#homelessness is skyrocketing.

[voskhozhdeniye]

[irregularbillcipher]

looks like he got the whole set!

[sobeautifullyobsessed]

Still coping with homelessness and doing my best to count my blessings when I can.

Though I still haven't found a permanent home within my means, I'm happy to share that I have a safe place to stay since last night and for the next six nights. It's a huge relief not to have to scrabble every couple of days to find a place to lay my head (including the breakroom at work), and I'm so grateful to have access to hot showers and a bed.

However...

The bad news is that this comes at the cost of leaving me severly cash strapped. Between my checking account and my pocketbook, I've got exactly $40 to last until my next paycheck (August 31). I have groceries enough to feed me the next few days and under a quarter tank of gas (the only driving I do is back & forth to work). So, as much as I don't want to ask for help again, I must because next Thursday is still ten days away. The town food shelf is open one morning a week, and that's while I'm scheduled to work. I would greatly appreciate any donations people can spare to bridge me to the 31st.

As always, thank you in advance for your understanding and kindness!💗Even a reblog could make a crucial difference in my situation.

my kofi

[anotherpapercut]

"the housing market is crashing" "YES PLEASE I CANT WAIT TO BUY A SUPER AFFORDABLE AND CHEAP HOUSE" none of you are going to be able to buy a house when the market crashes. you've all got to give up this dream :/ you're gonna be so fucking disappointed when another recession hits and you're actually just poorer and less able to afford housing than before

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[higurehige]

Fellas, is it Cruel and Unusual to tell homeless people to kill themselves?

[woundedheartwithin]

US federal government just banned the use of humorous traffic signs on highways, just in case anyone was wondering how we’re doing over here

[genderqueerdykes]

homeless disabled trans person needs help paying for hotel, storage unit & phone while government assistance housing program keeps delaying their move in date

March 21st, 3/21/2024: hello, I'm equinox or Johnny, I'm a severely multiply disabled trans person living in a hotel right now due to not being able to afford apartments on the housing market right now. i have a guaranteed apartment through a government assistance program, but their compliance team keeps delaying my move in date because they cannot figure out how to calculate my earned income because i am self employed. they have been running me in circles asking for the exact same information for six months and have been becoming increasingly more condescending and rude as I've pointed out that they're asking for information i physically cannot provide, like "bank statements" for GoFundMe, a fundraiser website that considers all money earned personal gifts, and tumblr bank statements.

i haven't been able to get my hormones in weeks.

i was promised to move into my apartment on the 7th, then the 11th of this month, and it was requested of me to put the electricity bill in my name so I could get moved in as soon as possible. I did this and now i have a $20 electric bill in my name because they've delayed for so long. my unit has been sitting empty for 6 months and now I'm expected to pay for the electricity that is running in a 1 bedroom apartment I'm not living in.

i have been homeless for 6 months straight. i have been living in my hotel for 2 months. my hotel has been without WiFi for a month which forced me to get a Tracfone with a data plan so I can do my job and communicate with this apartment complex via email. i unfortunately need to buy more data because this has taken so long. most of my possessions including large portions of my stock and shipping supplies are in my storage unit, of which the $78 bill is due in 3 days.

the hotel I'm staying at is normally $40/night but the prices are skyrocketing this weekend because this is a very cheap hotel due to its low rates. i can't afford any of these nights independently of each other, let alone altogether, and it's Thursday and i haven't heard a single word about my move in date.

i have been depressed and crying for days, i cracked a tooth from clenching my teeth and i haven't been sleeping due to stress and nightmares. anything helps. thank you for taking the time to read and support and share. everyone has kept me housed for 2 months so far. i owe you all so much

PayP al: glittergraphicnightmare@gmail.com

cash app: $glitterGraphix

venmo: @ Equinoxian

chime: @ Equinoxian

[therosecleric]

URGENT: Please help a queer disabled household avoid homelessness.

We are incredibly exhausted and past the point of embarrassment and desperation, but the harsh reality is - we're going to be homeless soon if we do not get the help we need to move. We are queer, disabled, work multiple jobs, and it still isn't enough to cover all of our bills, with our landlord raising rent & groceries and utilities skyrocketing in price.

Here is a link to our fundraiser.

I apologize for having to ask for aid during these times, but we are grateful for anyone who is able to help us in any way so that we can avoid being in this position again.

