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If you have thick skin, live cheaply and have a high tolerance for administrative bull%5^ you can make it work. I've known a few long-term unemployed people in

If you have thick skin, live cheaply and have a high tolerance for administrative bull%5^ you can make it work. I've known a few long-term unemployed people in NZ who programmed a lot for fun. Not disciplined "open source as a job", however. Collecting unemployment can be a surprising amount of work. In NZ/AU it's sufficiently annoying and unpleasant that not many people who could hold down a decent job would bother. So working as designed, I guess. Nominally you're supposed to apply for N jobs per week, go to interviews, do training or whatever according to a plan you make with a case worker. The enforcement is not entirely consistent from one benefit office to another or even across case workers. People's experiences vary a lot. In NZ it's harder to move to a low cost of living area - those areas have no jobs. They'll pay your benefit if you grew up there but not if you move there.

yakak 5y ago
> Nominally you're supposed to apply for N jobs per week, go to interviews, do training or whatever according to a plan you make with a case worker. In many countries that is a requirement of unemployment, not the social system. In ones where you fall out of unemployment into the social system they have often classified you as unable to work. On the topic in general, I would point out that it is usually frowned upon to do anything that is valuable economic work for free while needing to rely on social insurances. One is in essence undercutting paid positions for other workers if one builds usable Enterprise Software, does a data entry internship, etc. I would recommend working on no-commercial-potential GNU oriented Software. (Accidentally getting small contracts can also end up being a hassle/liability in some benefit systems.)