I’m not in the US so any comparisons are pretty much worthless, but 30k/year sounds just ridiculous. Myself and my wife make slightly above average by local standards but if we’d need to cough up another 2k/month for insurance that just wouldn’t happen. With mortage and other living expenses with kids there’s practically nothing left from what we make. Sure, we could cut our expenses a bit, we’re living pretty comfortably, but there’s no way we could squeeze 2k/month out of our “non necessary expenses”.

But, again not being in the US, that’s taken care of via taxes. 30+% is a lot out of salary but at least I don’t have to save for college fund nor worry about visit to hospital/doctor.

Just a few days ago I tried to feed my home automation logs to copilot in hopes that it might find a reason why my controller jams randomly multiple times per hour. It confidently claimed that as my noise level reported by controller is -100dB (so basically there’s absolutely nothing else on that frequency around, pretty much as good as it can get) it’s the problem and I should physically move the controller to less noisy area. A decent advice in itself, it might actually help on a lot of cases, but in my scenario it’s a completely wrong rabbit hole to dig in. I might still move the thing around to get better reception on some devices but it doesn’t explain why the whole controller freezes for several minutes on random intervals.

In here it’s hovering roughly around 1,60 - 1,70€/l (~7 - 7,50$/gallon). Plus car tax and mandatory insurance in 1000€/year ballbark for gasoline cars, with diesel it’s more but depends on the type, emission class and weight of the car.

With cloud computing you get someone (or at least some entity) to blame when things go wrong which apparently has some value too. Also, if you don’t need a lot of resources cloud can be cheaper than setting up whole infrastructure by yourself, but that has a ton of variables. Plus with cloud there’s often option for colocation/high availability/ddos protection and other stuff around which can be pretty expensive to build yourself.

Obviously if you try to shoehorn your current modrate sized esx/hyper-v/whatever environment to the cloud as is, that’s going to be expensive.

You can get refurbished hard drives for around 300$/20TB (quickly searched estimation). So, 15 drives plus maybe another 5 for raid reundancy takes you back 6k$. Server to hold those drives 1-2k$ (used), UPS, internet connection and other bits’n’bobs and your total is very roughly around 8k$ (or €, as I threw the estimations on a pretty big ballpark).

Damn right. I paid for the device, it’s mine and I can use it solely to take pictures of my bare ass should I choose so. There’s of course, and for a reason, limitations on how I can use those pictures, but those apply to any device capable of taking a photo of anything. But I can still use pictures of my ass as a wallpaper in my own home if I want to.

Outlook (new) classic new new final (7). Teams (personal). Multiple products with wildly different appreance and somewhat different functionality. And then the whole 365-environment naming, starting from the platform itself.