Everyone deserves safety. Everyone deserves shelter. If you cannot donate, please share with whoever you can. We sincerely thank everyone that is able to help us, and we hope to be in a position where we can give back to the community that has shown us love and care.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Biden wants to ban ripoff “financial advisors”

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Once, American workers had "defined benefits pensions," where their employers promised to pay them a certain amount every year from their retirement to their death. Jimmy Carter swapped that out for 401(k)s, "market" pensions where you have to guess which stocks will be valuable or starve in your old age:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The initial 401(k) rollout had all kinds of pot-sweeteners that made them seem like a good deal, like heavy employer matching that doubled or even tripled the value of every dollar you put into the market for your retirement. But over the years, as Reaganomics took hold and workers' power ebbed away, all these goodies were clawed back. In the end, the market-based pension makes you the sucker at the poker table, flushing your savings into a rigged casino that is firmly tilted in favor of finance barons and other eminently guillotineable plutocrats.

Neoliberalism is many things, but most of all it is a cult of individualism. The fact that three generations of workers are nows facing down retirement without pensions that will provide them with secure housing and food – let alone money to see the odd movie, buy birthday gifts for their grandkids, or enjoy a meal out now and then – is framed as millions of individual failures, not a systemic one.

In other words, if you are facing food insecurity and homelessness after a lifetime of hard work, it's because you saved wrong. Perhaps you didn't save enough (through a 40-year run of wage stagnation and skyrocketing housing, health and education costs). Or perhaps you saved wrong, making the wrong bets on the stock market. If you can't afford to run your air conditioner during a heat dome, that's on you: you should have been better at stocks.

Apologists for this system will say that you don't have to be good at stocks – you just have to pay an Independent Financial Advisor to pick the stocks for you and you'll be fine. But IFAs don't work for free! What if you can't afford one?

Enter "predatory inclusion" – the practice of offering scammy, overpriced and substandard products to poor people and declaring it to be a good deed, because otherwise, those poor people would have to do without. The crypto bubble relied heavily on this: think of Spike Lee and others shilling for pump-and-dump scams as a way of "building Black wealth":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/business/media/cryptocurrency-seeks-the-spotlight-with-spike-lees-help.html

More recently, Intuit and other scammy tax-prep services have argued against the IRS's plan to offer free tax preparation as bad for Black and brown people, because it will deny them the chance to be deceived and ripped off with TurboTax:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Back in 2018, Trump won the predatory inclusion Olympics, when his Department of Labor let the Fifth Circuit abolish the "Fiduciary Rule" for Independent Financial Advisors:

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/dol-fiduciary-rule/

What was the Fiduciary Rule? It said that your IFN had to put your interests ahead of their own. Like, if there were two different funds you could bet on, and one would pay your IFN a big commission, while the other would be a better bet for you, the IFN couldn't put your retirement savings into the fund that offered them a bribe.

When Trump killed the Fiduciary Rule, he proclaimed it a victory for poor people, especially Black and brown people. After all, if IFNs weren't allowed to accept bribes for giving you bad financial advice, then they would have to make up the difference by charging you for good advice. If you couldn't afford that advice, well, you'd have to make bad retirement investments on your own, without the benefit of their sleazy self-dealing.

The Biden Administration wants to change that. Biden's Acting Labor Secretary is Julie Su, and she's very good at her job. Last spring, she forced west coast dockworkers' bosses to cough up the contract they'd stalled on for a year, with 8-10% raises for every worker, owed retroactively:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

Su has proposed a way to reinstate the Fiduciary Rule, as part of the Biden Administration's war on junk fees, estimating that this will increase retirees' net savings by 20%:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-07-julie-su-labor-retirement-savers/

The new rule will force advisors who cheat their clients to pay restitution, and will require them to deliver all their advice in writing so that this cheating can be detected and punished.

The industry is furious, of course. They claim that "The Market (TM)" will solve this: if you get bad retirement savings advice and end up homeless and starving, then you will choose a different advisor in your next life, after you are reincarnated (I guess?).

