Kind of. I use their waterleak sensors and pair them directly with their YoLink Siren. The siren will go off without cloud, internet, or even power (until the batteries run out).
Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.
My wife and I are expecting. Daycare is expensive, but it's only an outrageous expense if you have two people making up to about 3x minimum wage. Below that, it makes sense (at least in our area) to have one person stay home. But the cheapest state-regulated, licensed daycares are around $1500/mo for full-day infant care.
$18k/yr is a lot to spend on anything when you're making $20/hr for sure, but if you've got two professional people making $75-100k/yr each it becomes a very manageable expense and nobody considers staying home to save that.
$75k is about $56k after taxes. And many people that have children tend to have at least two children, so you can double that $18k to $36k/year for those people.
Once you get to that point, it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year. It starts making more sense for one person to stay home (or work a part-time gig that lets them still raise their children) and the other person to try to make a bit more money on their end instead.
My parents got around the daycare cost problem by my mother running a daycare out of the home, so she was making money while still able to raise us. But I imagine that's become so much more risky nowadays (like legal issues, parental trust, etc) that it probably wouldn't be worth doing that anymore.
And as soon as we both graduated high school she stopped doing it and went back into the workforce elsewhere.
Yeah after taxes and then daycare it gets blurry unless you're making well above US median.
even then, I'm not crazy with the idea of random strangers raising my kids. being "qualified" to run a daycare is mostly paperwork. plus I work remotely, and that means I can see my kid 3 times a day, even if I can't really stick around to do serious parenting in between meetings.
my wife's people are also around, retired teachers no less, so having them pop in on the regular helps a immensely. they had 3 kids, several grandkids, and have educational backgrounds in early childhood development, and I trust them to do everything they can to take care of my kid, even if it means occasionally giving them extra ice cream (but, usually, it's grandpa reading books or working on basic math with them, etc.).
"it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year."
An extra $20k/yr is huge for most people. Median household income is around $80k. I've heard it's more like $100k for married couples with kids, but can't find that Stat. With either number(or even 75% of those after tax), that's a large bump (or subtraction).
This was already assuming the person quitting was making $75k though, per the parent, so presumably the other person is making more (or else they would probably be the one quitting for day care). Which means they're already making double the household median.
And once you get to that level, the person keeping the job getting a new job for a $10k-$20k bump starts becoming feasible (I got a >$60k bump when I last switched jobs), and that can make up the difference right there.
Then you have one person who can take care of the children and have time and energy to help with cooking and cleaning (keeping those costs down, especially if you were getting a lot of takeout before), and can save even more money.
There's plenty of families making this decision nowadays, it's not a hypothetical. It doesn't always make sense for every couple, but the marginal increase of income doesn't always make sense for all the added stress of trying to raise children while having two full-time jobs and the house not completely falling apart.
We don't even have children, and we aren't able to fully keep up with cooking and cleaning on two full-time jobs, we just don't have the leftover energy afterwards.
You're on Hacker News. I work in the Midwest, and I'm probably making half or less of the total compensation of people (with half my years of experience) working in Silicon Valley, which is the target demographic of this site. Yet I'm making significantly more than $80k. 'Lots of income' is the norm here.
And $10-20k isn't a huge bump between jobs. I've gotten that much of a bump, or more, at least six times throughout my career. And I wasn't always a software engineer, so it's not just because I'm in a lucrative career.
I haven't gotten it every time, but often enough that this shouldn't be impossible at least once in someone's career if they're extra motivated by switching to a single income household (unless it's a field known for low salaries, like maybe teachers can't expect that much of a bump, unfortunately).
I'd like to get less takeout. I'd be fine with just lunchmeat on bread or something microwaved for most of my meals, but my wife won't. She insists on a 'proper meal' every day, so on weeks we don't cook those (which almost always take me about 1.5-2 hours to cook) we tend to get a lot of takeout. I hate how much money we spend on it, but we can afford it.
House upkeep has been a challenge. Both of us have been pretty low energy after work, so during the week not much more tends to get done besides dishes, sometimes cooking, and laundry.
And then on the weekend we might be out pretty much all day both days (I work from home, so I feel more of a need to socialize on the weekends to make up for it, but even just extended family social obligations can suck up a weekend) or trying to relax from a long week, so not much tends to get done there either.
And so slowly things that need doing start accumulating, until it becomes this big thing that takes a lot of work (and some proper time off) to tackle.
I know it's not just me either. I know several friends and coworkers that hire maids to keep up with housework. People I know aren't making a ton of money comparatively so I wonder how they afford it. We can afford it but we kind of need to get the house up to a certain level before it's even worth hiring a maid (have to do enough decluttering, for example).
Also doesn't help that I keep saying "Well next week let's do better." and it keeps not happening for one reason or another.
