So on the upside: this works, and charging your phone “by magic” is exactly as cool as it sounds. It makes marginally longer to charge, but if you’ve got an S5 it’ll probably save you
time in the long run because you don’t have to keep opening the waterproof seal at the bottom of your phone. Plus, this charger uses the Qi standard so it’ll be compatible with lots of
other inductive-charging devices now and in the future.
Unfortunately I’ve found that it’s quite fussy about where exactly you have to place the phone in order to make contact. A centimetre or two out from the ideal spot and the phone keeps
losing the connection and then regaining it, causing it to beep and the screen to flash (which isn’t much use if you’re trying to sleep!). The upper surface of the charging pad doesn’t
have much grip and is convex in shape, so it’s very easy to knock your phone off the ideal spot, too. And while it’s reasonably price, it still feels a little cheap that it doesn’t come
with a power supply of it’s own (you have to use the one that came with your phone).
All-in-all, I wouldn’t recommend this, even though it “works”: there are probably better devices out there.
4 Way 13A Switched Adaptor with Surge Protection - White
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Overall good, but not suitable for every space
Overall, a good way to get extra sockets especially above workspaces. However, the shape of the device means that it might not be suitable for every space: for example, if you plug it
into one of a pair of sockets you might find that you’re unable to easily use the adjacent socket because the new sockets get in the way of the cable. And if you’re plugging and
unplugging things into/out of this power strip often, you’ll discover that it can “wobble” in an alarming way. The power switches feel a little light and plasticky, too.
But still – overall a good idea and reasonable value.
[this post to a private subreddit originally included a link tohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkcU2_Vs7Xw, but that video since seems to have disappeared]
Hi /r/polyfamilies. After much pestering by people who know us, I finally got around to writing about how my polycule and I organise our finances, and I thought that you might be interested to. The whole thing’s described behind that
link, but I didn’t want to be seen to be gathering karma or self-promoting, so I thought I’d make a text post to briefly explain it:
Us: My partner, her husband and I are three adults sharing a home (plus, this year, their baby girl!). We rented together for several years, and now we’ve got our
first mortgage together. We wanted to come up with a fair way to share our costs (rent/mortgage, bills, shopping, etc.) that wasn’t just “split it three ways”, which didn’t seem fair
given that we all earn different amounts – variable even from month to month as my income fluctuates depending on how many days I spend looking after the baby and what kind of
freelance work I get, and as my partner gradually returns to work (part-time for now) after her recent maternity leave.
Our system: We use a system of 100% means-assessment based on gross income. So in other words, if Alice, Bob and Chris live together, and Alice earns twice as much as
Bob, then she’d be expected to pay twice as much towards their collective household costs, too. And somebody who didn’t earn anything wouldn’t be expected to contribute
anything. We didn’t always use 100%: early on, we used 75% – in other words, a quarter of our costs would be simply “split three ways”, and three-quarters of our costs would be split
in accordance with means-assessment. Make sense?
It’s really easy: The good news is, it’s really easy to do. I’ve made a spreadsheet on Google Docs that’s a simplified version of our
sheet, and you’re welcome to take a copy and use it yourself. Just put in everybody’s salary and what percentage “means assessment” you want to use (0% means ‘simply split X ways’;
100% means ‘split completely according to means’; anything in-between is a balance of the two). Then put in each cost and who paid it (Eve paid the rent, Alice paid for this week’s
shopping, Bob paid for last week’s shopping, etc.) and it’ll tell you who owes money to whom in order to square everything up again.
It’s universal: You don’t even have to be a polyfamily to make use of this, I reckon. It works with as little as two people, and it’d work with any household of
multiple adults, if you wanted it to. It provides a simple, fair, and slightly-socialist way of splitting up the living costs of a group of people who live together and trust one
another.
Let me know what you think!
tl;dr: My polycule and I use a use a spreadsheet to divide up our monthly costs in accordance with our relative incomes, which then tells us who owes money to whom at the end
of each month.
