-monopoly law keeps companies in a false theatrics of competition is to set arbitrary rules that prevent the most powerful from competing against the weak. This concept doesn't work.

Encouraging companies to compete and gain disproportionate power then fixing an artificial ceiling on them, hoping they will abide by the rules and agree to not use their power to eliminate threats to growing its power. It's a show. Companies will work to rewrite the laws or get around them, but they won't change their practices.

Government run corporations is an result of allowing free competition, not banning it. The most powerful organization beats all its competition, using all the resources available to it - the government. Every time another group contests it, the government is allowed to use whatever competitive advantage it possesses - including the military - to win. That's what free competition really means.

This fiction of a free market in which each new company is able to compete fairly with the most powerful existing company is a contradiction. In order not to be wiped clean off the face of the earth, the small company must be given an enormous handicap preventing the large company from freely competing against it. A big company can stall a fight against a small company, lose some profits and move on, whereas a small company goes bankrupt if it doesn't make a return on investment right away.

And the majority of start-ups do fail because the reality is companies *are* allowed to freely compete and that means the big company can crush any small company it chooses to. Lawyers, capital, contracts - all are things no start-up can match up against. The reasons a tiny fraction of start-ups do survive is through one of the big investors (a financial company providing the capital) decides this little pit fighter can make it some money in the ring with betting (stock prices), and takes it under its protection.

Here's how a cycle of corruption begins. Fair practices come from individuals who produce the rewards they enjoy with their own hands, their gain is limited by the natural limits of the quality and productiveness of their work. This leads to healthy cooperation, in which each member contributes to a collective effort and their individual work is utilized more effectively and achieve more with their work. When the collaboration reaches a sufficient surplus, it allows members of the group to gain benefit without contributing. There is a turning point towards corruption when individuals gain benefits that they do not produce themselves, and it becomes more advantageous for them to use their unmerited benefits to acquire more unmerited benefits, rather than improving the quality of their individual contribution.

Competition and corruption go hand in hand. Corruption is the act or intention of gaining unmerited benefit. Gains in unmerited benefits translates into a growth of power. Powerful individuals seek to acquire more power, to prevent other powerful individuals from taking away their source of unmerited benefit. Power in individuals gives rise to competition. Competition is really in essence a process of acquiring a benefit beyond which one's own work merits.

The whole point of the competition is to acquire unmerited benefit beyond that of individual work! So that two equally worthy individuals compete for a position whereby one receives the bulk of the benefits and the other does not. It is not proportionate to award the winner the benefits that the loser does not receive. But there would be no incentive to compete if both contestants were rewarded the same regardless of the outcome. Competition is a act of acquiring a unmerited benefit - at the most benign level it is still a form of seeking mild corruption.

You can say a professional athlete for example has deserved the benefits he receives for competing. Yes the athlete who wins has earned benefits for the work he has put in, but this doesn't mean the gains he is seeking is proportionate to his labor. One athlete has to win at the expense of another, no matter how worthy (or not) both contestants are. The intention is to have two roughly equally worthy individuals and disproportionately give the slightly better one more rewards than the other, to make one want to beat the other.


Corruption makes competition worthwhile. Without the incentive of unmerited benefit, you couldn't gain advantage by beating anyone. Your best interests would be to match the amount of sacrifice you make through labor in order to meet your individual need for benefits. The guy with more benefits has no more advantage than the guy with less, if he is forced to sacrifice his an equivalent amount of his other assets in time and labor for that benefit. In the absence of a corrupting process to turn merited benefit into unmerited benefit, he could only use that benefit on himself or for altruism, and if it is more than he can use on himself, the excess benefit does gain anything more for himself - so the excess doesn't turn into an ever growing need to acquire more excess.

If people were satisfied to produce with their own two hands every benefit they sought, it wouldn't matter who acquires more benefits - because that benefit would be balanced out with equal parts sacrifice through time and labor. That individual wouldn't end up with any more than the person whose work balanced their needs. It's because people are able to gain benefits without making equivalent sacrifice, that they have the incentive to compete to acquire more benefits than someone else in order to 'win' a seat of power to acquire more and more unmerited benefits.

