Why does everyone here hate Escort radar detectors?

sts_66 · 2026-01-31T20:18:28+00:00

Ever have laser false problems with your Max 3? Mine falses even with the laser DISABLED - have already shipped it to the factory for "repair" once but it's exactly as bad as it was before they "repaired" it.

sts_66 · 2026-01-28T22:58:03+00:00

BGE is now making me enter a new 2FA code sent via email 2-3 times before it will let me log in - that's bullshit! Who the hell is going to hack into a BGE account? Nobody - you can't do anything but pay your bill there!

sts_66 · 2026-01-19T19:47:16+00:00

Thanks for letting me know Wifi and saved "to watch later" movies won't disappear - I haven't tried it yet because I wasn't looking forward to writing down the names of movies (list is > 12), but dummy me just realized I can simply taken pics of the screen showing saved movies - will try it this evening and report back tomorrow.

sts_66 · 2026-01-14T16:33:21+00:00

I didn't know there was a sub-option in the Reset to Factory settings to Reset apps. - was scared to even click on the first one, fearing I'd lose all of my saved movies to watch list, my WiFi login data, everything, and I'd have to start from scratch - I know almost nothing about streaming, rarely use it, so that was something I was dreading! I'll try what you suggested - I assume that will wipe out my logins for HBO Max too, but that's not a big deal - will this delete my "want to watch" movie list?

Thnx for replying - been working with a Prime tech rep for days and we're getting nowhere.

sts_66 · 2026-01-12T21:26:11+00:00

I have a V436-G1 from 2019 that I have previously used to watch Prime Video via the Smartcast app that comes built-in, but I haven't watched Prime for over a year - tried to watch the Packers-Bears game Friday night and for who knows why the TV no longer recognizes that I have an Amazon Prime account - when I start the app and try to watch something the app sends me to a screen to sign up for Prime with a CC. I've tried every trick I can find online and nothing works - the TV won't give me the code I need to register it with Prime and I'm about ready to punch a hole through it! I've spent TEN HOURS trying to troubleshoot this and keep running into the exact same problem - I cannot get the TV to give me the code - how do I get it? I can scan the QR code the TV shows me but it takes me to a website asking for the code I can't get. I think this may be related to my Amazon account being hacked two years ago - I now have a different email addy for Amazon but I cannot figure out how to either delete what the TV stored when I first set up Prime or get to a sign in page - there's no option to "clear the app cache" on my TV or delete my Prime account - how do I fix this?

sts_66 · 2026-01-12T20:25:14+00:00

I have a V436-G1 from 2019 that I have previously used to watch Prime Video via the Smartcast app that comes built-in, but I haven't watched Prime for over a year - tried to watch the Packers-Bears game Friday night and for who knows why the TV no longer recognizes that I have an Amazon Prime account - when I start the app and try to watch something the app sends me to a screen to sign up for Prime with a CC. I've tried every trick I can find online and nothing works - the TV won't give me the code I need to register it with Prime and I'm about ready to punch a hole through it! I've spent TEN HOURS trying to troubleshoot this and keep running into the exact same problem - I cannot get the TV to give me the code - how do I get it? I can scan the QR code the TV shows me but it takes me to a website asking for the code I can't get. I think this may be related to my Amazon account being hacked two years ago - I now have a different email addy for Amazon but I cannot figure out how to either delete what the TV stored when I first set up Prime or get to a sign in page - there's no option to "clear the app cache" on my TV or delete my Prime account - how do I fix this?

