JayB

Communications majors always struck me as the folks who were taking their education seriously, and seizing every opportunity to challenge themselves and develop all of the capacities that a college education was intended to foster.

I dunno man - depends on what you consider "Alpine," but there's an awful lot of long routes way up high in the mountains that feature rock/snow/ice. Kiener's ranked right up there with the North Ridge of Stuart for me, and involved quite a bit more time in Crampons. Heck, even the North Face of Pikes Peak had some pretty sweet alpine routes. The attitude that seems to flourish in Boulder might be a drag, but it seems like there, just as anywhere else - you can choose who you associate with and your experience will vary accordingly.

Getting an education and preparing for a career are only mutually exclusive goals for some.

It doesn't actually sound like his debts are the key limitation. If he had said, "I found a job that neither involves working in an office, nor that I consider beneath my dignity - but unfortunately it doesn't pay enough for me to live independently *and* pay off my student loans," then perhaps the loans would be the key variable. Seems to me like he's having a tough time grappling with the cosmic injustice inherent in the fact that he didn't have a dream job waiting for him upon graduation, rather than his student loan debt. Unfortunately for him, paying for food, clothing, shelter, insurance, etc often compel lesser beings to make concessions and compromises, and exemption from student loan debt wouldn't diminish the probability that he'd have to contend with any of these realities after graduating.

Preserve his dignity!! He has a history degree! Ergo he shouldn't have to submit to the constraints like....working in an office...that lesser beings like accountants and engineers submit to if he wants to make enough money to live independently and pay back his loans! "Student debt limits who we become Ken Ilgunas, who lives in Niagara Falls, fears college is becoming unaffordable for most Americans. I am 24, live with my parents, can’t find work and am floundering in a sea of debt five figures high. I think of myself as ambitious, independent and hardworking. Now I’m dependent, unemployed and sleeping under the same Super Mario ceiling fan that I did when I was 7. How did this happen? I did what every upstanding citizen is supposed to do. I went to college. I took out loans so I could enroll at Alfred University, a pricey private school. The next year, I transferred to the more finance-friendly University at Buffalo, where I could commute from home and push carts part-time at Home Depot. I related my forthcoming debt to puberty or a midlife crisis — each an unavoidable nuisance; tickets required upon admission to the next stage of adulthood. But as interest rates climbed and the cost of tuition, books and daily living mounted to galactic proportions, I realized this was more than some paltry inconvenience. Upon graduating, I was helplessly launched headfirst into the “real world,” equipped with a degree in history and $32,000 in student loans. Before ricocheting back home, I would learn two important lessons: 1) There are no well-paying — let alone paying — jobs for history majors. 2) The real world is really tough. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I had no intention of living in a society that was as unfair as this one. To seek a haven devoid of the ruthless 9-to-5 ebb and flow of contemporary America, I moved to Alaska. As a liberal arts major, I dreamed of making a profound difference in people’s lives. Instead, for a year, I lived in Coldfoot, a town north of the Arctic Circle that resembles a Soviet Gulag camp. My job as a tour guide for visitors temporarily alleviated my money woes because it provided room and board, but when the season ended and I moved back home, I was again confronted with the grim realities of debt. Desperate, I browsed through insurance and bank job descriptions. I had hit an all-time low. Could I surrender my soul for health coverage and a steady income? Could I sacrifice my ideals by falling into line? Suddenly, living at home didn’t seem nearly as degrading as selling out. But sadly, other graduates don’t have any choice but to work for temp agencies and retail stores to eke by. That’s the tragedy of student debt: it doesn’t just limit what we do, but who we become. Forget volunteering. Forget traveling. Forget trying to improve your country, or yourself. You’ve got bills to pay, young man. Unfortunately, the recent passage of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act doesn’t portend that times are a-changin’. The act reduces interest rates on Stafford Loans and increases Pell Grant awards. Whoopty-do. There’s no question that this is a step forward. But we’re still talking pennies and nickels when we need to completely revolutionize the government’s role in financing post-secondary education. College is a wonderful experience and something every young citizen should pursue. But without help, a college education is becoming an unaffordable rite of passage and a privilege of the affluent. My loan payments can’t wait much longer, and soon I must leave home to find work that doesn’t compromise my integrity. Although I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I had declared as an accounting major and got a cushy job punching numbers somewhere, I’ll take my history major, my debt and my mom’s cooking any day of the week. "

