In one scenario, you're paying $980 of interest and $20 of principle on your first like 50 payments (not exactly accurate: you're accruing $980 of interest, then paying $1000, moving your balance down by a net of $20). Paying $20 extra bypasses $980 of accrued interest in the end, saving you money.
In another scenario (low interest rate), you're still paying $1000/mo for 360 months; but even the earlier payments are like $850 of principle and $150 of interest. Whereas each $20 will save you $980 off the total cost of the house, you have to put down $5553 extra on each of those early payments to save $980.
With a lower interest rate, the sale price is higher: since much of the cost of the loan is not interest, you can't dismiss it by prepayment. Whereas $120k of sale price and $330k of interest can be reduced to $220k in total (saving $230k) by adding an extra $300/mo, low-interest rate markets turn this into $330k of sale price and $120k of interest, while requiring heroic efforts (extra $5000/mo) to shave off half your interest, in the end reducing only to $390k (savings: $60k).
You're better able to reduce the total cost to yourself with minimal additional capital investment when interest rates are high and loan terms are long. The natural inflation (increase in salary) or your ability to manage your finances will provide you with additional money over time, allowing you to increase your loan payment; with high interest rates, small increases in prepayment become huge savings off the total loan cost.
people realized although such was the value on paper, no one could actually sell at that price and receive anything near the current "market value".
I keep telling people we need our high-interest-rate market back because it'll force home prices down. Home prices go up when interest rates go down, because people are still buying the same houses for $1200/mo; the difference is whether it's a $120k house or a $350k house that you're paying $450k for. Also, with high interest rates, putting an extra $20 on your mortgage cuts off tens of thousands of dollars from the total cost; with low interest rates, you need to take heroic efforts, like tripling your payments, to save any real money.
They tell me that people just won't be able to afford houses, and that the prices won't come back down. Houses will just go unsold, forever.
If you're doing large, high-risk, long-term projects with lots of steps and huge amounts of work, waterfall is probably the worst way to do it unless absolutely nothing will change between project initiation and close.
Your old, vanilla-style Waterfall sets the whole project up to start with, with all the planning done, and then runs with it. It's a terrible way to manage the risks inherent in running a project: changes require re-work and re-planning, and propagate down through the project.
Agile project management breaks projects down into iterative and incremental phases. An agile project will use the same methodologies as a Waterfall project, but will break down major parts of single-projects and single-phases into iterative and incremental deliverables. An iterative deliverable supplies a foundation--such as a set of core communications systems for network software--which is then iterated upon--for example, by adding facilities to carry different types of message payloads, APIs for interfacing with the networking software, and so forth. An incremental deliverable supplies a component from a larger system--for example, a core networking library--which is examined before building the rest of the project.
Iterative project management lets you build huge, monolithic things in even layers to make sure it all fits; incremental project management delivers each single, solid piece so that the stakeholders can examine further components components in the context of what's already been built. If things change, you have tools and platforms ready to incorporate into the newly adjusted project target; you can also modify these tools and platforms without rework of further work dependent on them, since that work hasn't yet been done until late in the project.
I would not run a 5-year project without iterative and incremental project management.
Kenneth L Higbee's book, "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It," is also interesting. He talks about experiments with human memory, and their shortcomings. Really light stuff, no serious PAO systems and card memorization techniques and such. There's a lot of references to studies and experiments, as well as a lot of psychology.
Don't think all the educators and administrators in this country wouldn't love to teach everybody all of those things.
The current dogma is that memorization is bad. Educators learn in college that memorization is the worst tool for students, and will cripple their minds. Mental math requires memorization of multiplication tables, which has long been established in educational dogma as bad. Learning to memorize facts has been established as incorrect and harmful in educational theory.
I guarantee you more wheat will have more nutritional value. It's going to be more because it has more calories. If you're banking on micronutrients in wheat... your diet is wrong; even brown whole wheat and brown rice are not significant sources of anything, with brown rice containing like 0.005%DV iron and white rice containing 0%DV (so you'd need 12,000,000 kcal from brown rice to hit 100%DV iron).
