JayB

Is there anything at Walmart that's as generic and stale as reciting shopworn, derisory little articles of faith about Walmart or their customers in order to establish one's hip-urban-lefto-trendo-cred? Economics is another topic that I find the proximito-elite tend to excel at. Lots of gems like "I just think that, like, we're in some serious trouble unless the workers can afford to buy the product they're making." Pearls, pearls I tell you. It's almost as though the act of passing a trite fallacy back and forth without any logical analysis is roughly analagous to the actions of those rotary rock-polisher thingies, and their infinite succession of collisions with equally dull objects eventually lends them a polish and an appeal that their substance wouldn't otherwise warrant. I live less than a block from one of the leading non-profit grocery collectives to be found anywhere in the city. It said so in the local art-zine. Less than a block. In the whole city. Seriously. Right next to where I live. Not too far from the neighbor who I overheard describing one of the rolls at the local Sushi-joint as "Mesmerizing." It's amazing. Right here. I'll see if I can find one between the free-range soy and the bulk lentils, though.

You are aware of the fact that - right now - somewhere in the city, there is a vegan poetry SLAM(!) that you are missing out on. Right now. You can't put a price on that.

Whenever I hear someone talking about "culture," as it pertains to where they've chosen to live, and actually have the chance to discuss their personal habits with them, it normally turns out that they don't actually read anything terribly complex or profound on a regular basis and may have never done so, haven't developed the capacity to appreciate whatever art form it is that they purport to be a patron of, etc - and generally think that the mere presence of institutions harboring, catering to, or displaying the works of great artists or thinkers somehow grants them admission into a higher cultural echelon by means of a process of spatial osmosis. There is a kind of transparently desperate aspirational quality to this kind of pretense that is almost touching, though. Yes, the mere fact that you drive past "The Museum of X" on your way to work automatically elevates you above the guy who drives past Home Depot while doing the same. Most of them also have an astonishingly poor understanding of the physical and biological world. All pretense, no substance. Sorry, but wallowing in the latest lurid kitch-o-thon that Andrew Lloyd Weber cranks out and forking over $100 a plate for dinner afterwards doesn't confer membership in any kind of artistic, intellectual, or cultural strata above the guy who takes the family to Applebees on the way to Cineplex. Any town where the average person is unlikely to be displaying this ghoulash of multiple pretenses at every opportunity, which is typically at least as hollow and shallow as it is nauseating, is much more likely to have the kind of culture that actually matters.

Colorado is not quite as high on the list as the PNW, but it's pretty sweet. I think if I had to pick a place to live there and there were no constraints imposed by the onerous necessity of having to make a living, I'd take Salida or Buena Vista. When I was there both were relatively undiscovered and affordable, but that could have easily changed by now. I've heard even a couple of the odd little towns like Fairplay up in South park have started to change from the mix of crazy-ass survivalists, ranchers, hold-out prospectors, resort-town burn-outs, etc into satelites of greater Breckenridge. Haven't been there for a while, so its hard to say how true this is.

My three general criteria would be: 1. Not East of the Rockies. 2. Close to major mountain range. 3. Reasonable to low cost of living. Something between Ellensburg and Cle Elum would suit me just fine.

What? Never been to Vantage? I seem to recall names like Yoder, Pogue, Windham, Massey, Kerns, Collum, etc associated with the bolted lines out there. Don't think these folks fall into the category we're discussing here.

:LMAO: assworked just got worked... Why do I have to waste my time explaining posts that you didn't even read. I never said that I knew of bolted cracks in Washington. I said that if there were any, then newbs would eventually bolt the rest of them because they wouldn't know any better. How many routes is anyone aware of that have been installed by rank beginners? I'm talking sport-lines here, not even the mythical grid-bolted crack.

can you say "regional ethics" ruMR? Or are you conversing in JayB? Didn't realize that we were fretting over Eurostone here.

