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.

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.

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.

You're wrong because fuck you.