Plants don't store up nutrients for your benefit. Potassium deficiency in the soil will stunt plant growth; plants store calcium, magnesium, and potassium because they need it to grow. Blueberry foliage turns red when the soil is cold because blueberries cannot effectively migrate potassium from the soil, and so cannot produce sugars via photosynthesis. Most plants will fail to grow without potassium content in the leaves. Magnesium deficiency will prevent the development of chlorophyll. All kinds of processes require all kinds of metals and vitamins and enzymes.
65-pound dog can die from 3g. A husky weighs 35-50 pounds. Toxicity at higher doses occurs in the canine liver; at low doses, a massive insulin reaction occurs, causing a blood sugar level drop resulting in effective starvation.
A 12oz bottle of soda has 30-60g of sugar in it (I've drunk sodas with 61g in a 12oz serving). That would be 15-30g of Xylitol, potentially as high as 1g/oz. Small and miniature dogs are currently in vogue, and would quickly die from as little as half a gram (a few laps); a medium-size dog could lap up enough soda for a fatal dose in 3-5 seconds.
The American educational system has been dragged through the mud for the last 40+ years over the idea that all children can be geniuses.
We have cut and cut and cut. Some kids are "gifted", and get to take Calculus; algebra is no longer standard curriculum. English grammar has been cut back. Latin and Greek are too hard for the less-special of us.
The school system is targeting "success", in that "we can all succeed", by lowering the fucking bar.
I've watched a dog eat a half a bag of chocolate peanut butter cups, vomit, then be miserable for days. A dog eating a chocolate bar isn't nearly as fatal as you'd think.
Chocolate is like if you inhaled gasoline fumes. Xylitol for a dog is like if you inhaled Sarin nerve gas.
It is, but it's an important consideration: if you drop a piece of xylitol gum, and your dog eats it, your dog will be dead in half an hour. Their body will massively store glucose, causing fatal hypoglycemia. Your dog won't get sick and die slowly; it will die quickly.
Mushroom poisoning can take several days to kill a human. A small amount introduced one time will make you sick for a week, during which time your liver and kidneys may fail. Xylitol poisoning will simply kill your dog, quickly, possibly before you can reach a vet to get an $800 glucose IV.
Yeah the studies I've seen on both ends are weak; I don't know where aspartame stands in the pseudoscience realm at the moment. It keeps fluctuating between "aspartame being bad for you is pseudoscience" and "aspartame being safe is pseudoscience".
1g of Xylitol is enough to kill 3 dogs in half an hour. It's the kind of stuff most people can't keep in their house. If you spill your soda, your dog runs over, laps at it, and then is dead in half an hour.
On the bright side, increased yield per planting should result in less water used per total yield. Ability to produce higher yield will of course result in more total water used.
Plants actually consume LESS CO2 when it is in abundance...
Categorically false: the rapid propagation of poison ivy has been attributed to the increase in atmospheric CO2. Toxicodendron species grow 3x faster than they did in the 1500s due to CO2 availability.
Multiple studies find that CO2 greatly enhances plant growth in general, while also increasing the water demand for plants. Agriculture in a high-CO2 atmosphere will place higher demands on aquifers, but will produce higher yield. Higher temperatures also increase growing yield by rapid plant growth and growing season extension. This leads to the disturbing consideration that our society may depend on an unsustainable increase in atmospheric CO2.
Because storing hydrogen is ass-impossible. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel requiring 4000-10000 PSI storage at liquid-helium-cooled temperatures. Storing and transporting hydrogen is energy-hungry. If the tank ruptures, it detonates like several dozen pounds of dynamite--assuming none of the hydrogen actually ignites (it shouldn't, until it mixes with the atmosphere sufficiently and becomes a fuel-air bomb capable of taking out an entire city district).
The great body of information on human expertise is driven by K. Anders Ericsson in Florida University, in the same way that relativistic physics was driven by Albert Einstein for a while. Ericsson isn't the only person researching this, but 100% of current research cites Ericsson or is done by researchers working in tandem with Ericsson. This is the peer review process: one researcher is developing all these findings, and other researchers are citing his work and attempting to reproduce similar findings with similar and dissimilar methods to explore, refine, confirm, or debunk.
