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Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#51
>> and building my own AI-assisted mental health tools (ChatGPT literally saved me) Come anytime to our AI Workshop & Playground as my VIP (you'll need to join via Zoom) and share your tools & journey. We have founders, developers, etc.

http://earthpilot.ai/play

Package up your mental health tools and start teaching folks how to do the same as you did.

If you can get yourself a tow behind RV, you can drop it on Federal Land and only need to goto a new spot every 2-3 weeks.

Luckily you are in a beautiful place for car camping.

Also, can you work from a library?

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#52
post #26

Poster who replied is right. I am out of my depths.

Homeless people usually can't benefit much from food banks, since they give out little (or no) ready to eat food. Maybe I missed it but I don't think OP mentioned having access to a kitchen or even a fridge. Cooking on a camp stove or something is possible but can be very risky depending on location and other factors. Living out of your car it's extremely important not to draw police attention to yourself, you do not…

Updated my comment. You are very correct.

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#53
post #10

> I drive Lyft/Uber full-time Stop driving Lyft/Uber. It's for those who don't have any skills beyond driving a car. Sit down and determine what are the skills that you currently possess that are the most valuable on the market right now. Then sell those to the highest bidder. My two cents, that isn't a job. > I know I can earn 3-4x more doing freelance tech, but I can’t do that from a car. Yes, you can. That's a lim…

I only have a desktop. I thought about getting office space from the chamber of commerce for 250 per month... and I can use their fridge to save money on food (Greek yogurt, Jimmy Dean sandwiches, and string cheese is all I need)...

> I only have a desktop.

Sell it. It's a paperweight for you right now. You can find a really nice open-box/used laptop for $300-400 that will allow you to work from anywhere. You can charge the laptop at a cafe or a library. $5 for coffee and you have a working space to take calls and work.

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#54
Your area may have several services that can keep you from being homeless. There should be some social workers good at helping people with just your problems. E.g., they may have a shelter you can use overnight. For long term housing, they may have an area, not easy to see from the main streets, with a few dozen manufactured/mobile houses with subsidized, low rents. They may have sources of food or money for food, maybe a free food credit card, and Walmart, etc. have selected basic foods for such payment means. Your area may have some essentially free basic health care -- apparently there are some quiet Federal programs that funnel money to pay for such services. Where I am, an immigrant started doing yard work mowing grass. Soon he had a truck pulling a trailer with equipment and had hired a few people. Now he has a very nice truck, trailer, and equipment -- big mower with 'sulky', leaf blowers, edge trimmers, etc., maybe > $150,000 in equipment. It looks like he is making good money, and he only works ~8 months a year. So, if could work for some such guy, could learn the details of his business and then start your own. Might help to read up a little on the botany of care and feeding of grass, flowers, trees. Shockingly, there may be more money in a grass mowing business than can expect as an employee with a BS in computer science: Such a business has some advantages, e.g., geographical barrier to entry. Get paid for the work, yes, but also for reliability, trust and generally pleasing the customers. Likely most of the candidate customers don't know much about competitive rates. In such small businesses, references stand to mean a lot. And if your area has cold winters, maybe could keep busy moving ice and snow. Tires for a car? Not so long ago, some people waited until the threads started to show! And might be able to get used tires for much less. Maybe some people for a while don't have licenses and insurance up to date. Maybe "Taxes? What taxes? I don't need no stink'n taxes!" Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#55
Shelter first. The cheapest land anywhere ideally with trees, building a structure out of sight, gathering materials with what money I got. There's books on concrete foundations in public libraries, frames, any topic... a water well and some veggies will meet my physiological needs.

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#56
post #36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he switches from contract/1099 to a wage job I wonder if child support will start garnishing the fuck out of it. This is the black hole a lot of people get sucked into and end up having to start their own business to buy some runway because the courts very much enjoy kicking non custodial parents in the teeth to the point they cannot get one foot on the ground.

Supporting their kids is one of their responsibilities. Child support is income-based. I haven’t had to navigate that system so don’t have specific advice, but I’m not going to support someone dodging child support.

It is based on imputed not actual income, unlike taxes. Hence say someone getting taken hostage by terrorists will owe back support and be jailed upon their release [0].

The tax analogy would be the IRS thinks you should be better at stocks, maybe on the basis you had a few good years, then taxes you for that this year instead of your bad gains due to luck/depression/whatever.

https://greensboro.com/ex-hostage-jailed-in-child-support-ca...

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#57

1. Give up dream of tech. 2. Call local tech schools and ask about rapid certifications and sponsorship programs like Kentucky has for CDL training doe people experiencing privation 3. Live on student loans working toward a licensable occupation in which graduate degrees benefit you, such as social work, nursing, teaching, paralegal 4. Live on loans either in a dorm or get the cheapest studio apartment around. 5. You…

There's a reason there are a lot of highly qualified people from India in tech. It's because their government actively created affordable high quality higher education in these fields. Rather than say this is because "Indians" maybe you should ask why your government didn't invest in affordable modern education systems in order to compete.

