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Housewife 1: Ooooh look! Your husband's coming up the walk with a beautiful bouquet of flowers! Housewife 2: Oh that's fucking lovely! Now I'm gonna have my legs spread all weekend. Housewife 3: What's the matter? Don't you have a vase?

Lots o' good readin'!

Maybe one factor in the rising claims equation is because there is more negligence? Also could be that the "unfailing doctor" mystique is fading and people are more likely to file a claim when medical injury occurs? I believe there are studies that show that in states with damage caps malpractice insurance premiums tend to be lower AND rate of claims to be higher! Caps on damage seem to be the right thing in terms of reducing premiums, but wrong in terms of weakening the deterrent for negligence. Any limit on tort liability should be accompanied by some sort of additional deterrents on negligence. see this link if you're interested

So are you saying that the first sentence of my quote is an innaccurate description of Bush's plan?

"If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of irresponsibility. The fact that this plan has an elaborate disguise, one that would add considerably to its costs, makes it worse." link

CONSUMER ALERT!!! I bought a "Beers O' the World" mystery mix of beers at Trader Joe's yesterday. On the surface it appears to be a good deal, 10$ for twelve mystery beers, and it's not like Trader Joe's stocks too much Black Label or Pabst. So anyway, 5 beers from US, 7 from non-US, not bad. But the beers I got Mandarin Orange Hefeweisen P U! Oregon Honeybeer puke! "Coastal Light" WTF! the label looks like it's the housebrand beer at Super-8 motels Some really stinky Czech beer Some supersweet Widmer stout (puke) I got taken. Just a heads up.

Your concept is correct, it's just not anything specifically Bayesian. The election is a tie. You could count and recount and recount and keep getting different answers. The only thing to do is follow established procedure, and see who wins that way. The option for a recount is established procedure. Stop whining you anti-recounters. Christine Gregoire could save somebody a bunch of money by quitting. Just the same as George Bush could save a lot of people from sorrow by abandoning his post (again) and hiding somewhere.

Bayesian statistics huh. Nice big word Dru. Too bad you used it incorrectly.

Try to avoid mucking up clips on a sport route with webbing. How would you like it if you were pumped and nearing salvation of the bolt only to find that it's all jammed up with someone's bail webbing? Use a biner or Toast's solution. One thing about lowering (besides Alpinfox's very good advice about don't do it through webbing), make damn sure that you have enough rope. Just to safeguard in situations where this is not always perfectly clear, have your belayer/lowerer tie in to the rope.

There's some data on vote counting in this article Wolter K, Jergovic D, Moore W, et al. Reliability of the uncertified ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida AMERICAN STATISTICIAN 57 (1): 1-14 FEB 2003 One tidbit: out of 2357091 ballots investigated that were counted by optical scanning, 7202 were judged by the machine to have no mark. Of these, 2603 (0.11 % of the original total) were judged by human judges to have had a vote marked in. A 99% confidence interval for percentage of votes missed by optical scan is 0.105% to 0.116%. To put it another way, that's 105 to 116 votes missed for every 100,000 votes cast via optical scan machines (I focus on optical scan ballots here, as that is how it works where I vote. Some machines had worse accuracy.) Extrapoloating to all of WA state, that's more than 3000 votes just plain missed. This says nothing of other types of mistakes that can happen (like those 720 uncounted ballots "found" by King County election officials during the recount). Bad news is previous studies seem to show hand counts even less accurate. See this paper. So, no solution there. Once a vote is this close, with this many votes, the final result is determined by random chance. The "choice of the voters", in terms of which candidate is above the magic 50% line, is impossible to determine. What I think would be great is if after a hand recount it was determined that there were enough votes "found" that put Gregoire ahead. But then Rossi ends up winning because Gregoire's office missed the deadline to submit the findings!