Every once in a great while a cruxy spot that's tough to protect with gear, or that used to be protected with an old pin gets bolted, or someone puts up a line an puts a bolt someplace that someone else is convinced protects well enough with gear. If this is the problem you are talking about, that'd be one thing. Bring the hilti-armed newbie hordes grid-bolting line after line and you've drifted into the realm of fantasy. This is not a problem. This is not even a potential problem worth worrying about.

There's quite a few intersections on the path from climbing a route with a bolted crack to rap-bolting another crack that would prevent such an income in any remotely plausible scenario. The specter of the "Bosch-Toting-Crack-Bolting-Newbie-Hordes-From-Hell" is so far-fetched it would make the average urban legend blush. Can anyone point to a single crack in Washington that's fallen prey to the dreaded bolt-happy newb?

"For example if you allow even a single protectable crack to remain bolted, climbers who don't know any better will assume that all cracks like it should be bolted.Eventually there is a bolt ladder all the way up Outer Space, or the Nose, or -insert your favorite rock climb here-." This has to be one of the sillier statements I've ever heard on this site.

Viewing the world through an everlasting fog of venal paranoia and shallow, narcissistic, pop-spiritualism and attempting to pass it off as enlightenment is clearly the ideal state in which to pass through life.

Things are just getting started in Venezuela. They've just started the long-march on "The Road to Serfdom." Destinations: Repression, Poverty, and Collapse. There is no escape from this.

Crass? Yes. Heartless? Yes Truthful??? Yes. Seahawks equates socialism with totalitarianism. One does not follow necessarily from the other. Once the state has amassed enough power to assume complete control over the economy, it has more than enough power to crush all dissent. Leon Trotsky said it best: "'The old principle, 'Who does not work shall not eat,' has been replaced by a new one: 'Who does not obey shall not eat.' ''

The U.S. will never stop the competitive slide with this approach. Again, an educated workforce is the only competitive edge we will have going forward and 'baseline catastrophic coverage' will never provide the necessary baseline of family health necessary. 1). You seem to be either oblivious to or deliberately omitting an acknowledgment of the role that lifestyle choices have on one's health, and healthcare expenses. Take a look at obesity alone, here. There are scores of millions of fat people who have zero problem accessing an extravagance of preventive care, none of which has any impact whatsoever on their waistlines. Ditto for smoking, etc. 2). The notion that preventive care is a major, or even the sole determinant of workforce productivity and/or competitiveness is just bizarre. Education, taxation, infrastructure, labor-market regulation, trade policy, etc, etc, etc, all factor into the mix. I don't think that you'd be able to convince many folks that direct foreign investment in China or India is driven by the strength of their health care systems.

Kind of dumb question, it not really free, someone pays. So if the poor can't pay and the rich know how to get around paying who going to pay??? I think you can answer that. I'd agree with you that the poor can't pay, but the data doesn't support the conclusion that the rich aren't paying. Top 1% pay ~ 23% of all taxes. Top 5% pay ~ 52.2% of all taxes. Top 20% pay ~ 68.2% of all taxes. These percentages have been trending upwards ever since Reagan cut the top marginal rate. This is the data. People can argue about whether this is fair per their particular conception of the term ad infinitum. http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf

This paper from Baldwin during his days as a Useful Idiot is classic. http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/blog/baldwin.pdf "Freedom in the USA and the USSR." Key Quote: "I champion civil liberties as the best means of building the power on which worker's rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When the power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means." Emphasis in the original. Thankfully, the same naive idiocy which enabled him to fawn over the Soviet Union during the worst of the Stalinist violence, prevented him from realizing that the means that he was envisioning to create a worker's paradise along the lines of the Soviet model in the US would not only *not* bring about the desired ends, but would prevent such an outcome from ever occuring so long as they - civil liberties - remained in place. Hilarious.

I'd love to be responsible for my personal health and health records instead of having the medical establishment as highly interested party caretakers who except for the rich (or those not rich willing to pay massive fees) provide no user specific services. I needed to receive an antimalarial. A Drs office charged me $100 for the pleasure of following the exact CDC website flow chart. He was nice enough to print out a copy for me. His value added = 0, however he's the gatekeeper to a prescription. How convenient. I'd have no problem with making the vast majority of drugs OTC.