"What you call a social position consists in the privilege of capital and education. Unwealthy and uneducated people earn their crust of bread by physical labor, and I see no reason why I should be an exception."
- Misail Poloznev
from Anton Chekhov's short story My Life.

Corruption of moral language in working America

'Merit' is a bullshit currency denomination of systemic bribery. The more money you have, the higher merit your accredited institution dishes out for equal work.

"Anyone who had no silver for bribes was put in the foremost assault ranks. But if a man was able to spread a bit of money around he stayed in the central army and received frequent commendations for “valor.” There was a great deal of this kind of corruption"
Outlaws of the Marsh. Chapter 78: Ten Commandants Confer on Taking Liangshan Marsh Song Jiang Defeats Marshal Gao the First Time

A brand-name private university degree you are paying top dollar to have it look better than a state school, although curriculum around the country are pretty much the same. God forbid you go to a community college or sketchy for-profit university. Even the free education classes online require you to pay to receive certificates of merit for doing the same work as someone who didn't pay.

Most definitely MIT will bust your ass, and earning a 4.0 gpa there will be respected for the higher degree of difficulty compared to getting your ass to Everest. But for the bulk of mediocrity that is the drunken, coffee resuscitated cram-fest of stressed out and scared 20 yr old children going through the motions it doesn't matter where you learned Calc I and Biology. You'll have forgotten most of it after if not before the final exam.



'Leadership' is a bullshit term used to camouflage corruption. The more business and personal ties you have in workplace politics, the more you are considered a leader.

A retail worker describes feeling overlooked in career advancement for a store manager position, despite seniority and years of hard work, surpassed by less experienced, less motivated, and less capable personal relations of company superiors. http://www.depressionforums.org/forums/topic/130074-invisible-at-work/

"I've held my current job for close to 6 years. I started as a receiver in the back room of the store and quickly worked my way up to what they call a 'key carrier' (lowest level manager). ... I've always prided myself on being an extra hard worker. Get there early, stay late, and take anything on with a positive attitude. My dad always taught me that hard work would get you far. I feel like hard work only gets you more hard work.... I've been at that position for at least 5 of the 6 years

When I started there, a 20 year old kid had just been selected for an assistant manager's position. This guy was no ball of fire and rather than move into managing his own store quickly, he plugged up the assistant's position for 4 years. The only reason he was allowed to park there so long was because he and the manager of our location are BFF's (60-some year old store manager living vicariously through a wild 20 year old but that's beside the point).

I hoped that as soon as he moved on, I would be in line for assistant, and then to eventually take on my own store... Unfortunately, our district manager had other plans and moved someone who had only been with the company 2 years into the spot I thought was mine.

he moved on to his own location after only a few months, opportunity presented itself, but again the DM brought someone else in. This time a girl who was reputed to be a TERRIBLE worker. She proved to be just that and was fired after only two months.
 ...
I just got word today that they're moving yet another person in."

'Networking' is a bullshit euphemism for socially accepted corruption. The more you use those personal relationships to gain undeserved competitive advantage, the more you are networking.

It's condoned and sanctioned by this society, to act selfishly and irresponsibly with whitewashed forms of corruption that are advertised as 'successful', 'smart', 'talented'. In a corrupt system the only real value is in power to manipulate one's position to acquire more power, using unmerited advantage to gain more unmerited advantage.

There is no equity between reward and contribution. The contribution comes from the bottom, the powerless, the workers. The cream of the crop is skimmed off the top by the ruthless, the unscrupulous, the people who look out for themselves no matter who else gets axed - and have steel nerves, ability, and entitled privileges to force and trap their competitors out of the game.



No person climbs to high power without leaving a pile of skeletons.

Is that a justification to do it? No. A corrupt system eats at its roots, the group's value diminishes year by year until it reaches unsustainable imbalance, at which it collapses and corrects itself with heavy loss of life.