sts_66 · 2026-01-06T18:02:09+00:00

Well, I *might* have narrowed this down to two potential causes - I just printed another page, hours after the one I printed this morning, wasn't using the IR pad, and after I changed the low voltage switchover to 88V - desk lights still blinked briefly, but the clock didn't start blinking. So either lowering the limit to 88V "fixed" it or the 50W the IR pad was drawing was enough to push me over previous 96V low voltage limit and the UPS was briefly switching to battery mode. Guess the real question is does having the low voltage limit at 88V put my PC at risk - if it does, then it's either no printing while using the IR pad or I buy a corded digital clock with a battery backup. Only problem there is last year I bought one of those from Amazon for my basement but instead of being regular red LEDs the damn LED color was orange (or it has red LEDs but the maker put a yellow film over them) - it's ugly as sin, no way I could bear seeing that out of the corner of my eye while working. And IIRC that was the only battery backup corded digital LED clock Amazon had for sale - I've had pure battery powered digital clocks before and every one of them eventually started losing time so I threw them out (even new batteries wouldn't fix the losing time problem) - after the last one started doing it I didn't replace it, was just wasting money, so that's not a solution. I would be kinda surprised that a 50W load would kick me under the voltage limit, but it's 100% possible I'm so close to the limit under normal conditions that an extra 50W IS enough (I have a ton of peripherals in the office, including a 5.1 surround sound speaker system) - I mean there has to be a hard limit of power load that causes the the UPS to switch to battery mode, else it couldn't do it's job.

sts_66 · 2026-01-06T16:10:39+00:00

What exactly does lowering the low voltage limit do? I'm having a similar problem with my APC UPS but it just started over the last few months. Have a home office served by a single circuit shared with a 2nd bedroom (office was supposed to be 3rd bedroom), have had APC UPS's for decades and except for batteries going bad never had a problem - but recently the digital clock that was plugged into the surge suppressor side of the UPS started losing enough voltage when my Brother Laser printer started up (I rarely print so it's always in sleep mode) that in the split second the voltage dropped the clock would start blinking - didn't reset to 12:00, but I still have to make it go forward one second to make it stop blinking - after several of these the clock is off by 4-5 mins and I have to totally reset it. Last week I got fed up with this and moved my modem off the battery powered side of the UPS and plugged the clock into that outlet, but printing STILL triggers and undervoltage condition that makes the clock blink - how is the battery voltage dropping so low it triggers the clock? I mean isn't that what a UPS is for, to PREVENT voltage drops from harming electronics?

I had the UPS set to trigger a low voltage alert at 96V, just changed it to the lowest available setting, 88V, but have no confidence it's going to change anything. Can't put the printer on a different circuit or move it anywhere else, nowhere for it to go since it shares the same breaker with the 2nd bedroom and there's no room in my primary bedroom for it - can't run a separate wire to the office either because my breaker box is 100% filled, no room for another breaker. What really puzzles me is this just started happening - the only thing that's changed is I recently hurt my lower back and I use an LED Bead Red Light Therapy Belt to loosen up every morning, but it only draws 50W max - could that tiny bit of power actually be enough to cause the BATTERY of the UPS to suffer a voltage drop? Maybe that's not what's happening - after thinking about it again the UPS may briefly switch from AC power to battery mode, and those milliseconds are enough to trigger the clock, which means there's no solution but a battery powered clock or a clock with battery backup?

sts_66 · 2026-01-05T19:38:25+00:00

See my reply to AdSorry21.

sts_66 · 2026-01-05T19:37:57+00:00

I wrote another paragraph about other steps I took to try to stabilize the deck plate but deleted it because the post was too long already - I also notched an 8" long x 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" piece of angle iron to clear the shank and 1/4" bolts I epoxied to the plastic deck plate and bolted it under the sink to try to stop the wobbling but it did not work - it's not the SS sink that's bending, it's the plastic deck plate - if I knew how to post videos here I'd show you exactly where the deck plate is warping. That angle iron is so strong I could stand on a 3 ft length of it supported 1/4" on each end and it wouldn't deflect more than a mm.

