More Fires and More Advice!

I had a pretty good day today. I finally passed 23m firemaking xp after I decided to buy 10k yew logs. I still have 9k left, which should give me around 2m more xp, putting me at 25m firemaking xp. I'm still not sure how far I want to go with this, but I'll keep going until I get bored, I suppose. My exams are over, so I have a lot more time now to dedicate to computer time!

Flipping Tip #2: Empty Your Offers!

Unless you like taking risks, it's usually best to keep your Grand Exchange offers empty overnight. The exception is if an item is rising and you think you can sell them for a massive profit if you buy some overnight. However, if an item shows unstable signs or is evidently falling, don't keep an offer in for the item overnight. You never know when an item will start falling unexpectedly quickly!

I recently took a risk on arcane spirit shields. I decided to buy some overnight, and found the next day, to my dismay, that they had begun crashing. The result was a loss of 3m per item, which could have easily been avoided if I hadn't bought them before I went to bed. In a way, this feeds into Tip #1: Don't be greedy!

Personal: Today we had an abstinence-only sex education talk in one of my classes. Although I don't have any plans to have sex anytime soon, I was still quite offended by this. They propped up abstinence as the only "right" thing to do, then showed us some very shifty statistics concerning condoms, like their 50% protection rate against STDs like gonorrhea. I was dying to be a smart-alike and ask how the test was conducted, how many subjects they surveyed, and how long the test period lasted. They liked the fact that condoms have a 98% success rate (which makes them seem very risky over long periods of time!), but what they fail to mention is that this test was conducted over a year-long study. That means the success rate per encounter is much, much higher than 98% In fact, it makes their effective rate at around 99.7% per encounter. Yeah, they didn't mention that.

So why did this make me so angry if it doesn't affect me? Because it's stuff like that that causes stuff like this. Kids in the Bible Belt of the United States are simply taught to never have sex. Therefore, when they finally decide to go and try it, they have no idea how to protect themselves and end up with unwanted pregnancies and STDs. The rest of the developed world seems to understand that teaching alternative methods to abstinence helps stop these trends--why can't we?