Ericsson's large body of research effectively condenses to the simple principle of deliberate practice: that a person will develop expertise by practicing with technical goals in a manner providing constant and immediate feedback. Modern cognitive science defines practice as an activity which generates errors so as to allow the practitioner to learn to reduce those errors--for example, typing faster to the point of making typographical errors so that you learn to move your fingers more precisely and type faster without making such typographical errors. The researchers benefit from the hundreds of books and papers produced by these cognitive studies, but only the broad conclusions are useful to you and I.
In the paper like that I remember best, the thesis was that anybody could learn to be a great memorist, and the support was that one of a group of subjects had managed to do so.
Memory papers are interesting. Depending on how you measure the results, you get completely different outcomes. Do you measure the percent of things remembered, or forgotten? Do you measure the number of things remembered, or the number forgotten? Some studies show that random experimental groups memorize 60% of the information given to them, versus 70% for an untrained control group; yet, at the same time, the experimental group memorizes 48 of 80 items inspected in a long list, while the control group memorizes 42 / 60 items inspected in the list--the control group memorizes fewer items, and inspects fewer items. Do we base on time, or on number of items inspected? The control group may take 10 minutes to inspect 80 items, while the experimental group takes 6 minutes; if the control group memorizes more, do we attribute that to simply having more time, and can we assume that the experimental group would memorize the same number of items if they took 10 minutes?
Such challenges are inherent in all statistics-based science. As well, what you've described is a standard experiment: a group of subjects versus a control. Prescription drugs, for example, are backed by thesis that the drug will control depression or ADHD or blood pressure, with the support that a group of subjects has shown better mental health or lower blood pressure when provided with the drug.
Slashdot Mirror
tl;dr: guy 1: "Falling interest rates would never cause home prices to rise!" guy 2: "That's exactly what just fucking happened 10 years ago!"
In one scenario, you're paying $980 of interest and $20 of principle on your first like 50 payments (not exactly accurate: you're accruing $980 of interest, then paying $1000, moving your balance down by a net of $20). Paying $20 extra bypasses $980 of accrued interest in the end, saving you money.
In another scenario (low interest rate), you're still paying $1000/mo for 360 months; but even the earlier payments are like $850 of principle and $150 of interest. Whereas each $20 will save you $980 off the total cost of the house, you have to put down $5553 extra on each of those early payments to save $980.
With a lower interest rate, the sale price is higher: since much of the cost of the loan is not interest, you can't dismiss it by prepayment. Whereas $120k of sale price and $330k of interest can be reduced to $220k in total (saving $230k) by adding an extra $300/mo, low-interest rate markets turn this into $330k of sale price and $120k of interest, while requiring heroic efforts (extra $5000/mo) to shave off half your interest, in the end reducing only to $390k (savings: $60k).
You're better able to reduce the total cost to yourself with minimal additional capital investment when interest rates are high and loan terms are long. The natural inflation (increase in salary) or your ability to manage your finances will provide you with additional money over time, allowing you to increase your loan payment; with high interest rates, small increases in prepayment become huge savings off the total loan cost.
people realized although such was the value on paper, no one could actually sell at that price and receive anything near the current "market value".
I keep telling people we need our high-interest-rate market back because it'll force home prices down. Home prices go up when interest rates go down, because people are still buying the same houses for $1200/mo; the difference is whether it's a $120k house or a $350k house that you're paying $450k for. Also, with high interest rates, putting an extra $20 on your mortgage cuts off tens of thousands of dollars from the total cost; with low interest rates, you need to take heroic efforts, like tripling your payments, to save any real money.
They tell me that people just won't be able to afford houses, and that the prices won't come back down. Houses will just go unsold, forever.
If you're doing large, high-risk, long-term projects with lots of steps and huge amounts of work, waterfall is probably the worst way to do it unless absolutely nothing will change between project initiation and close.
Your old, vanilla-style Waterfall sets the whole project up to start with, with all the planning done, and then runs with it. It's a terrible way to manage the risks inherent in running a project: changes require re-work and re-planning, and propagate down through the project.
