Samsung TV starts playing ads if it feels you are idle so i don't connect it to internet directly so use a fire stick. I once connected tv to internet to update some firmware but disconnected the same day because of ads.

There are also concerns about control, in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82, I am worried about what other companies could do like smart washer ( how about allowed to wash cloths only after 10 pm ) or not allowed to use some setting like extra wash etc.

What would happen if your account gets locked and you cannot access your smart stove to cook a meal. All those people who posted that their oculus was locked out because their FB account go locked out. In my opinion most of these smart appliances are more of a hassle than worth it.

I agree with a lot of your post, but the Texas example is actually the kind of example I would prefer. Folks were not deceived when they signed up for the process. It was clearly spelled out, enjoy lower rates, but when energy grid gets hot, you might have some conditions throttled resulting in mild discomfort (the exact window of how much this could affect and the minimums was transparently communicated). And it was all opt-IN which I think is again a good thing.

I don't like when smart appliances like the Samsung connect to the internet for what I as a consumer hope are good things (like using Netflix with the push of a button, etc.) and instead abuse that by showing me ads -- not something they include very visibly in the agreement or feature sell. It is not transparent and near impossible to opt out of.

What I don't get about signing up to allow your thermostat to be remotely controlled for a discount, is that isn't really easy to circumvent the system? Either the cloud thermostat isn't even connected, or a second thermostat in parallel, or only sign up a thermostat that controls half your load (making the other half work harder), or even just a candle under the thermostat to make it think it's warmer than it is.

Making it do what it's advertised to do would either require fully trusting the hardware (and hardware in this case means the whole hvac system), or monitoring a home's electricity usage and having some after the facto punishment (which will only catch the unsophisticated ways of working around it).

The electrical utility program they’re talking about doesn’t control your thermostat, it’s a line-voltage device that is wired in-line with your air conditioning compressor. It has a relay that enables and disables the compressor circuit. The enable/disable signal comes from the utility. The furnace fan will still run.

Xcel Energy calls their program “Saver’s Switch” if you want to read more about it

That seems even easier to bypass, but makes more sense if they're just using that to moderate instantaneous draw (everyone's compressor kicking on at once), rather than trying to reduce total cooling demand.

But my original critique still applies. If you have two AC units, and only install the switch in series with one, do they figure it out based on your draw and cut your discount in half, or what? Or do they do the install themselves and check over your system. And if you later open up your own equipment and bypass it, they treat you similarly as if you were to just jump your electric meter?

I do wonder if this approach makes sense from the homeowner perspective too. Modulating your compressor means that you need a bigger compressor to handle the same cooling load, and short cycling isn't going to be good for it.

You're overthinking this.

Yes, you could buy a second AC and do complex wiring and control trickery to hack the system... Or you could just not sign up for the voluntary system and pay an extra couple bucks a year.

Any effort to hack the system is going to be far more cost or hassle than just not signing up for the program, for people who are following financial incentives. If you want to hack the system for the fun of it, sure you could, but the utilities aren't really worried about that.

I'm overstating it because I'm analyzing it adversarially. But I could very easily see these situations happening emergently. Central HVAC in the main house, then an addition/office/etc that gets a mini split or even its own ducted HVAC. So sure, main AC gets set back 5 degrees but then you're still hot, so just kick the office AC on high and leave the door open.

Also jumpering over a low voltage thermostat takes like 5 minutes tops, and could be easily done by the type of tech enthusiast early adopter that would be interested in programs like these. And it only takes someone getting too hot once to try it, and then just continue doing it routinely. Never mind people for which the few bucks a year is significant.

We bought our samsung in 2016 and in... 2018 it started showing us ads, and then later they installed the "tv plus", uh, "feature". Which you can't uninstall so every time your toddler bumps the channel button on the remote, it will kick you out of whatever netflix/youtube/disney+ thing you're watching to go to some ad-supported BS. Over the years the UI has gone from good to almost unusably slow and laggy. Next time we move, we're trashing the 2016 samsung and getting something else, and never ever hooking it up to wifi.

When I bought a samsung tv for my home office, I explicitly never enabled the wifi, and plugged in an external FAANG device with a remote and control the TV via that. If the device gets buggy I can go buy a new one for $60.

> in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82

As I understand it, those people got a discount on their bill specifically _because_ they allowed for that.

> There are also concerns about control, in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82, I am worried about what other companies could do like smart washer ( how about allowed to wash cloths only after 10 pm ) or not allowed to use some setting like extra wash etc.

