JayB

It was amusing to watch a handful of long-time weed users laugh hysterically at the notion of buying "Corporate McWeed" at state-run stores, much less doing all of their buying during the old state liquor store's operating hours. They evidently get much better price, quality, service, and convenience from private sellers and have zero intention of patronizing any state monopoly.

I'm all for legalizing all drugs immediately and will vote accordingly, and don't think that the Constitution has ever endowed the Federal government with the power to enforce drug prohibition. Having said that I'm going to enjoy watching people who argued that the commerce clause grants the government the power to force people to purchase a private good or service when they were arguing in support of the ACA contend with the reality that a government with the power to force you to buy insurance certainly has all of the power it needs to prohibit any and every aspect of marijuana cultivation, distribution, and consumption. This absurd abuse of the commerce clause was already established by Raich v Gonzales in 2005, but good luck finding a legal arument in which there's a logically and legally consistent interpretation of the post-ACA commerce clause under which the Federal government can use it to force you to buy health insurance,but not prohibit commerce in marijuana even in states that pass laws legalizing it.

Yup. This thread was a good reminder to send another pair of shoes his way...

After listening to many years of tales from the front lines I get the sense that broken/abusive families, substance abuse, and mental illness seem to swirl around in a self-perpetuating vortex that makes it immensely difficult for a non-trivial portion of the folks who spend the bulk of their adult life on the far left side of the table above to change their situations - with or without outside help. I'm not sure what kind of job a high-school-dropout bi-polar meth addict raised in an abusive home is going to be a good match for, but there are some people who are going to struggle financially no matter what the taxation/redistribution policy the country happens to be under at any particular time. Ditto for the 28-year old morbidly obsese, clinically depressed diabetic strung out on Oxy's who's already logged multiple years on the disability roster. If the kids raised in that kind of chaos were magically whisked away and raised in intact households headed by sane, responsible, non-abusive, non-addict parents - be they Unitarian lesbians or white-bread Mormons - they'd have a much better shot IMO.

Changes in household composition are a far more significant driver of "household" income inequality than changes in the distribution of individual incomes. Tough problem to address via tweaking marginal tax rates.

A more precise interpretation would be that there's little or no empirical connection between marginal and effective tax rates, so attempting to tether marginal tax rates to anything via a statistical regression will tell you nothing about the connection between marginal tax rates and whatever it is you are claiming is affected by them. IMO all you can say about taxes is that in general if you tax something you get les of it than you would otherwise, and if you subsidize something you get more of it than you would otherwise. A flat consumption tax would be economically optimal but I'd settle for a progressive consumption tax. Get rid of taxes on income, savings, investment, and production and there'd be much more to redistribute.

I'm sure the statement that there's little or no connection between the official top marginal rate and economic growth, etc, is true because there's not much of a connection between the top marginal rate and the actual effective tax rate at any income level. E.g. if the top marginal rate is 90% but the rate only applies to a tiny number of taxpayers, it only applies to the top-tier of their income, and it's easy to avoid it most of it via loopholes - then it's more of a populist distraction than a reliable indicator of how high the real tax rate actually is at any income threshold. The effective tax rate data is much more reliable if you are interested in how much tax the average household in each income quintile is paying: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=456 Taxes a share of GDP is a much more accurate way to tell how much of the economic pie Uncle Sam has been eating. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205 The remarkable thing is how stable taxes as a share of GDP has been since WWII, despite the dramatic changes in the top marginal rate. The average since 1944 has been 18-20%

Dunno. Depends on how they perform and what their incentives are. It's not as though there are no monetary incentives in place that distort policy - just take a look at the voting/lobbying activities of the prison guard's union in California regarding their idiotic three strikes law, drug legalization, etc. The government directly (grants) and indirectly (loans) spends many billions of dollars financing private educations at the college level, many of which are religious. Is this a problem for you or are you okay with that?

