JayB

http://www.truth-out.org/conservatives-twist-economic-debate/1329850101 1. What is the definition of rich per the Census? 2. Did the Census Bureau suddenly stop collecting income on rich households in the early 90's. If not - then you'd have to have data that demonstrated that the change in the number and magnitude of the incomes beyond whatever arbitrary cut-off they used after the said date had a material impact on the metric. 3. It's possible that they don't include household's beyond $500K/year because there aren't that many of them. The original point was that the vast majority of the change in the gini coefficient since the early 70's has been driven by the fragmentation of low-income families into separate households with an average of less than one full-time wage earner per household (vs the top quintile where the number of wage earners per household increased, and the divorce rate leveled off roughly a generation ago), and the diversion of more compensation into non-cash benefits. Did you ever post data that refutes those points?

It's entirely possible that that's the case for you, but that certainly hasn't been my experience. I find the argument that people who dig pits and make rational decisions about which slopes to ski based on their considerable experience and training don't ever get buried and die on slopes that they've just evaluated particularly strange given the nature of the fatalities that occur in the backcountry every...single...year. I suspect that Rad has a beacon, probe, shovel, and avalanche training and yet he posted the following: "I am very conservative and rarely head into the backcountry because I am anxious about avalanches and recognize that I don't have the skills or knowledge to be confident I can make the right decisions to avoid making a fatal error. This means I miss some fantastic experiences, I'm sure, but I'm willing to make that trade-off." There's lots of people that fall into that group. They're less likely to take calculated risks based on confidence in their expertise. Consequently they're less likely to get caught in an avalanche and die than people who are prepared to assume those risks on the basis of their skill, training, etc.

[video:youtube] Skip to ~3:35 to see an avy test with dummies. -It's been established over and over again that things that mitigate the consequences of taking risks lead to more risk taking - but it's also easy to determine that their net impact is to save many more lives than whatever false sense of security that their use might create actaully claims. It's interesting to me that there's still such an active debate regarding the utility and limitations of avalanche safety equipment, but no one in their right mind would waste any discussing the potential for modern nylon kernmantle climbing ropes to encourage excess risk relative to woven hemp, and thus lead to more deaths. -On a related note, I find it odd how much time we talk about beacons, probes, avalungs, etc encouraging excess risk taking behavior, and how little we talk about the risks associated with the false sense of confidence that avalanche education can instill. From what I've observed in myself and others, presuming that you can assess the stability of a slope with enough accuracy to ski slopes that you'd avoid if you had less confidence in your expertise drives waaaay more, and more serious risk-taking behavior than having beacons, probes, etc. In terms of safety, knowing that you can't possibly know enough to make the right call every single time when the hazards are elevated, and staying off of avy-slopes or just out of the BC all-together until the snowpack settles down, is way more likely to keep you alive than pursuing a level-3 cert and operating under the assumption that you'll be able to make the right calculation 100% of the time. Of course nothing beats being the level three-guy who behaves as though he knows next to nothing about how to evaluate high risk slopes and just stays off of them when the risks are elevated - but I have to wonder how many people fall into that category.

This topic came up in a discussion about the kinds of articles that people would like to see added to cc.com, and I thought that this is the kind of thing that the collective user base might have quite a bit of experience with, and be willing to share. If it generates some quality content, it might be something that we can turn into something permanent. There are definitely women out there who have introduced new boyfriends to climbing, which I'm sure has its own unique challenges, so if you are one of those women - feel free to chime in and share what you've learned about how to make that process work. Having said that, the demographic reality is such that it mostly goes the other way and that's where most people who approach this problem will be coming from. I'll try to post a few thoughts based on my own experience later, but the short summary is that I went through my own trial and error process and found out that getting it right (turning each outing into a positive experience for each person) had a lot more to do with dealing with my own limitations than with my female partners'. Most of that meant fine tuning objectives so that I didn't feel too burdened by the responsibility that comes along with being the more experienced partner on one hand, and feeling uninspired by the outing on the other. Recognizing that certain kinds of objectives just made me way too anxious for her safety to enjoy what we were doing was also a big part of figuring things out. What emerged from the back-end of the filter was multi-pitch slab climbing on beautiful weather days. I find them plenty engaging on lead, she digs the fact that we can climb interesting routes in dramatic settings where the emphasis is on balance, body position, and movement and not pain tolerance or a level forearm conditioning that's rarely possible to maintain with the demands on her time. That translates into fewer outings, but we both enjoy ourselves way more than we ever have before.

