ragebutt

I don’t know anything about Oklahoma but a cursory search shows they do have case management

Reach out to a place like this https://www.offibhs.org/case-management/ though there may be a better fit depending on where you live specifically. Also unfortunately you may find that case management is geared towards people who are severely lacking in resources, eg facing homelessness or are homeless. Depends on the state. In my state case management has a bit more funding so it is more applicable but this is definitely not the case across the country

Well then the skies your limit, you just have to get good enough at something.

I could never get good enough at the creative stuff to justify that. I love music and write my own stuff but I’m not nearly good enough for that. It takes me like 2 weeks to write one song. My friend that writes beats will bust one out in like 40 minutes and can basically do whatever. You want reggaeton? Sure

But I buy up broken shit and resell it. You spilled a drink on your macbook? You broke the hdmi/usbc on your console? Your graphics card died? I will swoop in and lowball you since I know you’re gonna throw it away if I don’t buy it. I take on a lot of risk because a lot of things either can’t be fixed or aren’t economically viable to fix but at the same time I also often pay like $1-200 for a ps5 and resell it for $400 refurbished with like 2 hours of work and $10 of parts so it balances out. Graphics cards are the worst ones tbh, the risk:reward is too high. I get a ton that are just fucked and are parts boards but every once in a while I get a repairable one and then it’s a $5-600 profit or more. I won’t pay more than 2-300 for a dead 4090 because they’re often totally fucked

Depending on your income level and what state you are in Medicaid may not be viable then. Not filing taxes is not necessarily a deal breaker but does increase complexity. If you file through healthcare.gov (or whatever your state uses) they may expect you to either file those taxes now to declare taxable income levels but this is usually not required for MA. You do need some proof of income though (bank statements, pay stubs, etc)

Depending on what state you are in it may be helpful to see if there is a blended case management service available. This will potentially help connect you with services including MA

This is tough without special training or scummy morals

Like you can resell stuff but that’s gross

Crafting is cool but that’s a special skill. I know people that sell crochet, needlepoint, etc

I refurbish electronics but that’s also a special skill, it’s not terribly difficult to learn though and can actually be quite lucrative. Good for the environment too. Buy a switch that someone is just going to throw away, fix it, resell it as refurbished, that kind of thing. This is getting much harder though. Ebay was the primary way to go and they’ve been shifting away from refurbished and used sales a lot over the past few years

I have a friend that does custom artwork for people but that’s a special skill. I have another friend that sells music for people that wants beats but again special skills. Fivver type stuff

Basically a lot of these will be “monetize your hobby”

Where do live? Do you have a job?

If you have no income I would strongly suggest applying for Medicare. Depending on where you live the process may not be very difficult and if you are approved it may make your life much easier. Finding MA providers can be a challenge but when you do your cost is essentially $0

There’s a huge degree of separation between “violent music/games has a spurious link to violent behavior” and shitty AIs that are good enough to fill the void of someone who is lonely but not good enough to manage risk

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/tech/teen-suicide-character-ai-lawsuit

“within months of starting to use the platform, Setzer became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem. He even quit the Junior Varsity basketball team at school,”

“In a later message, Setzer told the bot he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.”

The bot responded: “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” before going on to say, “You can’t do that!”

Garcia said she believes the exchange shows the technology’s shortcomings.

“There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that,” she said. “I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

The lawsuit claims that “seconds” before Setzer’s death, he exchanged a final set of messages from the bot. “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot said, according to a screenshot included in the complaint.

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Setzer responded.

“Please do, my sweet king,” the bot responded.

Garcia said police first discovered those messages on her son’s phone, which was lying on the floor of the bathroom where he died.”

So we have a bot that is marketed for chatting, a teenager desperate for socialization that forms a relationship that is inherently parasocial because the other side is an LLM that literally can’t have opinions, it just can appear to, and then we have a terrible mismanagement of suicidal ideation.

The AI discouraged ideation, which is good, but only when it was stated in very explicit terms. What’s appalling is that it gave no crisis resources or escalation to moderation (because like most big tech shit they probably refuse to pay for anywhere near appropriate moderation teams). Then what is inexcusable is that when ideation is discussed with slightly coded language “come home” the AI misconstrues it.

This results in a training opportunity for the language model to learn that in this context with previously exhibited ideation “go home” may mean more severe ideation and danger (if character.AI bothered to update that these conversations resulted in a death). The only drawback of getting that data of course is a few dead teenagers. Gotta break a few eggs to get an omelette

This barely begins to touch on the nature of AI chatbots inherently being parasocial relationships, which is bad for mental health. This is of course not limited to AI, being obsessed with a streamer or whatever is similar, but the AI can be much more intense because it will actually engage with you and is always available.

the crowd the villain plays to is much easier to play to and extract money from

Yeah okay. I’m sure the American government with all its resources would have sooooo much trouble finding a fucking dorky tech nerd that decided to play survivalist

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Frein

Eric Frein was an actual ass survivalist here in PA who shot two cops trying to start some kind of revolution to overthrow the government and disappeared into the PA wilderness. Because he killed 2 cops they went hard, state police from multiple states (they were paying crazy amounts of OT), atf, FBI, and, us marshals. They caught him in a month and half. This was a libertarian “I do war reenactments and live in woods for fun sometimes” person so for a while it really looked like he would successfully dip, especially given the time of year was not super conducive to tracking as it was raining a lot. He specifically knew how to avoid being tracked as well using stuff like rivers to his advantage and there were even several times where the cops saw him and he was able to dip because of terrain advantage