Hi /r/polyamory. After much pestering by people who know us, I finally got around to writing about how my
polycule and I organise our finances, and I thought that you might be interested to. The whole thing’s described behind that link, but I didn’t want to be seen to be
gathering karma or self-promoting, so I thought I’d make a text post to briefly explain it:
Us: My partner, her husband and I are three adults sharing a home (plus, this year, their baby girl!). We rented together for several years, and now we’ve got our
first mortgage together. We wanted to come up with a fair way to share our costs (rent/mortgage, bills, shopping, etc.) that wasn’t just “split it three ways”, which didn’t seem fair
given that we all earn different amounts – variable even from month to month as my income fluctuates depending on how many days I spend looking after the baby and what kind of
freelance work I get, and as my partner gradually returns to work (part-time for now) after her recent maternity leave.
Our system: We use a system of 100% means-assessment based on gross income. So in other words, if Alice, Bob and Chris live together, and Alice earns twice as much as
Bob, then she’d be expected to pay twice as much towards their collective household costs, too. And somebody who didn’t earn anything wouldn’t be expected to contribute
anything. We didn’t always use 100%: early on, we used 75% – in other words, a quarter of our costs would be simply “split three ways”, and three-quarters of our costs would be split
in accordance with means-assessment. Make sense?
It’s really easy: The good news is, it’s really easy to do. I’ve made a spreadsheet on Google Docs that’s a simplified version of our
sheet, and you’re welcome to take a copy and use it yourself. Just put in everybody’s salary and what percentage “means assessment” you want to use (0% means ‘simply split X ways’;
100% means ‘split completely according to means’; anything in-between is a balance of the two). Then put in each cost and who paid it (Eve paid the rent, Alice paid for this week’s
shopping, Bob paid for last week’s shopping, etc.) and it’ll tell you who owes money to whom in order to square everything up again.
It’s universal: You don’t even have to be a polyfamily to make use of this, I reckon. It works with as little as two people, and it’d work with any household of
multiple adults, if you wanted it to. It provides a simple, fair, and slightly-socialist way of splitting up the living costs of a group of people who live together and trust one
another.
Let me know what you think!
tl;dr: My polycule and I use a use a spreadsheet to divide up our monthly costs in accordance with our relative incomes, which then tells us who owes money to whom at the end
of each month.
[this was originally posted to a private subreddit]
This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian
day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004) The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover’s navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover’s
panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see.The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images
zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera’s colour filters.
For the last four years or so, Ruth, JTA and I (and
during their times living with us, Paul and Matt) have organised our finances according to a system of means-assessment. I’ve mentioned it to people on a number of ocassions, and every time it seems to
attract interest, so I thought I’d explain how we got to it and how it works, so that others might benefit from it. We think it’s particularly good for families consisting of multiple
adults sharing a single household (for example, polyamorous networks like ours, or families with grown children) but there are probably others who’d benefit from it, too – it’s
perfectly reasonable for just two adults with different salaries to use it, for example. And I’ve made a
sample spreadsheet that you’re welcome to copy and adapt, if you’d like to.
How we got here
That’s a long receipt!
After I left Aberystwyth and Ruth, JTA, Paul and I started living at “Earth”, our
house in Headington, we realised that for the first time, the four of us were financially-connected to one another. We started by dividing the rent and council tax four ways (with an
exemption for Paul while he was still looking for work), splitting the major annual expenses (insurance, TV license) between the largest earners, and taking turns to pay smaller,
more-regular expenses (shopping, bills, etc.). This didn’t work out very well, because it only takes two cycles of you being the “unlucky” one who gets lumbered with the
more-expensive-than-usual shopping trip – right before a party, for example – before it starts to feel like a bit of a lottery.