And of course, they're also claiming that forcing IFNs to stop cheating their clients will deny poor people access to expert (bad) advice. As the Financial Services Institute's Dale Brown says, this will have a "negative impact on Main Street Americans’ access to financial advice":

https://www.fa-mag.com/news/legal-challenge-predicted-for-new-dol-fiduciary-proposal-75257.html

Here's that rule – read it for yourself, then submit a comment expressing your views on it. The government wants to hear from you, and administrative law requires them to act on the comments they receive:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/03/2023-23782/proposed-amendment-to-prohibited-transaction-exemptions-75-1-77-4-80-83-83-1-and-86-128

Su is part of a wave of progressive, technically skilled regulators in the Biden administration that resulted from a horse-trading exercise called the Unity Task Force, which divvied up access to top appointments among the progressive wing and the finance wing of the Democratic Party. The progressive appointments are nothing short of incredible – the most competent and principled agency leaders America has seen in half a century:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

But then there's the finance wing's appointments, like Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who ruled against Lina Khan's attempt to block the rotten Microsoft/Activision merger (don't worry, Khan's appealing):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

Perhaps the worst, though, is Biden's Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a private equity ghoul who did a stint for the notorious wreckers Bain Capital before founding her own firm. Raimondo has stuffed her department full of Goldman Sachs alums, and has sidelined labor and civil society groups as she sets out to administer everything from the CHIPS Act to regulating ChatGPT.

As Henry Burke writes for the Revolving Door Project and The American Prospect, Raimondo's history as a corporate raider, her deference to the finance sector, and she and her husband's conflicts of interest from their massive stakes in companies she's regulating all serve to undermine Biden's agenda:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-11-08-commerce-secretary-gina-raimondo-undercutting-bidenomics/

When the administration inevitably complains that its popular economic programs aren’t breaking through the media coverage, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The Unity Task Force gave us generationally important policymakers, but ultimately, it's a classic "pizzaburger." If half your family wants pizza, and the other half wants burgers, and you serve them something halfway in between that makes none of them happy, you haven't made a wise compromise – you've just made an inedible mess:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

[crippled-peeper]

imagine thinking Israel’s military deserves more and more and more U.S. taxpayer money when there’s over a million homeless people in our country and 44 million people (1 in 5 children) go hungry and suicide rates are skyrocketing and it takes 3 years to get on disability benefits

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Throughout this pandemic, Passage has been publishing articles and courses documenting how Canadians are suffering due to the housing crisis.

Houses are too expensive for most of us to buy. Skyrocketing rents are forcing us out of our communities or into smaller and worse living spaces at higher costs. Some of us are even ending up on the streets, as homelessness is on the rise.

Of course, though, not everyone has been suffering. People who own property have been watching the value of their investments surge, and maybe even scooping up more of it to the detriment of those in need. Landlords have recently been able to jack up rents with little resistance. And the financialization of housing, where corporations that view it as a tradeable stock or asset as opposed to a human right and treat it accordingly, has been able to spread unimpeded.

So where do our political representatives fit into all of this? Do our members of parliament have more in common with us, or the landlord class?

According to recently released research I’ve put together over the past few months, nearly 40 per cent of MPs are landlords and/or invested in real estate in some way. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @vague-humanoid

[scretladyspider]

please don’t scroll; I really need your help to reach my gofundme goal of $3500 and not become homeless.

Im Elle, a queer, ace, disabled person with ADHD, depression, and two cats. In November, I lost my job without warning. I have no savings as the job already had me living to the last dollar of every paycheck. I was denied unemployment and food stamps. I cannot work away from home, a physical job, or something with strict hours due to some yet-to-be-diagnosed illness.

this is my story — what’s going on & how I got here. (Smaller text used because it’s a lot of information/a long post.)

In early 2018, I was doing regular walk/runs. In 2019, I stopped being able to run, so I went on walks. Running took hours, then days, to recover from. My body couldn’t produce energy to do it consistently, so, walks. In 2020, I kept going on walks and tried to do aerobics. I was not able to keep doing aerobics. My body took hours upon hours to recover, where before it hadn’t, I was alone for almost all of 2020, and never developed COVID symptoms; it was what happened with running all over again. In 2021, it started to take more time to recover from walks. Then I started to need to take a nap immediately after I clocked out from work— and it was a work from home job. In 2022, I began to go from my sitting desk job straight to my bed most days, laying down exhausted right after work, even sleeping through lunch to get some rest.

On New Year's Eve 2023, I spent 30 minutes cleaning, including vacuuming my living room. I had to rest the rest of the day.

In the last five years, I've gone from running to being exhausted for hours by taking my garbage to the curb.

Imagine you were someone who enjoyed recreational exercise. Now imagine doing 1/100th of that and feeling sick for days. Thats me.

There are other symptoms also. More vulnerability to infection and more trouble fighting infection. Shooting, sharp muscle pains in large muscles such as the thigh or forearm, like a pinched nerve, that come and go at random. Pulse rate that skyrockets upon standing, to go back to normal soon after. Stomach inflammation. Inflammation without major swelling. Headaches. Complete inability to tolerate heat, leading to excruciating migraines that only go away with things like cold showers, electrolytes, and hours of rest in the dark with ice. Muscles that literally don't feel like they're getting oxygen. Random rashes. Face flushing. Being much more easily out of breath, yawning over and over, like I can't get air correctly. Weight gain, no matter what I eat or don't eat.

