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MACBOOK UPDATE….Thanks to everyone who suggested resetting the SMC controller in my MacBook. It didn’t work, but it did cause the white LED on the front of the notebook to start pulsing again, which made me think it was working for a while and allowed me to go to bed happy. When I woke up this morning, though, the battery was still dead after a night of charging and the message on the menu bar was actually more ominous than before. Sigh. Off to the Genius Bar, I guess.

But I’m curious about something. An awful lot of people in yesterday’s thread seemed to think that I had committed some kind of technological malpractice by letting the battery discharge completely. Mind you, this wasn’t deliberate on my part. I just closed the lid one day (August 29, I think, after using the MacBook to blog about Sarah Palin during a power failure) and then didn’t happen to use it for the next two or three months. But frankly, even if I’d known I wasn’t going to use it I wouldn’t have done anything special. I would have just figured that the battery would discharge completely and I’d have to charge it before I used it next. No big deal.

But that’s not so? If you let your battery discharge completely, the entire machine dies and refuses to charge the battery again? Why? Just to teach me a lesson? Or what? I don’t understand why completely discharging a battery should have such dire effects. I thirst for knowledge, as always, so can anyone enlighten me?

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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