How do you feel about food stamps? Aren't those vouchers? Offering food stamps doesn't take away from a larger pool of money meant for "socialized groceries" or whatever from an official government grocery. They would be similar if everyone got their groceries from the Obama'Mart for free, but you could get food stamps to buy elsewhere. A better analogy to food stamps would be government college grants. They're really good credits, not food vouchers. -Converting to a voucher system wouldn't reduce the total pool of public funds available to for educating children. It'd just result in a system where schools have to compete to attract students in order to pay for their overhead and salaries. Given the massive and growing percentage of the public school budget that currently goes to admin and overhead costs - there's actually plenty of room to reconfigure spending so that more of the money actually winds up in the classroom even though the total amount of spending is the same. I'm all for using public money to fund education - but it's not clear to me that funneling it directly into an unaccountable monopoly is the best way to translate public spending on education into the best learning outcomes...in the same way that funneling money into a government-run food production and distribution network is unlikely to be the best way to insure that poor people have access to quality food at a reasonable price. Having said that - if our main objective is to an unaccountable monopoly provide guaranteed access to a massive pool of public money irrespective of how well it delivers the good that it's supposed to produce then the current system is definitely perfect for achieving that goal.

but it's still the assumption that private schools will be better - for the lower income folk, the first concern is basic security - private-run prisons don't seem better at preventing riots, do they? how does the charter school on the other side of town help you if a) you have to pay to get all the way over there and b) once you arrive, it has the same herd of deranged lunatics who fled your public school? and if the reality is the charter school can just refuse to admit the lunatics, isn't that just converting hte public school to a full-on prison itself? it's not surprising inner city folk are pro-charter/vouchers - folks on the top of burning buildings often jump - it's not like it helps though... -I'm not necessarily making that assumption - but if they look at the public schools available to them and make that determination on their own I then I'd like them to have that option. If it turns out that the public schools actually do a better job than the alternatives that spring up the students will basically stay where they are no?. -As far as the dregs are concerned - from what I could see at my high-school neither the gangbangers, thugs, and drugged-out wasteoids were doing much to improve the learning experience for the rest of the students* or the teachers who had to deal with them while trying to teach the rest of us, nor was the conventional school environment doing much for them. I'm not sure what the best solution is for kids who fall into those categories but the traditional sit-listen-and-do-homework model sure wasn't it. *I did learn that white semi-suburban kids with aspirations to join a gang were generally the most sensitive to perceived slights to their street-cred and by far the most twitchy and volatile.

How do you feel about food stamps? Aren't those vouchers?

Wow, this is amazing! I mean, what you're saying is, we should just use MONEY to BUY our way into better schools! Glad to see you're as much a free-thinker as ever. Always taking a nuanced, ecumenical approach to suit the complexities of any issue under discussion. God, you're a fucking tool. Thanks! Sorry to be the one to let you in on the secret that most people in the middle-and-higher income ranges use their earning power to buy their way into good school districts by acquiring property in them. Vouchers would just give people in the lower income ranges a chance to do the same if they want to.

Translation: let public schools in poorer districts die on the vine rather than fund and fix them properly. Randian Fuck the Poor Policy #467. Not that I don't think you believe your own bullshit, Jay. I think you actually do, so there's that. What in God's name do you know about the public school system anyway? How do you know its so fucked and 'beyond repair'? Now on to the'whites and asians and indians' remark...yup...the real root of your message: WEZE GOTS TA GIT 'WAY FUM DEM CULLUDZ, N VOUCHUHZ N CHAHTUHZ BE DA WAY TA DO IT! The interesting thing that unifies the folks opposed to charter/voucher programs here the underlying assumption that there will be a significant net migration out of conventional public schools and into charter/private schools - at least amongst engaged parents who care about their children's education. If public schools are the best solution for all kids, why on earth would parents be so anxious to get their kids out of them? I think that most parents in most neighborhoods where the schools are decent-to-excellent will keep their kids in public schools, but it wouldn't surprise me if the parents of children in poor areas where the schools are terrible and remaining in them is going to consign their kids to a life of poverty jumped at the opportunity to take a chance on something different. Didn't you go to private catholic schools all the way through? I actually attended a public junior high and high-school with all of the racial and socioeconomic diversity that folks like to wax poetic about from afar. It worked out fine for me - but I could have done without the company of the four or five classmates hauled off for murder between years 7-12, ditto for the kids of all races who were getting into the gang thing. Thankfully that didn't really affect me directly and there were some aspects of being in that environment that I think were valuable. I'm not sure what the 25% of the kids in my class who failed to graduate got out of the experience, but it's possible that they may have been better served by a different learning environment. Anyhow - lunchtime is over, so I'll leave you with this partisan drivel from a notorious right-wing rag.... "Urban black America favors school vouchers, but its leaders don't. Vouchers transfer authority over the use of a portion of government education funds from bureaucrats to parents, who then may use their grants to send their children to the schools, secular or religious, they believe will best educate their kids. But we must be honest. If the Supreme Court rules in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that the Cleveland voucher program is constitutional, the decision will help some families, but it will not expand the educational opportunities of all black children. Even so, such a result is likely to increase black support for vouchers. It will also show how far out of touch the black governmental class is with its black constituency. A 1999 survey by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research group, found that 68 percent of blacks favor vouchers. A similar poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, showed that the percentage of blacks supporting school vouchers rose to 60 percent in 1999 from 48 percent in 1996..." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/opinion/why-blacks-support-vouchers.html

Aren't you an attorney? Must have changed fields, but I do like the idea of a lawyer's union. "Hell No, We Won't...err....entertain offers from the undersigned party of said regarding the subordination of clauses 4.6 and 9.2b.."

