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Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving On Bitcoins
An anonymous reader writes "Wired profiles a homeless man who's supporting himself primarily through Bitcoin. Jesse Angle, a former network engineer, earns small amounts throughout the day by visiting various websites that pay him to look at ads. He then converts it to gift certificates and uses the certificates to buy food. '"It's a lot less embarrassing," he says. "You don't have to put yourself out there." And unlike panhandling in Pensacola, using an app like Bitcoin Tapper won't put him on the wrong side of the law. This past May, Pensacola — where Angle has lived since April — passed an ordinance that bans not only panhandling but camping on city property.' Angle learned about Bitcoin from a charity organization called Sean's Outpost that wanted something better than PayPal for accepting donations over the internet. The organization has even opened an outreach center paid for solely with Bitcoins. Founder Jason King said, 'Bitcoin beats the s#!% out of regular money, We've resonated so well with people because it's direct action. There's no chaff between donation and helping people.'"
eHobo?
My sister's husband's nephew is homeless but makes $4,500 a month just looking at Internet ads!!! You can too!!!
For more information go here:
http://www.makemoneywhilelivingunderthebridge.com
Have you compared the price of those energy drinks with a bag of apples or coffee?
I wouldn't call coffee nutritious in any way, but I know that I can get about 5 pounds of bananas, 1 pound of beans, or 2 pounds of rice for the price of one of those "energy drinks".
I don't respond to AC's.
For what? To sit at home and watch TV?
I have no problem with the concept that everyone needs (deserves?) a basic income provided by society. I have a huge problem with the concept that they do not, in turn, owe society for that.
Give them a basic salary and then choose what menial position the Bureau of Suggested (Forced) Labor deems is best for their skills. Maybe that is doing stupid shit on the internet, I don't know, nor care, but they damn well should be doing SOMETHING.
Giving everyone 25k a year (okay, 40k a year in some places) to live, with no expectation that they will do anything other than convert oxygen to CO2 and reproduce is rather short sighted insomuch as it ignores the vast laziness of so very, very many people.
Just another ignorant American.
He doesn't pay for internet. He uses free public wifi in a park. He mainly survives off of food stamps but uses the bitcoin revenue to supplement that.
I seriously doubt he pays a phone bill unless it's prepaid, certainly not for data. Bitcoin doesn't require a bank account (which often charges a monthly fee if you have too little money) and people can't beat you up and take your bitcoins.
And exactly how is selling your laptop to maybe afford one more month of rent going to help your living situation? Then you're just homeless without a laptop.
I think he has proved that keeping the laptop is worth its weight in food as a potential income source.
I don't understand why people always hate on the homeless. Is it so impossible to imagine a situation where you're down on your luck and fall through the cracks? Not everyone has a safety net of family and friends. I almost feel like the idea scares people so much that they get reflexively angry about as a form of denial.
"It's impossible! This could obviously never happen to me and so these people must be scammers, scum, or addicts!"
No... the real left is thinking that a basic income guarantee is becoming very close to feasible. Perhaps not yet, but we are getting close to the point where the labor generated by people who work for either self fulfillment or access to luxury goods and services can produce enough wealth to provide every household with a basic income capable of covering rent, food and basic utilities.
Not even we here in Norway which is about commie-red by US standards goes that far, in fact we just took one baby step away from socialism in the last election. The problem is quite simply that if people don't feel it pays off to work they won't. If they put the "basic income" too low, the poor can't actually afford to use it. It'll only become a cheaper way for the middle class to take a year off as many people dream of doing to fulfill some sort of self-realization but find too expensive. If they raise it too close to a low-end job, who really want to struggle eight hours a day in a dead end, physically demanding job when they can bum around and play video games? Because obviously we'd have to tax the shit out of people to pay for all this, so it's not like your pay would become your current pay + your basic income, that'd require us to create tons of money from nothing.
Already we're seeing certain trends in welfare abuse, not directly fraud as such but people who try very hard to get disabilities claims or to keep their unemployment claims by not being very employable. Statistically we know these trends aren't real because we don't have the sickest population in Europe and our working conditions are very gentle compared to many other countries yet we have one of the highest disability ratios in the western world. It just doesn't add up. These are the kind of people who are already looking to get out of the job market, they'd all take basic income and never return. Recently we've had some changes to the pension system where you could elect to retire earlier for lower pensions and lots of people got out at 62 instead of 67. Really, all the signs point to that if people can get a living paycheck without working, damn many would get the hell out.
Of course, the naive say that for each one that takes a year off a position opens up for someone else. That's not how it works, businesses aren't going to hire a dropout who is also now on basic income and probably happy with it just because they lost someone, they're not that desperate to keep the headcount up. If we decrease the talent pool, the jobs are just likely to disappear or move overseas. I think such a system would belly flop miserably but I'd be the first one on it, I'd see it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take a year off at a reasonable cost. I'm thinking I'm not alone in that respect, good luck replacing all of us from the ranks of the currently unemployed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, holding down a job is tough when you are struggling with things like depression or any other mental illness. I compare it juggling with an extra ball added. While we are all juggle with ups and downs in life, I go into severe funks and cut myself off from the world.
I have been fighting it for years and it makes it hard to concentrate. I also take things really hard when I don't know something or can't figure out something right away. So people think I just don't care sometimes when the opposite is actually true.
While I can hold a job and went to a good school...its pretty middling work and I had poor grades. It makes me very frustrated and angry when I look back at this because I lost a good chunk of my youth sitting around waiting for the world to come crashing down on me.
My experience has been that hard work and really investing in therapy has paid the most dividends. While I do take medicines like Prozac, and it does help, being totally honest with a strong group of people (led by a very competent counselor) about my situation and past gets me away from the crushing isolation I feel sometimes. The sad thing is, the whole mental health system in this country (US) puts almost all its stock to treat illness it doesn't really understand with medicines that they don't really seem to understand. Also the US has a rapidly deteriorating safety net and more and more people that could be treated and put back into circulation as productive members of society are just falling through the cracks of this country.
I don't mean to be too political, but I have taken food stamps at one time and I can't believe the politicians are trying to cut it off.
With proper mental health care, a great deal of those people could be medicated, counseled and otherwise treated to the point where they could become contributing members of society, and the ones that are too far gone for that, could be off the streets and getting proper care somewhere.
We have free/public health care in Canada, as well as public drug plans like the Trillium plan here in Ontario, which can offer up to 100% drug coverage depending on your income level. We still have homeless people with mental illness. We probably have less than in the US, but you can only help people who want to be helped, and some people will always choose to live on the street. (some people will end up there because they don't realize they have a choice, but that is a different discussion entirely)