I don't think anything can touch Boulder. One other town that I think gets dismissed for political reasons is Colorado Springs. If you live on the western side of the town, you're usually just a few minutes from Garden of the Gods and a bunch of other small granite Crags, a bunch of stealth crags on Rampart Range Road, about 40 minutes from 11-Mile Canyon, and about 10 minutes beyond that you are into Turkey Rocks and the granite infinity of the Platte. There was even a somewhat stealth two-pitch 3-4 ice line about 20 minutes outside of town, and a spot offering `~100 feet of 1-2 ice that I could play around on before work. The trailhead to Pikes Peak was also about 15 minutes away. Head about 1.5 hours South and you're at Shelf Road and warm south facing rock that you can climb just about all winter long. Also big enough for real-jobs, the downtown core has Colorado College, small bookshops, bars, restaurants, etc - just about all of it with a great view of the Front Range. And ridiculous amounts of Sunshine.

i have a climbing buddy of mine who eventually got divorced for this very reason. his wife was thin and trim long enough to get him sucked in then went off the diet pills (that he didn't know she was on) and ballooned. he stuck it out with her for years, but it was a source of friction - 'you should love me for who I am', and no effort to get in shape. eventually they split. I think the same rule applies to emotional stuff as well. Assume that you no longer have to put any effort into the way you treat the other half and you're essentially doing the same thing.

I think that "letting yourself go" after you close the deal is a sign that you take your other half for granted, which is something that borders on contempt IMO.

Rousseau being captured and eaten by cannibals would have been more ironic...

Interesting that you make no mention of Chris's discovery that his father had not been divorced from his first wife when he married Chris's mom, and also fathered a child with the first wife after Chris was born. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an 18-year-old capable of forgiving their father after learning that, but maybe the ones who aren't naive and self-righteous would just take that right in stride. The family I refer to includes Mother/Father/siblings. Krakauer discusses the impact that the guys choices had on his mother at some length in interviews that he's given about the book. I don't recall the book clearly enough to remember to what extent he mentioned this in the book.

yes, it does. nice PC try though. kids need both a male and female role-model, so with same-sex parents, that missing role model needs to be filled somehow - ideally speaking that is. male and female, or masculine and feminine? And why? Is it simply so that they have a frame of reference when interacting with the rest of us? Conceptions of what a good Masculine roll model, and a good feminine roll model are vary so much from culture to culture, I wonder how much value they really have, except within that rather narrow group. When people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born, following the local social and familial norms may have been more necessary, but any more (especially in the US) we have the ability to create our own families and subcultures around us and can tune the people we associate with to our desires/beliefs. So I don't think that the traditional male/female has as much value as it used to. I agree with the notion that same-sex couples can raise healthy, well-adjusted kids - but I also think that kids naturally seek persons of their own sex to model themselves after, and counsel from people who faced similar situations/obstacles/dilemmas, and if that's not present to a certain extent in the home, they'll seek it out elsewhere. It'd be especially interesting to see what the statistics have to say about the outcomes in those cases of girls reared in male-male households, and boys reared in female-female households. My limited, biased, subjective, and wholly unscientific opinion is that boys raised in female-female homes will be both overprotected and overindulged in a way that's not going to prepare them terribly well for any of the more male-dominated environments that they happen to encounter in their lives.

Just to make sure that I'm not misinterpreting this statement - you are claiming to have had sex with three of your brother's wives, your best friend's wife, and two of your wife's sisters?

Definitely shades of the Grizzly Man, but he, unlike McCandless, was dedicated to something outside of himself, which made him a more sympathetic - if equally tragic - figure IMO.

I read the book and thought that he was a profoundly naive, narcissistic kid who was obsessed with his own righteousness, and the manner in which he treated his family was completely inexcusable.

I love the auto-congratulatory flourishes that are appended to all of your posts. Do you often find yourself winking slyly at your right hand and saying "It was good for you, too - wasn't it?" People are not rational actors and...the optimal response to this is to allow a centralized authority control over what they are allowed to chose? "unless you assume that such a mechanism will be completely effective in preventing any additional rise in global temperatures, part of the response to global warming will consist in adapting to it." Even if your fantasy of a centralized authority given carte blanche, the odds are high that adapting to changes in global climate would constitute a substantial part of the human response to it. Sorry.

