JayB

Let's compare apples to apples here. Your argument was that that because some subset of the population benefits from health care administered and paid for by the government, it follows that nationalization of the entire medical economy is clearly the optimal model for the provision and delivery of health care for everyone, as well as fostering lifesaving innovations, etc. One could easily make the same arguments for legal services, or any other sector of the economy. Why is it that you are so sure that such an arrangement would be optimal for a segment of the market that is much larger, many times more complex than the sector of the economy in which you make a living, but unsuitable for legal services?

Got mine done for ~ 1250 per eye with Dr. John Jarstad at the Evergreen Eye Clinic. Very happy with the results. My folks got their eyes done their and also had very good results/experiences. This was before the "no blade" thing came along, so that may have affected prices. My wife just got hers done a few months ago with the "no blade" option, and the tab was $4500. Seemed to be roughly the going rate out here, but pretty much everything is more expensive.

BTW - why are all of the passionate advocates of nationalization so unenthusiastic when someone volunteers their profession/industry for the same treatment. Strange.

Works as a bumper sticker, not terribly helpful elsewhere. And proper oversight equals...nationalization?

Good argument for developing a single healthcare data platform, bad argument for transforming all of health care into a public monopoly. Millitary procurements take place within a single payer system, and we've certainly never seen any corruption, waste, inefficiency, or politically motivated misallocations of resources there, have we? BTW, how would you feel about transferring control of IT/electronics/programming to the government? Again, surely the benefits of a single-payer system would be equally valuable in this sector of the economy.

I have an idea that Matt should wholeheartedly embrace, for the sake of intellectual consistency if nothing else. Legal services are a basic right, and there are far too many people in this country who cannot afford quality representation. Public defender's offices, for example, provide legal representation at a cost that's far lower than that which can be obtained in the private market for legal services. Think of the savings to be had, the efficiencies to be realized, and the vast expansion of coverage that will be realized under this model. Clearly the best solution is to adopt a single payer model to provide for universal legal coverage. The government will determine how much all attorney's services are worth, what the total quantity of legal services as a whole, and in each sub-specialty the country will need every year, and compel attorneys to provide representation at a fixed price that it deems fair and reasonable. There are some, who selfishness, greed, or a misplaced faith in "the market's" ability to allocate legal services in an efficient manner, or who question the government's ability to provide legal services that are of the same quality as those obtained in the private market for legal services, or who question the government's right to abridge the citizen's right to choose whichever attorney they think will best represent their interests, but one can see through the naked self interest inherent in these statements. How about it, Matt? What's good for medicine will be good for the law, no?

The government already provides health care for millions under medicare/medicaid/the VA, etc. Government health care is a fact on the ground, and I'm glad that the are programs whereby the states provide care to people who - through no fault of their own - can't reasonably be expected to pay for it. This includes children, the disabled, the elderly, the indigent, etc. Accepting that government has a role in the provision of health care for these people is one thing, accepting that transferring control over the entire health care system to the government and creating a public monopoly over the same is the optimal solution to all of the problems and the shortcomings that currently bedevil our healthcare system is quite another. Welfare payments to those who cannot work can be beneficial to those that need them. It does not follow that we should therefore transfer control of all employment and payrolls to the government.

"I think it is pretty clear that a systematic catalog of where we've invaded or intervened over the last sixty years (post WWII) has a lot closer relationship to where we have had economic interests at stake than it has had with the religious beliefs or internal politics or even the target government's political rhetoric.." Love those scare quotes. Seems like your last reply is an attempt to dodge the fact that no sane or rational explanation of US interventions around the world over the past sixty years is consistent with the thesis that you've put forward in this statement. When you get around to it, it would be interesting to see if you can reconcile how Japan, Europe, Canada, Korea, Taiwain, Australia, etc have managed to get their hands on all of the commodities that they need without seizing the lands that contain the greatest concentrations of the same by force, and how it is that you manage to get your hands on the coffee that you drink every morning without sending a private army to the Colombian highlands to physically seize it for you.