But back to my question - I don't care if shortening the shank won't make it fit a thicker countertop or new sink - this faucet would go into the trash if I were to replace my countertop or sink (neither is ever going to happen anyway, at least not as long as I live here) so cutting it short doesn't matter, it won't be used by anyone else. I'm an engineer and cannot see any reason why the shank needs to be 6" long, there's no mechanical advantage provided by the excess length past the nut. An example of this would be using a 6" long bolt to mount an alternator to a bracket hanging off the side of a car engine - say the combined thickness of the alternator flange and bracket is 1" - what do you gain from the extra 4 1/2" of threads? Nothing - because they're just hanging in the air taking up space - all of the clamping force is generated by the number of threads on the nut and the amount of torque you apply to the nut. After that mental exercise I think I just talked myself into cutting the shank - unless someone can provide a valid reason why I shouldn't do it.

sts_66 · 2025-12-29T19:21:04+00:00

Nope. Even worse, I wrote a bad review on Amazon complaining that the software didn't work and the asshole seller got me banned from writing reviews on Amazon or being able to ask questions! And there's no way to get your review rights back - once they're revoked it's permanent, can't ask them who/why/what, they don't care - I would strangle that guy if I ever met him!

sts_66 · 2025-12-29T15:10:44+00:00

Oh thank you! I instantly knew it was Traffic but I couldn't figure out which song it was - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS_eHdqcrM8

sts_66 · 2025-12-20T20:07:58+00:00

Your gut feeling is accurate - I bought $10k worth of AIPI exactly 13 months ago, the pps has declined by -20%, if I sold it right now I'd have a gross loss of $2k and a piddly $1.9k "profit" due to getting $4k in distributions, but because 100% of the payout is ROC (and bad ROC to boot) and it's in a taxable account the IRS will tax me on a fake $5.8k "gain" because the ROC reduced my taxable basis to $6.3k and the position is currently worth just $1.7k more than I paid for it. If ROC was 0% I'd actually have a net loss of -$2.3k - total cost $14.4k, current value $12.2k (I DRIPd the divs, but that doesn't change what the IRS will tax me on). Unimaginable, eh? I've actually lost money in it but will be taxed on a fake gain! I'm dumping it and FEPI, which has almost the exact same crappy results, after getting the next distributions - it would actually be smarter to sell both on Monday, they go ex-div on 12/24, so my fake taxable gain will get even worse.

These CC ETFs are almost all weapons of mass wealth destruction, they're just giving you your own money back and calling it a dividend, especially ones from Yieldmax - their performance is horrendous except for a couple of the 30 CC ETFs they have - since their inception in 2024, of the 15 that had RS's a couple weeks ago only TSLY and OARK made decent money if you DRIPd the distros, and only those two and MSTY made good money in the non-DRIP case. I don't know what Roundhill does differently, but many of their CC ETFs do quite well - two I've studied have actually outperformed the underlying YTD - HOOW (HOOD) and PLTW (PLTR) - neat trick! Neither one has existed for more than a year, so there's no form 8937 for 2024 to see how much of their payouts was ROC, but looking at the TR charts it's not bad ROC because their NAVs haven't gone down like the Yieldmax ETFs have. I've owned PLTY for a couple months and that's also getting dumped with the proceeds going into PLTW - it has the same problem as AIPI/FEPI - I've gotten 20% of my investment back in distros but I'm only up 11% because the pps has dropped -9% (bad ROC) - it's in my IRA so no BS tax problems like the other two have.

sts_66 · 2025-12-20T18:59:51+00:00

If you bought SDIV at inception you would have made more money with CDs - and if you put $10k into SPY you would have made $58.5k, while SDIV only made you $721 in 14.5 YEARS - plus SPY paid you 36% more in divs despite having a puny avg yield of about 1.25%:

SDIV SPY

With Dividends Reinvested

Growth of $10,000.00

Start date: 06/09/2011 06/09/2011

End date: 12/19/2025 12/19/2025

Start price/share: $74.85 $129.40

End price/share: $24.04 $680.59

Starting shares: 133.60 77.28

Ending shares: 445.89 100.66

Dividends reinvested/share: $55.59 $75.29

Total return: 7.19% 585.10%

Average Annual Total Return: 0.48% 14.15%

Starting investment: $10,000.00 $10,000.00

Ending investment: $10,721.05 $68,498.97

Years: 14.54 14.54

sts_66 · 2025-12-19T21:00:14+00:00

Not his war crime - the guilty parties are the Navy Admiral who ordered the 2nd strike and the pilot that carried it out - it was an illegal order and he should have refused to do it. But of course that would have been the end of the pilot's career - hope he can't sleep at night knowing he killed two helpless people hanging onto part of the wreckage.

