Kim Komando

Round 2 of our most-loved format. The airline seat map is a sales floor, not an inventory list. The hotel’s 800 number can’t help you, but the front desk can. Plus, the $15 modem rental fix, the $12 dryer trick, the help desk’s sacred order and the photographer’s one-second habit.

You buy electricity from a regional market, and data centers are hitting every one. A power plant auction in the East hit a record $16.4 billion, and families in seven states paid $4.3 billion to connect data centers to the grid. Bills jumped 7.1% last year, double inflation. Four fixes inside.

Your bank app is no help when it files wine, dog food and a rotisserie chicken under groceries. Paste last month’s transactions into any chatbot and get your five biggest money leaks ranked by annual cost. Two prompts inside: one to find the leaks, one to cut them.

Custom Instructions, Memory and Temporary Chat are already in your ChatGPT app. Here’s the 60-second setup for each, the instructions to paste and the privacy catch on incognito chats.

USC researchers found you overpay on nearly 1 in 4 prescriptions, because a middleman sets your copay higher than the drug’s real price and pockets the difference. Pharmacists couldn’t tell you until 2018, and still aren’t required to bring it up. The six-word question, price-check apps and no-middleman pharmacies inside.

Trades are booming while AI panic spreads. A SpaceX welder’s $28/hr job turned into $880K stock. Electricians building data centers earn up to $260K debt-free. The FAA hired 2,000+ gamers as $144K controllers. No degree needed, just paid apprenticeships.

Flock’s cameras scan more than 20 billion license plates a month, and they’ve found kidnapped kids and closed murder cases. They’ve also tracked police officers’ ex-girlfriends, shown up in a Virginia woman’s front yard uninvited and nearly ended up on 350,000 Ubers. Now, 30-plus cities have pulled the plug, the company is scrambling to add rules and its own CEO reportedly keeps his plates out of the system. Here’s the whole story, plus the free map that shows every camera near you.

A Catholic sister in a full habit has 198,000 TikTok followers, and one convent video pulled 3.4 million views. The twist: Her order has been chasing the newest media for over a century, from printing presses to trending sounds. Meanwhile, monks in the Wyoming mountains run a thriving online coffee business. How the most unplugged people in America mastered the most online thing there is, without letting it master them.

Turn it up, now it’s blasting, turn it down, have to rewind, “what did she SAY?” A survey found over half of Americans keep subtitles on, mostly because the audio is muddled. The real culprits: razor-thin TVs with speakers firing at the wall, theater sound mixes crammed into your living room and streaming compression.

Homeowners are opening nonrenewal letters triggered by photos taken from planes and satellites: moss on the roof, a tarp, yard clutter. One insurer-backed imagery network says its cameras cover about 99% of the U.S. population. Nobody knocks, nobody calls, the letter just arrives. Four moves fight back, starting with demanding the photo.

The ugly stock numbers are technically disclosed and practically invisible. Here are the exact prompts I paste before buying a single share, including the one that makes AI argue against the investment. Plus the five terms to search in the 10-K yourself.

ChatGPT will find open tables, book them and even join a Yelp waitlist without you leaving the chat. Here’s how to do it, the prompt that gets the best results and the catch about cancellations.

It’s America’s most-argued tech question. You mention dog food once, and the ad shows up an hour later. Scientists tested 17,000 apps and found zero secret recordings. But one media firm bragged about “Active Listening” tech, Apple paid $95 million over Siri misfires, and 2,230 companies are quietly feeding Facebook your shopping habits. The way ads REALLY find you is creepier than a hot mic. Plus the 5-minute settings fix.

Tonight, Earth plows through a comet’s dust trail: the Perseid meteor shower, up to 100 shooting stars an hour, visible from every state. This year’s peak lands on a new moon, the darkest viewing in years. When to look, where to look and the phone camera settings that can catch a falling star.

Loyal customers pay the most. Here’s the AI script trick that turns a 10-minute call into hundreds a year, free.

Ralph is saving $875 a year. Marta, $675. Jon, $1,095. Same towers, same 5G signal, way smaller bill. Here’s how Consumer Cellular pulls it off and the two catches to watch for.

Twenty family facts, like nicknames, old addresses and that one boat story nobody lets go of, are all AI needs to write the clues. Free sites turn them into printable games in about 15 minutes flat, no cost, no login.

Amazon hides five clearance sections you’ll never see on the home page. Resale, Outlet, Haul, Renewed and a coupon page, with markdowns up to 70% off. Here’s how to find them all.

Your savings account might be earning $1 a year on $10,000 while an FDIC-insured online bank pays $400 on the same money, with the same government insurance. A fintech collapse once froze $112 million in customer deposits, so here’s how to verify a bank is real before you move a dime.