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Posts
7
Comments
899
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Thanks. I feel like the people responding negatively might be immature and maybe frustrated with their own personal finances. Budgeting changed my life and allowed me to take a career risk that really paid off, so there's no scenario where I can see budgeting as a bad thing.

  • Did I touch some sort of nerve? Why is taking about budgeting getting such a harsh reaction? Lemmy is really disappointing, sometimes.

    A person can experience homelessness for a variety of reasons. This teacher is without a place to live because he is being turned down for having bad credit. Don't get mad at me for there being credit bureaus in the US, I can't change that.

    Atkinson, who is currently teaching at NYOS Charter School, said even after applying for places that he could afford, his application was denied due to bad credit.

  • For those saying, just move farther away

    I don't think anyone suggested that's the solution. I just said it's unfortunately the same way where I live, but fortunately here you don't have to go too far. Austin is much bigger, like you said.

  • The guy in the article is very open to sharing his financial struggles and asking for help, so I'm confident that his feelings wouldn't be hurt if he reads what I wrote.

    My goal was for someone else to read my comment and have it kick them into gear to get their finances straight. Maybe someone out there is researching how to budget right now after reading it, and that's a good thing.

    So yes, it's valuable to speculate and discuss hypothetical financial struggles so that we can learn ways to avoid getting into a similar situation.

    I know the point of the article is "teachers didn't make enough money" which is true, but the point of my comment is "people don't become unhoused while holding a steady job unless some mistakes were made along the way".

  • I'm trying to understand your point about not being able to budget when living paycheck to paycheck. This is when a budget is most important.

    I'm sorry that I called teachers professionals. I didn't know it touched a nerve.

  • I think you'll be plenty happy with a router/wifi combo. I'm a HUGE fan of having a separate router and WiFi AP's, but that's only because 1) I can afford it, and 2) I'm a nerd and like a bit of a challenge sometimes, and 3) I live in a house and it's beneficial to have multiple access points.

    If you want something that will "just work", there are tons of "consumer grade" stuff out there. They aren't necessarily consumer grade because they are bad quality, but it's more the software that is designed to be relatively easy to set up, offering limited options for customized stuff. You'll still be able to do everything you probably want to do, like port forwarding, changing DNS, etc. This includes stuff like Eero, TP Link, etc.

    Then you have stuff like MikroTik, which is very affordable but also complex and capable. The hAP series from them are router/wifi combos. They offer a default configuration that will "just work", but from there you can make all sorts of complex configuration changes to your hearts content. Check out The Network Berg on YouTube. One thing to note, people are generally happy with the WiFi from 'Tik devices, but they are not known for having the best WiFi. It'll be stable and work well, but you might not see speeds on par with other brands.

    Then you have what you mentioned - OpnSense with other hardware for WiFi. For me, the downsides to this are:

    1. Running dedicated hardware just for this is a waste of electricity.
    2. Whatever you plan on running it on likely only has 1 ethernet port, so now you're spending money on a networking card. There may be a way to run it using a single eth port, in which case you can ignore this I guess.
    3. If you already have a computer on 24/7 for other stuff, you just have reliability to think about. If you have a hardware failure, for me it's faster to replace a router than an entire computer. The likelihood of needing to replace either one is slim, but it's something I consider. Picture this - you update your computer and need to reboot it. It fails to boot after the update and gives you some error messages, but you can't look them up because your router is down.... That sort of thing.

    Now back to the pros and cons of having separate router and WiFi AP.

    Pros:

    1. Can upgrade either one individually
    2. Can run multiple APs to extend WiFi coverage
    3. Can choose brands based on their reputation. For example (don't take my word on this) MikroTik for router, Unifi for WiFi.
    4. Scratches the nerd itch.

    Cons:

    1. If you use different vendors, you'll have different configuration options to deal with. OpnSense can't configure a TP-Link AP, for example.
    2. Adds some complexity. Now you're dealing with more ethernet cable, PoE injectors, and mounting of the AP.

    Hope that helps.

  • Austin is an expensive place. The town I live in has a similar problem, where in order to live here the teachers need a spouse who can afford it. Otherwise they need to live in a neighboring town. Fortunately you don't have to go too far to find something more affordable, but ideally they'd be able to live in the community where they teach.

    I always support professionals making more money. $4500/month before taxes is not a lot for a HCOL area.

    That being said, if you know your salary you should be making a budget. There are people who make $25,000/yr. with financial problems, and there are people who make $300,000/yr. with financial problems.

    This gentleman says he has bad credit which is a big factor into why he can't get an apartment, so saying he can't afford it is a bit misleading. He even said he has applied for apartments that he can afford. To me the question is how did he get into this situation? Taking on too much debt might be a cause, or just a snowball effect of too many bad financial decisions. Having to repay a grant sounds like it might have been avoidable, but I really don't know how the grant system works.

    Either way, if you're in this situation, please make a budget before it gets to this point.

    Now getting back on topic, lets pay teachers more!

  • I took a cap gun to school when I was that age. It was just a random toy to me. Despite the poor judgement, I still would have known a real gun was super off limits (not that I had access to one (never have, never will)).

  • You need to be able to move while dumping stuff. A beeping noise during normal operations would be so annoying, people would just figure out how to disable it.

    An alarm above a certain speed would make sense, though.

  • We run on the cheapest Hetzner VPS we can, which is about $8 USD/month. Pictrs are on cloudflare R2. Pictrs storage hovers around 14GB and we have yet to get a non-zero invoice.

    Our active users are super low (I think). I don't think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance, just for communities, but since it's a niche instance I can safely say it's around 10 people.

    So that's a little less than a dollar per month per user. On the existing VPS I think we could safely add a bunch of users without needing to upgrade.