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In the Spring of 2010 I was driving a really nice car while wearing a grey pinstripe suit. I saw a man standing on the median holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. I pulled up next to him.
I pulled $200 out of my wallet then held it up in front of him then sternly said "No drugs! No Alcohol! No cigarettes!" then gave him the money.
"You just got me off the street!" he shouted in great joy.
"I was once just like you!" I screamed in agony.
"Pay it forward bro. Pay it forward!"
I gave him my card then asked him to call me the next day. I never heard from him again.
I was so upset that when the left turn signal turn green I very nearly crashed into three cars. All three of them swerved to get out of my way.
During the summer of 2012 I walked into a restaurant in Oceano California while carrying a shopping bag and a kitty litter bucket then asked the manager for a job. "Your kitchen floor needs to be swept."
"I'm sorry but it's the end of the season."
I sadly walked outside then pulled a newspaper from a garbage can so I could look at its help wanted ads. A man who watched me do all this walked up to me then without saying a word he gave me one hundred and twenty dollars.
I bought food with it, and shared some with a couple other homeless people.
A few days later I walked into a pr0n shop in Grover Beach. The manager said "Put down the bags." I didn't. I just looked at him. "Put the bags down NOW!"
I put them down then said "I came to apply for a job," then offered him a flash drive with my resume on it. That resume had over twenty years experience as a coder, with the last ten years being mostly self-employed as a software consultant.
"I'm sorry, I can't accept that. You need to apply to our head office."
"No worries," I replied then put the stick back in my pocket.
"How much do you think I could make," I asked him "doing work that I regard as morally reprehensible?"
He went slackjawed with his eyes open wide. "More than this shop makes in six months."
He was correct: as a result of my experience as a Quantitative Investment coder I had been solicited dozens of times to write Sub-Microsecond Precision High-Speed Trading code, mostly by Bloomberg and Solomon-Page. I never responded to any of them.
Such high-speed trading is the reason we really did need to Occupy Wall Street. Some Congresscriters have proposed a punitive very short-term capital gains tax so as to piss on all the billionaire quants but none of those proposals ever achieved traction.
I got paid today, in the form of a wire transfer from my client's Chinese subsidiary. I'm paid by China for Chinese tax reasons.
After work today I'm going to drop by the Portland Rescue Mission then donate a thousand dollars.
"Buy yourself something nice," I'll say.
I'm getting a similar wire in three weeks or so, when my clients OEM customers sign off on my macOS driver for a USB Video chip. My client just makes the chips, the OEMs build them into dongles for sale to end users.
When I get that final paycheck, I'm going to donate a thousand dollars to Right 2 Dream Too. It's more commonly known as The Tent Camp, and is a homeless shelter operated by homeless people.
R2D2 is quite forward thinking because both men, women and couples can sleep there, and one can sleep during the day. Every time I lost the bed lottery at the Portland Rescue Mission I was able to spend the next day sleeping at R2D2.
I'm also speculating - NOT investing: speculating - on cryptocurrencies. I plan to divide eight or ten grand evenly between bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, etherium and peercoin.
Just now I bought $1000 of etherium.
My credit union's security people do not permit debit card withdrawals by coinable - "It has a high potential for fraud," the teller told me after he rang up their security people. Three $60 and one $200 EFTs went through OK but I am uncertain whether the credit union will permit much larger EFTs. So I'm going to break up the trades, with the dollar amount I buy increasing with each EFT so I can be sure they all go through OK.
When I get that last wire I'm going to donate a grand to CityTeam Ministries. I speculate - SPECULATE now - that I'll make quite a bit of money off the cryptos. From time to time I'll sell some then donate to the Blanchet House Of Hospitality, Union Gospel Mission, St Andre's Catholic Church, all of them in Portland, as well as Vancouver's Share House, a church in Vancouver that serves a free lunch, the St Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz California, Dorothy's Drop-In Center and Kitchen in Salinas, and Vancouver's Consumer Voices Are Born.
CVAB is a day center for mentally ill folk. They also do stuff like job training, they have six computers and a laser printer to enable the members to apply for jobs.
And an upright piano. The first time I saw that piano I was onto it like a pit bull on a pork roast.
"Consumer" is a euphemism for "Mentally Ill Person". I have a furious hatred of the word "Consumer". I call myself a patient. Look man, if you had heart disease, you'd call yourself a patient too, wouldn't you.
