What are some of the bugs you encounter in Thunderbird?
The interface used to freeze randomly and completely for varying periods of time. Made it completely unusable for me. It's not an unknown problem. Unfortunately, none of the fixes ever seemed to work for me.
You can rather easily host an instance of Nextcloud on rather modest hardware in my experience. It just needs to be able to run apache/nginx, php, and sqlite (you're supposed to use mariadb/mysql but don't absolutely need to if you're just running it for yourself). Activate the tasks app and you're good to go. The entire infrastructure is all open source and you get a whole lot more benefits than just self-hosted tasks.
Everything is accessible with CalDAV so you can use the built-in sync from the iPhone or DAVdroid and OpenTasks on Android. For desktop/laptop you can access it from the web interface or through your preferred groupware software.
Since security is an issue, if you don't want to pay for an SSL certificate you can self-sign one or get one from Let's Encrypt.
Isn't "heat" just slightly longer waves of red light?
Heat is kinetic energy. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a system. It also happens that individual atoms/molecules can transition between energy levels by emitting/absorbing infrared radiation. That's the way that heat from something like the sun can travel through the vacuum of space to reach Earth.
Have you ever thought to ask those teachers how much they make, and what their expenses are?
No, I've never done that because that would be rude. It's not my place to judge them. Of the one with whom I had a personal relationship, I know he had a child with greater-than-average medical needs. The others seemed to signal that they were just trying to make some extra money.
I don't know where you live, but in my state, the average teacher salary is ~$50,000/year (source). I wouldn't exactly call that rolling in dough, especially when you consider that many have a master's degree and also have their own kids to take care of. Also, our budgets for resources and supplies is garbage in this state. Many teachers ask for donations of paper, glue, etc from the parents. Many end up buying the stuff they don't get with money out of their own pockets (so that employee discount helps). The problem just magnifies when you get to poorer school districts.
Agreed, WalMart is just the poster child for the larger living wage problem. When I was in High School (80s), jobs like that (in my town) were 80% staffed by kids with no real income needs - just for pocket money, there would be the occasional older loser who just didn't care that they could only afford to live in a trailer park with 3 roommates in an 800 square foot tin can built 30 years ago, and once in a rare while - a true hardworking person in a tough situation who was just using the income to get by until they got something better.
Today, there are so few better opportunities out there that the demographic of who's working near minimum wage jobs has become much more diverse, and people who really want out don't have nearly as much opportunity to get out. It's not impossible, but it's much much more challenging and competitive.
I'm glad we found a common ground. I see the same thing happening. Even in the 90's when I was in high school, I knew people who worked at K-Mart, Pizza Hut, grocery stores, and other low wage positions. Now those positions are increasingly staffed by older people. A knew quite a few people at Wal-Mart who were teachers trying to supplement income on the evenings and weekends. It's a sad commentary that the people who are educating my children are having to work 7 days a week just to make ends meet or provide a decent living for their own kids. How much time does that leave for lesson planning outside of school? Something needs to give. I don't think huge minimum wage increases are the answer because that will make everyday items more expensive and lead to even more job elimination. I'm personally a big proponent of the various universal basic income schemes. We'll see what happens in the future, but the status quo is just not heading in a good direction.
Any program which runs right is obsolete.