willstrickland

No Barbies in Yakima?

You don't have ta. I'll be on the ferryboat back to PNW in Oct

I'm not into the cross dressing thing so I don't wanna get IN your pants. Getting you OUT of your pants might be another story. Sounds like most of my partners. You'll fit right in. Yah no problem, as long as you sport the dough for the brews and supply the car, I'll go into the store and buy it, and drive your rig way over the speed limit. Don't have a dog. G-spotter, Dean Potter, call me whatever name you want. As long as you're ok with the

Are ya makin' buildings or layin' rugs? Save the drama fo yo mama. Time and place. Not here. Not now.

Dude in the back against the car is EE, the chick is Shelly , no idea who the ice cream eater is, dude in front is Leroy?

In 2006.... March 21 – Bloomberg (Claudia Carpenter): “Orange-juice futures in New York rose to their highest price since 1992 on speculation the government will reduce its estimate of Florida’s orange crop because of damage from dry weather. Florida is the world's second-biggest grower.” And way back in 1983..... "Randolph: This is not a meal, Valentine. We are here to try to explain to you what it is we do here. We are commodities brokers, William. Now, what are commodities? Commodities are agricultural products, like coffee that you had for breakfast, wheat, which is used to make bread, pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a bacon and lettuce and tomato sandwich. ---------- Mortimer said it was for research. Research, so he can get that top secret report, two days before it goes public. Oh my God, the Dukes will corner the entire frozen orange juice market. Unless somebody stops them. Or beats them to it." --------

Southern Comfort. Kanye West. Opera. Joyce. Casinos.

Damn dude. Sort that shit out in person not here. I got one for ya...my first job in PDX. I had a company rig I would take home at night. On the way to the office one morning I got fired for making a right on red without coming to a complete stop at a T intersection (boss was in the convenience store at the corner). There was no street to my left at the interstion, I could only go straight or turn right. Since the opposing traffic also had a red light, there was no possibility of any conflict. And I got canned for it. Not speeding. Not screeching tires around the corner driving crazy...just recognizing there was no possible issue with turning right on red. If anyone should have understood situation and that it was impossible to have a collision it was my boss....a traffic engineer.

Because 99.99% of your poltical cohorts that I hear advancing these very arguments do so with no intent to help these people as they view them as inferior and lesser beings. Now, you may very well be the Black Swan Event of the wingnutteratti and have moral motives for backing these policies, I think you are mistaken in your conclusions, but good for you if that's true about your motive. Having read your commentary on matters in general over a long period of time, I am hardly persuaded that this is the case. We could keep arguing about min wage, but it's the same argument that's been going on for 30+ years, with the same talking points on both sides. What baffles me is how, as a free market capitalist type, you have no problems with excessive CEO compensation. Are you not a shareholder? You enjoy the fact that dividend yields are in the toilet historically while these inept crooks divert company cashflow into their own pockets and dilute the float with excessive op grants? They sit on each other's boards, collect a chunk there while approving the comp packages for each other..it's ridiculous. That's your money they're stealing. Who owns the corp? Last I checked it was shareholders.

Well there's now a confluence of Nick's reco, and mine: TNF Cat's Meow 20deg polarguard delta, last year's model closeout on sale @ Campmor $130 right now.

I beg to differ. It may be consensus among your Univ. Chi Friedmanite winger bretheren. Here's a list of 562 economists who would say otherwise: http://www.epinet.org/stmt/economistsminwage200410web.pdf An excerpt: We believe that a modest increase in the minimum wage would improve the well-being of low-wage workers and would not have the adverse effects that critics have claimed. In particular, we share the view the Council of Economic Advisers expressed in the 1999 Economic Report of the President that “the weight of the evidence suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage have had very little or no effect on employment.” While controversy about the precise employment effects of the minimum wage continues, research has shown that most of the beneficiaries are adults, most are female, and the vast majority are members of low-income working families.

Jay, given your last statement... Please reconcile these: Productivy gains have been enormous over the last decade according to govt stats. In that same time period, real wages have been flat to down, while CFO and CEO salaries have roughly tripled. BTW, I don't think you can eliminate povery by just paying everyone wages that are above the poverty threshold. That is not my assertion. But I also don't believe that you automatically hamstring a business by requiring minimum wage. Further, I assert that when your employees are not having to work two jobs to make ends meet and not stressing the fuck out because they can't take a sick child to the doctor, you will increase productivity of those employees and to some degree offset the higher wage. I don't believe that it is moral, ethical, or christian nor a benefit to shareholders to pay corporate execs wildly bloated salary packages while the rank and file employee can't heat their home or feed their kids. You deem it socialist, I call it human compassion. I leave you with two thoughts: 1. As of 2005, if the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour. 2. In 1965 the CEO:Worker pay ratio was 24:1. Today it is over 430:1. In Japan today it is 55:1. And before you claim "they are worth it" take a look at Treas. Sec Snow's tenure as CEO of CSX Rail, or Ken Lay, Kozlowski, etc, etc.

Shit or get off the pot.

and good luck.

