(Img is a bilibili thumbnail I came across lmfao)
My mother and I are disabled with severe chronic illnesses, so for my entire life we’ve been living off of SSI. This traps you in poverty and leaves you very little space to grow money. Several years ago, before I was an adult, when we first got class action lawsuit settlement checks, we both sort of decided that it would be smarter to spend it within the 10-day limit before it affects SSI. We’ve been able to have a decent car, nice tech, etc., but we’ve always struggled with food and certainly have been living beyond our means, especially lately.
My mother’s husband passed early this year, so we’ve been living on that inheritance money, and around the time that he passed, I lost my SSI. We’re currently renting two apartments as my mother’s husband had moved into the upstairs unit only about a month before he passed. We’re in the process of moving from the bottom unit to the upstairs unit, but it’s been an ongoing, slow process since he passed. While we’re mostly living in the upstairs unit, most of our stuff is still downstairs.
I’ve decided to try and get back on SSI rather than try and make an income myself because I do not have the consistency necessary to make a dependable income. The only way I could make an income involves starting a business, and that takes a risk that I don’t think is worthwhile. I am essentially completely materially satiated now. I have all the tech, tools, and equipment I could ever want or need for as long as they’ll work, so I don’t see a reason to take on that risk if I don’t have anything I’m reaching for. It’s just about managing our recurring expenditures in America’s rapidly deteriorating economy and having as big of a safety net as we can possibly get within the regulations of SSI now.
That’s why I’m wondering if anyone here has suggestions on how to live cheaper. I have an assembled homelab that I yet to setup, so that could let me cancel most of my media subscriptions. I have multiple computers that are capable of running fairly large LLM’s locally. I got an air fryer recently as well as a rice cooker, and I also got a 3D printer. We plan on selling a lot on eBay and other platforms since we have a lot of old shit we don’t need anymore and are tired of living in a pile of boxes and old junk.
I’m not too worried about it since we have a lot of unnecessary expenditures that can be cut, but I’m still wondering if y’all have any ideas. Also, we live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in the California-Cascadian mountains, so shopping cheaply requires a 2-hour drive.
I hope this may be useful to other comrades as well
Hello comrade, first off i am terribly sorry for the extreme circumstances you find yourself, i honestly can not offer any advice however i wanna offer my sincerest sympathies and hope that things work out for you. If i may ask are all kinds of work out of the question for you my friend?
Anything physical is, so WFH would be my only option.
Have you tried applying for some WFH positions that could suit you?
Reminds me how nazi Germany “economical resurrection” was going so well that Goebbels promoted “10 pfenning dish”: groats, lard and salt.
Goebbels promoted “10 pfenning dish”: groats, lard and salt.
Bread, butter and sugar/fairy-bread was a huge part of growing up as a lot of that was given to my family for free.
Just reminds me of exactly that; sugar instead of salt and the oats are baked into a nutrient-void sugar loaf.
Share this on !mutual_aid@lemmygrad.ml too, comrade.
how big are the llms you can run? i’m not entirely sure how you’d make money off of running anything local unless you were doing commissioned ai slop but who knows?
I just mean like I don’t need to have a subscription to access frontier-level models, my MacBook has 128gb of ram.
i wouldn’t expect any performance or quality that you get on the cloud, but you can make a trade-off between the two with the mac’s unified ram. you can either get higher quality (still not comparable to cloud) for poorer speed, or better speed with lower quality, but it will never match what you see online.
“commissioned ai slop”, I’ve actually seen that with porno (do not ask), in regards to having a patreon that makes ai gooner slop. So it could work lol. Usually it’s involving niche stories, or like comic strips of their own little plot. It’s a strange but lucrative enough hustle?
We’re currently renting two apartments
I have all the tech, tools, and equipment I could ever want or need for as long as they’ll work
I have multiple computers that are capable of running fairly large LLM’s locally
I got an air fryer recently as well as a rice cooker
well, mr rich techbro (wink). you could make some things:
-sell the equipment for some extra bucks
-rent it for crypto-mining for ignorant cryptobros
-rent it to local leftist orgs for storage, activist networking and stuff
-stop buying cooking oil and use dat air-fryer to live on a diet of fried roadkill, fried home-grown potatoes and fried green-plantain
It depends on where you live I guess, but you can make a really cheap meal with chickpeas (dry, not canned, much cheaper) + brown rice + cabbage + any other cheap veggies. Fry the chickpeas, then throw in a lil bit of soy sauce and coriander at the end. Very tasty, good protein, decent nutrition for less than $0.50 (where I live). You can cook dry chickpeas in bulk, then only use a bit at a time. It lasts about 3 days in the water it was cooked in if you put it in a jar.
Also soy chunks are very cheap, pretty nutritious and very tasty if you make them well.
Both of these options also last basically forever in the pantry cos they’re dried. I usually buy 10kg of each at a time, and it lasts for many months. Plus you get a good bulk discount that way.