And just being so, so tired.

In summer of 2018, something… stopped working in my body. I felt sick all the time. I had a low, unexplainable fever nearly every day. Shooting nerve pain would wake me up at night. The doctor said I had a cold. But months went by and I didn’t get better. When my blood work and thyroid hormone level was normal, I was referred to a rheumatologist.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia after he made me wait 45 minutes, came in and asked “are you tired?", poked me hard, said I was tender, and left without running tests. This sort of “uhm the standard blood work came back normal, have you tried exercising more? I know you’re here because your body can’t recover from it but have you tried more of that? Also going to sleep at night?” has been the response over and over and over for five years. It got to the point where I even started to wonder if I was somehow making it up. I see a psych nurse. She thinks there's more than just depression, ADHD, and other things - though we both agree that managing those is vital too. She used to be a cardiologist, so this is reassuring. But when I have tried to see other doctors, it goes differently. Most of the time they see I have ADHD, a long history of depression, and hypermobile joints, and say that explains everything. I can't count how many times I've been told "well, you have depression” when the labs, if they even agreed to run them, came back normal. My standard blood work sometimes comes back with anemia, but I take an iron supplement. No improvement had come of it. I’ve had my thyroid hormone levels tested over and over, but never the antibodies. No imaging or referrals have happened, outside of one to a second rheumatologist. He ran no tests either; he just saw my joints are hypermobile and I was “sure taking a lot of mental health medications” (two at the time), and… that was that.

I had given up on actually even getting help until my SIL recommended a doctor she knew. For the first time in five years, when the standard blood work and TSH tests were normal, she told me we would keep looking. I actually cried with relief at that. It’s amazing to be believed after all this time.

Because of …. All of this, I'm trying to figure out how to either work for myself or find a work from home job that has flexible hours I can choose. I literally wouldn't be able to work a retail gig where I have to stand for eight hours, or even a 9-5 where I have to be there for those exact hours, because my body cannot do that right now. I want to get better but it's a long way off. First I need to know what's even wrong. I'm praying for a diagnosis soon. And treatment. At the least, management.

I have heard of EDS and I have been evaluated. I apparently don’t meet enough criteria, hence the diagnosis of JHS instead. It’s in the same family. I have also heard of POTS. I am pursuing testing. Same with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MCAS, fibromyalgia… yeah. The thing is nothing outside of the standard blood count and thyroid hormone level test, no other lab tests have been done. There are so many things this could be that have never been checked. Lyme disease, for example, is extremely common where I live (it’s actually just extremely common worldwide) and matches much of my experience, but 1) in the USA the initial Lyme test relies on a strain of bacteria cultured in the 80s 2) there are over 100 strains of Lyme disease in the USA 3) in spite of decades of research there are doctors who don’t believe chronic Lyme exists 4) no doctor has ever checked and I only recently learned anything about it so I never asked. But… there are a lot of things to check that I’ve never had checked is my point. Fingers crossed someone can help me get there.

I do not have a partner who can try to support me through this, and my family already supports me however they can. My severance (which was low as I found out I was being paid much less than the rest of the team later) paid only my January rent.

Since my ability to work is severely limited right now, and I've been denied unemployment and food stamps, and I would need a diagnosis and to be awarded disability benefits in court (which can take YEARS that I don’t have), I have nothing in savings because of years of underpaying jobs the cost of living and being disabled and going through prior periods of unemployment due to this and other factors, I am left in a tough spot without help. Without this help, this gofundme... I have nothing.

So... here I am. A queer nonbinary disabled neurodivergent writer, trying my best, living with some undiagnosed illness that's severely impacted my ability to function, who got fired without real reasons (in America they can just do that to you without even telling you why), asking for your help to pay my February rent and January bills so I don’t repeat the trauma of being homeless. Or for you to reblog this.

Thank you for reading all of this.

It’s been on my chest for a long time. Even if it wasn’t for the gofundme, it feels good to talk about and be honest about my health. It reminds me you’re not supposed to feel like this all the time when I tell other people and they tell me I should get help and deserve answers. It’s reassuring to see competent doctors who finally believe me. I hope we figure it out.

no donation is too small— they add up. If just 100 people gave $35, the goal would be met. Sharing is also giving— it means someone who can help is more likely to see it.

