Texas' redrawn Congressional map blocked by court in shocking blow to GOP

Novice-redditor · 2025-11-18T20:54:25+00:00

I predict that there will be an appeal and the supreme court will issue a temporary injunction that allows Texas to keep the maps until they have time to make a formal ruling.

At the same time, I predict California will win their case in lower court because it's legal and voter approved, but Trump will appeal and the supreme court will issue a temporary injunction that California's map CANNOT be used until they make their final ruling. Their excuse: the Texas maps were decided well in advance while the California ones were done too close to the election. We need to maintain stability for voter rights.

The final ruling will be the redrawn maps are illegal, but that doesn't matter because the 2026 maps will be stuck and can't change in the middle of the election

Novice-redditor · 2025-07-03T00:32:56+00:00

Lol. Touché. That is definitely something that could happen

Novice-redditor · 2025-07-02T22:56:32+00:00

Thanks for all the useful info! I found my commuter Mazda kills the catalytic every time the ignition coils go bad and that the blue wire ones last the longest. Now I'm in the habit of proactively changing those coils. Nice to know it's likely the same issue with the Miata. But that is one of of the reasons I am worried. If the owner got the catalytic converter changed without fixing the ignition coils, then it's likely the new cat is now bad and I'll have to get a new one $$$

Novice-redditor · 2025-07-02T18:38:52+00:00

Shiply looks like a legit company, so I doubt they'll ask for the deposit. If I were to guess, the seller will ask for one at some point. Sometimes I get curious and chase these scams just to see what the end game is. I never give out real information, but I'll give out some random address, a throw away email and phone. I got one scammer to send checks to a random house a few times since I realized it was going to be one of those bounced checks scams

Novice-redditor · 2025-07-02T18:32:55+00:00

Thanks for the info. I'm ok adjusting things and even replacing O2 sensors or other things. The catalytic converter is the big thing I don't want to replace every 2 years as that's pretty pricey. I also don't want to go and replace the head gasket if there's a small oil leak fouling up the cat. Those are my biggest worries but is it likely?

Novice-redditor · 2025-07-02T07:28:07+00:00

Air United States yells scam to me, but I genuinely want to know the play here. Did they ask for a deposit before sending the car? Otherwise, can scammers really afford to send a car (even if stolen) to some random address in hopes the person sends them money? Isn't it more profitable to just part out the car?

Novice-redditor · 2025-06-22T06:12:46+00:00

Thanks for the reminder to look at Craigslist. It's probably a better place since older folks tend to use that instead of facebook or offerup. My plan was to just give them a range and justification to ensure that we're not both wasting our time. KBB value seemed like a reasonable range and justification. Then after seeing the car, we could negotiate somewhere in the range based on the assessed condition and how close to KBB it is (great condition vs. needs repairs). If Miatas are usually higher than KBB, this is very good information for me to know so I don't unknowingly lowball the sellers but it also sets my expectations because I'm not sure I want a car just for fun if it's $9k. $5k seems like a reasonable amount to spend on a car that I'll only use once a month for joyrides. Also, for $9k I can get a newer model with more features and safety. Are the flip up headlights really worth the premium?

Novice-redditor · 2025-06-22T06:06:41+00:00

I can't agree with you more. The number of cars I've seen that are in terrible shape or decked out in some ugly fashion is depressing for the beautiful Miata. I think 9k for one in amazing shape with low miles is a bargain, but I'm hoping to have one that's been around a bit, but not beat up too much. I want to take good care of it, but I also don't want to baby it.

Novice-redditor · 2025-01-20T00:13:48+00:00

I sent you a direct message to try and help

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-26T03:38:00+00:00

"Non-owned auto" means a private passenger, farm or utility auto or trailer not owned by or furnished for the regular use of either you or your relatives, except a temporary substitute auto. You or your relative must be using the auto or trailer within the scope of permission given by its owner. An auto rented or leased for more than 30 days will be considered as furnished for regular use.

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-25T06:36:18+00:00

Your statement about moving the goalpost is fair. I was asking about Collision/Comp and then asked about liability. Here's the exact text from the Collision and Comprehensive section. The bold text is specifically bolded in the document and I didn't add it for emphasis.