Agile project management breaks projects down into iterative and incremental phases. An agile project will use the same methodologies as a Waterfall project, but will break down major parts of single-projects and single-phases into iterative and incremental deliverables. An iterative deliverable supplies a foundation--such as a set of core communications systems for network software--which is then iterated upon--for example, by adding facilities to carry different types of message payloads, APIs for interfacing with the networking software, and so forth. An incremental deliverable supplies a component from a larger system--for example, a core networking library--which is examined before building the rest of the project.
Iterative project management lets you build huge, monolithic things in even layers to make sure it all fits; incremental project management delivers each single, solid piece so that the stakeholders can examine further components components in the context of what's already been built. If things change, you have tools and platforms ready to incorporate into the newly adjusted project target; you can also modify these tools and platforms without rework of further work dependent on them, since that work hasn't yet been done until late in the project.
I would not run a 5-year project without iterative and incremental project management.
Kenneth L Higbee's book, "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It," is also interesting. He talks about experiments with human memory, and their shortcomings. Really light stuff, no serious PAO systems and card memorization techniques and such. There's a lot of references to studies and experiments, as well as a lot of psychology.
Don't think all the educators and administrators in this country wouldn't love to teach everybody all of those things.
The current dogma is that memorization is bad. Educators learn in college that memorization is the worst tool for students, and will cripple their minds. Mental math requires memorization of multiplication tables, which has long been established in educational dogma as bad. Learning to memorize facts has been established as incorrect and harmful in educational theory.
The theory is wrong.
I guarantee you more wheat will have more nutritional value. It's going to be more because it has more calories. If you're banking on micronutrients in wheat... your diet is wrong; even brown whole wheat and brown rice are not significant sources of anything, with brown rice containing like 0.005%DV iron and white rice containing 0%DV (so you'd need 12,000,000 kcal from brown rice to hit 100%DV iron).
Plants don't store up nutrients for your benefit. Potassium deficiency in the soil will stunt plant growth; plants store calcium, magnesium, and potassium because they need it to grow. Blueberry foliage turns red when the soil is cold because blueberries cannot effectively migrate potassium from the soil, and so cannot produce sugars via photosynthesis. Most plants will fail to grow without potassium content in the leaves. Magnesium deficiency will prevent the development of chlorophyll. All kinds of processes require all kinds of metals and vitamins and enzymes.
If it grows, it's full of trace elements.
65-pound dog can die from 3g. A husky weighs 35-50 pounds. Toxicity at higher doses occurs in the canine liver; at low doses, a massive insulin reaction occurs, causing a blood sugar level drop resulting in effective starvation.
A 12oz bottle of soda has 30-60g of sugar in it (I've drunk sodas with 61g in a 12oz serving). That would be 15-30g of Xylitol, potentially as high as 1g/oz. Small and miniature dogs are currently in vogue, and would quickly die from as little as half a gram (a few laps); a medium-size dog could lap up enough soda for a fatal dose in 3-5 seconds.
Dogs are popular pets.
The American educational system has been dragged through the mud for the last 40+ years over the idea that all children can be geniuses.
We have cut and cut and cut. Some kids are "gifted", and get to take Calculus; algebra is no longer standard curriculum. English grammar has been cut back. Latin and Greek are too hard for the less-special of us.
The school system is targeting "success", in that "we can all succeed", by lowering the fucking bar.
I've watched a dog eat a half a bag of chocolate peanut butter cups, vomit, then be miserable for days. A dog eating a chocolate bar isn't nearly as fatal as you'd think.
Chocolate is like if you inhaled gasoline fumes. Xylitol for a dog is like if you inhaled Sarin nerve gas.
It is, but it's an important consideration: if you drop a piece of xylitol gum, and your dog eats it, your dog will be dead in half an hour. Their body will massively store glucose, causing fatal hypoglycemia. Your dog won't get sick and die slowly; it will die quickly.
Mushroom poisoning can take several days to kill a human. A small amount introduced one time will make you sick for a week, during which time your liver and kidneys may fail. Xylitol poisoning will simply kill your dog, quickly, possibly before you can reach a vet to get an $800 glucose IV.
liquid (synthetic) petroleum fuel oil.
Yeah the studies I've seen on both ends are weak; I don't know where aspartame stands in the pseudoscience realm at the moment. It keeps fluctuating between "aspartame being bad for you is pseudoscience" and "aspartame being safe is pseudoscience".