JTuff, I think you meant: Big mofo SUVs or polar bears

.12 ga or .44mag or tabasco in a spray can

Looks like a longer version of Mexican Crack in LCC. That's a killer shot Off_white.

electric or acoustic

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Jay, I am well aware of the flood of liquidity and the current unwinding of the yen based carry trade. The euro carry trade is neglible in the grand scheme, being much smaller in scope, and having seen a good deal of it unwound from 2003-2005 when the Euro went from somewhere around parity to upwards of 1.30. The end of BOJ's ZIRP will indeed raise rates globally and was the trigger for the unwinding. Especially coupled with the fact that all major central banks are tightening concurrently. Yet, we have no idea what the FED will do...other than more obsfucation, see: end of M3 reporting. Given Bernanke's past utterances, I assume he will continue the Greenspan "mop up" policy. The elephant in the room is that this "mop up" is simply a massive re-liquification that subverts the rebalancing of capital allocation and leads you right back to asset bubbles in another class, courtesy of the leveraged speculator community and their access to endless credit creation. The explosion of MBS and the deluge of derivatives (credit default swaps, etc) have disrutped the standard credit creation mechanisms. Take a look at the notional value of CDSs sometime. Bank issues a load of mortgages, packages them, sells them to Fanny, who issues MBS. Now the bank can continue issuing and selling off the mortgages with little regard for lending standards of running into reserve requirement limitations. The credit mechanism is fucked and continues to morph like the cancer it has become. It has evolved to serve the financial paper handlers rather than the market for capital allocation to productive endeavors. These matters, as intersting, complex, and important as they are, do not sufficiently address the deficit problems. Growing our way out of it, with the demographic bomb about to drop is fantasy land talk IMO. And in the short term, rising rates should slow growth if anything. You state that Seems like a self-contradictory statment. Are you advocating across the board cuts of a certain percent to every program? As in they should all be cut by the same percent without regard to their relative value to the nation? You may wish to note that the "good ol days" of prosperity in the 50's had a upper end marginal tax rate of something north of 80% if recall correctly. I don't agree with rates that high, but it is interesting. This is the fiscal conservatives dilemma in the current GOP... raise taxes and suffer politically -or- cut spending and eliminate/reduce the safety net and suffer politically -or- do nothing and suffer politically because the fiscal conservatives defect or "forget" to go vote. GOP is in a serious bind and the "gay marriage!" rallying cry loses some effectiveness when the base you're trying to rally are in dire economic straights or watching their jobs disappear to the global labor arbitrage game. We can compare work history all you like, I've done some shit jobs in my time too. But it's a variation of a dick measuring contest at best. The point I was trying to make is that you, me, and most other people have it much easier than the typical service worker who can barely make ends meet while working their asses off, yet for some reason you begrudge them a living wage. Do you think pushing even more people into poverty will help the crime rate?

Jay, of all the items you list, only one addresses deficits, eliminating the mortgage deduction. Meanwhile, you reduce tax revenues even more by ditching the cap gains tax, raising IRA limits, and ending tariffs. A line item veto does nothing, it is a tool, not a policy. Any of the pork barrel earmarks bullshit could have been cut at anytime by Delay, Hastert, or Frist. Bush could have, and should have vetoed the appropriations bill until they sent him one without pork. Over and over and over until they "got it". But that requires ethical standards. The question is: would you raise taxes or cut spending, and if you're cutting spending what would you cut? We hear all this blustering from the radical right "I'd end funding for the NEA"...well, OK fine, that's a few hundred million, which we spend in the GWOT fiasco every hour of every day. What else? So, your solution is to fuck the middle class and the poor, while giving the wealthy elite even more concessions and doing nothing at all to address the deficits. And please, no supply side bs. You seem to live in this fantasy world where there is a meritocracy. I see nothing but cronyism and systematic looting of the public coffers by those wielding the levers of political power. But at least those dirty fuckin' spics and nigrahs won't make $7/hr anymore while working a harder day than you've ever experienced in your pampered life. Edited to say: I'll give ya the elimination of subsidies as addressing the deficit too, and with that you still got a lot of cuttin' to do. Where should we start? And I'm not real fond of unions within the public sector either so I'm with ya there, but not to the rabid "all unions are evil" degree of the radical right you embrace.

Jay, being the patriotastic fella I know you are, perhaps your time would be better spend figuring out a way to address the socioeconomic problems facing America, rather than some country you obviously loath for their socialistic tendencies. One might start by reigning in the drunken sailor spending, pork chasing, GOP congressional caucus. I don't really give a flying fuck if the French are having problems when right here at home we have an enormous credit bubble, the manufacturing base and infrastructure is eroding, housing affordability is at extreme low levels, the savings rate is negative, debt service as a percent of disposable income is at extreme readings, true inflation is running upwards of 6%, the employment/workforce ratio is saying that official govt "unemployment" figures are understating by about 3%, China and Japan are the only thing standing between us and a dollar crash, and the bloated budgets combined with irresponsible tax cuts lead us to unsustainable, extreme current account deficits upwards of 6% GDP. And you have time to worry about the cheese eating surrender monkeys? You must be a trust funder or a CEO.

So it WAS you that started the "War on Christmas?" Man, O'Reilly is pissed, you better lay low Commander, he' after ya.

Yup. The roof is almost perfect hands after the first couple of jams. Theres a good pic somewhere of RoxBrock in the roof. Edit: Here it is...

Jay I do pretty much what you do. My larger point is, beyond some combo of improved sliding X's, you hit a steep curve of diminishing returns. Simple, fast, tough to screw-up, expandable/adaptable to any number of pieces close together or spread out. What else does a brother need? When those cats using their insanely intricate systems get benighted, two pitches from the top, because they were fucking with the anchor an extra 10minutes at each belay...how safe are they then?