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My suggestion would be to stick to well-populated areas with 24-hour access, good lighting and cameras. Walmart and Cracker Barrel parking lots are notoriously friendly with RVs, and I myself have camped in my minivan there on occasion. State and national parks also often have affordable passes and such amenities as bathrooms with showers, electrical hookups and similar.A 24-hour gym membership will also help you, as will keeping your car as clean and presentable as possible. Remove any identifying aspects like stickers or decals, use suitcases from Goodwill or fabric laundry bags to keep your possessions neat inside the vehicle, both to deter theft and to keep your car looking tidy, and have your car washed as often as you can afford. The safest way to live in one’s car is to be as invisible as possible, and the more your car looks like other cars, the harder it will be for people to notice and complain of you.Before our minivan-camping homelessness adventure, my wife and I read Ken Ilgunas’ blog, (he was the Duke grad student who lived in a van,) as well as various other articles from Instructables and various bloggers about how to camp in a conventional vehicle. We had some warning of our impending homelessness, and this bought us time to put our things in storage, find tenants for our home, design a plug-in air conditioner kit and some other clever but inexpensive camper modifications for our minivan, as well as to apply to many, many jobs. We lived in the van for a few months while traveling to various interviews, my wife kept up her telecommuting job using library and Burger King WiFi, the mileage reimbursements for the interviews paid for our gasoline and meals while the Mrs. saved every paycheck, and the rent from our new tenants paid the mortgage and kept us from losing our home despite the layoffs. Once we found a new job for me, we kept up the vandwelling lifestyle to save money, and in just a few months we had enough to purchase our second house. We were homeless, yes, but we were homeless landlords, and now we’re just regular landlords with day jobs, a modest but happy home and a minivan that still occasionally serves as a camper now and then for inexpensive state and national park vacations, as well as the most comfortable vehicle we’ve ever taken to a drive-in movie.It’s not easy to blend in as homeless van-dwellers, though. My wife was occasionally approached by police officers, ‘concerned citizen’ types and various other busybodies who wanted to know what we were doing and why. Luckily, it was the work of but a few moments every day to look up which wholesome, popular concerts were within about a half-day’s drive and it turns out that most people would rather just believe two adorable but impoverished newlyweds were ‘saving money by camping’ on a job interview road trip in the hopes of affording concert tickets on their way back home -technically not a lie, but leaving out a few key details. In your place, I would just explain that you’re attending [college you attend,] and if people object to your sleeping in your car somewhere, just explain that “it’s really hard to catch a nap, working [number of jobs you work,] and sleeping here saves me a trip before my next shift starts.” Technically not lying, and so long as your driver’s license has SOME kind of address on it, many people just might forget to ask.You might even be able to get a second (or third,) job on the night staff at one of the dorms, and provided your classes are relatively late in the day, you just might be able to nap safely in the library in the mornings when it’s quiet. Book a study room, stuff a hoodie so it looks like a person bent over some open books, then unroll your sleeping bag beneath the study table, the Mrs. says. (I try not to ask how she knows so much about sleeping in odd places or being secretly homeless.)The Mrs. and I tended to wear college t-shirts throughout this adventure and since we looked a bit younger than we were, it seems that most inquirers dismissed us as broke students, so I’d make a point to wear as much collegiate attire as you can afford. Goodwills always have college-themed shirts and such, and it’s generally easier for a ‘hardworking but broke student’ to pass with busybodies than any other type of homeless young adult.We also had the unfair advantage of being white, with middle-class accents and attire that made us look as nonthreatening as possible. I wouldn’t like to think how things might have gone differently had we been of minority status, perhaps less conservatively dressed or if the Mrs. wasn’t really kind of used to talking her way out of anything. And I know that her habit of washing, regularly vacuuming and otherwise keeping our minivan looking really nice, the fact that it was a popular type of van, in a popular color, which we tended to park in places with several other vans just like it, that helped. The negative stereotypes about the homeless in America, that they’re dirty, that they smell bad, they’re panhandlers, etc.? Those are your checklist for what not to be. If you don’t look like a homeless person stereotype that a privileged person who’s never actually thought about the problem would assume to be true, why, their eyes will just gloss right over you and you’ll pass for not-homeless easily. Clean, commonplace car that doesn’t stand out. Frequent showers. Clean clothes. At least one job. If you don’t look like what a lazy thinker thinks a homeless person looks like, they might never know you’re homeless.There are far, FAR more homeless people than you think, by the way. They are everywhere. Most have jobs, many are just couchsurfing from friend to friend, many are educated, even with degrees in what people think of as ‘good’ subjects (I myself had a Master’s in a STEM field when we went homeless and the Mrs. had her bachelor’s,) and a shocking number, the majority in fact, are just ordinary people who had one, maybe two things go wrong in an ordinary, paycheck-to-paycheck life. Medical bills, job layoffs and a hundred other little things that could happen to anyone can cause homelessness. It’s usually temporary, and while it’s never fun, it’s easy to get very angry at how our entire country pictures reality entirely wrong on the subject of homelessness. The stereotype of a homeless person actually reflects the least common type of homeless person, but hey, so long as lazy thinking is making it easier to pass, might as well use the popular, wrong perception to your advantage until you can afford a place, eh?At a state park, people camping in a van are a little unusual, but not that remarkable. In a Walmart parking lot, it’s more unusual, but you might be surprised at just how many ‘hidden homeless’ people are actually in such places. There were Walmart, Cracker Barrel and other service-industry employees living in their cars, the summer we went homeless, we regularly met other ‘car campers’ and ‘band followers’ who were really just ‘between addresses’ at highway rest stops, national chain 24-hour gyms and other reasonably safe overnight parking spots, and sadly, we sometimes met people who were living out of their cars with their children. Drug problems or alcoholism were very rare. Even cigarette smoking was uncommon. Medical bills, though, house fires in mobile homes that insurance companies decided weren’t insurable or rented homes the landlord decided to strategically default on and the bank didn’t rebuild, fallen trees, divorces, job layoffs, factory or plant closings, store closings, foreclosures, bank chicanery…there were hundreds of perfectly ordinary ways a hardworking, moral, perfectly deserving person could, in spite of everything, wind up homeless.It happened to my wife and I. It has happened to friends of ours. It can happen to anyone. So don’t beat yourself up too much.So long as you’re a single adult with a working car, you’re still doing better than a lot of the people we met on our ‘little adventure.’ And we both wish you all the best of luck.