WHY DO YOU HATE GOVERNMENT, UNIONS, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Likely to be one of the only growth industries in Greece for quite some time.

I hate to break it to you, amigo, but whites/asians/indians (and pretty much anyone from any ethnic group under the sun with enough income to do so) has been cutting and running for decades and buying their way into good schools (e.g forking over the coin required to buy homes in good school districts). It's strange for me to hear progressive types vehemently oppose vouchers since a) they'd give people who don't make enough money to buy a home in a good school district or pay private school tuition the option to buy their way into better schools and b)most of the folks I've heard make this argument are people who bought their way into good school districts and wouldn't dream of sending their own kids into the crappy public schools that they want to trap the poor kids in. Hearing "Vouchers - hell no!" from people that used money buy their way into a good school district so that their own kids could be insulated from having to "interact on a daily basis w/ folks outside of their narrow world" going on to vehemently oppose letting poor families use money to buy their way out of crappy schools is infinitely amusing to me. I'm not putting you in this category, mind you, and vouchers and charters aren't exactly the same animal, but now that we're finally starting to take a hard look at where we want to buy a home it's something I'm starting to hear in person quite a bit more often. FWIW I'm voting for the marijuana legalization and would gladly vote to see all drugs legalized immediately, and for the gay-marriage bill ("Gayweed is here! Where's Prole?) and for charter schools.

Seems like a temper tantrum directed at the Germans for cutting off their allowance more than anything that the rest of the world should worry about. Not nearly as worrisome as the rise of Grecian Formula IMO..

in other words, there ain't no bummer a hummer n' a hotdog can't handle Pretty much. My take-away was that even people who drone on about "radical indeterminacy and the impossobility of knowing absolute truth" etc for hours on end still brush their teeth, turn on the burner when they want to heat water, fill their gas tanks to keep their cars running, request anesthesia before their vasectomy, use birth control to prevent pregnancy, etc, etc, etc.

Not really a rebuttal, but your post made me remember this bit from Hume... “Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

I've heard good things about the K2 backups for the sort of ski you're looking for with setup #1. http://k2skis.com/skis/adventure/backup-1213 The DPS wailers might be a good choice for ski number two. http://www.wildsnow.com/6172/dps-wailer-ski-review/

Most people that I know who are into alpine climbing at all are into a bunch of other active stuff where being stronger helps - or at the very least have to help someone move a couch up a set of stairs every once in a while. Then there's the fact that percentage of people who are tackling routes where they need to milk every last ounce of fitness potential out of their bodies to succeed is probably well below 0.0001%, and that's generally for a very small percentage of their climbing lives, and for that to be a deciding factor they've got to have all of the mountain skills developed to an exceptionally high level and be climbing with people who are equally skilled, experienced, and fit. What percentage of real alpine-climbing scenarios does this describe? For people who hit trade routes with friends a few times a year the answer is...zero. IMO the reality is that there's a vanishingly small percentage of the climbing population that would have their performance in the mountains *hurt* by adding generic crossfit workouts to their routine, and most regular Joes would benefit quite a bit from doing so, even if you limit the discussion to alpine climbing. Add in the rest of life and it's even harder to identify the downside.

I knew I was living a lie the whole time, but coming off the couch after a full year of doing zero rock climbing inside or outside, spending a couple of half-days on that granite *and* climbing routes at grades that I had topped out on when I was climbing every weekend in CO felt mighty nice....

"Fundamental tenet: FAs by old skool badass climbers are sandbagged." Words to live by. This has always seemed particularly true for 5.9 (and especially for 5.9+) routes in areas that were developed before expanding the ratings to 5.10 and beyond was a widely accepted practice. Also seems to go for 5.10a routes put up at the tail end of that era, when claiming 5.10 was making a statement.

Just to get this thread back on topic: "Perhaps there is a God after all." Amen.