I am now worthless

[Stephen Morgan]

A job with the wheat lobby.

So I was right about bread as the food of poverty. In that case- eat away. Do you splurge for butter? If I were super poor I think I'd keep the butter and probably do dried beans, which have a lot of protein and are dirt cheap.

Butter, no. Occasionally margerine, with toast, but not with sandwiches. Even with toast I'm more likely to have baked beans. Four tins for under two pound.

Do you have a field of work that you're looking in, Stephen? My favorite low-wage jobs have been taking care of autistic people and pizza delivery. The latter I wasn't actually very good at, but I had fun, anyway. Why the *fuck* aren't the numbers on the houses, and why on earth does it jump from 42 to 126? I bet the numbering system was much more sensible in Soviet Russia... I remember thinking....

If I can get a job delivering via public transport that'd be fine. I don't think taking care of people is for me. I get distressed around people who need taking care of. I don't really have any experience or marketable skills, see. Even the things I know a bit about I'm not up to professional standard with. And I've got no qualifications.

There are almost always caretaking and delivery driving jobs available in the college town I live in, as well as canvassing for stupid liberal non-profits, which I'd have to be at absolute starvation to do.

Last interview I had was at Ladbrokes. If you're a foreigner, that's a firm of bookmakers. Didn't get it. Don't get many interviews, as there's nothing to particularly recommend me on an application form.

[wordspeak2]

Ouch. So how long can you live off unemployment or whatever?

[Stephen Morgan]

Ouch. So how long can you live off unemployment or whatever?

Permanently. I believe American benefits come with time limits, but English ones don't. Rather, the amount of my rent, up to the Local Housing Allowance limit, and the amount the government have chosen as a minimum for subsistence, will be provided on a permanent basis. Given that I tend not to drink or smoke or indulge in other expensive habits, that's perfectly adequate.

[wordspeak2]

SOCIALIST WELFARE STATE MOOCHER YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOUR PATHETIC...
Wow, yeah, unemployment is six months here in the United States of Goldman Sachs. Half of your previous income, I believe. Then you're on the streets, and good luck finding a homeless shelter.

Is unemployment there based on your previous income, or is it standard? How much more would you be making if you found a low-wage job, significantly more or no?

"Perfectly adequate" might not be the term, Stephen, but better than nothing, certainly, aye?

[Stephen Morgan]

SOCIALIST WELFARE STATE MOOCHER YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOUR PATHETIC...
Wow, yeah, unemployment is six months here in the United States of Goldman Sachs. Half of your previous income, I believe. Then you're on the streets, and good luck finding a homeless shelter.

I'd heard that America was full of abandoned houses.

Is unemployment there based on your previous income, or is it standard? How much more would you be making if you found a low-wage job, significantly more or no?

Previous income doesn't matter here, you just get a flat rate depending on age and number of people in the house.

I get about £65 a week dole, £80 a week LHA (Local Housing Allowance, aka Housing Benefit), minimum wage is about £6 per hour. You get lesser amounts of LHA if you make a low wage, though, and there's tax credits if you work more than 30 hours a week or if you've got kids. You can't claim JSA (Job Seekers' Allowance) if you work more than 16 hours a week, and if you work less than that you can keep five pounds a week of your wages in addition to JSA.

So people working less than sixteen hours are normally kids too young for benefits or people who can't claim because they're living with someone who works. Working more than 16 but less than 30 can be doable, but in my case that would require a new housing benefit claim, which would take them several weeks to process since it was all spun off to a private company, and that would be several weeks unable to pay rent, so that would be more likely to cause homelessness than staying on the dole. Housing is absurdly expensive, the alleged collapse of the housing bubble had very little effect and actually put rental prices up substantially. As you can see, my rather unpleasant digs cost more than half my income.

"Perfectly adequate" might not be the term, Stephen, but better than nothing, certainly, aye?

It suffices.

[sunny]

I'd heard that America was full of abandoned houses.

There's one right next door to us. It was foreclosed on summer of 2010. My former BIL is still living in the home he and my SIL lost almost 4 years ago. Banks can't be arsed to deal with so much inventory, I guess.

Congratulations on being worthless. Wish I could say the same. We're pretty much hanging on for dear life.

[Harvey]

I'm in the same boat. I signed off because I hated the BS. I'm self employed, work a few days a week in a book shop. Do some volunteer work. I earn so little that you're actually slightly ahead of me. I just wanted to say, I know what it's like, but that I agree, once you don't smoke and drink overmuch it can be done. I had help quitting though. A few months ago, something told me to STOP SMOKING and made it easy for me to do so. From a 60 to 80 a day habit, where the first thing that happened before I opened my eyes in the morning was that I rolled a cigarette... It's good sometimes just to know that you're not alone.

