mattp

Take another look at my posts, RBW. I specifically stated that I am NOT arguing that the blame for any increase in litigiousness lies entirely on the insurance companies, or even primarily upon them. I AM arguing that one should not be fooled by spokesmen from some industry groups (primarily insurance companies) and a bunch of cynical politicians who are trying to say that the entire blame lies with the greedy trial lawyers and some sudden lack of personal responsibility. Are there a lot of greedy trial attorneys out there? Of course there are. The profession attracts lots of jerks and to be a successful trial attorney you almost HAVE to be aggressive and good at manipulating people. I used to think that Plaintiff's attorneys represented the worst among my profession, but for the last four or five years I have shared an office with one and, yes, he fits some of the stereotypes. But once I've had the opportunity to hear things from his point of view I have come to the conclusion that, on average, insurance defense attorneys may be the lowest of the lot (and I have personally known some of them over the years, as well). Still, it takes both sides to make our system work -- even if you aren't completley happy with how it stumbles along.

I do not practice personal injury law, but I can tell you that it is well known that certain insurance companies make it a practice to play hardball in EVERY case and will deny a claim or try to settle a claim for next to nothing, no matter what. If this happens to you and you don't hire an attorney you are some kind of idiot. And, in my own experience, I have never faked or inflated a single insurance claim, but I have been screwed by my insurance company more than once. I have not been involved in very many car accidents in my life, but I DID have my insurance company (Farmers) tell me that coverage for my whiplash injury "expired" after one year, even though I was still suffering pain and undergoing medical expenses and missing work. They also terminated my policy and cause me to have to obtain high risk insurance because after I paid my premiums for fifteen years without filing a single claim, they paid two claims a single year - the first resulting from an accident in a "no fault" insurance state where my company had to pay my losses even though the other driver was ticketed, and the second resulting from my truck being stolen while I was parked in downtown Seattle during the work day. These kinds of practices DO foster a general mistrust of insurance companies and generate litigation. Do these and similar insurance company practices belie the fact that we are a society of irresponsible whiners? Probably not, but I do not bgelieve that the "problem" is entirely the fault of greedy lawyers and their irresponsible clients. I am not an expert in business practices, either, but let's take the example of the tobacco industry. All the right wing commentators and industry lobbiests say that it is a sign of personal irresponsibility that someone would smoke all their life and then hold RJ Reynolds responsible, but the known fact is that they lied and concealed what they knew about the dangers of their products -- for many many years -- and that they continue to heavily market to kids when they know they are literally killing people. Meanwhile, they made gazillions of dollars. Should these liars and crooks go to jail and all of thier assets be seized by the government, or should the companies face liability for what they oversaw? Or should they be allowed to have made such profits without facing any consequences? No, I do not. I don't know enough about the issue to say whether or what kind of tort reform would be appropriate, however, and I don't trust those who are in favor of tort reform to have my interests in mind. I DO think the attack on trial lawyers is driven by a very malicioius and cynically motivated campaign to promote general hysteria and distrust of our legal system.

Low angle raps are a pain in the neck, but sometimes I have had better luck making short raps on that kind of terrain - try using a single rope and rapping 80 feet instead of using two ropes and going 160. I don't think there are enough anchors to do that up there right now, but there may be.

If that is the case, I do not believe that your parents reflect the "norm" for their generation as you would have us believe. They may have some weird and extreme distrust for the legal system, but their failure to want to hold the drunk millionaire responsible for his act would not, in my opinion, be either intelligent, productive, or commendable -- and it would be particularly sad if what you say is true and they are in any way dependent upon you financially but you have no life insurance policy that would benefit them. I don't suggest that there aren't plenty of greedy lawyers, or that frivolous lawsuits are not a problem. I do think the "problem" is often mischaracterized by insurance companies who are acting in their own monetary interest, and by cynical politicians who reduce the issue to a simple and populist cartoon in order to further their own position.