I heard on the radio (this spouted by the DNC guy in WA [truth in advertising]) that there was a Cal Tech study done showing that the error rate of these voting machines is more than 1%. So, yes, 42 out of 2.8 million (0.00004%) is a tie. A runoff election would be interesting and costly. What I think they ought to do is hold a lottery, and pick one lucky WA resident who gets to decide who the governor is. PLUS, just to make it like a real lottery (big money winner), that person would have no legal restrictions upon taking money from interest groups. Just think how exciting that would be! Way better than basically giving the benefit of the doubt to one candidate because of a flip of the coin which is what is going to happen.

1. Longer lines at the Vegas drive-thru wedding chapels. 2. Higher prices for divorce and pre-nup attorneys due to increased demand. 3. Wedding rings more expensive. 4. Less "available" guys for guys like ConradCA. 5. More chance that the kid you put up for adoption (because you're too much of a deadbeat to take on the responsibility) might get adopted by a homosexual couple. 6. Might have to change a lot of names in your address book. 7. More weddings to attend and gifts to buy. 8. more?

Me? Why do you think? I did get to spend a lovely sunny couple of hours at a nice playground. Enough of this chatter, back to the subject at hand:

Translation into what? Gremlinese? It looks sunny and beautiful today Klenke. Shouldn't you be about beating some busy right now?

Not that I really want to extend this discussion, but I do not recall any censorings of explanations of how a climb went. Are you saying that some TR's were deleted?

Ha ha....errr....yeah (we need an uncomfortably tugging at collar gremlin). You've probably progressed past that treating patients like bugs phase too? You even seem like a doctor that knows what "evidence based" means. We need more doctors like you.

"The Republicans made it known to the FDA that not enough new drugs were being approved and that the FDA was overly concerned with safety." Do you have any information to support this claim?

Recent dirt on Vioxx and the FDS's lax enforcement of drug companies knowingly selling dangerous drugs. link1 link2 ""I would argue that the FDA ... is incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx," he said, because of the FDA's close relationship to the drug companies it regulates."

We could accomplish both of your goals by replacing the current income tax with either a flat tax or a national sales tax. Of course, doing this would mean that you would probably have to pay a greater percentage of your income to federal taxes, but HEY! it would save that tax time headache!

Hmmm....I guess I wasn't confrontational enough... HOW MANY OF YOU LIBERAL COMPUTER JOCKS WITH NO HOUSE AND STOCK OPTIONS ARE EXCITED ABOUT BUSH SAVING YOU A BUNCH OF MONEY? HOW MANY OF YOU FAMILY VALUES WORKIN' STIFFS WITH NO SAVINGS AND A MORTGAGE ARE EXCITED ABOUT PAYING MORE TAXES SO LIBERAL COMPUTER JOCKS (SEE ABOVE) CAN PAY LESS TAXES?

From the Washington Post, in an article about the current plans for tax simplification. You can also read about it here, if you're too scared to engage in free registration. "Instead the administration plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth, according to several people who are advising the White House or are familiar with the deliberations. The changes are meant to be revenue-neutral. To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said. " So those of us who get more money from interest on our savings account and stock investment gains than we pay for our property tax will be happy with this news. Those whose major investment is their house, those who were excited about that new law to make WA sales tax deductible, and those businesses who provide health insurance for their employees are gonna be sad. I fall into the latter category How about you?

Is that from the gallery. If it is, it's not her fault. The gallery's broke now and doesn't auto-resize like it used to. Also, the old resized versions all got scrapped.

Are we talking about two different things here? If you abolish social security, then many people will be even less prepared than they are now come old age. If we keep it, less people will be indigent at old age. You say you get all your money back, plus interest. Then where is the sacrifice? What is your problem with it? I assume it's because you would rather do something your consider smarter with the money (or you're planning on dieing at an early age?) If you would rather not make this sacrifice of acquiescing to put some of your money away at a guaranteed rate in order to assure that thousands of elderly will not be destitute, then I say yes, it's you who is abrogating the moral responsibility.