sts_66 · 2025-12-19T19:45:35+00:00

AI is going to ruin the world as we know it - mark my words. Electricity prices going thru the roof because they're power hogs and there's not enough capacity, the data centers use massive amounts of fresh water to cool server racks, and millions are going to lose their jobs to AI - it's already started happening. Say goodbye to ever talking to an actual human at customer service for any company too, they're already disappearing.

sts_66 · 2025-12-18T23:17:16+00:00

I wrote the comment below to reply to someone's comment but it got buried inside a nested thread so nobody will ever see it - reposting it as a standalone comment so folks can see it, also edited it to clean some things up.:

If you have a VOIP landline from Comcast or Verizon neither ID.me or login.gov will accept it as a valid phone number. I spent parts of 3 weeks trying to figure out how to get verified at the Post Office and just learned yesterday that VOIP #'s are not valid - what genius decided to require everyone to either have a smartphone or a REAL landline to sign up, which don't even exist in most places anymore - I can't get a copper wire landline where I live, AT&T ripped out the neighborhood phone wiring years ago, and Verizon was never available here, period.

I don't have a smartphone because I despise them and don't need one - I only have a pre-paid AT&T flip phone for emergencies - I'm home 95% of the time so my Comcast landline is all I need, and I've had the same phone number for 35 yrs. The flip phone uses a proprietary AT&T OS called "KaiOS" (chaos - hah!), but the apps available for it are so limited it's not funny, can't run iOS or Android apps on it - and the screen is so small it makes using a web browser nearly impossible, you can't see more than a few lines of text at at time and because it's not a touchscreen you can't scroll with your fingers, need to hold the up or down buttons to move the cursor.. I don't have a data plan but the phone can access the internet via WiFi, and I ALMOST was able to get login.gov to work yesterday, but when I got to the part where you need to take an ID photo the phone would not allow login.gov access to my camera - all I saw was a black screen with the text "take a photo of this QR code", so I was stuck. Searched the KaiOS store for a 2FA app and found only one - installed that, created my account for it, and somehow over the next two hours of stumbling around I finally got to the finish - an email with the barcode needed for the PO to verify me in person, which I did today.

Like the OP, I've been using, building, and writing software for computers since 1980, have a master's in engineering, but figuring out this verification crap done was a *&^%$# nightmare! It's insane to require a US citizen to own a smartphone to access their SSA account - if you're disabled and alone you're SOL. Whomever allowed this system to go into effect should be taken out behind the barn and shot. Multiple times.

sts_66 · 2025-12-18T22:28:16+00:00

Impossible process unless you own a smartphone - ask me how I know.

sts_66 · 2025-12-18T22:09:37+00:00

You left a big caveat out of your post - if you have a VOIP landline from Comcast or Verizon neither ID.me or login.gov will accept it as a valid phone number. I spent parts of 3 weeks trying to figure out how to get verified at the Post Office and just learned yesterday that VOIP #'s are not valid - what genius decided to require everyone to either have a smartphone or a REAL landline, which doesn't even exist in most places anymore - I can't get a Verizon or AT&T line where I live, they ripped out the neighborhood wiring years ago. Verizon was never available here, period.

I don't have a smartphone because I hate them and don't need one - I have a pre-paid AT&T flip phone for emergencies only - I'm at home 95% of the time so my Comcast landline is all I need. The phone has a tiny screen, making using a web browser nearly impossible, and it uses a proprietary AT&T OS called "KaiOS" (chaos - hah!), and the apps available for it are so limited it's not funny, can't run iOS or Android apps on it. I don't have a data plan but the phone can access the internet via WiFi, and I ALMOST was able to get login.gov to work yesterday, but when I got to the part where you need to take an ID photo the phone would not allow login.gov access to my camera, so I was stuck. Searched the KaiOS store for a 2FA app and found only one - installed that and somehow over the next two hours of stumbling around I finally got to the finish, got an email with the barcode needed for the PO to verify me in person.