-Some of this stuff could be done wiki-style, too. I'll start a thread on "How to Introduce Your Girlfriend to Climbing," and see if it generates the kind of content that we could turn into perma-link, edited permalink, or have someone read through and distill into an article. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1058472/How_to_Introduce_Your_Girlfrie#Post1058472

I think an article on volcano the zen of volcano climbing by a local that's oriented towards out of town climbers would be useful. What I have in mind would be short, have little or nothing to do with the technical aspects of volcano climbing, and just focuses on some of the intangibles that are hard to pick up on from a distance "Be humble with your objectives, be flexible with your plans, and be aware of local weather patterns and the specific hazards they present to climbers."

Hey Austin: Here's a suggestion (worth what you paid for it) - save some money and take an extended recon/climbing trip to Washington before uprooting yourself from your home base. If you're a young guy with no other commitments you could very easily see all of the communities that you might have an interest in living in first hand, climb all over the state, and make lots of connections with other climbers over the course of a summer, and find yourself in a much better position when and if you actually decide to make the move. Better yet - since it sounds like you're poised to go into teaching, you can get established as a PE teacher and literally live anywhere in the country *and* spend an entire season out here without having to worry about where your next meal is going to come from. When and if you decided to make the move to Washington, you'll be in a much better position in virtually every way. Best of luck,

I don't need 100% to commit to an unreversable set of moves - I just need to be able to convince myself I'm in the ballpark. I free climb over a lot of marginal pro on FAs and have taken no shortage of 50+ footers over the years. It is a fine line though and I've backed off of as many of those situations as I've pushed. Edit: I should state that I'm ridiculously rational when climbing - in fact, turning off thinking and evaluating is probably my biggest challenge in a clutch along with breathing which I often forget to do. That as opposed to my old partner who in a clutch could sort of roll his eyes back, get almost malevolently primitive with a strange breathing pattern - when you saw that you knew you were with the best possible rope gun in circumstances where you both might die. I've always been alternately somewhat frightened and envious of him in that regard. My observation wasn’t so much about the absolute magnitude of the risk, but the nature of the risk and the decision-making process that goes into mitigating it. I’m sure that the objective risks associated with the routes that you climb are substantial and would be lethal to a large swath of the climbing world, but you seem to have a adopted a highly systematic approach to mitigating the risks that reduces them to a level that you’re comfortable with. Like most people who have spent some time climbing, I’ve been in irreversible situations everywhere from crag routes to alpine walls – but getting to the point of maximal risk was an incremental process with multiple checkpoints that offered abundant opportunities re-evaluate key decisions, contemplate alternate strategies, which have normally included backing off - before becoming irreversibly committed. E.g. lots of little decisions that generally allow for at least a few seconds of thought between them. In whitewater (at least in my experience) the risk evaluation process generally boils down to one big, irreversible decision followed by a burst of highly reflexive actions in a dynamic environment where the sensory inputs are changing way too fast to process consciously. The medium changes so quickly, the hazards are so deceptive, and the extent to which it’s possible to stay 100% in control at all times (a big part of the game is assessing the consequences of losing control beforehand) is so much more limited that the real-time, algorithmic, lossless risk processing that you seem to groove on (at least from your posts)just isn't possible.

I thought this was interesting: "Using widely available public data we can compare whitewater paddling against a number of familiar activities. Its accident rate ranked well below those reported for recreational swimming (2.6) and for bicycling (1.6) Whitewater kayaking had a higher fatality rate, 2.9 per 100,000. This ranks well below well below the figures of 3.5 for scuba diving and 3.2 for rock climbing. Whitewater paddling thus falls near the bottom of the risk sport family, and kayaking sits comfortably in the middle. Looking at the big picture, 62 fatalities among whitewater paddlers comprises about .026% of the total drownings in this country (2400) each year." I found this interesting because it's totally at odds with my own assessment of the relative risk level in rock climbing and whitewater kayaking (kayaking feels at least an order of magnitude more dangerous to me because of the nature of the risks, and it seems like I've had personal connections to more people that have died kayaking than climbing, despite the number of people I know in each activity being roughly the same). After reading JosephH's posts (which I enjoyed quite a bit, BTW) I found myself thinking it'd be the antithesis of his kind of risk because it requires making 100% committed, totally un-reversible decisions about risk on the basis of information that can never be perfect, all of the critical variables are intensely dynamic, and can't ever be known with 100% certainty.