The electric utility is very clear about what would happen if you sign up for their energy saving program. It is possible to buy a home that has an energy saving switch already installed on the A/C circuit, but you can simply request to have it removed by the utility.

Samsung TV starts playing ads ... in the US.

This kind of craziness is illegal in Europe and I honestly cannot understand why this is not regulated in the US.

My mother called me freezing cold. Her nest thermostat had a "wifi connectivity lost" message on the screen and she couldn't (or didn't know how) to turn up the heat.

Snowflake separates compute and data storage which allows you to add more compute during busy times and switch to a lower compute during off peak times. It is also considered to be a data warehouse that is not from a cloud provider(even thought it uses AWS underneath and managed by snowflake).

The company i work for use snowflake. Just like any cloud platform, you can run up the tab if wrongly configured and not optimized.

I did contracting for a while, I bought insurance with dental in 2010. It cost me about $120 a month and was comparable to my work. I did some contracting around 2015 and i bought insurance, I was paying $400 with barely any coverage. In my 2010 plan i had no concept of co-insurance, in my 2015 i also have co-insurance, also heard from my friend that when his wife had a baby, they had several doctors half in-network and half out to max out his deductible. He said same hospital for his first kid cost him around $400, second kid at 2017 cost him $4500.

The cost have gone up a lot.

Am i missing something, if a treadmill has a subscription, the kid can still run on it right?, is it some kind of fingerprint or face authentication that would stop a kid from running.

If you have a subscription, you can set a password.

I mean, they gotta be able to make a free account SKU though that has nothing but "Just Run" enabled.

On the flip side, I wonder who bought a Peloton treadmill and didn't intend on getting the subscription service. Not that it makes it right, but I imagine most people already pay for it and the number of affected users is quite low.

"Intend on" when they bought it, sure. Wouldn't be surprised if quite a few people found they don't actually want to stick with the subscription - although then admittedly returning it and getting something else sounds like a good deal, even if it's hassle.

The subscriptiion allows you to set a pin

Some of these landlords also have mortgage on rental property, one of my friend had a rental property, i think he was netting $100 a month. The rest went for mortgage, property tax, maintenance and property management person. He sold it in 2014.

I don't think he could have absorbed 12 month + of non rent payment and pay all those expenses out of his pocket.

That's just the risk of investing in real estate directly instead of through a financial instrument.

The risk of being forced to house someone for free by government edict? Who doesn’t love unfunded mandates.

What's the difference if it's empty? Same loss of revenue. And sure, some maintanence/upkeep for tenants, but given how fast properties rot when vacant, that's probably a wash.

Rent seeking with someone else's money? Yeah, that's risky.

> What's the difference if it's empty?

Was it empty though? There is a shortage in housing and it's pretty rare to have an empty rental in this market. You're injecting conditions that don't really exist to make your point.

> Rent seeking with someone else's money? Yeah, that's risky.

This point is enough.

Oftentimes the landlord covers utilities and lumps that up in to the rent, and I have a place in New England where that is the convention. We pay $500-$600/month for heating oil in the winter. Then we have about $300 in electricity and another $300 for water/sewage.

These numbers might be off but you get the idea.

That's the difference.

If empty you can more readily find another tenant, perhaps at a lower price?

> What's the difference if it's empty?

If it is empty then someone who is willing to pay can rent it.

The government edict didn't appear in a vacuum, it was a response to a massive crisis affecting the entire country. Ultimately, from a financial perspective, this is no different from any potential crisis that could have caused a downturn in the rental market, and those risk factors are what you take on when you make rental investments.

It doesn’t sound like anyone in the government forced them to buy a rental property that stretched their finances to the limit.

The government changed the terms of fully executed private contracts. But as risk increases, so follows insurance. So if the government wants to abuse contract law, watch the rent, penalties and security deposits climb to compensate for any future "moratoriums".

The government enacted emergency powers and public health laws they already possessed when those contracts were signed. Where is the abuse?

I'd be personally ok with the government bailing out smaller landlords (just because), but the largest percentage of these defaults are going to affect private equity firms who have bought an outrageous amount of the housing stock. We need to stop socializing risk and privatizing profits, and this would be a good place to start.

The abuse was largely in the duration and indiscriminate scope, regardless of ability to pay or not.

Student loans are cheaper precisely because they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Rent is cheaper because of eviction. Now that we've seen the government unilaterally discharge rent through moratorium, you can expect to see that risk profile baked into an increased monthly payment.

The US government and their mandate without compensation or forbearance stretched their finances to the limit.