I'm glad someone else spends this amount of time cooking. Look, I actually really enjoy cooking. It's almost zen to me to go from programming all day to just following steps, the most complicated of which is usually something like "now add some ingredient but don't stop stirring." It's mindless in a good way but still creative.
But can we talk about how every single unit of time seems to be distorted like it was written in some relativistic hellscape? Any 30 minute recipe takes just over an hour, any "from scratch" recipe takes me half the day.
I find it interesting how income tends to segregate with marriage, and how that exasperates some inequalities.
Having kids for those highly compensated dual income homes seems narcissistic when you get to the root of it. Like why have kids if we're outsourcing their raising to daycare and schools. The we only care about their accomplishments and leaving them with a large inheritance or paying for a fancy school. Then they go off to live mostly separate lives. Look at how well my kid is doing because I set them up in life, even though I barely raised them and rarely see them now. I don't know?
Telling the monthly rate in Texas is not a great metric in general... you must always add the property tax costs. What are those, 300k'ish houses? You're probably looking at at least another 500 a month in properly tax pushing it up to $2300, then if they are built like this add another $200 in for summer time cooling.
1800/month including tax. Real estate tax is high in TX, but not income tax. I prefer this taxation which has to come from somewhere. NYC has high income tax and real estate tax, and the grocery options could still be not close at all.
How far do you have to drive to go to a supermarket from that development? To a library? (Silly me, expecting people to go to a library in 2024, right?)
If Dallas or Houston or Austin had decent mass transit out to those areas that'd be one thing, but they wouldn't be very "mass", and therein lies one of the problems. Car culture increases isolation and generally shits up the world ever further; somewhere like a YOLO development in the suburbs to exurbs is deleterious to human flourishing and saying "well just buy something where you need a car for everything", as opposed to like the one-off Home Depot run or something, is just trading problems.
Yes, of course! And it's reasonable to think that living in both modest precarity and isolation is worse than living in somewhat more severe precarity; "affordable" places to live are inferior goods!
The problem, fundamentally, is that we, collectively and as a country, need to create more good places, rather than to exile people to the bad but affordable ones. We need a concerted effort to have strong towns and to put cars at the edge and not the center of those towns in order to have a healthy community future, and just sneering that you can buy a house in the hinterlands is both non-responsive and cruel to boot.
I agree with you. However, the discussion about housing is normally around how it's worse now than it was in the past, and these types of dynamics have existed for a long time.
Just looked it up because I was curious. Mortgage + Real Estate tax is right at 1800/month. 4 Bed / 2 Bath, new construction. Kroger is 3 miles away with a "cash and go" type place even closer, so about 8 min by car, 20 min by bike.
Point remains, that there is plenty of affordable housing in the US. It's just not where people want to live, thus supply/demand.
No amount of "fuckcars" ideology will matter here, some people actually prefer driving. I know I do, I don't want to be stuck in a subway or bus.
"How far do you have to drive to go to a supermarket from that development?"
That's the system - resource scarcity and preference. If you live in a densely populated area, prices tend to be higher because real estate is constrained. Zoning won't fix all of that because many people have a preference for SFH, larger sizes, etc. You end up with options and amenities, but it will cost more due to the consolidation. Or you end up with space, needing to drive to amenities, and cheaper prices largely due to less competition.
if you get out Dallas or Austin... where are the jobs?
the number of people working remotely, even now, is still comparatively small.
doesn't matter if the housing rates are 50% lower if your only options are minimum wage at some chain (dollar general, chik fil a, etc.), or scraping for one of the few non-wagie gigs.
that doesn't fix the problem, that just means you're getting paid less, while house prices may have roughly the same ratio of income-to-cost that you'd find in DFW or ATX.
and in exchange now you need a car, need to drive constantly, and have fewer amenities and choices (maybe save for access to churches or walmarts).
shit, even far flung burbs of Austin like Taylor and Hutto are getting pricy compared to when I was last out there. Hutto Hippo oughta make a reappearance and start eating the carpetbaggers who keep moving in around there.
Ad hominem means "against a specific person". He made a general argument. Might be good or bad, but in no way it was an ad hominem. Arguing how a group of people conflate or tend to misrepresent this or that, is not an ad hominem.
"Our profession" can work remotely from anywhere. Whether some companies choose to acknowledge that or not doesn't change the fact that we don't need to live by big cities. Most companies do understand that.
What a role model of a human being. Bookmarked for the weekend, I'll be making a donation in his honor for sure. Sometimes a cause connects with you and gives you greater purpose, I hope I find myself honestly in such a way. It's always on my mind.
