JayB

Pakistan supply route costs U.S. $100 million per month Oh, the money is there. We just choose to spend it on other things. Now if San Jose or CA would just pull back their efforts and apply it to their pensions we would be set. The point, or at least my point, is that if benefits can't be sustained through a reasonable return on investment, why should middle-class taxpayers be forced to supplement these with higher taxes. So you mean the federal govenment should spend federal tax dollars on providing benefits to works beyound than those that can be expected on conservative market expectatations? I think, as a nation, we can put those fed dollars to much better use than dropping them over the -stans, but wouldn't choose public pensions as the first alternative. Ever feel like you're in a time capsule having a conversation with Greeks in ~ 2002?

Pakistan supply route costs U.S. $100 million per month Oh, the money is there. We just choose to spend it on other things. I'll ignore the many layers of legislation, taxing authority, and reality that stand between Chuck Reed's budget and the Federal funds that have been appropriated for the Pentagon and go along with this claim for the sake of argument. The voting public has chosen to spend funds that could be used to finance unreformed pay and benefits for public sector employees on "other things," or vote down tax increases on themselves because they have other priorities for their money that they value more. It's not there. It's reform compensation or layoff hundreds and slash services. How does the "Layoff, slash, and don't reform" plan benefit the public?

Great TR - interesting commentary. It'd be interesting to hear from folks operating in other mountain ranges chime in to see if they had something like the same "Renaissance," "Golden Age," etc emerge in the wake of the internet. It sort of feels like they haven't - but I could easily be wrong. If they have folks posting TR's but not a Scurlock equivalent, then maybe it'd be possible to speculate a bit more productively about what specific factors lead to all of the new lines going down here. I'm sort of surprised it hasn't already been mentioned (maybe it's been assumed), but I'd also like to offer the opinion that cascadeclimbers.com also played a role in catalyzing things by providing a central hub for like minded folks to connect and share/record their adventures.

Even if one were to concede the broad claims about unions and the broad sweep of history (*solely*) for the sake of argument - it's not clear how that would translates into an argument against reforming pensions and benefits for unionized public sector workers in a manner that makes them more fiscally sustainable and preserves existing levels of service delivery. The money isn't there. Folks like Chuck Reed can only work with the amount of tax revenues that the public is willing to fork over. He - and many others - can leave pay, pensions, and benefits untouched and layoff public employees by the hundreds with all of the cuts in public services that come along with that - or reform compensation. How, exactly, is it in the public's interest to do the former rather than the latter?

In my experience the really accomplished folks fall tend to fall into two camps. The people who have excelled because they are so passionate about the activity itself, and those who are motivated primarily out of a desire for recognition and praise from others. There's not necessarily a clean line between the two, and the same person can transition from one to the other over time - but it's easy to tell the difference.

That's good news. Someone should tell these guys! http://www.pewstates.org/research/reports/the-trillion-dollar-gap-85899371867

Are these the middle class citizens that benefit from paying more taxes for fewer services as the cost of employing unionized public sector workers grows faster than the underlying economy and cannibalizes funding for parks, libraries, social services, etc? How does the referendum in San Jose, championed by the Democratic Mayor Chuck Reed fit into this narrative? How about the Jeff Adachi in San Francisco ("Proud Progressive" campaigning for pension reform). Etc, etc, etc. "It’s late afternoon when I meet Mayor Chuck Reed in his office at the top of the city-hall tower. The crowd below has just begun to chant. The public employees, as usual, are protesting him. Reed is so used to it that he hardly notices. He’s a former air-force officer and Vietnam-era veteran with an intellectual bent and the clipped manner of a midwestern farmer. He has a master’s degree from Princeton, a law degree from Stanford, and a lifelong interest in public policy. Still, he presents less as the mayor of a big city in California than as a hard-bitten, upstanding sheriff of a small town who doesn’t want any trouble. Elected to the city council in 2000, he became mayor six years later; in 2010 he was re-elected with 77 percent of the vote. He’s a Democrat, but at this point it doesn’t much matter which party he belongs to, or what his ideological leanings are, or for that matter how popular he is with the people of San Jose. He’s got a problem so big that it overwhelms ordinary politics: the city owes so much more money to its employees than it can afford to pay that it could cut its debts in half and still wind up broke." 1. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-lewis-201111 2. http://www.mercurynews.com/elections/ci_20790991/early-returns-san-jose-voters-approving-pension-reform

Only interesting if you believed that it was principle rather than expediency that motivated the opposition to the said practices when conducted under GWB. Anyhow - since you are looking for The Outrage, I suspect that you'll find plenty of it blasted directly at you in high decibels (and garnished with particles of saliva, locally produced artisanal goat cheese, and organic chiraz sourced from heirloom vines)from a red-faced counterparty every time you ponder this conundrum out loud at a gathering of progressive types.

