Some smarty pants out there was talking about Jackery batteries. The kind that you might use with solar cells either camping or in an emergency. The recuring statement was never let it drain to zero and never charge to 100%. Apparently when you do use the full 100% of the capacity the crystaline structure of the battery degrades and the number of duty cycles declines.

Some of that makes sense as I have several proper UPS devices in my home and many only last a few minutes. You might think because of the energy demand but in fact is the age and duty cycle count….

What is particularly frustrating is that I have 5 laptops in arms length and 5 under a pile of books. The 5 away are all dead and I suppose I could power them up but they only last about an hour. The 5 in arms length are still pretty good and I try not to leave them plugged in. The challenge that I’m losing is not letting them get to zero (impossible) and then not charging them to 100 (also impossible).

this is called planned obsolescence

There is no immediate incentive for the battery technology people to develop the perfect battery. They must build the incremental improvements until they get to the best state they can so that every version pays for the next version. They fail to see the community benefit. Of course this is a capitalist approach to the problem. If the government sponsored the improvement then there would still be an accounting.

see US Fuel reserves

As an example for whatever gas prices started to skyrocket but instead of dealing with the profiteers the US government opened it’s reserves and offered tax free status. Prices did not fall across the board but they did lower. (see premium gas prices). So the increases are still there… te money just moved from the left pocket to the right. And when the left runs out of reserves the price will go up again.

give a mouse a cookie and he’ll want a glass of milk

It may be time to call a fork a fork. America is a constitutional democracy and/or republic. America tries to be a capitalist society and politicians get holy upset when they are called a socialist. We are, in truth, both. One cannot succeed without the other. The upper income class sees themselves as capitalists and the lower income class may want to be capitalists but benefit from income redistribution programms called socialism. You simply cannot have one without the other.

Symbiosis

… from batteries