Actually, I don't think that is true. I recall Beck filling us in on his progress toward gaining sponsors way back as early as May or something, and he brought some glossy material to a pubclub that I think took place in June but nobody was really all that interested. 'Round about July, there was a bit of a shock when he announced there would be professonal beer servers and a beer garden, and then there was general outrage when he started proclaiming Ropeup to be "his" festival and stuff like that. He has not shown much sensitivity to the concerns being expressed by some of the more vociferous posters around here, but in fact I don't think he has really been plotting "behind closed doors." Aside from the history of HOW WE GOT HERE, however, is the question WHAT DO WE DO NOW? I just think it looks like lots of people around here want to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Good. Now that we have established that factors like insurance company practices, regulatory climate, and irresponsible business practices have nothing to do with litigation we can move on to talk about how to fix the system. Let me guess: tort reform?

Did you and your friend figure out how to make the thing revert to "steady" light? The disco option might come in handy, I suppose, if I could control it.

Mr. K: I only partly agree with you about the cheastbeating thing. Yes, if somebody carries on like an idiot in their route report, the "deserve" to be made fun of. They would "deserve" ridicule if they unreasonably complained about how bad the weather was when they encountered a windless whiteout on the way to Camp Muir in November, too, or if they were asking what kind of gear to bring for a given climb at Exit 38. But all of this is rather subjective, and what you think is rediculous may in fact not appear so to somebody else. So, in general, I think that we ought to steer away from ridiculing even cheastbeaters in the route reports forum. But you are right: sometimes they deserve it.

Cracked: Here is what I wrote on this topic in a thread re "what belongs in route reports" last winter:

Those seem to be pretty good, Erik, though it is a nuisance to have to use the 4.5 volt batteries that are not widely available and the lamp is not nearly so bright when you use AA's, is it? Also, don't you have to unplug the battery to prevent the thing from turning on in your pack? (Maybe I'm just exepecting too much, I know.)

CJF- I'm not sure I disagree, much as I would like to just because I'm a contrary guy. If you are on a trail, if you are "on snow" where routefinding may not be that critical, or if you already know exactly where you are going, it doesn't matter what kind of a headlamp you have. Most people use their headlamps for camping, not for routefinding, and the Tikka or the Tikka Plus is just fine for that. But when I'm crawling through the jungle and looking for a way accross a roaring stream, looking for a route through an icefall, or trying to find an unknown descent in the dark, or in other words when I really need the lamp, I want as much light as possible. Has anybody tried one of those Silva headlamps?

I was hiking, ChucK. And we did a couple of damn nice moderate hikes, too: Tiffany Mountain and Heather Pass/Maple Pass Loop. Stayed in nice cabin, drank good wine, and smoked a cigar. Thanks for asking.

My nearly new supernova has developed some weird strobelight virus. I can't find anything about it in the directions, so maybe this was not an intended feature. I have to take my lamp back to REI and I'm wondering: does anybody know what the brightest thing is? In my view (as I've said before) more is better; lite is next to useless.

Good question. Do you think the answer is that nobody wants to take responsibility for theirself or that trial lawyers have a stangle hold on the democratic party, or might it be something else?

That's our system. With regard to public safety, I believe there are roughly three choices: (1) exhaustive governmental regulation with real enforcement (2) responsibility is to be determined by individual lawsuits (3) government, business, and your neighbor are free to hurt you or to be as irresponsible as they like, with no consequences. Yes, at a glance it would seem absurd to hold the Port Authority or Boeing responsible for 911 -- unless of course it turns out (for example) that the Port Authority knew the buildings were going to fail as soon as the planes hit them and they decided not to warn the inhabitants, or that Boeing could have installed hijacker-proof doors for little extra cost but decided not to do so without weighing the potential benefit. Do you know anything about the issues being addressed in these lawsuits? Do you know anything about the circumstances of specific plaintiffs? Go to Rush Limbaugh.Com to find out how messed up our tort system is and then come back to spew the spray.

not for the dittoheads. That's what I mean. Rush Limbaugh makes things up to fit a certain message that sells advertisements. Thus, the dittoheads don't know that that Clinton doubled the FBI's counterterrorism budget, they forget that he shot cruise missiles at Bin Laden and bombed Iraq, and they don't believe that the Clinton administration had a plan to hit al queda when Bush took office and the Bush folks sat on it largely out of a general hostility to anything that Clinton had his name on. But that is besides the point: to blame Clinton for 911, when it happened during Bush's term, or to suggest that Clinton is responsible for installing and building up Saddam over so many years or for failing to take him out in Gulf War I, or for failing to get our allies to go along with Gulf War II when we had all that political capital after 911, is ludicrous.

Thanks, Puget. I'm not sure about your numbers, but I'm glad to think that we may in fact be able to afford it because think we have an obligation to follow through as best we can. That part about blaming Clinton for giving rise to global terrorism or allowing Saddam to get in power and then stay there is a bunch of idiotic rhetoric, though.

Jay- We digress, but I can't resist taking your bait. As a society, we took an interest in environmental protection when we did not because we had a capitalistic economic system, but because pollution stinks and we could afford to do something about it. Yes, the governments of Russia and China may not have faced the same kind of electoral politics and therefore didn't have to respond to some growing social movement to recognize environmental goals, but the more important factor is they haven't had the cash to install scrubbers in all their factory smokestacks or whatever. And the "old nations" in Europe, those nations with the disgraceful social programs and high taxes that we hear so much about, are much more likely to engage in long-term thinking than we are. As far as you assertion that leftist fantasies have ben a driving force behind State takeover of private wealth, I again think you are looking at history through some highly distorted lens. Yes, the fact is there have been brutal regimes that were socialistic or communistic, and there have been large-scale nationalizations of industrial production that were driven by socialistic or communistic idealogy. But look at what actually happened, and who profitted from these activities. Did the assets end up in some State-controlled bank account, where they were managed by idealistic leftists? Hardly. Any idealistic goals were quickly sidetracked by individuals who sought to build big palaces and adopt all that wealth as their own. Yes, it would appear that a capistalistic political system MAY offer less of an opportunity for that kind of thing, but who here is arguing that we should adopt the Soviet economic model? Get over your idealistic propoganda, and look at the real world. The current trend toward privitization of everything from public lands to public education and our foreign policy is, in my view, horrific. Do you really think that Thousand Trails or the advocates of private school vouchers and Charter Schools, or Haliburton and Bechtel have ANY real interest in the preservation of public lands, the provision of education for society at large, or in a stable Middle East beyond the time it takes to profit from their current contracts? Do Bush and his buddies in the oil industry or who used to run Enron respect the rule of law? Give me a break.

If you don't want to go to Rope-up, don't. But don't think you're making yourselves look like the big man in town by jumping on the latest cc.com bandwagon. Sure, Beck has been rather offensive in his insistence that rope up belongs to him, but that point has been made, like, a hundred times over. If somebody wanted to change the program for Rope-Up, or the programmer, the time for that was months ago.

I hope your are right, Murray, but I think that, on the whole, we are pretty much known for willful obstinance and short-sightedness. To make matters worse, I'm afraid that as we become more and more polarized on issues related to our rightful place as rulers of the world or to such things as the environment or the value of public education, nobody is going to stand up to corporate greed. One thing's for sure, our friends who run Haliburton are going to come out of this OK even if the whole damn thing falls apart, and they are going to max out every possible donation to GW's reelection campaign (though for political reasons, the money may be "laundered" through intermediate sources).

Sorry, Murray. Most Americans have little interest in any balanced history and even less willingness to be "even handed about it" if by that you mean a willingness to recognized the fact that our foreign policy is driven by corporate greed and a fundamental belief that we are and should be able to run the world.

I think that rather than deal their recruitment a big setback, we have furthered their cause more than they could ever have done on their own. Time will tell, I suppose. I'd agree, however, that the Northern Alliance is probably better than the Taliban, and I hope we can help Karzai to get control over the country. Time will tell on that one, too. Do you think we are going to support the development of an effective and fair and independent government in Afghanistan? Iraq?

Fairweather- I seriously doubt that Bush is going to cooperate with the rest of the world. His past performance has shown that it just isn't his way, and his current plea that all of our former allies write him a blank check doesn't make me think that he has wised up at all. And yes, you are right - he'd have to do more than compromise on just a few issues to get my vote. Are you going to respond to my comments about what we have accomplished in Afghanistan? (Those comments were in direct response to you.)

He'd lose your vote if he supported just about anything I am interested in, Fairweather. Yes, the U.N. has been largely ineffective, but don't you think that has as much as anything else to do with the fact that WE don't support it? Rather than playing "High Noon" in a constant repeating video loop, I'd prefer to see us try to bring as many former allies on board as we can, through showing that we are trying to cooperate with the other civilized nations in this world in making the world a more civilized place.