Divide and conquer works with low information voters, especially when you outspend the opposition 8:1 for a 6 point spread. Those low information content voters presumably include the tens of thousands of former public employee union members who voted with their pocketbooks and stopped sending in their dues once it no longer became compulsory. "Wisconsin Unions See Ranks Drop Ahead of Recall Vote" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304821304577436462413999718.html

Spain, Greece, etc haven’t *chosen* austerity any more than the compulsive gambler who’s just pawned off the last of his gold fillings for a final bet at the craps table has *chosen* to put the dice down and walk away from the table. They’ve been cut off.

Where did this crazy challenge to the notion that government should be organized as a guaranteed pay, benefit, and pension dispensing mechanism with a sideline in providing essential services come from? While we're at it - where did these people get the idea that their primary function in life is something other than providing for the financial needs of unionized government employees?

Thread regarding the 2005 proposal, and its subsequent opposition and defeat.... http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/383361/Re_Gondola_on_the_Chief

[video:youtube]

...and it's bringing you tacos. http://tacocopter.com/

Is there any way to allow users to associate a TR with a particular peak when they can see that it hasn't been indexed because of a mis-spelling, etc? Seems like crowdsourcing could be helpful if it's technically feasible...

Has anyone bothered to compare the murder rate amongst returning vets to the same civilian demographic before concluding that vets in general are more likely to deliberately kill others? Per the DOJ - "US offender rate for homicide in the 18 - 24 yo range is 26.5/100,000.For 25 - 34, it's 13.5/100,000." Anyone know what the rate for returning vets is? I suspect that for all returning troops it's actually lower than the murder rate for civilians of the same age, race, educational attainment, etc - but it could be higher. Having said that - even if it's lower in general it could be higher amongst units that have had heavy combat rotations. I just haven't ever seen the numbers.

Sure Bill, things may look bad at the *national* level, but there's plenty of good fiscal news at the state and local level. http://www.pensiontsunami.com/

No one is even talking about tapering off. It's speeding up. Yes, it's really unfortunate. The republicans want to spend money on tax breaks for the rich and the democrats want to spend money on subsidies for the poor and the only guy who says any different wants to throw the economy into Mt. Doom or whatever. I'm sorry, anybody that thinks Ron Paul's solution is the answer is a fucking retard of the highest caliber of retards. I'm talking King of the Retards. Like Texas-caliber retardation. George W. Bush levels, the sort of retardation that is embarrassing to watch. Any opinion on Nassim Taleb? E.g. where does he fall on the retard-scale? [video:youtube]

"It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3&hp "This always had to be the endgame for reforming Wall Street. It was never going to happen by having the government sweep through and impose a wave of draconian new regulations, although a more vigorous enforcement of existing laws might have helped. Nor could the Occupy protests or even a monster wave of civil lawsuits hope to really change the screw-your-clients, screw-everybody, grab-what-you-can culture of the modern financial services industry. Real change was always going to have to come from within Wall Street itself, and the surest way for that to happen is for the managers of pension funds and union retirement funds and other institutional investors to see that the Goldmans of the world aren't just arrogant sleazebags, they’re also not terribly good at managing your money... Banking, and finance, is a business that has to be first and foremost about trust. The reason you're paying your broker/money manager such exorbitant sums is because that’s the value of integrity and honesty: You're paying for the comfort of knowing he has your best interests at heart. But what we’ve found out in the last years is that these Too-Big-To-Fail megabanks like Goldman no longer see the margin in being truly trustworthy. The game now is about getting paid as much as possible and as quickly as possible, and if your client doesn’t like the way you managed his money, well, fuck him – let him try to find someone else on the market to deal him straight. These guys have lost the fear of going out of business, because they can’t go out of business. After all, our government won’t let them. Beyond the bailouts, they’re all subsisting daily on massive loads of free cash from the Fed. No one can touch them, and sadly, most of the biggest institutional clients see getting clipped for a few points by Goldman or Chase as the cost of doing business. The only way to break this cycle, since our government doesn't seem to want to end its habit of financially supporting fraud-committing, repeat-offending, client-fleecing banks, is for these big "muppet" clients to start taking their business elsewhere." Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-goldman-executives-brave-departure-20120314#ixzz1p7ucKZRE

Been looking into the Chariot thingy for multi-sport kid hauling after we ran into some folks out skiing with the ski attachment. http://www.chariotcarriers.com/english/html/conversion_kits.php Seems like you could haul the kid + kid-supplies in the wheely-sled and at least carry a reasonably sized pack. The hiking attachment would obviously limit the kind of trail that you could use to access a campsite, but given that most folks aren't going to be doing to much scrambling with an infant on their backs maybe the limitations wouldn't actually be that severe in practice.

