Joining Together Credit Card Bills The Correct Way

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The Cheapest Way To Heat Your Home This Winter

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What’s the cheapest way to heat your home: oil, natural gas, electricity, propane?

Home heating costs vary by region and even by house.

Here's what the average Northeast homeowner can expect to pay to heat his or her home with various fuels this winter, as forecast by the Energy Information Administration (EIA):

4. Heating oil: $2,526

Oil prices have risen so high that oil heat, once competitive with other major home-heating fuels, has become the most expensive to use. Prices are tied to world events, so they can change quickly.

But the trend of the past decade is clear: Heating oil prices have more than doubled from $10.31 per million British thermal units to more than $25 per million Btus.

Nationally, only about 6 percent of homeowners use oil as their primary home heating source. Most of them are located in the Northeast.

This comparison uses the EIA’s Northeast prices, because it’s the one region that uses all four fuels in quantity and because it reflects the full costs of heating in a northern climate.

3. Propane: $2,386

Although it’s a relatively clean fuel, propane is expensive and has been losing popularity for years. In the winter of 2006-07, some 6.5 million homes used it for primary heat; this winter, that number is down to 5.6 million, according to EIA estimates.

The cost varies a lot by region. In the Midwest, heating a home with propane costs an average of only $1,534. In Maine, propane is replacing oil because it's cheaper to use.

Although it’s a relatively clean fuel, propane is expensive and has been losing popularity for years. In the winter of 2006-07, some 6.5 million homes used it for primary heat; this winter, that number is down to 5.6 million, according to EIA estimates. The cost varies a lot by region.

In the Midwest, heating a home with propane costs an average of only $1,534. In Maine, propane is replacing oil because it's cheaper to use.

2. Electricity: $1,315

The use of electric heat is on the rise, even in the frosty Northeast. Cost is a main draw, although some homeowners complain that electric heat isn’t as efficient as other fuels. Nationally, about a third of US homes rely on electricity as their primary heating source.

1. Natural gas: $1,024

Of the four main fuels used to heat US homes, natural gas is the most popular and now the cheapest, as well. A decade ago, gas cost about 80 percent of an equivalent amount of oil; it now costs less than half of oil, as oil prices have risen and America’s boom in natural gas drilling has kept gas prices low.

Nearly half of all homes use natural gas as their primary heating source. Some analysts forecast a huge supply of the fuel will be available for decades to come. 

Not everyone believes the supply is so large that natural gas will continue to be a low-cost fuel. The trends of the past decade, however, are encouraging: In inflation-adjusted terms, natural gas prices are roughly the same as they were in 2003-04, even before adjusting for inflation.

SEE ALSO: The 10 best cities to become a millionaire >

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Serbia Is The Sickest Man Of Europe

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On December 18th the World Bank released an estimate for a real GDP contraction of 2% in Serbia in 2012.

Analysis

Bad news keeps coming out of Serbia, with the World Bank being the latest organisation to revise down its growth estimate for 2012, to the worst economic performance in the western Balkans. Unemployment has rocketed, to 26.2% in October, with 170,000 jobs being lost in 2012. Inflation is running in double digits, following a food price shock, and the dinar is under pressure. FDI inflows have dried up as investors have taken flight from Serbia's economic malaise.

There are several reasons why Serbia has performed so badly. Like other countries, it has been adversely affected by the euro zone recession (we estimate a contraction of around 0.5% in the euro zone in 2012). Along with its neighbours, Serbia had to contend with severe winter weather in early 2012, which had a negative impact on economic activity. The region-wide drought had a devastating impact on agricultural output. In common with others, Serbia has been badly affected by rising international food prices.

There are some Serbia-specific explanations too. The election in early 2012 led to fiscal loosening in 2011 and left the incoming government facing a budget deficit in excess of 11% of GDP. Ensuing budget adjustments depressed consumption. The unemployment rate is among the highest in the region, having risen inexorably since a low of 13.3% in March 2008, and this has kept domestic consumption at rock bottom.

The government forecasts growth of 2.5% in 2012, banking on production at the Fiat plant in Kragujevac. Agriculture is also expected to bounce back. These are potential bright spots for Serbia. However, the gloomy outlook for the euro zone, for which we forecast another year of economic contraction, does not bode well for demand growth in Serbia's main export markets. If the government signs a new arrangement with the IMF, it will be under pressure to persist with fiscal consolidation and structural reforms, both of which will have a negative impact on employment and domestic demand.

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Blaming Video Games Won't Prevent Another Shooting Tragedy

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When tragedy strikes, it is human nature to look around for someone to blame and the killings at Sandy Hook elementary school have prompted a flurry of finger-pointing.

The media demands big-picture culprits and the reckless power of the gun lobby or the failure of mental heath services aren't enough.

Conservative commentators have dipped into their usual basket of bugbears, including video games, violent movies and godlessness.

