Use DarkSydOtheMoon@aol.com

If I collect a little more in donations this week, the blegging can stop. My Paypal email is Darksydothemoon-at-aol-com. Please chip in if possible to your gentle, progressive atheist activist. Sadly, there’s just no career path and little in the way of tangible benefits doing what I do here at FTB. Speaking of benefits, guess what happens when the minimum wage is raised to something closer to livable and guess what economic ideology is being shown as dead wrong on that score? [Read more…]

Use DarkSydOtheMoon@aol.com

Thanks so much to those that have helped out this month. For those who are new, I struggled for several years on barely-above- minimum wages after falling completely out of the middle class back in 2009. At eleven bucks an hour I slowly burned through my meager savings and then got hit by the financial coup de grace: a freak heart attack with complications. It’s just blind luck I happened to have health insurance and disability at the time. But the disability paid only a fraction of my crappy base pay and, of course, my out of pocket medical costs exploded. I survived, my job didn’t. Beginning in 2013 and through the new year, for the first time in my life, I faced down grinding poverty, food insecurity, cutting prescription meds in half or going without, and even the looming prospect of homelessness.

Finally, after recovering for the better part of a year, and then jumping through a lot of hoops for two more months to land a tech support job that might have paid a little better, it looked like things were turning up. Alas, just this month, just a few weeks after starting, I’m no longer employed and have no unemployment benefits. This all happened in the great state of Texas, where the social safety net for people in my shoes is essentially non-existent, even the Medicaid expansion that would help millions like me has been sacrificed to Gov Rick Perry’s fantasy of winning the GOP nomination for President. Please help out if you can, even if it’s only a few bucks. My Paypal email is Darksydothemoon-at-aol-com.

My story is sad but it’s becoming the norm. It’s just a matter of time before they come for other jobs that pay anything close to a living wage: [Read more…]

Use DarkSydOtheMoon@aol.com

I had hoped not to have to ask, but I’m between jobs, approaching dead broke and could use any help anyone can provide. No amount is too big or too small. Paypal email is DarkSydoTheMoon-at-aol-com. The economy’s definitely better, at least there are more ads for jobs here in Austin than in months past. But few of them are the kind of jobs that pay a middle class salary. Mostly 10 and 11 dollar an hour deals. The one-percent are reportedly doing fine though: [Read more…]

So, I think I have a job and I wanted to take a moment and thank all of you who have helped keep me afloat through 2013, which I hope will soon be the toughest year of my adult life fading in the rearview mirror. This particular job is a network support role and involves large agencies. It requires an extensive background check, now ongoing. If I pass that and it doesn’t fall through, the start date will be April 28th. It shouldn’t interfere with blogging and I’ll be able to get back into a regular habit without feeling like I’m wasting time doing something fun; writing and bitching about anything and everything here on FTB and elsewhere.

I know some of you have suggested consulting or being self employed in some way. I’m interested in knowing more about that. For example, there’s a lot of these companies popping up that set up web stores for small and medium sized businesses, like Web.com or Host Gator. Some offer design and support for the web pages, others hosting, still others will sync up social media, provide SEO services (SEO does sound a bit saturated, but I really don’t know enough about the state of that art to say for sure) and run email lists, a few try to do all these things.

What got me interested? Earlier this year an old friend who runs a landscaping biz offered me a few bucks [Read more…]

An op-ed worth reading popped up in the NYT over the weekend. It’s written by a former “wiz-kid” who was pulling in millions by age 30 and grew disillusioned: [Read more…]