Some might find your take bizarre, but the early architects of the internet were against NAT as well. Although, in their idealistic scenario IPv4 would not have held up as long as it did, and probably would have hastened the introduction of IPv6 - not to mention the security concerns like all devices needing competent firewalls. Some people just didn't like that computers could be locked behind a network veil/wall.
Actually, it's funny. My parents aren't Libertarian, but they kinda lean that way in terms of not trusting the government - etc. When they restricted pseudoephedrine, they immediately were suspicious about phenylephrine and eventually came to the conclusion that it doesn't do anything. They'd demand pseudoephedrine and claim that phenylephrine was just a way to restrict pseudoephedrine while allowing pharma to rip us off, yada yada. That's where my strong disdain for phenylephrine came from. Once I was in college buying my own medicine, I came to the same conclusion that one worked and one didn't. Pseudoephedrine was just a miracle drug to me, I remember stopping taking it too early and feeling blegh within hours.
If you could make it so you can completely turn off the dGPU through software (boot menu?), pulling no power, it would be insane. I would love the power of a dGPU to play casually on trips but turn it off for normal use when I'm just working. Also, I LOVE that it wouldn't look like a gaming laptop. I'm tired of the gamer-esque design cues, even when they're subtle (RGB keyboards are okay if configurable).
Heck, I'd love to not even carry the GPU unless I want to use it. What ever happened to external GPUs for mobile gaming? I faintly remember hearing about them years ago, but I don't know if there were ever practical consumer/prosumer products. I imagine it's not uncommon for some laptop users to carry Thunderbolt docks that are pretty beefy (the one I use weighs a full pound, although I almost never carry it with me), and I would bet you could fit a decent mobile GPU in a similar or smaller form factor.
You can completely turn off dGPUs from software nowadays. In theory the driver should do it for you when it's not in use (And I find this works well for me), but you can also forcefully turn them off, both on Windows and Linux, such that they draw exactly 0W.
Hmmm. My experience with XPS 15s is you can turn it off with software in Linux, but it was pretty technical (not something average users would be keen on). I wasn't sure if that was the case for most laptops. It definitely wasn't drawing 0W when I was just coding/browsing/etc though, it doubled the battery life in Linux when I turned it off.
Yeah, my experience with iGPU+dGPU setups outside of MacBooks has been messy. Part of the problem perhaps is the various different ways it can be set up, e.g. with/without mux switch, and last I knew AMD and Nvidia handle iGPU ↔ dGPU handoffs differently rather than agreeing on a standard.
With that in mind I'd also prefer that there be a way to flip off the dGPU in BIOS to guarantee that it can't unexpectedly become a power vampire.
I don’t think apple gets enough credit for how good their automatic graphics switching implementation was. I’d argue that most users who benefitted from it didn’t even know it was happening. It’s such a useful feature too, because dGPUs generally kill notebook batteries, and even at idle, they probably generate an impactful amount of heat.
Is there truly no equivalent to apples automatic graphic switching for PC laptops? If so that’s WILD.
AMD and NVidia now use the same standard, which is PRIME for handoff and automatic shutdown using Runtime PM, and if needed muxes are handled by the vga-switcheroo.
On the latest NVidia/AMD hardware, no configuration should be required, unless you try to use Wayland on NVidia.
Unfortunately on NVidia you really need the latest hardware, both on the GPU and CPU side. If you do, it should generally "just work". Of course Linux is Linux and it might not.
It depends on how recent the motherboard and GPU is, if you have an NVidia dGPU. If you have a GPU made in the last two years and a recent CPU, it works automatically out of the box with X11. On older systems, it's pretty technical, but thankfully many distributions now come with tools that handle it all for you and give you a button you can click to turn it off.
ASUS laptops, as of 6.1, I think, have kernel support and a userspace CLI and GUI to trivially configure this stuff (`asusctl`). In Windows, you can use GHelper and avoid the hundreds of megabytes of gaudy crap that is Armory Crate to configure this as well.
`asusctl` (the CLI), and `rog-control-center` (the GUI) lets you configure fan curves, "ultimate mode" (mux switch), LED lights, effects, panel overdrive, battery charge limit and more
And then `supergfxctl`, when "ultimate mode" is disabled, allows you to configure "Hybrid" or "Integrated"(-only) graphics modes.
For completeness/disclosure, flipping the mux switch aka Ultimate mode on/off) requires reboot, though it seems this may become unnecessary with new/future hybrid graphics tech in laptops.
ASUS should shower the developer in money, this G14 2022, all AMD is the most satisfying, best, complete out of box Linux experience I've ever had. And I've owned a lot of Lenovos, Dells, etc.
Looks wise, it reminds me of my Legion 5i Pro 2022 if only for the back part (I/O, exhaust). There's more laptop behind the display unlike most laptop designs where the display is the edge.
Citation? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim.