Scouting experience really depends a lot on the local troop (and council to some extent)

I had reservations about BSA (now just SA I guess :), but my son decided to join some years back, and I supported him, even eventually becoming an assistant scoutmaster in his troop.

I would say the program has a lot of great aspects, and I have seen first hand many kids really benefit from it, helping them overcome various challenges and grow into better and more independent people, including my son who also benefited from it greatly.

I do disagree with some of the policies, especially at the national level - I am an atheist, and the insistence on essentially not allowing atheists to participate openly is regrettable. I am glad they decided to allow girls and gay kids participate however.

Our troop was the first one in my area to allow girls to join. At the time we joined, the troop had a great group of kids (boys and girls) and parents which had the right attitude, and were generally looking for the right things from the program, focusing on what I think are the important aspects (for example religion played almost no role in our troop) and everything worked really well. I have definitely encountered other troops that I am pretty sure my son nor I would be able to stay with more than a day however. Also as kids age out, and new kids and parents join, the vibe of a troop can shift as well, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot. My son aged out, and I have transitioned out, but the last year in the troop things weren’t as good as when we first joined.

The scandals of the past are obviously terrible. However, other than having to do all the extra training and strict emphasis on rules designed to prevent such stuff from happening again in the future, I haven’t really seen any of that type of stuff during my time with the scouts - no creeps, and all parents and volunteers I interacted with were generally quite on board with following the rules and working together to keep the environment safe. But I suppose as with everything, a lot depends on your area and specific troop.

Cub Scouts require parents to participate. And most Scout troops I think wish more of their parents would take a more active role in the troop, so usually you would be more than welcome, both at meetings and on treks.

The Hyperfixed podcast covered this recently too

What kind of battery did you put in ? A standard alkaline battery has different voltage discharge curve compared to the recommended rechargeable NiMH batteries (example)

You can’t really measure the capacity of a battery directly, all you can measure externally is the voltage, so the logic has to make some assumptions about the type of battery being used when calculating percentage. Since they recommend the LADDA rechargeable batteries, which are NiMH, they probably set the 100% threshold lower - perhaps as low as 1.2V, so as long as whatever battery you are using is above this voltage, it will show up as 100% - it might take longer for an Alkaline battery compared to NiMH rechargeable, but later you might have the opposite problem, when the reported percentage will start dropping faster for Alkaline vs NiMH, due to the different discharge curve characteristics.

More sophisticated devices can sometimes have a learning function, where they observe the voltage curve over a full discharge cycle of a battery, and then adjust the % reporting to more closely match, but since every battery can be different, this is still not always accurate. The discharge curve can be affected by temperature as well, further complicating the issue.

Since these sensors are supposed to last up to 15 months on single charge, and it actually wouldn’t be too unusual for a device like this to report 100% battery for up to the first 1/3 of its battery usable life (especially if using Alkaline batteries), 3 months is probably still within reason. There is often some intentional padding as well by manufacturers, as they don’t want customers to see big drop in battery percentage early on, as this might cause people to make ultimately incorrect predictions about total battery life, and complain or return the product.