Arrest is largely a non-issue; it's conviction I'm talking about. Raising suspicion by these activities can get you a conviction.

Thing is, someone wiping their drive isn't evidence of a crime. At the same time, various evidence of a crime--Internet connections, behaviors, associates--isn't going to get you a conviction, at all. When you put these together, you get a different picture: we have a highly-circumstantial pattern of behavior that may or may not prove the suspect was a criminal, and the subject panicked and destroyed the thing that may have but was not certain to contain hard evidence proving that this behavior pattern was indeed linked to criminal activity. From all these inferences, we can strongly infer that the suspect was destroying evidence of some crime, for which we have a good outline of what that crime very well could be.

When you hear quacking, there may be a duck, or a TV. If you find feathers, there may be a duck, or a pillow. When you hear quacking and find feathers all over the fucking place, there is almost definitely a duck there somewhere, even if you can't find it; any other explanation involving there not being a duck is a bigger leap of logic than there being a duck somewhere in the area. US courts recognize these types of connected vague images, and overlay them until you develop a sufficiently clear picture that is sufficiently unlikely to be something else--which, really, if you find a dead body and a murder weapon in a bloke's house, all you have is a pretty fucking strong inference to go against an alternate theory of the mafia framing the guy, so it's the same thing: he's only probably guilty, but we're pretty fucking sure.

Which opens you up to all kinds of high circumstantial evidence prosecution. Evidence that you may have been involved in a crime coupled with a psychotic behavior in which you put your computer data at severe risk to handle an unexpected seizure? If they have weak evidence showing your involvement in a crime, the corroborating behavior provides circumstantial evidence supporting their weak evidence; either by itself may be inadmissible.

How much of those tasks are familiar to you because of their similarity to other things you're already familiar with? How much f(c) do you have to back up all that shit? Are you claiming that something utterly alien and highly complex can be learned immediately with no effort, or just that a new task recognizable and understandable using your existing knowledge is also easy to understand?

Modern cognitive science and genetic science both say there's no such thing as innate talent, in the same way that science says faith healing is a crock of shit.

There is no such thing as talent; there *is* such a thing as motivation, fueled by deep interest, often called passion, which leads a person to perceive vastly lowered effort in developing a skill, and thus put more time and energy into it, developing it further. Geniuses have piles of cognitive techniques--they learn to use the brain as a tool in the same way a woodworker learns to use a router to cut intricate joints and designs for carpentry--one of which includes dissecting and examining any topic to associate it with some goal they find *extremely* interesting, thus creating this motivation, eliminating the effort involved in learning anything.

Nobody has in-born talent. People are exposed to environment; if you give your kid watercolors as a tiny, tiny child and praise them for their artwork, they will feel important because of their painting ability, and will base their self-worth on visual and graphic art. Their whole life's motivation will be art, and they'll paint and draw and do all kinds of things, and develop incredible skills, and be said to be some kind of savant-level virtuoso with God-given talent implanted at birth.

Each payment, you pay for accrued interest. You accrue like $980 of interest on that first payment, $979.93 on that second, etc.

If you pay $50 more on that first payment, you skip the immediate next payment. You have 1 fewer payment to make, and it's not that last payment where you pay $999 principle and $1 interest; you skip that second payment where you pay $20 principle and $980 interest.

The math is right. Use a mortgage amortizer, use the Pe^RT formula for compound interest, and look logically at how mortgages work--how the payment schedule works. It works the way it does because we've written laws about precomputed interest to make sure it works the way I say--it's illegal to precompute all of the interest up-front and make the person pay it all even if the pre-pay; interest must be compounded by the passage of time, instead of the prediction of time's passage.

Something tells me you're not a financial expert.

If I use the Pe^(RT) formula on $100 at 10% for 15 years, I get a much smaller value than the amount of total cost saved if I pay an extra $100 on a 10% mortgage with a $300,000 balance.

You're missing something: $100 in the bank gets 15 years of 10% interest compounding continuously on $100 (yes, banks pay simple interest; that's not the point). That means it's 1/365 of $100, then 1/365 of $100+$100/365, and so forth. Loans don't work that way.

With a loan, you accrue interest, and then pay down balance. If your early payments are $1053, and you accrue $1000 interest, you're only paying $50 in. Instead of getting 10% interest on $1053, you're paying $1053 to avoid paying 10% interest on $53. Month over month, that $1000 comes rolling in; but if you pay an extra $53, you skip a month--suddenly $53 is worth $1000.

