The con aspect of tax write-off is offset by him being stuck with a lot of early adopter systems that don’t really work. I suspect his family would have been happier using 5$ thermostats that actually worked than such poorly implemented home automation.

LTT is like 95% entertainment 5% actually somewhat informative.

"Offset" for him, the money are still not going towards Canadian schools or healthcare or whatever.

OMG, a few thousand dollars is being deducted for a canadian business making money from mostly foreign countries, helping the trade balance, spending money in the canadian economy, hiring people who also pay taxes, promoting canada as a country and more, but they're ripping off canada because he dares have a few well documented tax deductions.

LTT needs to make a video either way. If he sets up home automation at his house or an artificial studio demo the same money is spent and not ending up going toward Canadian schools.

In terms of the deduction, I doubt he’s committing actual tax fraud if for no other reason than he’s so public a figure.

Ya but it is also a common syndrome in Vancouver. Someone building a "nice" house is pulled in by people touting various control systems. The systems never really work. It is always the first time the installers to be installing this particular equipment. There are reasons why people with old money still use standard light switches just like poor people.

My rule for home automation is that the automation should merely augment the existing stuff and degrade gracefully in case of failure.

I automate accessory lighting, but not primary.

Christmas/holiday lights, mood lighting, under counter lighting, all that is controlled by automation.

Now, primary lighting for the room, there's a switch on the wall for that.

I remember some IoT switches that just had lamp and switch connector and outside of control did just that - worked as dumb switch so if all else failed lights still worked as usual.

It is still adding one extra component that could fail, but it was at least immune to "controller died, nothing works" problem.

Part of the reason why I went with Lutron Caseta, only to learn their hubs do not include telnet access on the basic model to allow private management of the switches. Still some workarounds for it, but the need to register a cloud account initially remains unimpressed.

The cloud is always someone else's computer, the cloud always costs someone $, and over time, there will be less incentive to provide it.

Isn't that pretty much all LTT content? High on money and flashy-flashy, low on facts and care.

It's such garbage content and I also stopped watching. I figure he probably can expense a lot of the cost/tax because it's a business purchase once he makes content out of it but not sure if that works the way I think it does..

People write off personal stuff as a business expense all the time, it's not like tax authorities have the time to go through line items on invoices.

As for the legality, when you take stuff that you bought for the company and later use it for personal things, you need to "pay" the company for it, you can't just write if off.

> My 4 billion $$$$ home theater system

I loved the idea of running my PC elsewhere in the house, so I looked up both the USB and Thunderbolt fiber solutions he recommended.

$800.

Plus that whole project has been a disaster anyway. This is like his third attempt at centralized gaming machines, and even this one is buggy and problematic.

His previous one was flagged by anti-cheat due to it being VM-based.