"People will more often blow their finite resources on shit they don't need; individually and nationally. How about my new Esplanade? 194 billion more for Iraq? No problem! That is why both individuals and this country as a whole face an increasingly worrisome financial future." Clearly what we need then, is for a body of technocrats with the means and the authority to review everyone's personal expenditures to insure that they aren't exercising their freedom to spend their income inappropriately. What's the maximum predicted delta in global temperatures that full-implementation of Kyoto would generate? What's the probability associated with the delta? Clamor for top-down globo-mandates enforced by some kind of Uber-bureau-mechanism with infinite budgets and enforcement powers all you want - it's not going to happen. The most likely outcome will consist of voluntary efforts on levels ranging from the individual to the national - that make a dent in trend increases in CO2 emissions, but do not curtail them in time to prevent any additional warming from occuring. No matter whether it's a cooperative mechanism or coercive mechanism that materializes to reduce C02 emissions, unless you assume that such a mechanism will be completely effective in preventing any additional rise in global temperatures, part of the response to global warming will consist in adapting to it. That means the Southeast will adjust water-consumption, infrastructure, etc to changes in precipitation as they happen - rather than imposing draconian water restrictions and constructing a new reservoir the size of Lake Ontario to see them through years where trend precipitation is several standard deviations below the moving average.

There will never be enough money to prepare for every conceivable contingency, so people will always elect to allocate finite resources in a manner that favors the most probable. There's a reason that the per-capita dollars allocated to snow-removal in Portland Maine are greater than those in Portland Oregon. Are you electing to fund your IRA/401(K), or retrofitting your home to withstand a magnitude 10.0 or higher quake?

Democratic congressman in any state with extensive hurricane/flood risk and their constituents. Notable exceptions to the rule being the idiot Governor of Florida and Trent Lott.

If you like this, you'll love paying to rebuild Florida after the next hurricane rolls through. Prevent insurers from pricing risk in an actuarially sound fashion, and guess what happens - they decline to underwrite it. Part II comes when - after they drive the insurers out of the state - the state government creates an "insurer of last resort" which charges rates that are substantially below those needed to underwrite the risk. Last I saw, Florida had something like $5-10 billion in reserves standing against something on the order of half a trillion in potential liabilities. Part III will come when the next Hurricane rolls in, bankrupts the state in one push, and you get to pay for the damage to their property instead of private insurers. Way to stick it to the corporations! Had they not interfered in the insurance market, people who own or are considering owning homes in those areas would have to price the cost of insurance into their decisions about whether to stay in their homes, or to buy them in the first place. The most likely outcome would be a decline in the value of the homes that was commensurate with the increase in the premiums. People who couldn't afford to pay the premiums would have to sell. That's tough - but there's no right to home ownership, much less in a hazardous area - and far more people have been forced out of their homes by property tax levies than insurance premiums. One of the greatest ironies about this situation is that those who are agitating most vocally for action on climate change are those who are typically arguing on behalf of rate-caps like these that have the effect of enouraging ever greater development of the very same coastal/floodplain areas that will be hardest hit by more intense hurricanes, severe weather events, etc.

Yes, I'm sure the Northwest would waltz through an equally severe deviation from historical precipitation levels completely unscathed... "Although rain is due today across parts of the region, it will barely dampen the 16-month drought. Through September, it is the region's driest year in 113 years of record-keeping. In five of the six worst-hit states, rain totals this year are close to a foot below normal. It is the driest year on record for North Carolina and Tennessee, second-driest in Alabama and third-driest in Kentucky. A tree-ring study this summer of Tennessee's rainfall history shows this is the third-driest year for the state in at least 350 years, behind only 1839 and 1708."