[sunny]

We HAVE to quit smoking, that's for sure. It's too much. It's funny, nothing much has changed about our income the last two years--it went up slightly about two years ago but not since-- but we find ourselves slipping behind because the price of everything keeps going up. Everything. A couple months ago I could get us by [there are 7 of us now, including two children] on groceries for a week for $180, if I made almost everything the hard way. Now that amount is stretched too thin. Yes there are a lot of us but believe me I've always known how to stretch a food dollar like a champ.

Except on rare occasions we don't drink at all. I sometimes procure small amounts of Mother Nature's Valium but I'm willing to give it up if I have to.

[Nordic]

SOCIALIST WELFARE STATE MOOCHER YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOUR PATHETIC...
Wow, yeah, unemployment is six months here in the United States of Goldman Sachs. Half of your previous income, I believe. Then you're on the streets, and good luck finding a homeless shelter.

Here in Southern California, unemployment doesn't pay the bills. No way, even if you were single and living with roommates, it probably wouldn't pay the bills. So it's kind of a slow death as opposed to a fast death.

It does help, I suppose, with groceries and that sort of thing, but you can't depend on it or you'll end up homeless. And then it stops anyway.

And of course the amount you get is based on how much you worked something like 18 months ago! So if you had a bad year 18 months ago, you're sorta screwed.


On edit: Most jobs now don't pay enough to pay the bills either. I don't know how people do it unless they live with their parents, or live 10 to an apartment or something.

[wordspeak2]

I'm not quite how people do it either, honestly. I've also admired it. In the college town area I'm in there are several excellent "survival centers." I've spent some time in one. How much do they exist in the rest of the country, or is it just because I'm in a hyper-liberal area. Here pretty much anyone can walk in and get two warm meals a day six days a week- plus nice clothes, canned foods, etc.

[Nordic]

You can do that one day a year here -- thanksgiving -- when people like to feel like they're charitable.

Drove past the Santa Monica civic center on Thanksgiving day and it looked like people were lining up for a rock concert or something -- huge line down the sidewalk and around the building -- then I realized it was to get the free food. Very sad. People from all walks of life, definitely not just homeless people. In fact none of the ones I saw looked homeless.


I'm noticing something about myself, and I'm wondering if it happens to others -- the worse things get for me, the more I want to help everybody else.
Is that unusual, or natural?

[wordspeak2]

It's natural, but that's very cool to hear. Pretty interesting that you don't see a lot of really genuinely giving rich people- you see a few- but all sorts of poor and lower-middle-class folks will give you the shirt off their back.

Sunny, I'm plugging for you to find a way to quit smoking the bad stuff and keep smoking the good stuff. Actually, if you could ever afford the $ down the most economical thing is a vaporizer. That's what I use; it pays for itself quickly because it's like five times more efficient than smoking, but you have to have the $ to get one in the first place, several hundred for a good one, though there are mini cheap ones out there now, too.

[sunny]

We have a nice, mid-priced vaporizer we bought for the youngest grandbaby--will that do?

I've cut way down on cigarettes. It takes me about 4 days now to finish a pack so it shouldn't be too long before I quit completely. Or maybe I can become one of those people I've always admired who can smoke a single cigarette only occasionally. However, I'm not totally convinced pot smoke can hurt your lungs unless it's infused with something inorganic. I know of some old-timers who smoked pure tobacco right off the farm and lived to be a hundred and slightly beyond.

Yes Nordic and wordspeak, I think the altruism among our kind is perfectly natural. I find myself worrying if the shit hits the fan, will I have enough put back to share with my neighbors? I make a conscious effort to make sure that I do. Also, we've taken to swapping goods and services here in our neighborhood. Recently my husband fixed a neighbor's car and happily accepted 4 jugs of juice for the kids in exchange.

[wordspeak2]

[quote="sunny"]We have a nice, mid-priced vaporizer we bought for the youngest grandbaby--will that do?

I guess it will, huh? I mean does it work well? Wait, what's its intended function for the grandbaby? I'm in love with my $300 generic Volcano vape.

You wrote pot smoke doesn't hurt the lungs much in its natural state... you meant tobacco, yes? Pot smoke certainly doesn't. This was my latest contribution to Facebook:
Study: Pot doesn't harm lungs like tobacco does http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... ung11.html

[sunny]

WS2, sorry I wasn't clear. I only meant it as a comparison. If pure tobacco smoke seemed relatively harmless to our close ancestors how much less so is modern untreated pot smoke? Good to see there are studies to back this up. I enjoy a toke.