Now you really think some nerd who has not LARPed as a survivalist mercenary for the past 15 years and has the aggression of the entire federal government, not just one state, would be able to successfully shake them off? No fucking way. You’re public enemy #1. That’s some delusional thinking shit inspired by fucking Rambo or something. You’ll have 5,000+ people after you with serious equipment advantage, they’ll spend 10s of millions, if not way more (pa spent 12 million to catch Frein)

“Mattel's first AI product won't be for kids under 13, suggesting that Mattel is aware of the risks of putting chatbots into the hands of younger tots. … Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a companion on the Google-backed AI platform Character.AI”

Seems like a great idea

What I mean by this is that while the rhetoric of “this will save you/destroy the world, you are being watched, etc” does exist on the far left there doesn’t appear to be as much escalation to violence, to an extremely significant degree that is observable and measurable. This is not conjecture.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states - 1994-2020 57% of domestic terrorism is right wing, 25% left wing, ~15% religious (which sometimes coincides with right wing but in this dataset is mostly Islamic extremism)

https://extremismterms.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2020 - right wing accounted for 94% of extremist murders in 2020, and 75% of the extremist murders over the previous decade

https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/116th-congress/house-report/213/1 - 2009-2018 right wing extremists account for 73% of extremist killings, Islamic extremist at 23%, leftist at 2%

Statistics vary depending on source by quite a bit (and time period, violent leftist movements have declined significantly since the 1990s and those were mostly about ecoterrorism rather than communism) but the general consensus is that overwhelmingly right wing extremism escalates these people to extreme violence and murder. This is not conjecture.

Whether leftist movements have a similar number of people with this demeanor, whether those movements target people, etc? Less clear and much harder to quantify

there’s a deeper discussion to be had about schizophrenia and right wing rhetoric in America

This guy was maybe schizophrenic. Maybe a lot of the other right wing people that go to extreme violence to. Not all of course.

It is important to preface this by saying schizophrenia does not make you violent. It actually makes you more likely to be the victim of violence, statistically.

But delusional thinking processes, grandiosity, and religious or political hallucinations are schizophrenia symptoms. Again, these on their own don’t create violence. But delusional thinking processes can and often are shaped but cultural contexts and social narratives.

So dominant political themes - good vs evil, governmental control and surveillance, authoritarian power structures with strong hierarchy, become amplified. Qanon, racial purity, savior complex, etc.

Where this becomes extremely irresponsible is that it’s then very easy for someone who has this line of thought to then enter a place, many places even, where their delusional thought is not only challenged but encouraged. “You are correct, trump will save us, the democrats are going to kill everyone, you are being watched”.

It doesn’t help that government corruption lends credence to validate these delusions in some ways. While you’re not being watched 24/7 there likely is some kind of info on you in a database if you live in America. Whether it’s a social credit score or simply identification (facial recognition, demographics, etc), is unclear, but its increasingly clear this is the case (and more worrying the data is likely held by 3rd party contractors like palantir and amazon)

So then a mass shooting happens and people go thoughts and prayers (except not really anymore) or they say we need better mental health supports (except again not really anymore, we’ve kind of abandoned the song and dance). The improved mental health supports thing is true but that can’t counteract groups that actively seek out people like this. Lonely, isolated, angry, and unstable. They then amplify that persons bullshit by feeding them conspiracy bullshit and every once and a while they pop off

This could happen in a leftist space, the process is the same, but they appear to do a better job of policing themselves or supporting each other when someone is getting too far gone (at least based on the statistics of political violence in the USA).

A common critique of China and Russia is mass surveillance of their citizens and this is true, China through more in depth social registration and facial recognition, Russia through sorm and isp data retention, etc.

The difference is that Snowden revealed America does much of the same but without any transparency. His leaks forced some - PRISM, XKEYSCORE, MUSCULAR, STELLARWIND, etc are now public knowledge and have congressional oversight. But a lot has changed in the past 12 years. Modern AI was essentially nonexistent during his leaks. His leaks did not cover any military or CIA programs. By his own and the governments admission information was highly compartmentalized for security so he potentially only knew a small chunk of what was happening at the time.

Since then there have been a number of tools and things acknowledged but not expanded upon that are used by the government, such as the cia vault 7 tools disclosed by Wikileaks in 2017 (malware for many things, smart TVs, ios and android, cars, many web browsers, etc). To further complicate things a lot of government surveillance in the us happens outside of the government thanks to our military contracting system. Actors such as booz allen, amazon govcloud, and palantir maintain databases so they bypass FISA requirements.

This is finally becoming more concrete with trumps ICE raids as we begin to see leaks that show ICE, DHS, FBI, and local police departments are relying on palantir databases of American citizens for profiling and arrests. These databases did not appear overnight. They were built over a long time and indicate our government clearly has an issue both with spying on its own citizens and being transparent about it.

In the modern age it is clear that we are going to be tracked. We need to demand transparency and regulation surrounding this. We also need to demand fair treatment for federal whistleblowers, especially related to the military as these often get exempted from whistleblowing protections and charged as espionage. Snowden still lives in exile and is facing 30 years, reality winner got the harshest espionage sentence in history for leaking memos about russian hacking in the 2016 election (by the trump admin, which seems unfair), Chelsea manning got 35 years (which was commuted by Obama), Daniel hale got 45 months, etc.