LESSWRONG
LW

All of Tigerlily's Comments + Replies

How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily10

Thank you for your response. Yes, I've done these things. The unfortunate reality is that my state is not very charitable. The decision makers here fund the Department of Child Safety with federal money intended for social safety net programs.

The TANF benefit, for instance, is like $200 per month per family but requires recipients to spend a certain amount of hours every week in an office doing stupid busy work as punishment for not being employed, thus reducing the time/energy they could otherwise be using to find some income generating activity to do for... (read more)

Reply
How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily10

Thanks, I have done DataAnnotation already a few months back. It's true that it's difficult to get assignments there after you finish the first one or two. They supposedly have tons of work for people who specialize in certain tech roles, but that obviously won't apply to most people. There is also virtually no way to contact anyone who works at DataAnnotation if you have questions. But I have made a few dollars there.

Reply
How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily10

It is not that high here, but this is something I will look into if we can get to Seattle. But does this not require a license?

Reply
3Hastings
No one we have worked with has had a license. I think you need one to take care of multiple people's kids at your house, but not to take care of one family's kids at their house.
How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily30

To be honest, I downplayed much of my situation in my post. After all, it is my first post. I have contributed nothing to this community so far. I feel it's irresponsible and sort of entitled to hose people down with the full weight of my very negative and emotionally draining circumstances as an introductory post. It's not charming. I kept thinking, while writing this post, "do I really want this to be the first thing I say to these people?" I respect this community more than any other one and understand that it can only absorb so many posts that essentia... (read more)

Reply
2nim
I hear you, describing how weird social norms in the world can be. I hear you describing how you followed those norms to show consideration for readers by dressing up a very terrible situation as a slightly less bad one. In social settings where people both know who you are and are compelled by the circumstances to listen to what you say, that's still the right way to go about it. The rudeness of taking peoples' time is very real in person, where a listener is socially "forced" to invest time in listening or effort in escaping the conversation. But posts online are different: especially when you lack the social capital of "this post is by someone I know I often like reading, so I should read it to see what they say", readers should feel no obligation to read your whole post, nor to reply, if they don't want to. When you're brand new to a community, readers can easily dismiss your post as a bot or scammer and simply ignore it, so you have done them no harm in the way that consuming someone's time in person harms them. A few trolls may choose to read your post and then pretend you forced them to do so, but anyone who behaves like that is inherently outing themself as someone whose opinions about you don't deserve much regard. (and then you get some randos who like how you write and decide to be micro-penpals... hi there!) However, there's another option for how to approach this kind of thing online. You can spin up an anonymous throwaway and play the "asking for a friend" game -- take the option of direct help or directly contacting the "actual person" off the table, and you've ruled out being a gofundme scam. Sometimes asking on behalf of a fictional person whose circumstances happen to be more like the specifics of your own than you would disclose in public gets far better answers. For instance, if the fictional person had a car problem involving a specific model year of vehicle and a specific insurance company, the internet may point out that there's a recall on
How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily30

Thank you for this. I'm not eligible for it but I will send it to my sister who is. She needs emergency dental work but the health insurance plan offered through her employer doesn't cover it so she's just been suffering through the pain. So really, thank you. She will be so glad.

Reply
How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily10

Thank you for the thoughtful suggestions. Aella is exemplary but camgirling strikes me as a nightmare.

I have considered making stuff, like custom glasses/premium drinkware, and selling on Etsy but the market seems saturated and I've never had the money to buy the equipment to learn the skills required to do this kind of thing.

I am certified in Salesforce and could probably get hired helping to manage the Salesforce org for my tribe (Cherokee Nation) but would have to move to Oklahoma.

I've applied for every grant I can find that I'm eligible for, but there'... (read more)

Reply
5RedMan
If you can get a salesforce cert, you can get any of the other baseline IT certs.  Being a female and being native is actually massive for hiring at companies that care about that stuff. Apply for government IT jobs, help desk type stuff, a lot of it is hybrid or remote, if it's a hybrid position, ask to be remote for the first month (two paychecks) to manage moving.   Six months in, open a business, ask your company to switch you to 1099, route the job through your business, work it for another year, this creates a performance history.  Now you are a poor, native american woman owned small business, and you can apply for 8A set aside contracts as the prime.  This allows you to take 10% or so off the top when teaming with a large company that will actually staff the thing.  Grow to around 40 employees, sell for 5-10mil in 15 years. It's not honest work, but lots of people have done this.  If you think I'm full of it, I literally worked on a contract where one of the companies on the winning team was called "Native American Woman".   Good luck.
How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Tigerlily20

Thank you for your response. I probably should have given a more exhaustive list of things I have already tried. Other than a couple things you mentioned, I have already tried the rest.

Before becoming a stay-at-home parent, I was a writer. I wasn't well paid but was starting to earn professional rates when I got pregnant with my second child and that took over my life. I have found it difficult to start writing again since then. The industry has changed so much and is changing still, and so am I. My life is so different now. I'm less sure of what I write -... (read more)

Reply
2nim
Ah, so you have skill and a portfolio in writing. You have the cognitive infrastructure to support using the language as art. That infrastructure itself is what you should be trying to rent to tech companies -- not the art it's capable of producing. If the art part of writing is out of reach for you right now, that's ok -- it's almost a benefit in this case, because if it's not around it can't feel left out if you turn to more pragmatic ends the skills you used to celebrate it with. Normally I wouldn't suggest startups, because they're so risky/uncertain... but in a situation as precarious as yours, it's no worse to see who's looking for writers on a startup-flavored site like https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs. And finally, I'm taking the titular "severe emergency" to be the whole situation, because it sounds pretty dire. If there's a specific sub-emergency that drove you to ask -- a medical bill, a car breakdown -- there may be more-specific resources that folks haven't mentioned yet. (or if you've explained that in someone else's comment thread, i apologize for asking redundantly; i've not read your replies to others)