One of the primary reasons Medicare Advantage has become popular is the sales commissions are MUCH HIGHER than for Medigap plans. Those commissions don’t end after the first year either, they continue to be paid as long as the policy is held and that commission structure leads sales people to actively lie about Medicare Advantage vs. Medigap. Those increased commissions can easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars extra pay in just a few years for pushing MA.

People are told if they don’t like their MA plan they can just switch to Medigap at a future date but that’s a outright lie. The truth is that after the initial 6 month open enrollment period, the vast majority of people can never switch to a Medigap plan and are stuck with Medicare Advantage and its long list of disadvantages for the rest of their lives. Even the most minor of health conditions (such as medication controlled hypertension) can be used a pretext to deny coverage or substantially jack up Medigap rates.

Another common lie is that you can always go to any in-network MA doctor or medical center anywhere in the country. Again not true. In most places people are limited by specific geographic area except for occasional visits to medical providers other areas. If you have a world class medical center and doctors outside your coverage area you want to see too bad - computer says no. No one in customer service or sales will mention that. You have to read the 200+ page policy’s fine print or you would never know.

If you or a loved one are approaching Medicare age be very, very careful before choosing Medicare Advantage over Medigap, despite how tempting it may look.

Good. The idiot flying a drone in an active fire zone could well be responsible for millions in damage that could have otherwise been avoided. Lock him up.

I have a couple of these: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/LKWSZ211.html

They’re just OK. Single clicks work just fine, but double clicks have to be done very quickly or they register as single clicks. The button hold function is ridiculous and takes a full 4 seconds before transmitting. I’ve found no way of changing any of the button timings.

These work really well, but they’re single button:

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WXKG13LM.html

3rd? It’s all but certain that there are tens of thousands of other examples of this BS that haven’t been reported.

Never, and it has battery back up in case of power failure. Automation, security cameras, HVAC controls, file sharing, etc. running on it.

Adguard Home is a Pi-Hole competitor. They work fine for ad servers, but the content I was trying to reduce couldn’t be blocked that way or the TV’s wouldn’t work. Menu changes were being loaded while the set was off and Roku was inserting some ad content along with menu changes.

To my surprise this setup has reduced menu additions and ads to almost nothing. It seems that these menus aren’t updated when my TV’s are actually in use and that’s now the only time they can connect to the Internet.

Dahua (professional side of Amcrest) still sells their video doorbell through B&H Photo. According to a Q&A answer on the site it will power a wired chime.

I have another wifi Dahua camera (also bought from B&H) and have been really impressed with it. It’s used with Frigate and Home Assistant. Be aware that B&H offers their own warranty for Dahua products. I looked at the fine print before my purchase and felt it was reasonable.

EmpireTech sells rebranded Dahua products and they have a different model. The seller gets great reviews on ipcamtalk.com. Detailed user reviews here. EmpireTech also sells through Amazon.

My TV continues to chatter to random servers on the internet long after it has turned off. It transmits to a telemetry server on every single button press.

What’s even more irritating to me are the random changes to the TV’s UI. Turn it off for a while and I come back to an entire new set of menu entries and ads!

Home Assistant, OpenWRT and Adguard Home mostly fix those problems.

When my TVs are powered off a Home Assistant automation enables a couple of OpenWRT firewall rules. Those rules block all TV Internet access. When the TVs are powered on the firewall rules are automatically disabled and the TVs work normally. That along with Adguard Home’s blocking of all UI ads makes my TVs almost user friendly.

When you’re ready for a full monitoring package, check out Frigate.

The Shelter app allows you to sandbox other apps:

https://www.makeuseof.com/shelter-sandbox-android-apps/

It’s no longer on Google Play (likely because it makes it a bit more difficult to track people) but can be found on Fdroid:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

I have similar problems with devices disconnecting from my Realtek BT/wifi card. I was able to significantly reduce (but not completely eliminate) the problems by disabling power management for the BT adapter’s associated USB port.

The most problematic are ASUS USB-BT400 and Realtek RTL8821CE

Can confirm. The Realtek adapter in my HP laptop is a major PITA. Both BT & wifi have problems that I’ve only able to partially resolve.

Cities can refuse to provide services to venues who refuse to pay for them in most places. The city officials in every city that Trump screwed should have been demanding payment up front - they knew he routinely screws over everyone he deals with because he still has debts from 2016 that are unpaid. Those who haven’t been paid should have been making front page news by suing for what they are owed.

47% of the people in Kent County voted for the felon. Even if the Grand Rapids numbers are lower, it’s not reasonable to suggest a significant percentage of those making city decisions aren’t Trump supporters.

This isn’t an unpaid debt, it’s an illegal campaign contribution by city officials at their taxpayer’s expense.

Every single one of them knew they would be providing free city services for Trump while charging the Biden then Harris campaign for the same.

Many (most?) Ubuntu fixes also work on Mint. This post might help.

I’m using Netgear adapters between my router and a dumb AP. They’ve been very reliable outside of occasionally not coming back online by themselves after a power failure.

First corporations were people, now they’re kings.

There would be zero response if she had literally told another person she was going to kill them, in fact law enforcement would simply dismiss the event as not a legitimate threat.

In our corporatocracy/oligarchy even repeating words used during a crime is a serious crime worthy of imprisonment when our corporate overlords are involved.

Thomson hid behind company sponsored laws passed by bought politicians to legally kill tens of thousands of people despite valid insurance coverage. He is nothing more than a murderous villain, but it’s not the least bit surprising that the NYT thinks he’s a hero.

I don’t think us mere mortals can hope to understand the mysteries of Amazon marketing services.

Some problems with that:

1. Companies routinely use more than one source address meaning I’m required to play whack-a-mole to maintain my filters.
2. Setting up a content filter means wanted emails from other sources can be filtered out.
3. The majority of users have absolutely no idea what a filter is.