Welcome to your Thursday, friend.Hairspray. Station wagons. Wall-to-wall carpeting. It's the 1980s, and Toyota has a problem.
Their California design team, Calty, keeps sending plans to Japan for bigger cars that Americans would buy. Larger seats. More legroom. More everything. The Japanese execs keep pushing back. So in 1986, they tried something nobody had ever done before.
🇯🇵 What did Toyota's California designers ship to Japan to help executives understand American customers? A) A full-size American pickup with the interior stripped out, B) A complete mock American dining room, including a table, chandelier, curtains and family photos, C) A life-size cardboard cutout of an American football player sitting in a Japanese compact car or D) A side-by-side comparison of American and Japanese car seats. Take your best guess, the answer's at the end.
💧 Issue 3 of Splash of AI is out today. This is my free weekly AI newsletter and you're going to want this one. This week: the exact AI prompt that catches overcharges on any estimate, bill or invoice before you pay a dime. Plus, AI companies are paying real money for your professional expertise. And ChatGPT started running ads. Here's how to stop it. Five minutes. No jargon. We're still warming up the email servers. I will put a link here tomorrow so you can read if you are not already getting it. Sign up now if you're not on the list at SplashOfAI.com. — Kim
Phantom power, the electricity your devices quietly drain even when switched off, costs the average household $100 to $200 a year.
A smart plug stops it. The right one costs about $20 and pays for itself in a short time.
One product recommendation for the plug. One for a strip. Done.
📖 Read time: 3 minutes
It's called phantom power, the electricity your devices sip 24/7 even when they're switched off. Your TV. Your microwave. Your game console. Your Keurig that brews one cup a day, then sits there humming to itself like it pays rent.
The Department of Energy says phantom load costs the average household $100 to $200 a year. Cash walking straight out the door without you ever touching a switch.
A smart plug goes between your wall outlet and whatever you're powering.
Its super powers?
Connect a smart plug to your Wi-Fi, and you control that outlet from your phone or with your voice. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, whatever you have. Set a schedule. Shut everything off when you leave. Or when you don't want to get your butt off the couch. No judgment.
💡 The one to buy
There are tons of these on the market. I did the heavy lifting and found the best ones.
Buy the Kasa KP125M(27% off right now, $22, two-pack). Matter-compatible, meaning it works with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Samsung SmartThings. All of them.
Real energy monitoring, so you can see exactly what each device costs you per month. Slim enough that it doesn't block the second outlet. You're gonna love it.
🔌 This power strip does the real heavy lifting
Plug your TV, soundbar and game console into a smart power strip, connect that strip to one outlet, and one voice command shuts the whole entertainment center down. That's the move.
The best one: Kasa HS300(20% off, $40). Six individually controlled outlets. Three USB ports. Energy monitoring on every single outlet.
Here's what that monitoring reveals in real homes: A gaming PC in sleep mode pulls about $21 a year sitting there. A cable box or DVR runs 24/7 and adds $25 or more annually. A game console in quick-resume mode costs another $15 a year. Your microwave clock runs the other 23 hours and 45 minutes at up to $8 a year. Your printer, used once a week, still draws power every other day.
None of those numbers sound like much on their own. But add up five devices, and you're looking at $80 to $100 a year in electricity doing absolutely nothing for you. The HS300 strip more than pays for itself and then keeps paying.
⚡️ Know someone who complains about their power bill every single month? Forward this. The fix is easy and takes five minutes to set up. This is the kind of thing a good friend tells you.
Knowing when to retire is harder than knowing how much to save. The timing depends on what your retirement actually looks like: how long your money needs to last, what you'll spend, and where your income comes from.
Iran-linked hackers wiped out Stryker, one of America's biggest medical companies, erasing 200,000 devices overnight. Google, Amazon and Microsoft could be next. Here's what the escalating cyberwar means for you.
Plus, Uber's women-only rides, a fresh batch of emojis and how AI is secretly jacking up your electric bill.
🎧 Or search "Komando" wherever you get your podcasts. I'm everywhere.
WEB WATERCOOLER
🚛 Amazon doesn't want you to leave the couch ever: Two-day delivery wasn't fast enough. Same-day wasn't fast enough. Now Amazon is rolling out one-hour and three-hour delivery across thousands of U.S. cities, covering 90,000 products including groceries, medications and electronics. Prime members pay $4.99 for three hours or $9.99 for one hour. No Prime? $14.99 and $19.99. Check if your zip code qualifies right here. Your local drugstore's worst nightmare got a delivery window.
Sleep gets upgrades: Sleep apnea is huge, hitting about 1 billion people worldwide, 80% of whom are undiagnosed. Today's best treatment is a mask people hate enough to stop wearing. Cue "Luke, I am your father." It's a bleak sentence when untreated apnea raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia and walking around exhausted. Tech with help from AI is adding new options: $1,500 to $4,500 jaw devices, Inspire implants used in 100,000 patients, a chin stimulator entering trials in July, plus Zepbound and a nightly pill in development. Good news for the partners who have been elbowing them about it for years.
Nukes on Titan: Get this. NASA is building Dragonfly, a car-size, nuclear-powered rotorcraft to explore Titan, Saturn's biggest moon. Cost? About $3 billion. It's set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in 2028, arrive in 2034 and sniff around dunes, rivers, lakes and a buried saltwater ocean for signs of life in a world so hazy solar power won't work (hence the plutonium). It must feel so cool to say, "Send in the nuclear chopper."
