I looked into gig work to supplement my unemployment and it deducts 75:1 in my state. It’s definitely not worth all the extra work to potentially get another $250 so I’m not doing it. Gig work is my fallback if I can’t find work before the insurance payments run out in June.

I’m reporting it on my taxes.

I called the unemployment office to specifically ask about how rent impacts the insurance payout, and they were explicit that it doesn’t.

It is above board

It’s not being done off the books? We have a lease agreement and it’s all above board.

Yall are wildin with your assumptions

Because I let someone who was going to otherwise be homeless rent a room for well below market? Damn

The unemployment office is a wing of the government… the department of labor if you need me to be specific

I specifically called and asked the unemployment office… I didn’t just guess at this

I’m not an idiot.

Yes I own the property.

And yes I know that I am taxed on the rent.

None of that is the point of my comment. The rent I collect isn’t treated as income by a wing of the government.

I collect rent from a roommate. The unemployment office doesn’t consider it income so it doesn’t impact my unemployment payout.

The government doesn’t even consider landlord income to be employment income.

My hallway is shockingly dark when not lit, and the recessed light is so damn harsh I decided to install LED strips up in the corners. But I didn’t want to switch them, so the lights are motion controlled and conditional based on time. During the day, they’re full bright but with a nice color that’s not harsh. At night, only 6 leds light up a nice green so they don’t blast your eyes in the dark.

I have similar control over the kitchen lights but kept the recessed lighting in there. Full bright during the day, dimmed at night.

When the home alarm is triggered, all lights go full bright.

When the garage door is opened, the garage lights turn on.

When the temp in the living room is below 65 in the morning, or at noon, it kicks the heater on until it hits 70.

In the evening, when the outside temp falls below the inside temp, I get sent a message to open the windows. This only triggers in warm months because that crossover doesn’t happen in the cold months. It’s just always warmer inside than out. Similarly, in the mornings, when the temp outside becomes warmer than inside, I get an alert to close the windows. I use Aqara temp sensors on my front and back porches to grab the temps, so it’s very local and takes into account the radiant heat built up from the direct sunlight and works really well. This also has me thinking I might be able to work my contact sensors into the automations too…

I’ve got a contact sensor on my bedroom door to alert me if anyone enters while I’m not home.

My crawl space is encapsulated and I have a large dehumidifier down there. I have a smart switch connected to it so I can have some easy control and monitor power usage. I also have a temp and humidity sensor down there with alerts for if either temp or humidity change too much.

I set up LED lighting on my front porch and have HA turn it on an hour before sunset and off an hour after sunrise. I set it to different colors usually based on holidays, but have it set to a purple that I really like otherwise. Way less harsh than the white porch light.

And of course I can control nearly all the lights in my house from my phone or with Siri.

Having my hallway and kitchen lights be motion activated and brighter/dimmer based on ambient light is fucking great. If you get there you might wind up loving it like I do lol.

ADHD, major depressive disorder, and bipolar 2.

Yea. Tired. All the time.

Well, our trip was in March so that’s perfect!

In addition to other comments here, I think that there’s added risk to having such a starkly segmented way of running things. Having neighborhood stations (publically owned/owned by the utility service provider) reduces a lot of redundancy and hedges some risk for families. If a battery fails and gets spicy it’s less likely to put a family out of their home, when a substation could be highly specialized for managing that kind of risk so that even if a battery or several batteries fail, it doesn’t impact the whole. There’s also some specialization that goes into handling them at end of life, and trusting normal every day laypeople to both maintain and manage them is a tall ask when most people find themselves in a position to be unable to do larger maintenance on their homes already (it cost me 20k to put in a sump pump and encapsulate my crawl space to treat and protect it from mold and pinhole beetles, which I could only do by taking out a loan that I’m still paying for).

Ah that all makes sense.

Cancellations in particular suck, and are one reason I don’t fly budget airlines when possible. It nearly ruined the trip for my friends when they couldn’t get a flight out that night and put a damper on my birthday weekend for sure. I might mention to them the policy you pasted and see if they want to do anything about the extra few hundred they spent.

Thanks for the informative and high effort reply too! Really appreciate it.

This is in the US? I had a few friends get fucked with last moment cancellations for my birthday trip to Vegas and the airlines didn’t do shit. One, Frontier, had to be strong armed to get them on another flight and still charged them the premium for the new flight.

Sometimes a little cloud cover makes viewing the eclipse even better. I wasn’t too far away from the totality last year and saw this one:

Both shot with my mirrorless cropped from 200mm.

I’m guessing a lot of people in south Ontario had a similar experience to yours.

Neither. I want it on the front, right in the center.

Oh look, someone that doesn’t understand autism. Cool.

Might be a good idea to stop talking rather than keep shoving your foot farther and farther in your mouth.

For the record, ‘spectrum’ doesn’t mean it’s a linear increase in symptoms. It means it can be any unique blend of symptoms, some of which can allow a person to be very independent while still being cripplingly unable to manage some tasks or activities.

I always thought it was weird that the evolution of humans led to us being giant axolotl‘s.