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#58
You are in a tough spot.

I would warn against AI-assisted mental health tools regardless of any advertised claims or promotions. AI is more likely to harm than it is to help for a number of reasons I won't get into here. It can create convincing lies where you are worse off later.

If you want to do better, you will need to start networking with people that can help. There is no power as a lone wolf, members in a community people help each-other.

On a personal level, you need stable working space, and living space. Mental health is tied to stable spaces, isolation and food/shelter security will drive you mad faster than anything else.

You will only be as good as the working space you are currently in allows.

> I drive Lyft/Uber full-time ... without these costs I can't work.

You will need to properly project and evaluate whether this is sustainable. From what I've heard of Uber, I'm guessing it is not.

You shouldn't be doing work and trading time that doesn't move you forward to a better place than you started at. There are predatory companies out there that will suck you dry and spit you out. There is an opportunity cost to being a wage slave.

It sounds like you will need to figure out your expenses, and your average income for 40 hours including breaks at regular intervals (for health).

If you can't make a sustainable profit factoring in seasonality, you can't do that work and must find something else.

You should be including the required tax withholdings for business. Being a contractor must make sense. Net not gross for viability with at least a 20% profit margin for unexpected expense.

I would not recommend Information Sciences to anyone at this stage. It is a pipe dream now. Those that have the experience already can leverage it, but those that don't, now is not the time and it will only get worse from here-on-out without providing marketable skills.

Homesteading/farming might be an option though not one I'd recommend without a background/community that can help you with it.

You should focus on practical skills like handyman type blue-collar trades. Plumbing, HVAC, Pools, Electricians, Welding, Steelwork, or Machining. It doesn't take long to learn, and doesn't require a lot of equipment (much of which you can get second hand very cheaply).

Once you spend roughly 60% of your time doing the work part of whatever you choose (not the management), and bringing in a net profit, you should look at hiring your first hire as a business (without debt). Distributing labor is how we got to our current heights at a technological society.

Most white-collar work will be fully disrupted by AI in the next 2-5 years blocking off the sequential career pipeline by replacing entry-level work in these fields with AI. Business monopoly through integration has made the decision to force a deflationary cycle as we approach the end of market-driven business in 2030 (business stops doing business when profit in purchasing power cannot be made, those tied to money-printing can continue long after business fails).

Soon monopoly will have won so much that they force everyone (including themselves) to lose everything.

1 in 4 people are out of work right now, it will be much worse a few years from now because the economic cycle is reaching its inflection point (zenith) with liquidity drying up fast, followed by economic armageddon in 2030 (stage 3 ponzi; outflows/debt growth exceeds inflows. Kicking the can no longer works and these are the consequences of the last 100 years of economic and monetary policy.

I don't know your location's job market but you will need to go where the jobs are, and those places are shrinking. A local economy that is contracting will leave fewer options unless you are near the bottom level of the producer market.

The situation is not just you, the economy is and has been in the shitter, because of the Fed (boom bust cycle design, and the terminus from it to ECP/SCP chaos economically speaking). Shortages are prominent and sustaining. Famine driven by artificial supply constraint is likely to be next if history is any guide.

You will need to find a community of people who are self-sufficient, and become self-sufficient yourself. Many such communities do not welcome outsiders because most people today do not contribute reciprocally and act parasitically.

Before asking for help you should always offer help in something. This shows you are willing to work, above what lip service gives.

Staying afloat is about having the skills to navigate life in any economy. Producing what you need from little to nothing.

Many people have been robbed of this. The non-hollywood mythology of the American Dream is Self-sufficiency, Faith, Freedom, Independence and No taxation without representation. This is the True American Dream.

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#59
I have a spare laptop I could ship, it's running Linux now and cannot "officially" run Win11. It's a little older, Lenovo X1 Carbon with a chipped case & wonky touch bar for the Fn keys, but it works perfectly fine.

If you're interested and want to drop a way to contact you, I'll figure out a way to ship it to you. Otherwise, as much as I loathe sending you to Facebook, the local "buy nothing" groups another commentor recommended sounds like a good place to start.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How do I escape homelessness after rebuilding my mental health?

#60
Hats off for winning the first battle. Winning back your mind. It's not easy.

Freelance, as you said, might be a pragmatic next step. Sell your desktop PC to buy a laptop or get a cheap Thinkpad. Models from a few years ago are still perfectly good for programming. And then you could work from libraries.

I don't know how the tech market is going to evolve, but if the junior to mid level market stays as it is or worse then it might be prudent to think about acquiring additional skills that can't be automated so easily, i.e. plumbing, electric etc. Something I'm considering.

If you have a Gofundme - I'd be happy to contribute.

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