🎓 Degrees vs. robots: Glad I'm not 22. ServiceNow boss Bill McDermott says recent grad unemployment is roughly 9% by his math and could hit the mid-30s as AI agents swallow routine office work. The New York Fed already puts recent grads at 5.6% unemployment versus 4.2% overall. Job postings are down 32%, applications per role jumped 26% and Big Tech new-grad hiring is down more than 50% from 2019. Basically, the bottom rung of the career ladder got fed into a shredder.
🤖 Rock 'em sock 'em dinner: A viral video shows a service robot in San Jose suddenly going full breakdance beside the hot pot, smashing dishes until staff literally wrestled it down while somebody fumbled for the kill switch on a phone. When they said robot delivery, I assumed noodles, not a flying saucer plate. The broader robot world is getting spicier. EngineAI's T800 demo featured the humanoid kicking the CEO, and DroidUp's Moya companion bot could cost roughly $173,000.
DAILY TECH UPDATE
Meta licenses Google Gemini
One of the richest companies on Earth just said: We can't build AI fast enough. Here's what it means for all of us.
Cut energy waste with your phone or voice. Works with all the big smart home systems. Set a 24/7 schedule and come home to the perfect temp.
Image: meross
💡 Bright ideas | 4.5 ⭐ 6,500+ reviews These smart light bulbs(26% off, $25, four-pack) do more than shine. Choose from 104 colors or sync them to your music.
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Kill the glow | 4.3 ⭐ 7,300+ reviews Annoying LEDs at night? Light-blocking stickers(20% off, $8) cover them up so your room stays dark.
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your phone torch is also a lost item detector. Turn the lights off. Flashlight flat on the floor. Look across the room. The light skims the surface, and anything sitting on top of the carpet casts a long shadow. Earring backs, screws, contact lenses, SIM card pins, even a clear stud. I found a diamond earring I'd been looking for THREE WEEKS. Works every single time.
Let Gmail reply while you're away: Takes a minute to set up, so people know you're not ghosting them. Click See all settings > General > Vacation responder, turn it on and set your start and end dates. Add a subject and a message like "Currently out of office. Have you tried googling it?" Hit Save Changes and forget about your inbox. You've earned it.
💻 Your Mac lock screen is more customizable than you think: Open System Settings > Wallpaper > Clock Appearance to change the font style and thickness. There's a preview so you can see it before committing. Bonus: Go to System Settings > Users & Groups, select your account, hit Edit and choose a "Memoji" as your profile icon. It animates when you type your password. Cute, actually.
Quit recycling passwords: You know better. I use NordPass to create strong, unique passwords for every account. Plus, NordPass keeps passwords safe and easy to access. Get 52% off today, that's only $1.43 a month.*
⚙️ Some apps add themselves to your Windows startup without asking: That's why your computer feels slow straight after boot. Fix it. Go to Settings > System > Notifications, scroll down and toggle on Startup App Notification. Now when an app quietly enables itself at launch, Windows calls it out. You decide if it stays. Not the app.
✈️ The airport parking hack nobody talks about: Before you pay $30 a day to park at the airport, check if there's a hotel within a mile of the terminal. Many offer free or cheap park-and-ride packages, even if you're not staying there. Search "[your airport] hotel parking package," and you'll often find $8 to $12 a day with a free shuttle that runs every 15 minutes. Some hotels let you book parking-only online in under two minutes. Way cheaper than the garage, usually faster than waiting for an Uber, and the shuttle drops you right at departures. Book it before you leave the house.
WHAT THE TECH?
Image: ClearSpace
🛻 Help, I need a tow
Your car breaks down, you call roadside assistance. Your satellite breaks down, it floats there.
There are roughly 16,000 satellites orbiting Earth, and the dead ones drift. They spin. They occasionally explode into clouds of debris that threaten every working satellite we depend on for GPS, weather forecasting and the Wi-Fi you're using to read this.
Enter the world's most expensive junk drawer, 250 miles above your head.
Meet ClearSpace, a startup building what is essentially a space tow truck. It tracks defunct satellites, matches their speed and orbit and grabs them with a robotic claw. Then drags them down to burn up in the atmosphere.
Someone finally decided to clean up the mess. Only took 60 years.
🔜 Coming tomorrow: Google Maps has a tiny feature that can send you straight back in time with one click, from old houses and vanished neighborhoods to memories you forgot you still had. I'll show you how to roll back the years.
🍽️ The answer: B) A complete mock American dining room. Yep, Toyota's California design team literally shipped a full-on American dining room to Japan in 1986: table, chairs, chandelier, curtains, parquet floors, family photos, the works. It wasn't decor. It was a very expensive way of saying, "This is why the cupholders and legroom need to be bigger."
Toyota used that one fake dining room to reshape everything about how it designed vehicles for the U.S. market. By 2008, Toyota had become the world's largest automaker, surpassing General Motors for the first time. All those Camrys and Corollas in American driveways today trace back, in a small way, to a chandelier hanging inside a Japanese office building in 1986.
🧘🏼♀️ I was wondering, can a Toyota stretch? I mean, a Merecedes-Benz. (Oh come on, it wasn't that bad!)
📩 One in five emails never reaches the inbox. Not because you unsubscribed. Not because anything went wrong. Because a Big Tech algorithm made the call. If this landed in Spam or Promotions, drag it to Primary and hit "Not Spam." Otherwise, tomorrow, I'll miss you.
🌐 The world rewards the ones paying attention. You're ahead. — Kim
Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily
🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE:Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.
Companies and products denoted by an asterisk (*) within this publication are paid sponsors or advertisements. As an Amazon Associate, the publisher earns from qualifying purchases. Statements regarding products denoted by a double asterisk (**) have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; such products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This newsletter is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, medical, or professional advice of any kind. Readers should consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions based on this content. The publisher disclaims all liability for any loss, damage, or injury resulting from the use of or reliance on the information contained herein.
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