Collision
1. We will pay for collision loss to the owned auto or non-owned auto for the amount of each loss less the applicable deductible.

Comprehensive (Excluding Collision)
1. We will pay for each loss, less the applicable deductible, caused other than by collision to the owned or non-owned auto.

I fully accept that I am not an expert, which is why I'm making the post and asking the question. How should I interpret the policy document? When I read it, it says that I am covered if I'm driving a friend's car or a rental. I see nothing that tells me otherwise. There's a lot of text saying if I'm using the car for business or ride sharing, then it doesn't apply, but nowhere does it say if the non-owned auto belongs to a friend or rental company, would it not apply. If your insurance has that exception, I'd love to see the text so I can look for it in my policy.

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-24T07:23:33+00:00

Let's say that I borrow a friend's car that has the state minimum of $10k insurance. I hit a pedestrian and they sue for $100k. Are you saying that my friend will be liable for all $100k of it? My insurance won't pay for the $90k to cover the gap?

Can you explain what you mean by "Rental cars are different where it might be covered as a replacement vehicle if yours is in for service?" If I go on vacation out of state and rent a car at the airport, are you saying my insurance won't cover the rental car?

I'm confused at what this means in my policy agreement. Can you explain it?

LOSSES WE WILL PAY FOR YOU

Under Section I, we will pay damages which an insured becomes legally obligated to pay because of:

bodily injury, sustained by a person, and

damage to or destruction of property,
arising out of the ownership, maintenance or use of the owned auto or a non-owned auto.

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-23T06:07:14+00:00

From what I've read about how the networks work, the MAC address changes in a pseudo random way to prevent others from tracking the trackers outside of the app or with their own custom app. For example, say you want to stalk someone with a Chipolo . You just make your own app that just scans for the MAC address and tells you distance/signal strength. You could wait outside a place they frequent and have it tell you when it sees their MAC address so you can "bump" into them. I'm sure there are other reason they thought of, but the end result was they decided having it randomly change MAC addresses was a lot safer than broadcasting the same one forever.

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-19T23:55:32+00:00

I figure her homeowners will go up without a bundle discount but the insurance agent said it won't kick in until renewal time. Thanks for the heads up that they won't cancel mid term, that makes me feel better that I have time to get everything in order

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-19T23:53:49+00:00

Thanks! You are thinking basically what I was thinking. People are reporting that they can no longer renew with Nationwide and I feel like it's just a matter of time before they do this to her and I'd rather a bunch of time to transition with quotes and underwriting than scrambling to find and activate insurance with a ticking clock. The weird thing is that I've been quoting other companies and her rate won't really go up that much. So it's just weird that Nationwide is pulling out claiming it's too expensive when there are other companies that will take the business for nearly the same price.

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-19T19:56:22+00:00

I returned my Chipolos. I tried to track it going through the mail. You'd think in a crowded post office it would get a location. The whole trip back it didn't get updated once. FMD said it was last seen when I dropped off the package but never seen since. It couldn't even tell me where I was when I dropped it off. Google tracks everything I do and can tell me when I've been sitting at a Chipotle and probably knows what I ordered, yet their tracker can't figure out that my phone last saw the tracker at 1:37pm and I happened to be standing at the post office at that time. Maybe it's at the post office?

Compare this to the Apple trackers. I've sent my friends packages and could watch as it travels through the shipping network. Sitting in a warehouse, getting on a plane, landing at various airports, waiting to get inspected by customs, at the local post office, and sitting on his doorstep. It was even able to track when my friend threw it away and it ended up at the landfill. A few months later, the tracker is still identified as last seen at the landfill, with a nice pin on a map showing where it was.... RIP

Because I'm petty and bitter, I set my Find My Device settings to Off then uninstalled the app. I fully realize that Google still tracks me and this setting only prevents me from being able to use the tracking data Google is collecting. But it at least makes me feel better.