For $53 to turn into $1000 over 30 years, the interest rate must 23.13%. For a $120,000 loan at 10% interest, your first payment will be $1053.09, with $1000 paying accrued interest, and $53.09 paying down balance; the first payment in the second year pays $994 interest and $58.64 balance. If you drop about $50-$60 into any of those first payments, you save $995-$1000.

$60 at 10% compounded continuously over 30 years is $489.29. $60 dropped into your very first loan payment at 10% saves you $1000. $1000 is bigger than $489.29; paying off long-term debt is bigger than holding continuously-compounding savings at the same interest rate for the same period.

I live in an area that has 106F summers and -16F winters.

Heating bill: $244/mo gas.

AC bill: I run a dehumidifier that costs me $60/mo; have considered switching to a window AC, or getting a small AC unit, to replace the dehumidifier.

Welcome to science! In 10 years, a lot of what we believe today will be somehow invalid bullshit!

Say it with me: current theory suggests....

I'm an engineer. When the entire field of cognitive science rolled over on its back for K. Anders Ericsson, I said, alright, the research is funny, but the conclusions are useful. So it's all fucked up, full of bullshit and misunderstood data. Ericsson's hundreds of papers and books all boil down to one thing: experts become experts by a principle he calls "deliberate practice", whereby a person must have goal-oriented, technique-focused practice strategies with constant and immediate feedback. Cognitive scientists now define "practice" as some sort of activity that GENERATES ERRORS, having decided you don't learn if you're not fucking it up.

So maybe they don't understand all this bullshit; but they understand now that the prior theory--10,000 hours of rote mechanical behavior to become skilled in something--was bullshit. As an engineer, I don't care that the new theory is full of holes; all I care about is they definitely know that time doesn't really correlate with expertise, except by the confounding of more types of activities occurring in longer time. If you've done something for 10 years, you'll have made and corrected for more mistakes in your career as if you've done it for 10 minutes. The new theory? You have to pick a technical facet of the skill, practice that directly, and do so in a manner that strains your abilities and forces you to make mistakes you can learn from. I'm on board with that, because it works; at least, it works better.

In 10, 20, 50, 100 years, they'll come out and say, hey, we figured out you're like 5 times more effective if you practice in this way, and that whole "deliberate practice" pseudotheory bullshit was just missing this key common behavior among practitioners of deliberate practice! I'll be like, hey, that's cool, we'll do that then, because it works better.

Current theory suggests playing complex songs you can already play on the piano day after day won't make you any better; playing difficult songs will make you better very slowly; and determining what piano musicmanship skills you're weak in and drilling them directly in a fashion demanding skill beyond yours such that you make mistakes of a nature you are able to identify and correct for *will* advance your skill *very* quickly. Maybe current theory is full of bullshit, but all of these statements are verifiable as true, and so I know how I'm practicing my skills.

Well, people have been getting STDs for thousands of years, too.

You pulled an appeal to tradition first. I made a brief summary of loincloth-wearing tribal man with witchdoctors and bones in their noses to complete the picture. Did you honestly think a well-known logical fallacy was a good argument?

Argument: Primitives will distinguish their primitive brains and retarded evolution via tattoos.

Counter-argument: ... none.

I look at the whole human body as an aesthetic. I'm not usually looking at women in a sexual way at first glance; the first things I notice are body shape, skin tone consistency (blotchy and ragged or smooth and soft?), hair, and so forth. I see a complete picture, a canvas I guess you could say, all these elements brought together to express the physical state of a person; it even goes so far as exactly how they move, what expressions they show, and, of course, what they're wearing.

After taking all that in, I decide what category of attractiveness she falls into, if she's sexually attractive, if she's intimidating, or whatnot. All the normal stuff. You'd be surprised how much sexual attraction falls squarely on a good smile, a good voice, body movement, the emotional regard of personality (yes, even for a sociopath with no real empathy). The first look is to see what image I'm looking at, how it flows, and how visually pleasing it is; the second is to see how I feel about it, if I want it, and what I want it for.

Tattoos are art. Unfortunately, they're the kind of art you get by printing out RWBY fanart and gluing it into the middle of a Van Gogh: maybe the artist has really good lines and anatomy, and the picture is really great, but it fucks up the Van Gogh.

I'll be bangin' 18 year olds when I'm 40, because the fad will finally be over and I can get some women whose skin doesn't have blue and black blotches like the fucking bubonic plague all over it.

Tattoos look nice, but they don't look nice on your body. It's like grabbing piles of cool shit and plastering it all together in a house: you have the ugliest fucking house in existence. If you would learn to theme it properly, you'd get a nice interior design. Problem: tattoos don't make for a nice body design; they're a blotch on your body. They make for nice pictures and fantastic decals on your car.