$58 a day still seems like a bargain for Crystal. Could be much worse. You could be paying $45/day for this: http://www.crystalmountain.com/images/File/Winter2006_07/downhilltrailmap200607.pdf

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Yeah, I agree it's thier business, but I don't want to pay for it. I want points or a price break on my health insurance for having a normal BMI and exercising and not smoking, etc., just like I get a discount on my car insurance for safe driving. I don't want to pay for someone else's adult onset diabetes and high blood pressure and quadruple bypass. Ditto. A matter of virtue? No. A matter of responsibility? Yes. Many life threatening conditions have an overwhelmingly genetic component. It's not all "personal responsibility" (not even half or a quarter, an a lot of cases). Are you saying that you want a price break (or you want others to pay more, same thing) for your/their genetics? If one accepts the proposition that one has as little control over or responsibility for their behavior as they do their genetic inheritance, then this line of argument might have some merit. There are untold millions of people in this country who have probably inherited traits that make it more challenging for them to avoid harming others in some fashion, yet they enjoy no special exemptions from the expectation that they will do so, unless their impairment is so severe that they are deemed insane and granted a separate legal status whereby they are no longer held responsible for their actions. There may be a certain number of persons who have inherited traits such that society cannot reasonably expect to control the quantity of food that they consume, and they would be afforded exemptions from the expectation that they do so. For everyone else - the fatter they get, the more they should pay for their health insurance. THis is a formula for an even more invasive society. Levy a health care tax on fatties and, faster than you can add curly fries to that shake, they'll class action sue or lobby for legislation and levy a tax on risky behavior that might result in traumatic injury. Remember, the fatties are in the majority. You'll also have to somehow separate out and weigh (no pun intended) the genetic component of disease. That means genetic testing for everyone...and the rampant wholesale denial of insurance that would undoubtedly result. And privacy issues? Pshah! Finally, you'll have to have a system for monitoring behavior (what did you eat today, Mr. JayB?) as part of enforcement. This would undoubtedly result in a health care system many times more expensive due to the aforementioned overhead than the one we have now; hardly a change in the positive direction for anyone. I don't know about you, but pay the same as the two tone tillies so as to enjoy the resultant benefits of a simpler, less expensive one size fits all health care system, and fight obesity through public education: the only method that really works to produce widespread, substantive change in personal behavior. These are good points. As things stand now, the insurance companies can't price risk by simply looking at your age, sex, and driving record and as an effective proxy for your driving habits, and instead had to implement systems to continuously monitor every moment of everyone's driving. It's also true that there's no price competition in this market, so the costs associated with doing so have no bearing on the enthusiasm that any particular company might have on engaging in such monitoring, and if consumers had the option of submitting to continuously surveilance or basing their risk-pricing on their driving record, this would be a matter of indifference to them. The notion that we can distinguish between behaviors that mentally competent adults are capable of regulating, and those that they cannot, and that we can make the distinction between those adults who are capable of performing the mental operations required to do so, and those who can't is the basis of quite a few of the principles that society is organized upon. It's rather odd to observe people arguing so passionately against the same principles that - outside of such a debate - govern their expectations concerning how other people conduct themselves and what they are responsible for. If people can't be expected to govern what they eat, and in what quantities - then they can't be expected to control whether they smoke or not, and the list goes on. I don't think that anyone who argues that the vast majority of people have no control over their weight actually believe such an absurd proposition. So why defend such a specious argument? Why is the idea that there are elements of one's existence that one has substantial control over so threatening? You're much younger than I am, and so you're accustomed to a much more regulated (particularly by unaccountable corporations) world. I'm used to a freer society where privacy means something. Fair enough. It's all about the environment we were brought up in. So it was this environment that's responsible for your oft-stated desire to nationalize a massive sector of the economy and supplant voluntary interactions with control by a massive centralized bureaucracy, grant the government control over everyone's health care, and your desire to have the same entity micromanage all facets of human activity beyond simple respiration that generate C02 emissions?

Because there is plenty of evidence to show regulation of such procedures is not a simple matter? Merely saying it is simple does not change the substantial amount of data showing for the population as a whole it is not simple. Continue trying to change human nature to fit your system JayB, it worked so well for the Soviets Who is talking about changing behavior? I don't climb, ski, or paddle any less because I pay more for life and disability insurance - but people who choose not to assume these risks pay less than me. I could care less if people choose to gorge themselves all day long - if that's how they want to live, that's fine with me. I do think that it's high time that we drop the absurd pretense that mentally competent adults have zero control over what and how much they eat, and increase the rates for people who eat their way into a high-risk BMI, just like we do for people who smoke.

Any guesses as to which party they tend to vote for?