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFfVeXhtRa0

-I'm sure that distribution is accurate, but if the goal is to understand what's actually happening in society, rather than on an Excel sheet, you have to think about what the statistical data actually means, and to do that you have to ask what has changed during the interval that you are measuring. Is the concentration of wealth increasing? I think it probably is, but I'm less confident in our ability to precisely define what that actually means in terms of real people living in real households. I've shown data before showing that people's income varies throughout their lives, that the top income quintiles tend to contain intact families where both adults have full-time jobs, that there's lots of turnover between income quintiles, that people in the top quintile tend to be folks who are in their peak earnings years, etc. To the extent that wealth is concentrating in the hands of people who are older, more experienced, more highly educated, more likely to be working full time, more likely to maintain intact households, etc* - I don't think that there's anything about the resuting distribution of wealth that's unfair, bad for society, or really anything that the government can or should do much to change. Even if we transfer more money from the top quintile to the bottom quintile - these disparities are going to persist. Having said that, I think that most people who are interested in doing more than exchanging articles of faith back and forth (I put you in this category), can still have interesting discussions about tax and transfer policy. Even if you fundamentally agree on the ends, there's still plenty that well intentioned people can disagree on regarding the best means of achieving them. *

You might be a bit more precise and accurate by asking the question "How does lowering the tax rate for the upper 5% to lows not seen since the guilded age and allowing for redistribution of wealth upward and increased concentration of wealth help the economy? Funny, the economy managed quite fine when marginal rates were higher - that BS about trickle down has been proven to be just that. Also - I believe in paying as you go, not borrowing as you go. The bottom line is the wealthy have very low taxes, you and me have low taxes. All the Bush era tax giveaways should be stopped and we should all pay for things we need as a society instead of borrowing. Didn't say anything of the sort. The primary problem with schools is the expectations we put on them. Expecting them to solve all the problems we have created outside the walls within a 7 hr school day. Public schools have to take all comers - kids who don't speak English, severe ADHD, Aspergers, severe discipline problems, fetal alcohol syndrome. Private schools do not. Poor districts get screwed, rich districts have great fund raisers. Frankly, I'll go with Ivan on this. I volunteer at a school regularly and the kids are sharp, engaged, and have promise. And they are not WASP. BS! You are out of touch if you think we have cast too wide a social safety net. Pick a vulnerable population - the mentally ill, the poor, the infirm, the lower end of the working class - all have seen drastic cuts in social services. What is your specific solution here? Get rid of medicare? Social security? Food stamps? No shit. And how do you suppose we pay for it? I partially agree. But savings banks are backed by the FDIC and deserve saving. Investment banks, however are a different animal. Unfortunately, thank to Glass-Steigel (thanks Clinton and Congress) the distinction is more fuzzy than it needs to be. Neither do I. i think its a complex problem that people are trying to boil down to a catch phrase and that isn't going to happen. And neither do I, nor I think do OWS folks. The issue is the political power they have, they way they have continued to leverage this power into protection of their tax havens, resources, and bought politicians. Jim: I'd expect you of all people to understand the difference between nominal and effective tax rates: -Over time the top marginal rate and the effective tax rate on the highest income quintiles *have* gone down, but the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest 20% has actually increased relative to their share of national income. -Your effective rate increases along with your income even after accounting for payroll taxes (Medicare, Medicaid, SS) once you factor in the value of transfers that go to folks in the lowest income quintiles. The facts show that we've got a progressive tax system in both theory and practice. It's fine if people want to argue that it isn't progressive enough for their purposes - but it's strange to hear that the tax code isn't progressive at all, much less that it serves to redistribute income upwards.

Interestingly enough in my case, I think our first climbing "date" was an ice-climbing trip at ~13,000 feet in Colorado, that wound up with us descending ~ 300 vertical feet of spin-drift and verglas coated talus in the dark (forgot one headlamp, and the one that I did pack had a dead battery). The fact that she took it all in stride and was a trooper throughout the entire debacle that I'd gotten us into actually cemented things for more for me than an uneventful trip to a sport-crag on a sunny day ever could have.

Does this make you feel any better? http://andrewgbiggs.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-social-security-tax-regressive-once.html