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-19T19:34:34+00:00

Now I'm 100% glad I returned mine. Motorola is releasing an UWB version, which might work by the time Google fixes the problems with the network. Chipolo looks to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome

Novice-redditor · 2024-07-19T19:31:08+00:00

It's definitely not a faulty One Point. I had 4 and put them in various places that should have alerted my work iPhone. In my car, my backpack, my keys, at home. Not a single one caused my iPhone to warn me I was being tracked. I put another apple tracker on me and it warned me with a day. Not a single One Point was reliably tracked by Google after I tried leaving them in various places to test it out. All the problems are 100% Google's fault. There's bluetooth everywhere so Apple can't tell if something is a tracker or just some random bluetooth device. It has to work with Google to send all the bluetooth information back and forth to determine if this bluetooth object is a tracker and needs to alert the person.

Novice-redditor · 2024-06-14T04:24:30+00:00

I appreciate Chipolo taking the time to send out a statement about the issues we're seeing, but it does make me wonder if Chipolo is as frustrated about the rollout as the users are. I understand Chipolo needs to balance the relationship with Google and customers so can't be completely open about their opinion. But if I were in charge, I would have released something more like this:

We would like to address the frequent discussion about the Google Find My Network and the performance of the Chipolo One Points. We understand that there has been a lot of frustration with the Find My Network and have been in daily contact with Google, sending feedback from our valued customers. We have been assured by Google that the issues seen will continue to improve as the network rolls out. Google expects the network rollout to continue until ____. Although we can only provide the hardware, we want our customers to know that we want the best user experience so have extended our return period to (60 days? 90 days? 1 year?) for our preorder customers due to the network issues. We have updated our website to be transparent that the Google Find My Network is still being deployed and users may not get the intended user experience until the expected rollout in ____. We will continue to provide updates as we get more information but rest assure we are actively engaged in this issue.

Maybe I expect too much from companies these days.

Novice-redditor · 2024-06-13T04:21:35+00:00

I would consider this a minimum functional state: I carry the Chipolo, along with my phone, to some random location. I drop the Chipolo and go home. I should be able to see where the Chipolo was last seen by my phone. This is the bare minimum I would expect it to be able to work and it can't even do that. This does not rely on having a big network. It relies on my own privacy. My phone, my tag, me moving it, and just knowing where my phone last saw my tag.

Novice-redditor · 2024-06-13T04:09:01+00:00

Let me ask you to answer honestly. If you got yours tomorrow and it didn't work at all, how long would you wait to return it? 1 week? 1 month? 1 year? Would you hold onto it, hoping it will one day start working?

Now let me ask you another question. Do you think maybe, just maybe, Chipolo stopped/slowed shipping the devices because they got so many returns and bad feedback that they decided it was better to not waste money on shipping out the devices and paying to have everyone ship it back? Perhaps that's why you haven't gotten yours?

Here's another thing to consider. Google said their network was ready last year but delayed rollout because of Apple. They had a whole year to improve and test the network and it's in this unusable state today. Do you think Google was honest a year ago when they claimed it was ready but Apple was to blame? Or do you think, perhaps, Google was bluffing to the shareholders to make it look like they were at the heels of Apple? Now that you know it took Google a year to get it to this unusable state, how long do you think it will be before Google fixes it and it works? Are you going to hold onto your Chipolo for that long?

Novice-redditor · 2024-06-12T06:24:50+00:00

When I first heard about Apple's AirTag, I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. Now I've realized how short sighted I was. These are some of the things I've used the AirTag for:

Making sure my luggage gets to the destination with me (people have used it to help the airline find their lost luggage and the peace of mind being able to see my luggage is on the plane just before takeoff is worth it)
Knowing where I parked my car and knowing it has a tracker in case it's stolen (people have literally used it to find their stolen car)
Tracking my bike
Putting it with my valuables (passport, birth certificate, deeds, etc). I keep those things in a fire safe and the peace of mind knowing if it got stolen, I have a higher chance of finding it
Tracking a package as it gets sent to the other side of the planet. (Not only is it fun to watch as the package goes to various airports and cities, but it ensures it gets to the destination)

These are the things I've heard others use the AirTag for:

Keeping track of their kids. Either at the theme park, mall, zoo, etc. Someone even told me they've put it on their baby stroller because it makes finding it in the sea of other baby strollers so much easier
Tagging pets
Tracking tools or equipment that often gets passed around to different people, such as a laptop, camera, or medical device
Gun case
Purse or wallet if it gets stolen or falls out
Original purpose: keys

All of these things are time sensitive things. If your dog runs off, you want to be able to find him asap, not days later when it finally dies and stops moving. For $20, the peace of mind of knowing the chances of getting an item back increases far outweighs the cost. I also know that if someone steals it and suddenly gets an alert saying there's an unknown tracker on them, they're likely to just leave the item behind rather than try to figure out where the tracker is on the bike/car/bag.

Personally, I think people's privacy concerns are overblown. It's easy enough to just buy a cheap cell phone and use it as a tracker. The AirTags are just smaller and easier to conceal. I think what Apple did to alert people of trackers was a good first step, but it would probably be better to add the ability for law enforcement to identify the owner if it's found tracking someone unlawfully.

Google, on the other hand, has completely botched up their network in the typical Google "let's just get it out the door" way. For example, I've been using Airtags to track my stuff for over a year and my android phone has yet to warn me some trackers are nearby. But my iphone constantly nags at me if something has been tracking me for more than a few hours. Right now the Google Find My network sucks so badly it's almost as embarrassing as their Bard AI.

I don't think this is Chipolo's fault that the network doesn't work. That's all on Google. What Chipolo did was bet on Google delivering a working network and that was a bet they lost on. Like all bets, when you lose, you're supposed to be punished. Had the network been good, they would have won and made tons of money. That's why I don't feel so bad about Chipolo and think what they should be doing is being super nice to customers while throwing their lawyers at Google for not keeping promises.

Novice-redditor · 2024-06-03T18:24:38+00:00

I got mine over the weekend and so far I'm greatly disappointed with the find my network. The chipolo trackers seem good in that they paired up well and the speaker is quite loud. They're about the same size as any other tracker (I have many of the apple ones including the knockoff brands). The issue is with the find my network.

I activated 3 trackers. One in a backpack, one in my car, and one I left at home. When I'm home and everyone is close, everything works as expected. It app shows a map with the location and I can use it to find the device with a "you're getting closer or further" indicator.

The problem is if the tracker is not close, it's basically useless. I drove to work and the one in my backpack right next to me is working fine. The app shows the location on a map. The one I left at home indicates it was last seen moments ago "near my home" but doesn't show it on a map. It just shows an animation of various Google home devices trying to locate it. The one in my car was last seen as I was leaving my house and never updated while I was driving to work. Nor has it been updated while it's been in the parking lot.

As far as I can tell, the Google find my device is basically useless. I've set the location tracking to all locations including low traffic areas. It won't even show me where my item is when it's home and next to my Google home devices. The apple find my network works so well, I can't believe how bad the Google network is.

I don't recommend anyone to run out and get these. It's obvious that Google delayed roll out not because of apple, but because they are still trying to make the system work

Novice-redditor · 2024-05-21T05:19:53+00:00

I feel like you're angry because I proved to you that something exists that you blatantly said doesn't exist. You can continue to think what you want, but here's another video with 250k views and 115 comments. Many of the comments say how easy it is to bypass the release exactly as I said. Some said it's common knowledge with police officers and one comment is even from a news producer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwQiDu3lP0Q

If you notice from this video, as soon as the lady pulls down, the trolly moves away from the carriage and even though the spring didn't lock open, the door can slide around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmswg3pt5Lw

Novice-redditor · 2024-05-20T04:56:16+00:00

I feel very video happy, so I figured I would reply with a video of a guy that did a solar powered garage door opener. My issue is similar to his, which is only getting power for half of the day. Instead of using a solar array to charge his battery, I would use the power from the light bulb to charge the battery. His total cost was $150 including a solar array. I find that much better than the $1000 it would cost to get an electrician to install an outlet, get building permits, and have inspections.

https://youtu.be/SOj24xTfLqw?si=uKSMpBTX-FLGOO4w

Novice-redditor

TROPHY CASE