The Sun, however, has gone boldly off-piste by training its outrage on "brainless" Coronation Street star Helen Flanagan, who on Monday posted a picture of herself pointing a gun at her head, and asking grieving parents for their views on this woman they've never heard of.

It's an absurd yet familiar attempt to erect a cultural cordon sanitaire around a terrible event. For a few days, we must all pretend that run-of-the-mill gun imagery is utterly beyond the pale, an insult to the dead, before resuming normal service.

And if, in showing such remarkable empathy for the bereaved, the Sun gets the chance to show a picture of Flanagan in a lacy bra, well that's just a bonus.

These spasms of hypersensitivity and hypocrisy always seem ridiculous in retrospect.

Remember Massive Attack abbreviating their name to Massive during the gulf war, Kylie changing her album title from Impossible Princess after Princess Diana's fatal crash, the Strokes dropping the mildly disrespectful New York City Cops from their debut album following the World Trade Centre attacks, or the Proms cutting American composer John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine after both Diana's death and 9/11?

These were panicky decisions based on fear of outrage. They are part of the standard ritual of public grief but that does not make them rational or useful. Although there are extreme cases when bad timing can't be ignored – US radio stations had little choice this week but to stop playing Ke$ha's new single Die Young – censorship is always problematic.

After 9/11, US radio giant Clear Channel drew up an informal blacklist of "lyrically questionable" songs, which elided merely unfortunate titles (the Gap Band's You Dropped a Bomb on Me) with politically loaded ones ("all songs by Rage Against the Machine"). In the name of sensitivity, political dissent itself became "questionable".

At least you could argue that 9/11 was truly unprecedented, but last year 8,583 Americans were murdered by guns. Aside from a few well-publicised spree shootings, culture proceeds as normal regardless of the feelings of the bereaved.

If posing with a gun is genuinely crass and offensive then it should have been crass and offensive last week and it should be a month from now, but no, it only counts for one news cycle.

When we hear about a horrific event we feel that something must be done, yet we can do next to nothing ourselves. Nobody can reverse what happened at Sandy Hook and only US legislators have any power to keep semi-automatic weapons out of the hands of deeply troubled individuals.

In the absence of real power, some take the methadone of synthetic outrage and pretend that, in the face of 26 shocking murders, one tacky photograph matters an iota.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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How 20,000 Pounds Of Potatoes Brought Wi-Fi To Airplanes

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If you're flying somewhere this holiday season, you could be on a plane that offers Wi-Fi.

And a good Wi-Fi connection on a plane flying 500 miles per hour at 35,000 feet was a particularly hard tech problem to solve, say the Boeing engineers who solved it.

Packing a lot of people in a small space can interfere with radio signals like Wi-Fi. That leads to hot and cold reception spots on the plane, which means some passengers get great connections and others don't. It also has safety implications: You don't want Wi-Fi signals to bounce around and mess up the plane's instrumentation.

Engineers at Boeing thought up a way to fix the issue. But to test it they would need to fill a plane with people and make them sit there for days.

That's where the potatoes came it. It turns out that a sack of potatoes acts a lot like a person, at least as far as wireless signals are concerned. Instead of hiring people, the engineers filled all the seats of an old plane with sacks of potatoes—some 20,000 pounds in all.

The potatoes were content to sit quietly. They didn't need lunch breaks or bathroom breaks. What would have taken two weeks of testing with people took only 10 hours with the potatoes. (Update: A Boeing engineer tells us that they did keep the potatoes on board for a couple more weeks of tests, too.)

So next time you're watching Netflix on an airplane, thank a French fry.

Don't miss: Guess When These 20 Sci-Fi Technologies Are Coming To Your Phone Or PC

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CHECK IN: Manhattan's New Tuscany Hotel Mixes Classic History With Modern Design

Location: 120 East 39th Street, New York City

Why Go: The Tuscany, a property of the luxe St. Giles Hotel chain, is a modern and sophisticated hotel which opened yesterday after a multi-million dollar, year-long renovation. Design is a priority here. All of the rooms and public areas are decorated with interesting details: rooms have leather-wall paneling, soft velvet furniture, and hardwood floors while public areas have unique lighting installations and furnishings.

Standout Feature: All 124 guest rooms are giant for Manhattan. Since this hotel once served as an apartment building (and then an office building and later a hotel), rooms—which were converted from 1- and 2-bedroom apartments—are large. Even the basic rooms are around 400 square feet—larger than many Manhattan apartments. Suites are larger.

Interesting Tidbit: The hotel was originally an apartment building called The Tuscany, built in 1928 by Henry Mandel. Although the developers totally gutted the building to make it a completely modern hotel, they unearthed some hidden treasures from the original construction, including a few fireplaces hidden behind plaster and some personal letters from the 1930s and '40s that got stuck in the building's mail shafts. (They haven't opened or displayed the letters, but it's still cool.)

Rates: Introductory rates start at $269.