It sounds like they stretched their own finances to the limit. The government was trying to solve a much larger problem that required indifference to the risks they took, but sometimes that’s what the government has to do. It’s the investors job to cover risk.

“It sounds like they stretched their own finances to the limit. The government was trying to solve a much larger problem that required indifference to the risks they took”

Your second point sort of invalidates the first. You argue that the government isn’t the source of the harm, then justify the government action as a prudent balancing of harms.

I think the point most are making is that they were trying to solve a much larger problem, but didn’t think the problem through particularly well.

> Your second point sort of invalidates the first. You argue that the government isn’t the source of the harm, then justify the government action as a prudent balancing of harms.

No it doesn't. The pandemic caused the harm, the government acted to mitigate the worst effects of it. You seem to be of the opinion that the "worst effects" are the landlords losing out on rent, but the worst effects are millions of people ending up homeless during a pandemic, which is what the government prevented. Even if it was clumsy, I tend to think landlords would have been worse off anyways if there had been mass homelessness and higher body counts. You can't collect rent if your renters are dead or your own head is in a basket.

If you don't want to trust the government, don't buy property controlled by the government

All property is controlled by government. Name me one single place where no property laws apply.

I think that's the point.

Seems to me there's a constitutional amendment against that particular unfunded mandate. (Yeah, I know, that was specifically housing soldiers. I'm not sure a court would agree, constitutionally, that the government can force you to house civilians either.)

Considering the current makeup of the Supreme Court, I highly doubt they would fail to make the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Aren't half of them literal constitutionalists?

I doubt they're that literal... but I could be wrong.

Could an argument be made under the 3rd amendment if the renter is a US soldier?

Almost certainly not, since they're not being housed as soldiers.

They also end up with a house at the end of that mortgage.

They end up with a 30 year old house that has been rented. There is a lot of cost in the upkeep of a rented house. When purchasing a house with the intent of renting it there are rules in place to play by when calculating the risk and return...but when the government completely rewrites the rules on the fly and basically forces you to rent for free for >1 year then its a problem.

Fortunately, the owner also gets to expense the upkeep (that's a 30+% discount on future cashflows) and depreciate the improvements over a 27 year life, meaning that they have a capital loss even if the house appreciates in value.

Oh, and they also got to forego mortgage payments during the pandemic and also potentially write off the less than market rent that they were unable to evict during. (for 30+% off of the missed rent)

No they didn't...they got to put off mortgage payments for a few months, and all of those became due immediately.

Expensing upkeep...writing off rent...you act like thats free money that doesn't come out of their pocket. If you depreciate the improvements, you then have to pay the taxes on it when you sell the place.

Stop acting like it's free money and there is no risk...a significant portion of landlords do not make money month to month and do this for their long term financial health. I think if you had significant money and time tied up in any investment you would be just as pissed as they are if the government changed the rules in the middle of the game.

Then stop acting like the government did this capriciously with no reason. The eviction moratorium was a necessary public health measure.

Now, if you want to say "well, the government should have also enacted a mortgage moratorium, and made the banks the ones who shoulder the financial burden, rather than landlords (whether individual or corporate)," I won't argue with that in the slightest. But given who "the government" was at the time, that would have been an extremely hard sell. (Even now it would be pretty difficult.)

These two statements contradict

> They end up with a 30 year old house that has been rented. There is a lot of cost in the upkeep of a rented house.

> you then have to pay the taxes on it when you sell the place.

Owners only pay taxes if the gain is greater than the depreciated loss; (and if owner doesn't 1031 exchange it for another property to lose money on) so, the premise that a rented house has lost value shouldn't really intersect with a capital gain.

> Expensing upkeep...writing off rent

Expensing missed rent and eviction costs isn't free money; it does require reserves, but it does help a 1 year impact spread out over many years.

While that is also true, the parent post was pointing out that the landlord has a cash flow issue without rent coming in.

If they can't pay the mortgage without a renter paying, they may have the property repossessed by the bank.

Amazon is known to sell the ring data, i suspect this could give amazon more data that they can sell and make more money. It is almost like a mesh tracking in a neighborhood if this is enabled.

I think amazon might be more focused on owning the middleware for smart home devices to improve the features available (compared to say zigbee) and improve the experience... and sell chips to device makers for $$

I have a smart tv but never signed into my wifi from it, does it still have privacy issues. I use firestick to access netflix etc.

I assume the next versions of the tvs internet connection may be mandatory for it to work.

i would be ok if facebook charges and not track, i am sure we might end up in a state where we are paying and getting tracked. It would be like the roomba who said they will sell the floor plans.