Well, I suppose we'll just have to disagree about the extent to which I understand the methodology behind the figures. With regards to the gini-coefficient in particular, I took a moment to refresh my memory about how it's calculated, and it doesn't seem like a dynamic where the proportion of households above a particular income threshold is increasing while the proportion in the lowest quintiles stays constant is inconsistent with an increasing gini coefficient. Per the internets the gini coefficient is equal to A/A+B, and it seems like expanding the percentage of households in the top income quintile could easily shift the curve that defines B in a way that increases A and thus increases the Gini coefficient. As far as income is concerned, it's just not the case that households in any quintile are making less money than they were 20-30 years ago. The folks who happen to be in the top quintile in 2007 are making dramatically more than the people who happened to be in the top income quintile in 1979, but as I've been saying the composition of households has changed over that period of time, and quintiles are dynamic statistical abstractions, not actual people. Quite a few of the people who were in the top quintile in 1979 are dead, some of the people in the top quintile in 2007 weren't even born in 1979, and people move through various quintiles over the course of their working lives. I'm sure that the chart that you've posted about the share of wealth relative to the whole is correct, but "share of wealth" is different than annual income, which is not the same thing as absolute wealth. It's entirely possible for a household to have seen a decrease in their share of national wealth decline since the early 80's, despite the fact that both their annual income and the value of all of the assets that they own are higher in real terms.

It's not like I'm making up the data. I've forgotten the source for the first but pretty much every plot of productivity, total compensation, and take home pay over the same period will look like that. If healthcare costs rise at a few percent a year then over 50 years it doesn't seem inconceivable that the total magnitude of the costs could double. Ditto for the same compounded increase driving the average cost relative to compensation up even as the percentage of the workforce with private coverage declines. If the percentage of households in the upper quintile (I believe the data is from the census, but if you follow the embed code back to the URL I'm sure that you can find it) increases and the percentage in the lowest/lower quintile stays constant that doesn't necessarily seem inconsistent with rising household income inequality to me. I honestly can't remember how the Gini coefficient is computed, but if I'm completely wrong on that let me know.

Those are interesting examples, but the vast majority of folks don't work in either manufacturing or farming these days. But yes, the computer, as an example, has helped increase the productivity of office jobs as well. That said, I don't know what is the solution - it is apparant, however, that the gains in productivity - increased profit and wealth, are not being shared - I wouldn't even say equally because there is a risk in business ownership - but the upward push of benefits is obvious while the middle class is slumping. Yet cranking it out for the boss man. Well - it was just a representative example to show that you've got to consider the impact of productivity gains on both consumers and producers to get an accurate picture of the effect on society. It's happening in every sector, but it's just easier to think through examples with tangible inputs and outputs. On the intangible side, the supply-chain and inventory management efficiencies pioneered by the likes of Walmart have spread throughout the entire retail sector and have, thanks to competition amongst retailers, resulted in dramatically lower prices than we'd have otherwise. The aggregate effect has increased consumer purchasing power by hundreds of billions of dollars, but the folks working in the warehouses probably aren't making any more money - so consequently the gap between productivity and total compensation for workers in that sector has probably increased massively. How much of a financial cut should the guys working in the warehouse who had nothing to do with developing or financing these innovations get from these productivity gains? The answer from consumers is clearly "little or none," since it's their comparison shopping that has driven the entire phenomenon. Also - one last chart for the day. I agree that the statistics show that the middle class is shrinking, but it doesn't appear to be because the percentage of households in the lower income quintiles is expanding...

Total comp has still gone up. It's not entirely clear that there's much or anything that can be done to close the gap between productivity growth and compensation growth since the labor/skill/training component of productivity gains has been vastly outstripped by the gains driven by increasing automation, which is what gives us the tables like the one below: The returns to the inventor and the owner the robot that can enable one guy to do the work of 20 are always going to be higher than the gains to the one guy who operates the robot. What do you propose to do about that? The other thing to bear in mind is that in the absence of a monopoly in which producers and capture all productivity gains, the vast majority of the monetary benefits associated with productivity gains accrue to consumers - who get vastly better stuff at dramatically lower prices. Imagine a farmer that hires a combine operator to harvest a thousand acres of wheat in a day, and compare that with a farmer who has to hire a thousand people to do the same thing by hand. Then ask yourself what effect this has on the price of food. Who benefits the most under this scenario - the farmer, or the thousands of people who get the same amount of food at a dramatically lower cost?