The Tuscany hotel-front deskThere's a suede and studded panel behind the front desk that was made by artisans from Italy.

The Tuscany hotel-roomGuest rooms are giant for Manhattan, at an average of 400 square feet. Rooms have king-size beds, desks, sitting areas, and flat-screen TVs embedded in a leather wall panel.

The Tuscany hotel-roomThe hallways in each room have hardwood floors. The bathrooms are sleek and modern.

The Tuscany hotel- bathroom amenitiesBathrooms have luxurious toiletries from Molton Brown.

SEE ALSO: The Top 10 Hotels In The World >

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How Happy A Woman Is In Her Relationship Fluctuates With Her Hormones

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A woman's relationship satisfaction changes as she nears ovulation, when she's most fertile.

But whether or not she's more or less happy with her guy depends on his sex appeal.

In a new study, heterosexual women who rated their guys as highly sexually desirable felt closer to their partners and more satisfied with their relationships just before ovulation, as compared to their less-fertile days.

The opposite was true for women who said their partners were less sexy; they felt less close to their male partners and were more critical of their mate's faults as they approached ovulation.

Previous research has shown that the type of man a woman prefers tends to change across her ovulatory cycle, as she becomes more attracted to masculine faces and bodies, and bilateral symmetry, when she's fertile.

Another recent study showed that heterosexual women actually look and sound more attractive to guys on the women's fertile compared with non-fertile days.

"This is the first research to show that these changes have implications for relationship functioning," said study researcher Christina Larson, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hormones likely influence these fluctuating preferences and evaluations. However, the researchers didn't directly measure hormones.

"So we can't say exactly which hormones were responsible or how exactly they change women's behaviors," Larson said. Estrogen, which peaks at ovulation, is a strong candidate, she said.

Sexiness and satisfaction

The study, detailed online Dec. 3 in the journal Hormones and Behavior, involved 108 heterosexual women who had not used birth control in the past three months and who were not pregnant or breast-feeding.

The women, who had been in committed relationships for an average of two years, answered the same questions during two sessions, one during their high-fertility phase and one during their low-fertility phase.

The subjects self-reported where they were in their cycles, and the researchers confirmed the high-fertility session with an ovulation test. [10 Odd Facts About a Woman's Body]

The questionnaires included prompts such as, "How desirable do you think women find your partner as a short-term mate or casual sex partner, compared to most men?" and, "How sexy would women say your partner is, compared to most men?"

The women also answered questions about their closeness to their partners, their partners' faults and virtues, and the women's commitment to and satisfaction with their relationships.

The good news for men: Although a woman's time of the month seemed to influence her feelings about her partner and relationship satisfaction, her commitment to the relationship stayed constant throughout the cycle.

The findings are in line with the so-called dual-mating hypothesis, which suggests that women have two mate-choice mechanisms: "one leading to preferences for sexually desirable men who have high-fitness genes, and one leading to preferences for men who are able to invest in a woman and her children," the authors wrote in the journal article.

Choosing mates

Though the researchers can't say that hormones caused the mate-preference changes, there's reason to think the two might be related from an evolutionary perspective.

Dissatisfaction with a less sexually desirable partner when a woman is near ovulation may have encouraged cheating among our female ancestors, thus increasing the likelihood of conceiving children with sexually desirable partners, Larson told LiveScience.

Because sexually desirable traits like masculine appearance in men are thought to have indicated genetic quality in ancestral environments, these couplings outside the primary partnership might have provided an evolutionary advantage for ancestral women.

"All else being equal, a woman who conceived children with men who possessed high fitness genes (e.g., relatively free of deleterious genetic mutations) probably had children who were more likely to survive and later reproduce than the children of a woman who chose a less genetically fit partner," the authors wrote.

Sexually desirable men would have benefited, as well, but "if men were sexually undesirable, these behaviors were likely to be reproductively disadvantageous if they caused their partners to conceive children with other men," Larson said.

Jealousy and mate guarding — actions that men perform more frequently when their partners are fertile, according to research — may have coevolved to counter cheating. Larson’s lab previously showed that men identified as not very sexy were more jealous and attentive to their mates on the women's high-fertility days.

In the future, Larson plans to study whether or not women actually change their behavior — treating less desirable partners differently than sexier guys, or even cheating on them — when fertile.

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Amazon Can Drive Big Kindle Growth With China Launch

The huge market size and Amazon pricing its devices at low margins which most likely will appease the growing Chinese middle class leads us to expect that the devices will be well received and likely provide substantial upside to e-books and other content sales as well.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/12/17/amazon-can-drive-big-kindle-growth-with-china-launch/

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Benefits of Credit Card Debt Consolidation

Consolidation Loans with Bad Credit Is debt consolidation a good solution for my credit card debts? Debtors, upon realizing that in a few years their credit cards would have accumulated thousands of dollars through interests ask the same question. Credit card purchases, in many instances are actually more expensive because of high interest rates. Someone [...]

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