Our solution, then, was to replace the system with a fairer one. We started adding up our total expenditures over the course of each month and settling the difference between one
another at the end of each month. Because we’re clearly raging socialists, we decided that the fairest (and most “family-like”) way to distribute responsibility was by a system of
partial means-assessment: de chacun selon ses facultés.
Another enormous shopping trip.
We started out with what we called “75% means-assessment”: in other words, a quarter of our shared expenditures were split evenly, four ways, and three-quarters were split
proportionally in accordance with our gross income. We arrived at that figure after a little dissussion (and a computerised model that we could all play with on a big screen). Working
from gross income invariably introduces inequalities into the system (some of which are mirrored in our income tax system) but a bigger unfairness came – as it does in wider society –
from the fact that the difference between a very-low income and a low income is significantly more (from a disposable money perspective) than the difference between a low and a high
income. This was relevant, because ‘personal’ expenses, such as mobile phone bills, were not included in the scheme and so we may have penalised lower-earners more than we had intended.
On the other hand, 75% means-assessment was still significantly more-“communist” than 0%!
When I mentioned this system to people, sometimes they’d express surprise that I (as one of the higher earners) would agree to such an arrangement: the question was usually asked with a
tone that implied that they expected the lower earners to mooch off of the higher earners, which (coupled with the clearly false idea that there’s a linear relationship between the
amount of work involved in a job and the amount that it pays) would result in a “race to the bottom”, with each participant trying to do the smallest amount of work possible in order to
maximise the degree to which they were subsidised by the others. From a game theory perspective, the argument makes sense, I would concede. But on the other hand – what the hell would I
be doing agreeing to live with and share finances with (and then continuing to live with and share finances with) people whose ideology was so opposed to my own in the first place?
Naturally, I trusted my fellow Earthlings in this arrangement: I already trusted them – that’s why I was living with them!
Louis Blanc had the right idea, but his idealism was hampered by the selfishness inherent in any sufficiently-large group. Had he brought socialism to his house, rather than his
country, he might have felt more successful.
How it works
We’ve had a few iterations, but we eventually settled on a system at a higher rate of means-assessment: 100%! It’s not perfect, but it’s the fairest way I’ve ever been involved with of
sharing the costs of running a house. I’ve put together a spreadsheet based on the one that we use that you can adapt to your own household, if you’d like to try a fairer way of
splitting your bills – whether there are just two of you or lots of you in your home, this provides a genuinely equitable way to share your costs.
Click on the sheet to see a Google Drive document that you can save a copy of and adapt to your own household.
The sheet I’ve provided – linked above – is not quite like ours: ours has extra features to handle Ruth and I’s fluctuating income (mine because of freelance work, Ruth’s
because she’s gradually returning to work following a period
of maternity leave), an archive of each month’s finances, tools to help handle repayments to one another of money borrowed, and convenience macros to highlight who owes what to
whom. This is, then, a simplified version from which you can build a model for your own household, or that you can use as a starting point for discussions with your own tribe.
Start on the “People” sheet and tell it how many participants your household has, their names, and their relative incomes. Also add your proposed level of means-assessment: anything
from 0% to 100%… or beyond, but that does have some interesting philosophical consequences.
Then, on the “Expenses” sheet, record each thing that your household pays for over the course of each month. At the bottom, it’ll total up how much each person has paid, and how much
they would have been expected to pay, based on the level of your means-assessment: at 0%, for example, each person would be expected to pay 1/N
of the total; at the other extreme (100%), a person with no income would be expected to make no contribution, and a person with twice the income of another would be expected to pay
twice as much as them. It’ll also show the difference between the two values: so those who’ve paid less than their ‘share’ will have negative numbers and will owe money to those who’ve
paid more than their share, indicated by positive numbers. Settle the difference… and you’re ready to roll on to the next month.
Now you’re equipped to employ a (wholly or partially) means-assessed model to your household finances. If you adapt this model or have ideas for its future development, I’d love to hear
them.