Real median pay *has* gone down if you exclude benefits from compensation. If you include them, it has gone up steadily. Non-cash benefits have become a more significant percentage of total compensation. The lower you are on the pay scale, the more dramatic the effect is. Still a minor effect relative to the effect of household composition when it comes to household income inequality.

I think that your data on household inequality is correct, my point was that the overwhelming majority of the household income inequality are driven by social factors (divorce, having children outside marriage, etc) that are independent from how much people are making on the job. Easy example. Family A and Family B have two income earners each. Family B divorces and splits into two households. The household income inequality between A and B, formerly zero, has instantly increased by 100% despite the fact all of the individual incomes have remained the same after the split. If you look at the data (see the table above), it's clear that there are a lot more "Family B's" in the lower income quintiles, and the difference in divorce, illegitimacy, etc betwen the top and bottom income quintiles has steadily increased since the 1970s.

Where do you log resistance to vaccination, homeopathy and all of the other healing modalities that have no scientific evidence to support them, hostility to drought, disease, and pest resistant crops generated via genetic engineering, embracing new-age religions, etc, etc, etc. I agree that virtually all of the creationists are right-wing social conservatives, ditto for anti-global warming folk, etc but it's hard to sustain the argument that the right has a monopoly on antiscientific beliefs.

Whatever's been driving household income inequality clearly isn't happening at the individual compensation level. This data series and others show quite clearly that shifts in behaviors outside the workplace that determine whether or not people have children inside or outside of marriage or not, whether or not they stay married and all of the other habits, behaviors, and values that influence the formation and stability of households is a much more significant factor. It's not clear how clamping down on CEO pay is going to promote the sort of values, behaviors, and practices that promote household formation and stability amongst the folks in the lowest income quintiles, who have the highest divorce rate, most children outside of marriage, etc, etc, etc.

Not quite on-topic but folks perusing the thread might find the information useful (shovel test): http://www.voile-usa.com/AvalancheVol86_54-60.pdf

Remember both SS and Medicare are caped and Mitt doesn't have any payroll taxes so - usual disingenuity from the Anti-Tax dipshits aside - many more people pay more in taxes than Mitt. I've certainly paid more as a % some years. It's weird to count SS and Medicare as taxes, particularly so for people in the lower end of the pay-scale, for two reasons. The first is that they were and are sold as mechanisms by which people set aside their own personal money to finance their own personal benefits - essentially a forced savings program. The second is that the less money you make, the more likely you are to get far more money out of those programs than you paid into them. "Summary: For people with lower than average earnings, the ratio of the lifetime benefits they receive from Social Security to the lifetime payroll taxes they pay for the program is higher than it is for people with higher average earnings. In that sense, the Social Security system is progressive. For people in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution, the ratio of benefits to taxes is almost three times as high as it is for those in the top fifth. http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/77xx/doc7705/12-15-Progressivity-SS.pdf In any event, when you factor in all taxes minus transfer payments you get the chart above. People who make less money pay a much lower effective net tax rate. The tax system that was structured to be progressive is very progressive. The less money you make, the lower your real tax rate, and it'll even go negative if your income is low enough, and the value of the benefits that you get will exceed the value of the taxes that you pay. The higher your income, the higher your real tax rate, the the value of the benefits that you receive will be dramatically less than the value of the taxes that you pay. That's the reality. The only people who are upset are the people who are pretending it's otherwise, despite the mountain of statistical data to the contrary.

Agree with just about all of that. The only major quibble I have is that the current fiction about SS is that it's not a welfare program to keep people who didn't save enough on their own from being destitute, it's a compulsory retirement program in which people's Social Security payments are funded by their own contributions. If that's the case, then there's no need to tax income above a certain threshold because the odds that someone clearing $500K per year is going to need SS to keep him off of the cat-food diet are next to zero. If we did eliminate the exemption but still maintained the fiction that it's simply a compulsory retirement savings where each persons savings covers' their payouts, I'd be in favor of lifting the cap until a particular person sets aside enough money to fund the benefits that they are entitled to. Make Bill Gates pay 1.5 million in SS taxes for one year and then he's done. I personally think that since SS is actually a welfare program, it makes much more sense to admit as much and start lowering the SS tax and means-testing it so that we're not sending Bill Gates a check that he doesn't need to keep himself from destitution in his old age.

