Paypal locked my account after years of use for absolutely no reason. I never had a invalid charge, dispute, or any other kind of problem with it, just one day they decided to shut it down. They flatly refused to explain what was going on. With all the decent alternatives out there now there is no longer a reason to use their crappy service.

Love that they believe they’re the only game in town and can demand your bank statement.

I was using Z2M and found it had some weird, unresolvable device control quirks with a dimmer I’m using. Switched to ZHA and have had no problems at all.

It’s beyond belief, but insurance companies do the same thing to amputees.

We have all become unwilling, unpaid employees of every company in their pursuit of higher profits. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Corporations have discovered that there is no real downside (for them) when they don’t function. Customer satisfaction no longer has much of an impact on their profits because the few companies left in each sector are doing the exact same thing.

IMO this is yet another side effect of unchecked corporate power. It’s the same reason prices have risen so rapidly and corporate profits have reached 70 year highs. We are dealing with near monopolies and the billionaire class who created them. Until our government addresses the problem it’s not going to get any better.

In other words it’s not going to get better in our lifetimes.

Depends on the phone. Oneplus has a 65 watt charger.

Lol - that’s possible. I spend time in Mexico and Canada so I keep the exchange rates on my dashboard. Easier than looking them up every time.

I could set my the thermostat higher on cloudy days in the winter or more usefully, increase the setting when our cell phones are in the house and decrease it when we’re away. One guy put a vibration sensor on his nightstand and tapping on the stand turns on his bedroom light. There are way too many possibilities, useful and not.

My Home Assistant software and smart devices all are controlled locally and cloud access isn’t used but there are other, much more important reasons to avoid running it.

You should avoid it because Home Assistant is an addictive monster. It starts as a hobby and then the next thing you know you’re putting temperature sensors in your refrigerator and setting different brightness levels for your bathroom lights depending on the time of day.

Seriously though, the software gives an amazingly useful single dashboard for things you might use everyday including lighting, HVAC, alarm systems, weather, currency exchange rates, and entertainment systems. I use it every day.

The 1% pay their taxes.

Really?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/irs-has-already-collected-more-than-500-million-in-back-taxes-from-delinquent-millionaires/ar-AA1mRSsD

True. We must all make sacrifices so Amazon’s profits can grow. Maybe their marketing department should call the increase a “Mandatory Donation for the Good of the World” to help us keep things in perspective.

This is a 26% price hike. Amazon’s marketing BS shouldn’t fool anyone.

Perhaps so, but I’ve run HA on a Raspberry Pi under Raspberry OS, HA OS on that Pi, and HA Supervisor on a PC using Debian and am currently running it on a PC under Linux Mint. All of these worked with little or no delay between HA start and device status updates.

HA OS on its own doesn’t behave that way, so that leaves Proxmox or perhaps your specific hardware. Can’t help you though. Haven’t tried HA in any kind of virtual environment.

Something’s wrong with your configuration. What hardware, OS and HA config are you running?

My HA install does not lose anything when restarted. All my wifi, Z-wave & Zigbee devices, various entities and thermostat come back in the same state as prior to restart. I’ve run HA Supervised on two HW platforms and 3 distros and they’ve all functioned this way.

State law always trumps seller policies. The seller can force you to check a box agreeing to their terms of sale but those terms are not enforceable if state law gives you other rights. Unenforceable clauses have been in literally every contract or terms of sale I’ve ever read.

Rightful rejection laws make sense too, especially when you start looking at large purchases. Let’s say you ordered a black car from a dealer 500 miles away and the dealer delivered a pink one. The terms of sale say that you have to return the car to the dealer and pay a restocking fee for a refund. Those terms mean that the dealer has no obligation to deliver what you ordered or paid for and will make a profit (from you) even if they deliver something you didn’t order. That’s where Rightful Rejection laws become indispensable. All you have to do by law is make the product available for retrieval by the seller.

Funny you should mention Amazon - I’m literally dealing with this issue this week. They sent me a DOA item that has to be sent back. Amazon suddenly wants to charge me a fee to return a defective item that they have the legal obligation to retrieve. While I don’t mind dropping things off at a UPS store because I’m regularly a block away, they want me to make a special trip to a Staples or Whole Foods which is not convenient or reasonable. I was just going to order a replacement from them, but because of their new return fee I won’t be buying the replacement from Amazon, or much else going forward. My Amazon purchases will easily decrease by 90%.

Here’s the rub - a retailer does not have to continue to do business with you. If you force Amazon to retrieve an item they can close your account and refuse to sell to you again.

From an old Reddit post of mine:

If you buy an item and the seller sends one that differs significantly from the description or is defective, you have the right to reject the item and require the seller to retrieve it at their expense - no matter what the seller’s return policy says. You also have the right to a full refund. Rightful Rejection is part of state law and based on the Uniform Commercial Code. It is also written into Visa International’s rules. Don’t believe Citibank representatives or anyone else who tells you otherwise.

If you don’t want to pay new prices for a used item, it’s 100% up to GameStop to make it right. They have to pay to retrieve it and for return shipping. They have to give you a full refund on everything, including shipping charges.

So if you haven’t seen something happen it couldn’t have happened to any of the billions of people in the world? If I said my computer won’t power up someone here would insist I don’t know how to press the power button.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/windows-update-delete-linux/

The problem with purging Edge is my Windows 10 install will not open Firefox when the OS calls for a browser. For instance certain help screens are displayed in Edge or they aren’t displayed at all. And then there are Microsoft’s repeated reinstallations of Edge when running updates.

I have only one PC still running Windows and that’s only because Microsoft deleted my dual boot Linux partition and it is difficult and time consuming to reinstall, but Windows will be blown away soon…

Microsoft has been abusing their customers due to their market position for years and Justice Department needs to reopen that anti-trust suit. Time to break the company up.

Yes, and in reality. When you charge more per item for goods and services so that healthcare is included, they cost more.

A red-herring response if I’ve ever seen one.

This has literally nothing to do with the tactic of hiding additional fees so customers don’t see them instead of just increasing prices, or the difference between pricing something a cent below a round number and adding a wellness fee at checkout.

I try to avoid playing pigeon chess, but it seems that’s what I’ve been doing.

Did that make sense in your head?

This is just the equivalent of pricing things at $19.99 because people don’t understand that really means $20 which sounds like a lot more money.

So let’s say you checkout at the grocery store tomorrow and your $100 of groceries has a $20 “employee wellness” fee tacked on. You see that and pricing an item 1 penny below a round number as the same thing. Really?