[AnimalMuppet]

From your comments, I actually was somewhat aware of your situation. (Though it was news to me that you had made it off the street. Very welcome news, too.) I tried to write my comment such that it didn't imply anything negative about you. I can now see how what I wrote can be taken that way; I didn't intend that.

I meant to be saying that people can, though no fault of their own, fail to create much economic value, at least as measured in dollars that people will pay for what they do. (Yeah, sometimes it's their fault. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's kind of a mix - they made a choice, and it worked out badly, but it wasn't a clear-cut bad choice. Sometimes it's hard to tell. The point is, these people are there, in very bad economic circumstances.) The question is, what do we do about it? What do we do that genuinely helps them, without taxing the rich so much that it dulls the incentive to create the stuff that will make all of us better off?

And since there's (I think) a lot of "help" that doesn't actually help, I'll specifically ask you: What would have helped you?

[Mz]

You are taking my remarks very graciously. Thank you for that. I don't mean to be a bear on such topics, but sometimes I come across that way.

I posted the announcement that I was off the street to HN and it very, very quietly got upvoted over the course of the night and people were very kind to me in remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15205436

It didn't make the front page. The surprisingly high karma count for the piece happened really slowly, not enough to get it on the front page, so I imagine that a lot of people missed the announcement. It was a very strange experience.

What would have helped me would have been to get taken more seriously. In fact, once I began getting taken more seriously, that did help me. In recent months, I sometimes get resume work and I have a small amount of Patreon money for my blog writing. (Plus, my blogs sometimes get tips and my ad money is trending up as traffic trends up.) That preceded me getting back into housing and helped facilitate it.

I have reason to believe that sometimes rather influential people read what I write, but do not ever promote my work. They don't want to admit to reading anything I write. This makes me pretty crazy. A little more traffic, a small amount more social proof that I am not just a crazy loser or whatever can (and did, when it finally happened on a very small scale) make a difference for someone like me.

I think there are a number of reasons I don't get taken seriously or treated in a manner that helps me make money. I think classism is a factor and I think my gender is a factor.

There are other issues, like some people legitimately think I am nuts. But, some of those people were extremely ugly to me in a way that is wholly unwarranted by an assumption of mental health issues. These were often people who imagine they are good and kind people. They often wear that on their sleeve. It is virtue signaling and their actions (at least wrt me) don't match their claims.

So, less virtue signaling, and more just helping me figure out how to make money online, which was the primary I thing I asked for consistently over the years and was often openly dismissed, often by people who, themselves, earn their living online in some sense or to some degree.