Posts tagged ‘high’
Increase Your Income With Your Credit Card
There are two ways to get rich(er): spend less money and earn more money. Both can be tough, but here’s an easy way to start earning more money immediately.
Credit cards are a real life game and depending on how you play, you can win or lose real money.
When you lose, your credit card issuer wins big. When you win, your card issuer still wins, just not as much as when you lose. So, if you’re going to use a credit card, then you better be winning.
Some people have lost and decided not to play the game anymore, they cut up their credit cards and swear off credit forever. Depending on your lifestyle this may or may not work. In many cases, you need a credit card to rent cars, reserve hotel rooms, book flights and buy online.
Credit card issuers make it easy for you to lose the game. When you apply for their card, they ask you what your income is. Once they know they can trust you, they increase your credit limit beyond what they know you can afford to pay back each month. If you take the bait, they start lining their pockets with your hard earned money. If you carry a balance, you instantly lose the game — if you want to be a winner, be sure you pay your bill in full every month.
That’s the first step to winning. The second step is to switch your card to a high dividend credit (or debit) card. Dividend cards pay you a cash reward for using your card, usually 2-5% of how much you spend. This might not sound like a lot, but many people can make over $1000 per year with this. (more…)
Altitude Does Not Increase the Effect of Alcohol
By Chad Upton | Editor
Whether you’re in a plane, at the top of a ski hill or reading this in the mile high city, your body will metabolize alcohol exactly the same in all cases.
It is a common myth that you get drunk at high altitude much faster than at lower altitudes. In fact, I set out to research why this is the case, only to find out it’s not the truth.
As you can probably imagine, they didn’t have any trouble finding volunteers to help them get to the bottom of this — it has been studied and studied and studied and studied (PDF).
Even without alcohol, high altitudes can induce high-altitude sickness, which happens because there is less oxygen in the air. Because the symptoms are much the same as a hangover (headache, nausea, vomiting…etc), the effects of alcohol are often confused with high-altitude sickness. In fact, there is a study that shows Alcohol can impede the initial stages of adapting to high altitude; therefore, it is recommended that people do not drink for the first couple days while their body acclimatizes to the lower oxygen levels of high altitudes.
A study with alpine skiers in Austria tested blood-alcohol content at sea-level and at 10,000 feet. After drinking a liter of beer, their blood-alcohol levels were the same regardless of altitude.
An FAA study (PDF) found that both alcohol and altitude affect pilot performance, but there was no interaction between the two. Altitude does affect your ability to perform tasks, but that effect is present with or without alcohol. Another US government funded study found the same thing, concluding, “there was no synergistic interactive effect of alcohol and altitude on either breathalyzer readings or performance scores.”
From my observations, college loans are another popular way to get government money to study the effects of alcohol.
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Sources: Pub Med, High Altitude, Annals, FAA (PDF), AHA
Photo: evilmidori (cc)
Relevant:
Professionals should always supervise detox from alcohol and other drugs to prevent any untoward medical mishaps.
The Sugar in Most Foods is Not Natural Sugar
Real sugar, from cane or beets, is expensive to import. That’s why countries without real sugar, make it from other stuff.
The United States, Canada and the UK consume a lot of sugar and don’t have enough real sugar to meet their needs. A complicated series of transformations involving enzymes and fungi can process corn into a sugar substitute called high fructose corn syrup (known as “glucose/fructose” in Canada and “glucose fructose syrup” in the UK).
It is almost exactly like real sugar. Almost.
The safety of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a hot debate in health circles. Food manufacturers say that it is almost exactly like real sugar and there is no proof that it is any worse for you than real sugar. Other experts point to a key difference between natural sugar (sucrose) and high fructose corn syrup. It’s very technical, but I’ll try to simplify it.
Sucrose and HFCS are both made up of glucose and fructose, which is why the food manufacturers say they’re almost the same. The key difference is that sucrose contains a bond between glucose and fructose, while HFCS does not. Because of this bond, your body must break it down before it can be utilized. In high fructose corn syrup, there is no bond — allowing it to be utilized more easily.
When you have more energy than you can burn, it gets stored as fat. A high absorption of sugar can also lead to insulin resistance and then diabetes.
Pay attention to the type of sugar in your food, it’s important. You might be surprised by how many things contain high fructose corn syrup. Some examples include: yogurt, breakfast cereals, granola bars, crackers and of course things like soda/pop and cookies. But, for all of these products, there are brands with natural sugar. Even manufacturers are starting to pay attention, Pepsi is currently offering Pepsi and Mountain “Throwback.” They’re just like their normal drinks, but made with real sugar — a throwback to the good ol’ days.
Remember that if you’re not in the USA, high fructose corn syrup is called glucose/fructose or glucose-fructose syrup.
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Sources: WP HFCS, WP Insulin, Princeton University
Photo: *MarS (cc)
How to Get Free HDTV Channels
When I say free, I don’t mean free with your paid cable or satellite package. I mean 100% free without paying for any service.
When television broadcasting began in North America, the broadcasts were completely free. The costs associated with producing TV were covered by program sponsors (advertisers). TV signals were received over the air, so all you needed was a television and an antenna (aka “rabbit ears”). This worked great at the time because TV was new and nobody knew if it was going to be successful; laying cable to distribute signals didn’t make any sense and satellites weren’t an option yet.
Once television was a proven success, viewers wanted more content on bigger and better televisions. Today, those demands haven’t changed, but the technology has.
Receiving signals over the air was not perfect, there were a limited number of channels that could fit in the airwaves. Reception was spotty, but Cable and Satellite services came along with more channels and reliable signals that didn’t require any adjustments.
The technology has changed again. The development of digital signals has allowed broadcasters to fit many channels in the same space that used to only fit one channel. Although it caused a lot of disruptions in June of 2009, the United States ceased all analog TV signals within a specific frequency range. That means the once crowded airwaves are much more useful with digital signals that can stuff more channels in the same space.
Some broadcasters have been distributing their television signal over-the-air for more than 50 years and they continue to do so, now in digital. The secret to picking up these free channels: rabbit ears.
Seriously.
To many people, this will sound like a huge step back, and in some ways it is. You’re not going to find John and Kate or Jersey Shore on the free channels, but it could be worse: you might find John and Kate or Jersey Shore on the free channels.
If you’re on a budget; or you only watch the most popular network shows; or you want to stick it to the cable-man; or you want to pickup really good HD signals on a TV without a cable box or satellite receiver, then this is an option to consider. In many cases, digital over-the-air signal quality rivals cable and satellite signals, where signals are highly compressed because of bandwidth limitations.
Digital rabbit ears are much better than the coat hangers of the past — if you’ve upgrade to a digital cordless phone in the past couple years, you’ll understand the difference in reception, reliability and clarity that digital signals offer.
Depending on where you live, your channel selection will vary. In some places, you can get 10+ HD channels and dozens of standard digital channels, all for FREE! If you live in the United States, you can enter your zipcode in AntennaWeb’s search engine to see a list of the channels you should receive. In many places, you should get most (or all) of your favorite prime time shows in free HD. All you need is an HDTV, an ATSC tuner (most HDTVs have one built in) and an antenna. Here are some examples of affordable indoor and outdoor antennas that you can buy.
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Photo: Dano (cc)
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