Financial institutions with no concern have factored this in, predicting the next time the market collapses and the government issues a bailout. Hoping to survive each cycle intact, profits unhindered. Always staying on top, no matter how the weather comes down. That's a sure sign of corruption, not discerning the future or talent.

But the life of an individual cannot outlast that of a society. And power cannot be handed down to heirs who have not the capacity to attain that power themselves - it will be seized from them. So what good does corruption do? It will make the group weak for an outside group to conquer by force. It will make an arbitrary select few of the sharks capable of abusing the overwhelmingly outnumbering population.

Does it accomplish anything to have CorruptGuy1 have the riches instead of CorruptGuy2? The corrupt stand only for themselves, and without any higher cause to motivate either, it's a load of wasted resources for them to fight each other for top dog at the people's expense. Reduces the assets available to the group.

The people have to stand against corruption. Corruption is on the side of the powerful, they will never start a movement against their own means of advancement. It is the powerless, the vast numbers of weak who must do something. The powerful take the work you produce and throw it away by fighting among themselves. If anything is to be done against the poisoning effects of the powerful it must be by the collective that sustains them.


But the weak are weak and don't do anything. The system becomes too corrupt and the ever more aggressive virus kills its host so it dies too. In the ruins of the old order, a new organization must work together and promote moral values for shared interests in its survival against nature.

Morality is a simple harmonic oscillator. Swings back and forth with the prosperity of a society. When the organization reaches a critical surplus, the force of corruption again take hold. Turning the advantages of cooperation head under its feet and gaining advantage at the expense of the collective.



Having excess of nice things produces the worst people. Because when people stop having to work themselves against the challenges of the natural environment for individual survival, they benefit more by abusing the population than by collaborating with it.

In order to make an omelette, you have to break eggs. If you want to get something done with the work potential of a population, you need to force a large majority into a perpetually deficient state so that they will produce labor in a vain effort to achieve a sufficient state.

If each man had to produce the food he eats, the clothes he wears, the commodities he enjoys with his own hands... the population would be just and mutually beneficial. The society would not be very productive, no one would have the physical resources or time to accomplish much past simple survival. But people would play nice and be fair.

Fixing a laptop power jack connection without solder

Problem: DC power jack on my laptop came out as I pulled on the cord. The wires that connected the jack to the computer board snapped and I couldn't charge my battery!

It pissed me off that two detached wires could not be fixed by simply reinserting them into the jack. The jack held little wires by a small dab of solder. A firm tug and they come off easily. I'm supposed to solder this back on, but I don't have the equipment to do it.

The jack is not designed to be tinkered around with. For safety and design reasons. But shit happens and when it does, it would be so much easier to have a re-attachable connection like electrical nuts, or a big hole to loop the wire through.

Well, I managed to patch up the jack and get it working without soldering. It is not a safe or long-term solution, so don't do it. Tell me it's bad and why I should never do this... yada yada yada. But until the new part I ordered arrives, I want to still be able to use my laptop. So, here's what I did.

The red wire carries the electricity in and the black is the grounding wire. I stripped a piece of the wiring off the red and then I cut a section of insulation below that and moved it up to the end of the wire. So the wire is insulated on both ends, and exposed about an inch in the middle.

I looped this exposed wire section around the ball in the center of the jack. Making sure that the insulation keeps it from touching either of the balls on the outer edge of the jack. If it did, that would short circuit and could create sparks, melt the wire, fry the motherboard, etc.

Then I took the black wire and wrapped that around the outer ball, making sure that the wrap was tight and the stray strands could not touch the middle ball or the red wire.

I took out my DVD drive so I have lots of room to put the jack where it won't get bumped around. Plugged the charger into an outlet, and success - my laptop is running again!

Now, my laptop case has already been messed up and taken apart so many times that a person who cares about looks would not dare look at it. My DVD drive slides right out. The casing is cracked and the power jack moves around inside. I've removed all the screws and left it that way so I can lift the corner of the case to fit the charger plug into the jack.

So I don't care that my laptop looks like broken plastic, I just want it to work.