Both the availability, and the wait associated with the procedure, would depend on which state you are talking about. Still doesn't support the conclusion that the benefits of a health-care market which is not a public monopoly are confined to the entities that derive their profits from that system. Guess what happens to innovation in pharmaceuticals if the single most significant provider of effective demand for new therapeutics imposes price controls. Might introduce the rest of the world to the flip-side of the "free rider" problem when there's nothing for them to ride for free.

One could argue excepting the negotiated insurer discounts, self insuring for catastrophic care is fiscally realistic. In 7 years I, or my employers, have paid probably $20,000 in premiums to health insurers. I have utilized my health insurance a total of twice for a total doctor bill of $150. I would love to have all of my compensation as cash, and obtain a tax deduction for the premiums that I pay (rather than the tax benefit being confined to my employer) on a plan of my choosing - which would have a deduction on the order of $5K or more. Don't see this happening under any single-payer model.

Have you been out drinking with the Senior Senator again? The health care system sucks. It's all the profits of the freemarket with none of the consumer benefits. So when the pharmaceutical companies develop an entirely new class of drugs, like statins, or TNF blockers like Enbrel, or any of the many anti-HIV drugs and the benefit is confined exclusively to the drug companies? Blow out your knee skiing, and the only one who benefits from the reconstruction is the physician? Etc, etc, etc, etc.

Well that's reassuring, seeing as this is decidedly not the case in Canada. How is this different than the current model, other than one can only "opt-in" to the government healthcare system via poverty, disability, old-age, etc?

That's a joke no doubt - the families of those same individuals do not have adequate, secure health insurance coverage either. Hell, who does have decent coverage that wouldn't be canned in a heartbeat at a job change after a serious illness, accident, or cancer? You? Are you sure? Just to take the "job change" example, you could go a long way towards addressing this by transferring the tax deductions for health-care premiums away from employers and granting them to individuals. Affordability varies wildly from one state to the next, and the prime reason for this is the different mandates that are imposed on insurers in some states but not in others. Make it possible for insurers to sell insurance in any state, and transfer the tax benefit for premiums from employers to employees and you've gone a long way towards making health-care more affordable. Another interesting tidbit with respect to affordability comes from the data that Massachusetts collected when they were putting their health care plan together. They found that the single largest segment of uninsured individuals were young men earning decent salaries who could afford health-insurance, but elected not to obtain it, presumably because they figured that they didn't really need it. "Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's communications director, said that for those people with incomes above 300 percent of poverty, "our assumption was that these would be mostly single mothers who just did not have the wherewithal to get insurance. It turned out it was mostly young males. In some cases they are making very attractive salaries. These are people who just don't imagine themselves needing care, but of course when they break a leg when they're out bungee jumping they go to the hospital and we end up paying for their care anyway." You also seem to be leaving the development of new or better treatments completely out of the analysis, and also seem to be under the assumption that the adoption of a single-payer model would have some meaningful impact on the manner in which people lead their lives. Anyone working on the front lines can tell you what percent of their work is devoted to dealing with ailments that are substantially self-inflicted.

Even if all of the assertions about the state of the medical system here were true, this wouldn't necessarily support the conclusion that nationalizing health-care and forcing everyone into a single plan would be the optimal means by which to address these problems. Massachusetts has adopted a plan that provides for universal coverage without the state taking over the health-care market. It's not perfect, but it's accomplishes many, if not all of the objectives that advocates of a single payer system claim are behind their support of a single-payer system.

That's precisely the point. The term health care market is complex and heterogeneous. Health care services administered and paid for by the government might be the best way to provide health care for those who are constitutionally incapable of paying for it themselves - children, the indigent, the elderly poor, etc - but it doesn't follow that this model would be optimal for the remainder of the health care market any more than the fact that we have public defenders for those who cannot afford their own attorneys means that government administration of the entire legal market is the way to go. It's not like there aren't alternatives to the single payer model that would achieve many of the same goals. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/us/05mass.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=f0af8c5ff31d540d&ex=1301889600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss