Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Every Christmas, we set up a tree and the Christmas village. Turning these on and off as we enter and leave the house can get a bit tedious, so this year I introduced a little technology to the picture. Enter the Belkin remote controlled power strip! Our tree and village are plugged into this power strip and then the remote is left near the door. The ease of use means that we turn it on more and get more enjoyment out of the decorations. I picked this up at Home Depot but it’s also available at Amazon via the link above.

There are a couple stores around here that push their extended warranties ridiculously hard. Sports Authority is probably one of the worst. No matter how I say “No”, I continue to get the guilt trip throughout the entire transaction. It almost makes me want to explain why I never buy it, but I question whether they’d understand the math. Here’s how it works out:

The break even price of a warranty is equal to the cost of replacing the item times the percentage chance that you’ll need to replace the item. So if the product costs $100 and there’s a 20% chance that it will break, then you should buy the warranty if it’s less than $20. The trick is that it’s usually impossible to define the odds that you’ll need a warranty. There’s still a way to prove that it’s a bad deal though.

Think about the company offering the warranty to you. If they charge everyone less than that breakeven point, they’re going to go out of business. They need to make a profit so the warranty is almost ALWAYS going to cost more than that breakeven point. Therefore it’s a bad financial deal for you to buy it.

There are, however, some cases where warranties and insurance are a good thing. Those cases are generally when you do not have enough financial reserve to cover the replacement cost if the item is destroyed. Think about your house or your car. If you have $30K lying around to buy a new car, then you could technically get buy without insurance (though they’ve made insurance a legal requirement since almost no one has this kind of reserve available.)

So when you’re standing at the register and they offer you the extended warranty, know that it’s a bad deal and if you can envision paying that much money again to replace the product, do not buy the warranty. You’ll come out ahead in the long run even if you do have to pay full replacementreplacmenet value every once in a while.

A few weeks back, KenC mentioned Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast and I listened to one (three hour) episode. It’s incredible! He takes a small slice of history and dives really deeply into it. The story he weaves is deep and really helps you understand all of the complicated forces that combined to shape the event.

He only cranks out a handful of episodes a year and I imagine that’s because each one requires so much time and effort. There are 50 total episodes and starting with show 34, they’re available for free on his website.

If you enjoy history, I recommend that you give one episode a shot. That’s all it took to get me hooked.

When I moved here in 2006, I looked at a bunch of condos and townhomes. One that I really liked is right down the street from where our house is right now. It was tall and skinny with three floors, very similar to the townhouse where I lived in Jersey. Since buying this new house, I’ve wondered if we would have moved after getting married if I had bought that townhouse because it’s in the right location and it had three bedrooms. But now I’m extremely thankful that I didn’t buy that townhouse.

In June of 2006, I would have paid about $310K for a unit along the backside of the complex. Today that same condo is worth about $204K. But that’s not the worst of it. The buffer of trees that were behind the complex have been completely removed for the I-405 project. The new ramp from 405N to 522E is going to end up almost directly off the back porch of those townhouses! You can see some of the piers for the ramp in this picture.

I owe my realtor a lot for suggesting that I might not want to buy this townhouse. Even with the trees the road noise was loud, and we weren’t even there during rush hour.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the property values as this project continues.

If you’ve ever driven a motorcycle, you are familiar with the heightened sense of awareness that comes with it. You develop a sixth sense that helps you avoid accidents. “I bet that guy waiting to make a left turn is going to try to squeeze through the gap in front of me.” “I bet that SUV with screaming kids in the back is going to merge into me because traffic is slowing ahead.” It’s a survival instinct. You either get it or you crash.

Most of you riders will also agree that this extra sense also translates to driving a car and makes you a better driver. Now there is some data to back that up. Insurance companies are one of the biggest aggregators of statistics since it affects their profit margin and an insurance company is now saying that a car driver who also has a motorcycle is 23% less likely to make a claim on their car. I hope this translates into some lower rates for me!

http://www.visordown.com/motorcycle-news–general-news/motorcyclists-23-better-behind-the-wheel-of-a-car/23971.html

I’m saying this too late to have an impact this year, but the next time a voting opportunity rolls around, make sure you spend some time on the local races. They have enormous impact on your day to day life, much more so than the national races. Tired of congestion downtown? Nervous about some potential new zoning decisions? Tired of that street that needs to be repaved? Want to improve the quality and safety of the parks where your kids play? Concerned about your water quality? All of these things are done right in your hometown, not at the federal level.

Woodinville had a very hot race for city council with lots of mud-slinging and hype. The incumbent is apparently a psycho stalker making physical threats during meetings and the incumbent is accused of violating campaign finance laws. With all this hype, there were a grand total of 1380 votes cast in the race. Your vote really could swing an election. Our water district commissioner race was won by 17 votes!

You’re not going to find tons of commentary in the big media about your local election. They’re going for ratings so they’re going to cover what is common to everyone: the state and federal elections. It’s pretty challenging for me to think of any way that any of my federal votes last time around have had any effect on my life. But the local ones? Those are big. Pay attention, do your research, formulate an educated opinion, and vote!

So the NSA has all our data. All our web traffic, all our email, and even our encrypted traffic that they can unencrypt. That’s scary enough, but here’s something for you to chew on: what happens when this massive NSA storage facility gets hacked? You know that every hacker in the world is now trying to hit this place now that they know it exists. Sure the NSA has probably done a very good job sealing it up, but nothing is perfect. It’s only a matter of time before all that data on everyone gets leaked all over the internet. Then what!?

Do babies have big heads or short arms? Elijah can barely touch his hands together over his head. So does that mean that his arms are too short and will grow longer as he ages or that his head will shrink relative to his body?

The answer is that babies have proportionally bigger heads than adults. A child’s head makes up 20% of their overall height while an adult’s head is only 11% of their height. That means that if our proportions didn’t change as we moved through our lives, my head would be roughly twice as big as it is now!

This is as close as I’m going to get to being political, but I got to wondering if our 18th government shutdown meant that we were spending less money than we brought in (assuming the IRS would still operate to collect our taxes.)

So the first question is how much is the government spending during the shutdown? The estimated answer is that we have stopped about 17% of our spending. 83% of it is still trucking along unaffected. And secondly, how much of a deficit did we write into the 2013 budget? For that budget, we planned to bring in enough money to cover 76.3% of our spending.

Put those two facts together and you can see that even during this government shutdown, we are STILL spending more money than we collect.

And one final, somewhat-related thing before I return you to normal blog posts, KenC pointed me to a video that does a good job of putting all of these enormous numbers into perspective.

I’m sure people can take these numbers and use them to argue on either side of the aisle. That’s the beauty (and confusion) of our political system. But it’s helpful if we all start with the facts and go from there instead of starting with other people’s opinions that are screamed at us from the televisions.

I love a good burger. Up until now if you asked me for the absolute best burger I’ve ever had in an area restaurant, I would have to say it was the burger at Tavern Law in Seattle. That is no loner the case. Enter Lunchbox Laboratory!

Their first site was in Seattle, but even the draw of a delicious burger couldn’t convince me to venture across the lake to the city. Now they have a new location in Bellevue which is just a few exits down 405. Perfect! On the last Friday of my paternity leave, Logan, Tyla, Elijah and I headed there to see what the buzz was all about.

It’s a casual restaurant with a very fun menu. Pretty much every burger looked incredible. It was hard to pick one but I was sure that no matter what I picked, it would be delicious. More experimentation is needed to prove that hypothesis, but so far so good because I picked an AMAZING BURGER. It was the Sante Fe Slammer: "Super-beef, colby jack cheese, bacon, lunchbox onions, diced green chilies, and papa’s house-made bbq sauce. I got that with tots smothered in cheese and bacon. Tyla ordered the “Tribute to Dick’s Deluxe” (Dick’s is a famous burger place in the area) and Logan got a dork burger which is duck + pork.

The food was fantastic and I think we’re all eager to eat there again. The downside is that the location is kind of in the newer snooty area of Bellevue so parking is a pain. It’s also not cheap. Tyla drank water and I had a pop. Our total with tip was $48! This won’t be an every day spot for us, but if you’re in the mood for a wonderfully delicious burger, give us a call because we want to go back!