You can also help via my venmo — secretladyspider

CashApp — secretladyspider

or find PayPal in my tip jar in my linktree

Goal is $3500 or over. Funds needed ASAP. If it goes over, that’ll help with February.

Thank you for anything and everything.

[spiritmander13]

American politicians after seeing suicide rates skyrocket from KOSA passing: "See? Those people are weak and will never live up to the American dream. They deserve to die. Those kids will now be safer because of those plagued queer people dying-"

Don't you ever think that it's your fault this place is becoming less free because you let it become less free? I thought America was all about freedom, yet you dare violate your own over-200-year-old rules just to tell people who switched genders to go kill themselves.

You're slowly becoming the thing your ancestors vowed to never become: fascist, controlling, and willing to watch your country die. You'll slowly fall into an anarchist state, and it is both beautiful and melancholic. Everyone will want to commit treason for actions you could've prevented.

Instead of thinking about the children, think about the actual weak ones like the homeless, Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and much more instead of severing bonds with your people. Yet you keep doing this bullshit because you think you're the best country. You think America would be praised for aiding Israel in genocide, bombing Yemen, and telling queer people and people who need mental health to go fuck themself. Yet we all know the truth.

Every dream is eventually rotten with lies, evil, and darkness, and America was one of those dreams. And it'll be so fucking satisfying to see this country finally dissolve into a lost piece of history as it's steady downfall finally bites them in the ass.

[octocringe]

People raising money for renewal of a Hollywood tv show that was cancelled.

The us is in such a bad shape, homelessness in north America skyrocketed since the pandemic, there are genocides happening because of the US.

And people are raising money for a Hollywood TV show.

As if Hollywood wasn't spending so much more than it should overall. As if Hollywood wasn't just for profit

And as if all of those people who contributed to the crowdfund didn't know that there are people in their communities more deserving of help than a TV show.

I'm not trying to say you have to spend all your disposable income on just ethical things. But organising a crowdfund for a TV show is so much more than that

[misc-obeyme]

Smart Mc...

I know I have no choice in this but... What about my job and house? I can't leave for a year and expect to still have my job and house, plus if I do, my bills are gonna skyrocket....

Diavolo who didn't think of that:

Lucifer who also didn't think:

Barb who did think but wanted to see how it played out:

So... Uh.... I can't risk... You know... Being homeless after I get back...

Seriously though, how did that work out.

Bows for barb

OH.

I have thought about this. I have written about this in response to an ask before, I think, though it's been a while and I'm wayyyy too lazy to go find it lol.

But this is something I have thought about a lot because that is me.

I have a full time job that I will lose if I just stop showing up. I also have a house with a mortgage that I will also lose if I stop paying said mortgage. I live alone so if I'm not paying the mortgage, nobody is! I would indeed be homeless and unemployed upon returning to the human world.

I mean, yeah, they'll turn off the water and electricity and all that, too, but there won't even be a house if I don't pay the mortgage for a year. And the mortgage company can't get a hold of me? My family can't either? Or my job? Completely MIA as far as anyone can tell?

They're gonna assume I got murdered. Or maybe kidnapped. Or that I just decided to walk off into the woods never to be seen or heard from again.

Now I don't think they'd have me legally declared dead in a year's time. But I'd probably come back to find an open and active police investigation because my family reported me missing.

And even if all that doesn't happen, I will, at the very least, be unemployed and homeless.

This is the first thing I personally would discuss upon being summoned into the Devildom and told I was part of some random exchange program. I'd be like hang on, what about my job and my house, huh? Don't get me wrong, I am all about this, I love the idea of demons and angels and magic, I want to stay. But you'll either have to pay off my mortgage so I don't lose my house and I dunno... find me a new job when I get back or somehow secure my current one (good luck lol) OR allow me to stay here for the rest of my natural life...

Anyway, sorry to rant but this is something I have thought about too much.

I like to think that they've somehow worked out these details. Diavolo owns a corporation in the human world, right? Maybe he just hires MC as a virtual assistant so they can work from anywhere. And he does pay off any mortgage or rent or whatever they need while they're in the Devildom.

That'd be nice. While he's at it, do you think he would pay to have my house painted? I've been wanting to do that for a while. It needs a new fence, too. And I need to have several bushes removed. I could also do with a new backsplash in the kitchen. And the shower needs to be recaulked...

Or he could just replace it with a nice mansion, I'd be okay with that, too. SPOILER for OG Season Three but they do give MC Serenity Manor, so. It's not like it's totally out of the question!!!