It’s a tie.#1] I sat beside an early Apple exec who was one of the older people in the original startup. I mentioned that I’m a musician.Before Apple, he had worked on the software for the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line, a huge array of radar towers in the Aleutian Islands built to detect Soviet missiles coming over the polar cap. He launched into a story about the days on the DEW line when they were trying to write software to harness all those towers’ signals together and make the pictures they needed to create the “Early Warning.”The workforce had a serious lack of software engineers and programmers. His recruiter, at wits’ end, brought him a musician to interview. “Give me a break,” he said, not necessarily in those words.The recruiter said that he’d looked at the tasks that trained musicians perform and saw an analogy with what programmers do. If you write a composition with separate parts for 15–20 orchestral musicians, it’s parallel (the recruiter thought) to what a programmer does. Both are creating accurate sets of instructions to accomplish a very specific task. One is for human musicians and the other is for a computer.My seat-mate said he hired the first guy. It worked, and his recruiter had discovered a secret labor pool for the US defense effort. “Those musicians took no prisoners!” he said. “Their code was as good as anybody’s!”2] I’m an HR guy and I’d developed a checklist for teammates to use in keeping shared responsibilities on track. I ended up discussing it with my seat-mate.Hasan (my seatmate) had left Visa as a senior exec to start a new venture. His company makes modular houses for the Asian market. He had done a lot of very clever things.They made extra-room kits that could be built for the price of an unsecured business loan, so families didn’t have to create a mortgage.The modules could serve as office space for little family business ventures, so the structure pays for itself, a key requirement for their customers.They could be constructed in 24 hours. They could be set up with ordinary tools. Hasan told me, “I went on a build to assure myself that we were telling customers the truth when we said ‘24 hours.’ I’m not an Ikea guy,” he said, “but we built one in 24 hours.”They even had a module that for flood zones, that came down and went up easier than usual for populations who live in annual flood zones and had been improvising an annual migration up the mountain when the rainy season came. Those units could be broken down, moved, and reconstructed within a day.That reminds me—I owe Hasan an update on the team alignment hack. Thanks for the question!

To understand why Trump lies, I recommend reading Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, by Dr. Robert D. Hare.Professor Hare did the definitive work on identifying psychopaths back in the 1970s and has made it his career focus ever since. He created the diagnostic tool that lets psychologist identify the three to four per cent of the population who have this personality disorder.Psychopaths, of which Trump is a classic example, continually amplify their effects on over people — it’s all they care about. They want to impress, to persuade, to dominate, most of all to win. Every human encounter is a contest, and coming out the winner is all they care about.Truth, morality, right versus wrong, are alien concepts. The psychopath’s mind is as straightforward as an insect’s. He has drives and appetites and he fulfills them. He lives in the moment and is perfectly happy to contradict himself within the same sentence, as we have often seen Trump do. The important thing is to keep the flow of words going, even though it is pure bullshit.We normal human beings often respond to the psychopath’s BS by getting swept away on the torrent of words. When Dr. Hare’s graduate students — educated young men and women with psychology degrees — interviewed known psychopaths in prison, even they sometimes fell under the spell, finding themselves charmed and gaslighted by rapists, bigamists, and con artists.If a psychopath is telling you what you want to hear, as a con man always does, it takes an exceptionally strong mind to shake off the hypnosis. When I was studying psychopathic fraudsters to write educational materials for the British Columbia Securities Exchange Commission, I read the case of a victim who was taken by a con man for his life savings and the new mortgage the fraudster had him put on his house. He was a retired policeman.Read Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us and Dr. Hare’s other books, like Snakes in Suits. They will open your eyes. You probably know at least one person who would score high on the Hare Checklist. You regularly see one on TV.