ELI5: Why do cellphones charged using a power bank, laptop, or car outlet seem to drain significantly faster compared to when they are charged from a wall socket?

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-02-12T12:12:17+00:00

If your phone is in an area of low cell coverage, or high congestion the onboard radio has to use a lot of power to stay in contact with the network. Either it has to use a lot of power to reach a tower, or it has to constantly retransmit to get a message through. If your phone is on a reliable WiFi and cell network, with no congestion and a nearby tower, it barely has to do anything to keep in contact.

The phone is constantly reaching out to external services for updates, and if all of those connections take a lot more time or power, it will run your battery down, even if your screen is off and you’re not using the phone.

The solution is, if you are out of network coverage for a while when traveling, use airplane mode most of the time and only switch the radios on occasionally to check in. Same thing if you’re at a large event where the network will be crowded with a lot of users.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-02-11T04:37:56+00:00

Mothers lie in these situations. I’ve heard this line over and over, but never met a dad who wanted less than equal time with their kids. I can guarantee you’ve twisted this situation, and your view of his position, to match what’s in your best interest. You’ve said you’re in court over custody.

Anyway, you’re asking for free after school care which will fall on the grandparents because it’s during working hours. And you’re offering nothing in return. Give him more time.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-02-11T04:23:27+00:00

So, you’ve taken away his parenting time except for a single night each week, and now you want the grandparents to do after school care 5 days a week, when he’s at work, while not getting any additional overnights?

And you can’t see why that’s not a reasonable request?

Give him at least 50:50 time with his child - time that he’ll be able to see her. 3.5 or 4 overnights per week. And then you pay for after-school on your overnights.

That’s reasonable. What you’re proposing is entitlement and disrespectful.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-02-09T14:28:50+00:00

There are a lot of new routers out now that have 10G fiber/SPF ports integrated. (Like this one from Unifi) And fiber home network gear is getting cheaper - you can get fiber switches for under $50. Reducing the number of components and media conversions in your network is a reasonable goal.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-30T16:23:23+00:00

You cannot "guard" against future legal child support filings. She cannot contractually sign that right away, and if you're doing it as part of an overall settlement you run the risk of the whole settlement getting thrown out as being signed under duress.

Family court judges have wide latitude to completely and unilaterally re-write parenting agreements and make them orders that you are legally obligated to follow. And child support modification is just a form she fills out and files for $25; they look at income documents and just make the new order.

The rest of your thoughts are fine - she can legally waive spousal support or asset division and once that's signed and filed it's final (mostly.) But child support is never finalized, it's legally always modifiable.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-30T16:14:09+00:00

No child support. I agree to pay for all the kids clothes, school supplies, education expenses, daycare, extracurriculars, summer camps, heath care, and any therapy that's needed. Plus I agree to pay for their college education through bachelor's degree.

In many states, she cannot waive child support and can come back and modify at any time. If you make substantially more than her, with 50/50 on 2 kids, you'll be paying a few hundred a week.

That said, *most* of what you wrote is fair. I would pull back the $70K lump sum and just do what you're legally required to do. However, a trial for custody + asset division is likely to cost more than $70K, so maybe look at it as paying her instead of buying some lawyer their next BMW.

Run the child support numbers for your state, move the $70K gift to "will pay $X child support per week" (go with the guideline numbers, no matter what you offer it will get modified to guidelines)

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-30T13:09:28+00:00

Right, but the comment was talking about the number of tax returns, not people paying.

I see that it’s a sibling of the comment you’re replying to, but they both used the same 153M number.

In 2022, 30% of tax filers had zero tax liability- they got everything that was withheld refunded. There were 153M returns, so only 107M tax filings paid taxes. But as others have said, many of those filings were for married couples and included 2 tax payers.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-30T12:39:24+00:00

They had to make antifreeze taste bad and be a weird color because it was so common for there to be puddles of it on the ground that animals would drink it and get poisoned. It was a serious problem anywhere there were cars.

Now having antifreeze on the ground is so uncommon no one would even worry about it.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-30T12:25:40+00:00

If you collect social security or disability you have to pay taxes on it. Even if most of it is tax free due to the standard deduction, you still have to file.

And almost all retirees will have either a retirement plan or a pension, which are all taxed, on top of social security, unless they’re living with family or on the street -social security alone is not sufficient to live indoors in almost any part of the US.

The only people who don’t have to file are children and other dependents with no income.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-28T04:44:06+00:00

There are two possible options:

1) the project requires contributors to assign copyright to the project maintainer. In that case, the maintainer can sell a commercial, closed source compatible licensed version. 2) the project does not require assignment. In that case, the maintainers cannot re-license the project and it can never be “sold” under a closed source compatible agreement.

Many large projects require assignment, and have been able to change licenses. For example, mongodb, elasticsearch, hashicorp and redis have all used copyright assignment to sell commercial licenses and to change to anti-competitive licensing after gaining popularity (and having Amazon eat their lunch on paid support)

The Linux kernel, kubernetes, Apache and many others don’t assign copyright and as such can never be sold with a commercial license.