Two winters ago a Canadian Soylentil sent me three pairs of wool socks, wool gloves, three chocolate chip cookies, a Starbucks card and $50 cash so I could buy a pair of pants.
Please donate some of your own money to your community's soup kitchens, homeless shelters and rescue missions. I once met a disabled, homeless former welder who said to me "You talk to some guys on the streets, and they tell you they used to make six figures."
I didn't tell him I was one of those six figure guys.
I once earned quite a lot of money but for all the good it did me I should have burned the banknotes to stay warm on cold nights. But I live in a very modest way; I can easily afford to lose ten grand should the crypto exchanges collapse. I can easily afford to donate the occasional grand to those who serve Portland and Vancouver's homeless.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Saturday December 02 2017, @01:23AM (2 children)
Interesting....
On the one hand, it reads like an L. Ron Hubbard Sci-fi story.
But, on the other hand, it reads like an L. Ron Hubbard Sci-fi story.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 02 2017, @02:35AM (1 child)
It was in the Multnomah County Jail in downtown Portland.
He didn't quite know enough about computers even to be dangerous. He told me that the most-popular programming language is C. I disagreed, and suggested it was Java - not just for web apps but also Android Apps, and embedded applications.
He raised his voice then insisted it was C. I was never able to convince him otherwise.
He bragged about being a Scientologist. To me that came across as being a resident of Jonestown who was getting ready to Drink The Kool-Ade.
I found him intolerable. He just would not shut up. Late one night I used the intercom so I could ask the deputy who was guarding our pod to do something about it. "He's keeping us all awake!"
"I don't care."
In my experience most custody division deputies are quite a lot nicer than that. In fact that's my experience with every law enforcement officer I have ever met. But they must have special training in how to be mean and nasty when the situation calls for it because I've seen some of those same officers totally dominate an inmate just by talking to them in a stern tone of voice.
I was only in that pod for a couple days. It was where they put all the SPECIAL inmates. They moved me to a much quieter pod after determining that I wasn't really SPECIAL.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by t-3 on Sunday December 03 2017, @01:22PM
You have to make the annoying ones get on the bars and kite out. Deps don't give a fuck.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @06:05AM
high-speed trading is the reason we really did need to Occupy Wall Street
The 1 good thing to come out of that HST cesspool was when the London Stock Exchange and its MICROS~1 stack fell on its face for 7 hours during the trading day. [google.com]
(They'd had previous failures, but not so dramatic.)
Not long after that, London moved to a Linux-based stack.
(The new stuff was completely stable and faster.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:43AM (3 children)
If the money is coming in as fast as you say, better put some away for taxes next year. Just sayin'.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 03 2017, @04:07AM (2 children)
Most self-employed people have to pay taxes each quarter during the tax year. I don't recall when the next quarterly is due - I'll have to look it up.
It is quite challenging to sign a check for my quarterly taxes.
But if I don't pay enough in quarterlies, I could be penalized.
The IRS is certain to give me some grief because I went six months without getting paid anything, then yesterday I got paid enough that I won't have a problem buying eight or ten grand of cryptocurrency, with another check just like it in the middle of the month.
The IRS is cool with fluctuating income but they're certain to have questions about it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @06:07PM (1 child)
I hate paying quarterly taxes, one more thing to remember during the year. I'm a saver (probably learned from parents who lived through the great Depression) and always have some money in the bank. Since interest rates have been so low for the last 10(?) years there hasn't been much point in keeping it in the bank. Thus I pay the full estimated tax for the year when the first installment is due on April 15.
My income fluctuates too, sometimes the tax refund is enough to pay the next year's estimate, always a pleasant surprise.
Now it looks like interest rates are going back up, will have to figure out the cost of money to see if the convenience of paying early is worth the cost.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @10:18PM
When I was self employed (I'm a good old W2 now), my wife did our taxes. I remember her telling me one time, the penalties for skipping the quarterlies when you're 1099d aren't that big, and sometimes it was worth the hassle to just skip the quarterly and catch up the next time with a penalty.
In retrospect....what a screwed up tax system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:40AM
You mention donating money, but do you volunteer your skills? For example, how does CVAB get internet access and how could you help to reduce or eliminate the cost of connectivity? Do you regard wifi piggybacking as morally reprehensible? How about stealing electricity? What about stealing food to feed your homeless comrades? How far are you willing to go to assist the needy?
Or how much are you really trying to assuage your own guilt for having a little bit of money now?