Recent content by ShawnD

Awesome, thanks!

I'm trying to prove a point to someone about compounding periods and mortgage payments. Interest is calculated as $ = P(1 + I/x)^x where P is how much you borrowed, I is "annualized" interest rate and x is how many compound periods are in a year. For example, a credit card at 20% compounded...

I washed my clothes in the bath tub when the washing machine wasn't working. As long as you're not trying to get out stains, it actually works. Most people call that a "dish washer"

Where every single character is Mexican.

The money goes to the police so the police do not require as much funding from taxes. Ever watch that show Operation Repo? Crazy guy Matt is the only one there who isn't Mexican :wink:

They already do the first one (police auctions). The second one is mostly true. The third one will never happen because 99% of California is Mexican. Not addictive enough to be profitable. Alcohol withdrawal causes seizures, nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, caffeine withdrawal causes...

I don't want to use diamonds as the example since that's a very complicated issue. Look at alcohol instead. According to this random website, alcohol is worth $280 billion per year in the US. Meth could very easily slip in there and take $24b. The budget problem could be fixed (pun intended) in...

Legalize drugs, build the largest meth lab in the history of the universe, then sell meth to the other 49 states and the rest of the world. Hate it all you want but you know it would work :P

We're on a roll here. First step is banning music and the next step is rewriting books. In 50 years, books will say Hitler was Asian, that the Confederates won the civil war, and the first man on the moon was Jackie Gleason :wink:

The AWD thing as explained by youtube videos and Subaru salesmen is that Subaru's system is always on and it always tries to stay as symmetrical as possible. All of the wheels should be roughly the same speed, and equalizing power is more important than reducing slippage on ice. The...

They tax everyone because half the country is owned by the government. Governments own most of the roads, bus systems, train systems, coastal regions used for shipping, land used for airports, parts of the power grid, parts of the telephone grid, the water and sewage systems, education, the...

This in spades. I work in an office where not a lot of people share skill sets. There might be 1 mechanical engineer, 1 electrical engineer, 1 civil engineer, and 1 guy leading the troops. Losing just one person to parental leave is a huge problem. Right now the person on leave is a very highly...

It seems pretty obvious to me that most people really do want huge government. Even talking about cutting medicare will get you thrown out of office. During the 2008 election, Ron Paul was up on stage talking about how his ultimate goal was to slash pretty much every government program and...

Slow and painful death. Amplifying by 50dB three times would be (100000)^3 = 1,000,000,000,000,000 times as loud Bel is an exponential unit. Each bel means the ratio increases by a factor of 10. 5 bels would be 10^5, and thrice would be 10^5^3

I don't want to watch the video again, so I'll try to go from memory. I think the key point of his ranting was that the government often puts a hard limit on the development or improvement of anything it touches. Even though I think the tea party is misguided and overly optimistic, there's...