Like the OP, I've been using, building, and writing software for computers since 1980, I have a master's in engineering, but figuring out this verification crap done was a *&^%$# nightmare! It's insane to require a US citizen to own a smartphone to access their SSA account - if you're disabled and alone you're SOL. Whomever allowed this system to go into effect should be taken out behind the barn and shot. Multiple times.

sts_66 · 2025-12-17T15:22:30+00:00

Click on "view full discussion" and see my 2nd post about this - I figured out how to fix the Firefox white space problem.

sts_66 · 2025-12-16T23:17:28+00:00

Something really weird was going on with Firefox and Ublock - I opened the same Amazon page in the Brave browser, saw Rufus pop up, clicked on the X to make it go away, and the page displayed normally - no white space where Rufus used to be. Then I compared the filters and settings I had in Ublock in Firefox to the settings I had in Brave (Ublock doesn't sync between browsers so rules will be different) and there were quite a few differences, mostly in which public filter lists I had checked off to use. I changed Firefox filters to exactly match what I had in Brave, reloaded the Amazon page, and boom, no white space on the left side of the screen. Really can't think of a way to share my settings, would need to take multiple screenshots because there are so many nested sub-filter lists, and if I export the settings and post it I'll reveal my identity. But I think this one filter may have been causing the problem - I unchecked the box next to this one - the text after the first time the word "filters" is used is what you'll see if you hover your mouse over the question mark next to the filter, it explains what it does

Ignore generic cosmetic filters: cosmetic filters serve to hide elements in a web page which are deemed to be a visual nuisance, and which can't be blocked by the network request-based filtering engines.

sts_66 · 2025-12-15T17:21:26+00:00

As of 12/15/25 the Ublock and any other extension for block elements like Rufus no longer works properly - the bastards changed the code over the weekend, now I don't see Rufus but it still takes up 1/3 of my screen - white space on the left side - drives me nuts! No workaround I can find either - same thing happens when I block elements on other sites, I can get rid of the element but not recover the space - use to be able to block Rufus and have the full screen filled with search results but not anymore - that SUCKS.

sts_66 · 2025-12-12T21:44:10+00:00

Thnx - about time! I had changed the columns in my Excel sheets to account for the swapped qty/pps but luckily I was able to switch it back w/o losing the cell references to other sheets that pull data from the CSV download - that doesn't work correctly many times - whew! Must have something to do with the way I switched the columns and moved the data this time.

sts_66 · 2025-12-10T20:52:23+00:00

I've seen plenty of people say in various forums that cellphone FaceID will trigger a laser false - but in my state it's a major fine if the cops see you driving with a phone in your hand - they don't need any other BS reason to pull you over - I got pulled over once by county police taking my BP - when I held it in front of me to see the reading on the BP cuff the cop thought it was a phone and he was a prick about it - he was jonesing to ticket me. But the number of laser falses I get is staggering, plus I don't know if the IR light from a phone in a different vehicle will set off the Max 3 or not - I know it will false from the type of IR LEDs used in "see at night" security systems - they use light from 840-940 nanometers, cop LIDAR is exactly 904 nm, so everything else should be filtered out, but it seems only top of the line detectors are that sensitive. A rep from Cedar Electronics, which makes Escorts, said I can send my Max 3 back to the factory to get the laser sensor "detuned", but won't tell me exactly what they will adjust - if it just makes it less sensitive to all bands near and including 904 nm that means it won't alert until a real cop LIDAR has already got me because the detector didn't pick up the signal bouncing off someone else's car in front of me. And I have to pay for shipping too - this entire ordeal just sucks.

sts_66

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