Debt ceiling talks: What failure would mean for you

Congress' potential failure to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 would set off a mad scramble as agencies struggle to prioritize payments and try to avoid defaulting on the United States' debt.

Nobody knows exactly what might happen, since the federal government has always raised the debt ceiling in the past. But federal employees and retirees are almost certain to be losers.

If no deal is struck by then, some agencies may be shut down, at least partially. Federal employees and military service members would not receive their paychecks, even if they had to stay on the job.

And President Obama said in an interview last week that he could not guarantee Social Security checks would go out if the debt limit is reached. Social Security checks are paid on successive Wednesdays of each month.

After the Aug. 2 debt ceiling deadline, the first wave of 25 million Social Security and disability checks — with a combined value of $23 billion — is scheduled to go out on Aug. 3.

If Social Security checks don't go out, federal retirees' pension checks probably wouldn't go out either. But those would be affected only if the crisis continues through Sept. 1, when those annuity checks are scheduled to go out.

"The choices would not be pretty," said Jay Powell, who was former President George H.W. Bush's undersecretary of Treasury for finance and a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The center said June 28 that if the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling isn't raised, the government would have to slash spending on the government's 80 million monthly bills by up to 44 percent to stay under the limit.

But the results would be chaotic. The pace of incoming money — about $172 billion in taxes, fees and other revenues in the remainder of August — doesn't match up well with the nearly $307 billion in capital outflows for the rest of August, and the results would be "lumpy," the center said in its analysis.

The government could choose to pay interest on Treasury securities, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance and defense contractors, BPC said. But that would leave no money to fund the Education, Labor, Justice and Energy departments, Federal Highway Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, tax refunds and veterans programs.

Under another scenario laid out by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the government could try to protect the so-called social safety net by leaving defense contractors unpaid and instead spend on food stamps, housing assistance, veterans programs, special education grants and tuition assistance. But that would still leave large portions of the government — including the FBI, Interior, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — shuttered.

Fog horn built from plumbing supplies - Hack a Day

Instructables user [rog8811] was looking to build a fog horn that resembled hand-pumped units found on small ships in the early to mid 1900s. His budget was a bit limited, so he set off to build the cheapest replica possible.

While the original horns were likely constructed from steel, copper and wood, he opted to use cheap plumbing components he found at his local hardware store. He used a simple double-acting air pump to drive the horn, combining it with a slightly modified bottle trap. The trap was shortened, and a diaphragm cut from a dish washing glove was added to generate sound.

He added a few more pieces of PVC piping to enhance the output, giving him the results you see in the video below. He says that the best thing about his design is the ability to easily tweak the pitch and volume of the horn by simply adding different drain components to the pump.

Watch out vuvuzela, there’s a new cheap and annoying horn on the block!

This is way cool! Daring a horrible punlike attempt- rog8811 has made a new way for us to blow our own horn.

I do wonder what other effects we could derive from his build. Galton Whistles perhaps?

There’s a lot of Hacker potential in Sonic Energy devices.

http://www.sonochemistry.info/introdution.

Check the technique, liner notes for hip-hop junkies

As nasty as they wanna be, the uncensored story of Luther Campbell of the 2 Live Crew

The Yale book of quotations

SPIN

Letters to Penthouse Xxx, Extreme Sex, Maximum Pleasure