In Tennessee you can apply for unemployment if your employer suddenly reduces your work hours significantly. You don't have to wait until you lose your job completely.
If she's been an independent contractor, I don't think she qualifies
Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#22Maybe they can find a local Hackerspace that will help get a better dev environment setup? If the have tech skills I would think they could get a basic job easily.
I had not looked into that. There actually is a hackerspace however the rates for membership are $60 per month[1]. The discounted rates don't seem to apply to her situation. [2] It is not obvious whether that space even would be trans friendly. I can see if i can reach someone from there to get a vibe or an idea.
> If the have tech skills I would think they could get a basic job easily.
One would think so naively. I am working towards trying to help her find a job. I have not been at it for long. If you have some insight where i might help her find a basic job making use of her embedded/backend C, C++ skills developing cross platform {Linux, Windows} x {ARM, x86_64} emulator writing tools which work as library and as application with integrated LUA interpreters i would be thankful. It doesn't have to be that specific but that might give people an idea what flame she is cooking with.
[1] https://wiki.chattlab.org/joining_steps [2] https://wiki.chattlab.org/membership
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#23She needs to move. The psychological pressure we trans people are under in red states is breathtaking. Many of us are losing our health care. This is not a minor thing for us -- speaking personally, I'd rather die. Even if it hasn't happened directly to her, it will have happened to her friends. We all talk. It's hard not to empathize with one another. I myself feel like I'm a tiny leaf on a river of grief, most days…
Generally curious, how are trans people loosing access to health care in red states?
Republicans have made trans people the target of their newest culture war.
They're pushing to ban gender-affirming care, usually focusing on minors but some of the bans are for people up to age 26, and they're making noise about restricting or banning it for adults too.
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#24I think we should just ignore everyone suggesting she get treated for substance abuse issues.
We don't know her situation, and even if she is using drugs, there are many functional addicts.
If she's capable of working, it'd be nice if someone in the area offered her something like contract to hire, where they could then see for themselves if she's capable of succeeding in the field (I am in Canada and on the verge of struggling myself, despite also not having substance issues, otherwise I'd offer to help).
The real problem right now is a lack of a social safety net, in addition to hiring being incredibly tight (and she's not exactly in a tech hotspot). Trans people also face a lot of discrimination and often are trying to overcome multiple life challenges simultaneously, which compound.
Have you considered reaching out to some of the very prominent trans software bloggers who might be sympathetic and also be able to offer better resources?
I don't feel like it's appropriate to name names, but if you'd like I can email you the blogs of a few people who would certainly be widely recognized as staff-level, and might be open to helping your friend.
edit: since you mentioned she is currently housed at least, it will be much easier for her to turn things around if she is able to find work before that situation changes. Though this is really complicated by her having no work device right now. Can she get a loan to tide her over for the next few weeks? If not, maybe she'd be comfortable setting up a gofundme or similar?
Getting back on her feet will get much harder if she has to do it while homeless.
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#25This will be an unpopular opinion, but are you being scammed? Is she asking you for money?
Thank you for being concerned. No she is not asking for money. I came into contact with her when i discussed a project of mine in a Discord server. She approached me to join that project, did good work, showed geniune interest and had good ideas she was working on. I was looking forward to collaborate more with her. Her hours were cut after she helped the workplace find an issue in their IT infrastructure (which she reported proprely and professionally). It became obvious she didn't deal well with that. She was very overwhelmed with that situation and i offered her which help she accepted.
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#26This will be an unpopular opinion, but are you being scammed? Is she asking you for money?
I was thinking this same thing.
Please be cautious and avoid sending money.
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#27I think we should just ignore everyone suggesting she get treated for substance abuse issues. We don't know her situation, and even if she is using drugs, there are many functional addicts. If she's capable of working, it'd be nice if someone in the area offered her something like contract to hire, where they could then see for themselves if she's capable of succeeding in the field (I am in Canada and on the verge of…
> The real problem right now is a lack of a social safety net
Is that the real problem here? Unemployment in the United States is incredibly low and those who want to find good work for good pay are able to.
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#28I live in the southeast US, not Chattanooga, but not too far by US standards. At the moment basic, low skilled jobs are in high demand - almost every restaurant or store has a now hiring sign out, and the wages are 50% to 100% higher than before the pandemic. Similar story with manufacturing / warehousing. Amazon wants drivers, Walmart wants drivers, every grocery store wants drivers. I've never seen anything like it.
It sounds like most of the short-term emergency things could be fixed with a more steady income stream. [ $30K ] a year in a low cost of living area goes a long way compared to being homeless. It makes the car run, gets a Chromebook, plays for a cell phone plan with tethering.
I'm a programmer. I love it. As a teen I did manufacturing for six months, and I hated it. So I certainly understand grabbing a low skill job right doesn't look attractive, but it would stop the financial bleeding, and prevent things from getting out of hand while they find a software dev job.
On the immediate food side, I don't know about Chattanooga, but my town has super tiny food banks all over. There's not one centralized organization, and almost all of them are stocked at any one time. The are mom's on Facebook groups who keep track of them, and restock when low. (Some are as simple as a fridge on the side of a building, or a little library style box on a pole.) Most aren't listed on google. Not sure how to find them outside of asking around. Chattanooga has nine food banks listed on google. Odds are that they aren't all out of stock.
Good luck to both of you.
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#29I think we should just ignore everyone suggesting she get treated for substance abuse issues. We don't know her situation, and even if she is using drugs, there are many functional addicts. If she's capable of working, it'd be nice if someone in the area offered her something like contract to hire, where they could then see for themselves if she's capable of succeeding in the field (I am in Canada and on the verge of…
Both i and her have an effective social network reach of 0. I had considered asking for help but i have no idea where even to start. If you have any suggestion please email me. You seem to have a good grasp of her situation. Any lead would be helpful.
If you haven't seen i wrote about some code i was she had on her GitHub and we discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35672617
Re: Ask HN: American friends life is falling apart badly. What can I do to help?
#30This will be an unpopular opinion, but are you being scammed? Is she asking you for money?
you need to think one level deeper. are we sure we're not being scammed?
the amount of people willing to send complete strangers money over the internet is mind-blowing. check out /r/scams, and be amazed.