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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do.

    That’s how nearly all modern devices work. Li-Ion can’t be charged and discharged simultaneously. There is circuitry to split the power between the battery and the device when it’s being charged.

    Cheaper devices will just stop charging when you use them or they won’t work at all when plugged in.




  • Only way I’m using most shopping sites is if I know they’re trustworthy and if they support PayPal or one of the major payment processors. I’m not going to type my CC number into a random website and trust that they aren’t hacked.

    There are a lot of issues with PayPal, but at least it makes it easy for me to get a refund if the seller refuses. The last time I had to get a refund, it was because the seller told me I had to ship my $20 product back to China in order to get a 50% refund. This was despite the returns agreement explicitly requiring them to cover return shipping and that shipping it to China would have cost me about $150.



  • Blame the Republicans in Congress.

    It took until last May for the Senate to finally confirm the fifth Commissioner. Per law, they can’t create new rules or regulations when there’s a vacancy.

    Have you noticed that 5G was getting faster and had more coverage until it more or less stopped last year? For the first time in history, Congress did not renew the FCC’s spectrum auction authority. T-Mobile bought a lot of 2.5Ghz spectrum back in 2022 but the FCC couldn’t grant it to them. It wasn’t until a month and a half ago that they could use it… Because Congress passed a bill that granted the authority for auctions held prior to March 2023.

    They’ve also tried going after the VOIP services that don’t follow STIR/SHAKEN or allow robocallers. But they don’t have enough funding to do much more than the minimum. For the very few that they can catch, they first provide a warning period for the company to remove robocallers and correct their systems. If that fails, the FCC then permits carriers to block the provider, but they can’t mandate it.

    Except even that’s not enough. The FCC can’t take actual legal action against the providers, only the robocallers. So quite often, the provider will just change their business name, list different fake people as their executives, and then rejoin the networks as if nothing ever happened. Look up One Owl Telecom - they’ve done this numerous times.



  • droans@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlGold for house
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    2 years ago

    I’m seeing $412K as the average price of a home in 2023, not $495K. And gold was $2,135 in 2023. The price in gold is still higher in 2023, though about 193 bars for a home.

    Couple other notes, more related to the post.

    1920 is an oddly good year to use. It’s just after WWI. Industrialization and modernization are taking off across the US. Worker’s rights are beginning to take hold and working class people are now able to afford homes. It’s before the Roaring 20s, so you’re not going to get the actual details obscured with the market rush and subsequent depression.

    There is a couple important downsides though…

    Firstly, mortgages didn’t really exist back then. I mean, they did, but they were horrific. You’d have to go to an insurance company because banks wouldn’t offer them. The terms would give the insurance company full ownership of the property. If you were lucky, it would be a balloon loan - pay only the interest during the 5-10 year term and then pay the entire balance at the end. If you were less lucky, it was a lifelong contract where you only paid the interest plus fees every month.

    There was an alternative but most people didn’t have access to it: membership in a Savings and Loan corporation, also known as Building and Loan or thrifts. You’d join as a member and agree to buy X shares every month. If you give a notice (30-90 days usually), you would be allowed to cash out the shares plus interest earned for their actual value. When you wanted to buy a home, you would be allowed to use your shares as collateral. Each monthly payment would pay for the interest and a certain number of shares. Once you had enough shares, you would redeem them to pay off the loan. A bit complicated, but S&Ls were fantastic for the common person. They were owned by the members of your community and all loans went to support said community.

    Secondly, kind of related to the first point, there were no 30 year mortgages. Home prices are virtually tied to the monthly payment and a thirty year mortgage allows for lower monthly payments. Prices might get out of line a bit, such as right now, if people believe that interest rates will drop and they can refinance later. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see any drops for at least two years and, even then, we won’t see anything like the 2020-2021 rates unless we experience an economic catastrophe like 2008. You want higher rates when the macro environment is strong and lower rates when it’s weak. Cheap debt in a good economy is basically a handout to the rich - makes you wonder why Trump pushed the Fed to keep them low back in 2018-2019…