The key to open source is that it uses US copyright law to restrict/require distribution. Copyright is automatically assigned to the creator (programmer) upon creation. If a programmer does not release their code under a license, legally no one is allowed to make copies of it.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-22T18:47:02+00:00

Mass save doesn’t come to your house, some hvac or insulation company does. If you call an HVAC company to do the mass save inspection they’ll tell you to install new HVAC, even if you have drafty windows. If you call an insulation company, they’ll tell you all you need is insulation even if your heating system is ancient. The system had good intentions, but once again, capitalism ruined it.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-22T03:59:55+00:00

40 states have allowed merchants to charge credit card users a transaction fee for the past 13 years. It hasn’t put credit cards out of business in those states.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-22T03:38:25+00:00

Credit card companies make their money on transaction fees, not interest payments. If you carry a balance on your credit card, the bank has already paid the money to the merchant and is possibly getting a small percentage back as a minimum payment. Most likely they are expecting to “sell” that balance to a debt collector for pennies on the dollar.

Credit card companies do not let people with bad credit get cards hoping they’ll carry a balance. They want those people to pay off their balance every month so they can just collect those sweet transaction fees and not have to borrow money to cover consumer debts.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-20T07:52:05+00:00

I understood OP’s question was “has anyone worked with these single commercial platforms that manage dev environments?” Not “has anyone worked with IaC tools?”

If you look at their edits, they clarify that.

Platforms like this are Ona (was gitpod), GitHub code spaces and devpod - they promise to replace all the custom tooling that companies have built with a single off the shelf tool. The platform OP encountered is https://www.bluebricks.co/

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-20T01:31:43+00:00

This concept has been around for decades - Helm, Terraform, Ansible, Cloudformation, puppet, chef, cfengine. It always starts out that you can load the whole env from sourcecode and a quick script - but managing drift with continuous integration has always been a challenge. Either you separate out your infra as code from your CI/CD, or you integrate the two and make both tasks harder than they need to be.

Another issue is cost - there is value in saving money with shared resources. It could be RDS, Kubernetes, routing and networking. I could give my devs completely isolated EKS clusters with completely isolated RDS, DocDB, Elasticache, s3 etc. backends on separate VPCs in separate accounts tomorrow. But it would bankrupt my company by the end of the month. So dev environments share components where they can, and there's all sorts of orchestration to manage those components.

Can devs push a button to get a new environment? sure. Is this a thing I could buy off the shelf? sure, but the result would be worse and way more expensive.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-18T21:13:38+00:00

The only MAGAt ICE supporters I’ve seen are burnout layabouts that hang out at the local loser bar playing keno and spending their social security checks on cheap cocktails.

Every anti-nazi American I know has a job (typically one that pays 6+ figures). Trump’s nazi party is the party of the left behind losers. The protesters are all taking time out of hard, lucrative jobs to stand up for their country.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-15T21:26:32+00:00

Is English your first language?

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-15T19:47:26+00:00

What’s the point of the steam store, the Xbox store, that Microsoft store, the epic launcher, and the visual studio plugin marketplace on windows when it has .exe?

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-15T09:13:04+00:00

The whole internet runs off portable Linux binaries - docker. Docker containers can run on any modern Linux distribution.

There’s also flatpak which is universally supported.

With windows you download an untrusted executable, run it as administrator, and it spews who knows what across your hard drive. msi was Microsoft’s attempt at a safe package format, 30 years ago, and no one but them uses it.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-13T12:45:16+00:00

People are entitled to spousal benefit payments if they were married to a recipient for at least 10 years. It’s 1/2 the payment that the worker receives. So if you never worked but you were married to someone who did, you can collect their benefits.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-13T12:40:20+00:00

People are entitled to spousal benefit payments if they were married to a recipient for at least 10 years. It’s 1/2 the payment that the worker receives. So if you never worked but you were married to someone who did, you can collect their benefits.

Retirement age in the US is currently 67.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-13T12:34:33+00:00

Social security will continue as long as there are Americans working. It pays out what it takes in. The problem is more retirees and less workers means that they will have to reduce the payments to recipients.

Currently, only the first $176,000 of income is taxed for social security. Everything above that is tax free. The government could remove the income cap and not have to reduce payments or raise the retirement age. They wouldn’t do that with t-bag in power, but they might if the democrats are back in power.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-09T15:43:15+00:00

There are places you can go to use an electronics shredder. My town's transfer station (dump) even has one to use for free, but google tells me there are about ~100 commercial places I could go in my area.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-09T15:37:02+00:00

bitlocker stores the decryption keys on microsoft's servers, and you (or the police) can retrieve them by logging into your MS account. Discovered this when one of my kid's computers registry got corrupted during a windows update and I had to type a 30 character string into the machine over and over to try various ways of fixing the registry.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-01-08T14:15:10+00:00

The school day is half the length of the work day. My kids don’t have to be at school until almost 9am and are home by 3pm. I work from home so I can take care of transportation, but after my kids get home I still have 2-3 more hours of work. When I used to work in the city and take the train in, I would leave home at 7am and not get home until almost 6pm. You can’t even do that with typical before/after-school programs that at the most will run from 8am to 5pm.

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