1g of Xylitol is enough to kill 3 dogs in half an hour. It's the kind of stuff most people can't keep in their house. If you spill your soda, your dog runs over, laps at it, and then is dead in half an hour.
On the bright side, increased yield per planting should result in less water used per total yield. Ability to produce higher yield will of course result in more total water used.
I don't understand the mentality of "It doesn't solve every aspect of every problem neatly and completely, so it's shit and shouldn't be pursued."
You're wrong because fuck you.
Electrolysis of seawater would produce H+, Na+, O-, Cl-. HCl would be a problem; Na is a solid, so you'll get straight H+ at least. Not a problem.
You'd just manufacture shitloads of liquid nitrogen and lox. That stuff is valuable. LN and LOX plants now become LN, LOX, LPFO.
Plants actually consume LESS CO2 when it is in abundance...
Categorically false: the rapid propagation of poison ivy has been attributed to the increase in atmospheric CO2. Toxicodendron species grow 3x faster than they did in the 1500s due to CO2 availability.
Multiple studies find that CO2 greatly enhances plant growth in general, while also increasing the water demand for plants. Agriculture in a high-CO2 atmosphere will place higher demands on aquifers, but will produce higher yield. Higher temperatures also increase growing yield by rapid plant growth and growing season extension. This leads to the disturbing consideration that our society may depend on an unsustainable increase in atmospheric CO2.
We're pumping enough CO2 into the air to manufacture a year's worth of fuel every year. We've been doing it for centuries. Direct logic.
Because storing hydrogen is ass-impossible. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel requiring 4000-10000 PSI storage at liquid-helium-cooled temperatures. Storing and transporting hydrogen is energy-hungry. If the tank ruptures, it detonates like several dozen pounds of dynamite--assuming none of the hydrogen actually ignites (it shouldn't, until it mixes with the atmosphere sufficiently and becomes a fuel-air bomb capable of taking out an entire city district).
Large processes always have greater yield. Small processes have disproportionately-high loss.
Pandora has 200 million users. If they're all listening to 20 songs per day, that's $400,000 of royalties per day.
The great body of information on human expertise is driven by K. Anders Ericsson in Florida University, in the same way that relativistic physics was driven by Albert Einstein for a while. Ericsson isn't the only person researching this, but 100% of current research cites Ericsson or is done by researchers working in tandem with Ericsson. This is the peer review process: one researcher is developing all these findings, and other researchers are citing his work and attempting to reproduce similar findings with similar and dissimilar methods to explore, refine, confirm, or debunk.
Ericsson's large body of research effectively condenses to the simple principle of deliberate practice: that a person will develop expertise by practicing with technical goals in a manner providing constant and immediate feedback. Modern cognitive science defines practice as an activity which generates errors so as to allow the practitioner to learn to reduce those errors--for example, typing faster to the point of making typographical errors so that you learn to move your fingers more precisely and type faster without making such typographical errors. The researchers benefit from the hundreds of books and papers produced by these cognitive studies, but only the broad conclusions are useful to you and I.
In the paper like that I remember best, the thesis was that anybody could learn to be a great memorist, and the support was that one of a group of subjects had managed to do so.
Memory papers are interesting. Depending on how you measure the results, you get completely different outcomes. Do you measure the percent of things remembered, or forgotten? Do you measure the number of things remembered, or the number forgotten? Some studies show that random experimental groups memorize 60% of the information given to them, versus 70% for an untrained control group; yet, at the same time, the experimental group memorizes 48 of 80 items inspected in a long list, while the control group memorizes 42 / 60 items inspected in the list--the control group memorizes fewer items, and inspects fewer items. Do we base on time, or on number of items inspected? The control group may take 10 minutes to inspect 80 items, while the experimental group takes 6 minutes; if the control group memorizes more, do we attribute that to simply having more time, and can we assume that the experimental group would memorize the same number of items if they took 10 minutes?
Such challenges are inherent in all statistics-based science. As well, what you've described is a standard experiment: a group of subjects versus a control. Prescription drugs, for example, are backed by thesis that the drug will control depression or ADHD or blood pressure, with the support that a group of subjects has shown better mental health or lower blood pressure when provided with the drug.