It may not be and I wouldn't particularly care if it were eliminated. I'm for lower, flatter tax rates that have zero exemptions for anything. I think that the optimal tax rate on capital gains and dividends is zero, but that'll never happen so I'd be happy to compromise by taxing all income at fixed flat rates. Aside from being way more efficient (way easier to prepare taxes, way harder to defraud the government, way less incentive to bribe congress to give you a special exemption, way less incentive to engage in convoluted and wasteful behavior just to dodge taxes, etc), it'd be much easier for the average person to avoid getting confused by the difference between things like the top marginal rate and the effective tax rate. The point of the article, which is backed up by all of the statistical data, is that all of this business about the rich paying a lower tax rate than Warren Buffet's secretary is a flat out crock. Even with the lower capital gains rate, and every other tax preference Romney's effective tax rate is still higher than 90% of all taxpayers, half of whom either pay no income tax or have a negative income tax. The more money you make, the higher your effective federal tax rate, and the higher your share of all federal taxes paid. Factor in the value of all taxes (state, local, federal) and net out the value of all income transfers and this is what the effective tax rate looks like:

One more time: Our taxes are OK Be honest: Do you pay more than Mitt? [No - and neither does Buffet's Secretary] The release of Mitt Romney's tax returns — the news he paid 13.9 percent of his earnings in income taxes — has rocketed one of my pet crusades back to the top of the charts. Which is: We are clueless how low our taxes really are. Apparently many of my brethren in the media must pay more in taxes than Mitt. A lot more. Because his taxes were described in most headlines this week as "low," and his effective tax rate as "only" 13.9 percent. Some portrayed his burden as "startlingly light" (New York Times' Paul Krugman.) The tax man must also gouge Democrats much deeper than Mitt. Because they responded as if Romney — who paid $3 million on earnings of $21.7 million in 2010 — is a freeloader. "Mitt Romney used every loophole in the book available to the wealthiest and large corporations to avoid paying his fair share," said the Democratic National Committee. "The president believes that it is not fair — inherently not fair — that millionaires and billionaires pay at a lower rate than average Americans who are struggling to get by," said President Obama's press secretary. Even some Republicans ribbed Romney. Newt Gingrich offered to name his 15 percent flat-tax plan the Mitt Tax. So that "all Americans could then pay the rate Romney paid. I think that's terrific." I must be some sort of slacker, because I have to admit: I pay less than Mitt. I'm not going to release my tax returns until I make my run for president, so for now you'll just have to believe me. But I do routinely pay a lower effective federal tax rate than the lowly Mitt But here's the thing: So, most likely, do you. Because according to the IRS, more than 90 percent of Americans pay at a lower effective rate than Mitt. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2017324261_danny25.html

Women's set up has been spoken for.

185's are spoken for. Score the 163's for your wife or girlfriend and if it turns out she hates skinning uphill with a pack on you're only out $125!

Good deal for anyone looking to get into the BC game without paying a fortune. Both sets of skis have had lots of use, but still have more than enough life in them to justify the price. #1 (Sold): 185cm Fischer Big Stix with Diamir/Fritschi Freeride bindings (XL, with brakes) and skins (BD Glidelite cowhide, cut wall to wall, missing one tail-clip but BD should be able to hook you up with a replacement). Canned description: "The Big Stix 750 is a lightweight touring ski that's stiff enough to rip the resort. Takes on everything from high-speed hardpack to bumps and mank. Super smooth and powerful. Aircarbon titanium, wood core. Sidecut dimensions 113/75/100 mm; sidecut radius 20m. 8 lb. 4 oz. pr." #2 (sold) 163cm Fischer Alltrax Freeride 68 (05/68/90) with Diamir/Fritschi Titanal II (S) Bindings (no brakes) and skins (Ascension mohair skins) Canned description: "The Freeride 68 bounces back and forth between groomed and ungroomed with no hesitation and plenty of performance on each. "Versatility and ease of use in one package", says SKIING magazine, "easy and forgiving…a lightweight, smooth rider." Will ship UPS ground if you want to add shipping to the price of the skis. If you want to take a look at the skis in-person I can meet you near downtown Seattle.