Yes, the Cold War was a minor footnote that had little or no influence these things. Kosovo/Serbia, Haiti, Somalia, etc - all fit into this hypothesis pretty well.

For starters.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb "A History of the Arab Peoples" by Albert Hourani might also be helpful. ..... Japan has no oil whatsoever, and has been one of the world's leading economies for quite some time, yet they "control" all of the oil that they need to by using the resources that they do have to produce goods and services that they exchange for oil. Ditto for Europe. How is this possible without physical control over the resource? We get very little of our oil from foreign territories that we have direct control over, much less that we have conquered millitarily. How does one who insists that physical control over a territory is the sole, or even the optimal, means by which to obtain the resources in the said territory reconcile this theory with these empirical realities.

Quite a bit of the fault may lie with the defense, but my own prejudices are such that I suspect that the testimony of a pro-freestyle skier will matter quite a bit less to the average juror than the testimony produced by an physicist from Caltech who's never hit a jump before in his life. Thankfully there are states like Colorado that have passed statutes covering terrain parks, and Whistler will always be close after one more season of exile out here, so the damage from judgments like this that I disagree with will likely be contained to states like Washington.

I'd love to figure out how you transmogrified the lawsuit outcome into this thesis - it makes liberal conspiracy theories look rational. Every jump has some envelope of entry speed + skier weight that can land within a given comfort level. The smaller that envelope the worse the jump. The envelope can indeed be designed JayB, and it's no stretch to think there should be some reasonable standard for the resorts to design their jumps too, the same as they are required to maintain their lifts to a reasonable standard. I'd actually say it's velocity alone that matters, not the skiers weight, but whatever. A lift and a jump are fundamentally different, and arguing that that it's even possible to apply the same principles to them, much less that ski resorts should be expected to do so is one of the more ludicrous propositions that I've ever heard. One guy fucked up and crippled himself. No matter what parameters go into jump design - even infinite landings for 3 foot kickers - there's simply no way to eliminate the possibility that someone will do something completely fucking stupid and cripple or kill themselves on the said jump, much less specify globally valid quantitative parameters for jump design. The same design, on a different aspect, with different visibility, and different snow conditions, and different temperatures, hit by people with different skills will always produce variable risk that cannot be engineered away except by one set of boundary conditions obtained by reducing the height, width, etc of the said jump to zero.

Like you said. Reading comprehension would help here. There are cases where some specific expertise is necessary to properly evaluate the evidence in a particular case - the DNA evidence in the OJ trial comes to mind here - and that juries composed of people who have the background necessary to understand and evaluate evidence will be different from those who lack these assets. I recognize that this is just a limitation of the jury system that we'll have to live with.

Where did you get the idea that I was arguing against the jury system as a whole? I'm not "falling back" on anything here, but perhaps if you didn't catch the sarcasm in the original post, you may not have caught that either. My point, per the OJ trial, is that they make mistakes, and that it's reasonable to argue that a particular jury did so in arriving at a particular judgment. In this case, I personally think that a jury composed of people who neither ski (11 of 12), nor ski park (the 12th) were not terribly well positioned to determine what constitutes the sole responsibility of the user, and what constitutes the resort's responsibility in a case like this. I think the same is true for those who never ski park. I would be interested in hearing how the notion that the resort is responsible for insuring that all jumps, at all times, under all conditions, are gaper-proof is not going to impact parks. If resorts were intentionally putting unmarked, unavoidable jumps in the middle of runs, then this case would have some merit. The fact that the decisions concerning if, when, and at what speed to hit a particular jump that can only be hit if a particular skier makes a conscious choice to do so means that this case has none. I'm not surprised that you are having a hard time comprehending this, given what I know about your preferred modes of skiing.

My argument wasn't that the jury system needs to be replaced by anything else, but that juries are fallible and sometimes make poor decisions. I think that this is one of those cases. If the system were designed on the basis of the notions that juries were infallible, there would be no provision for appeals. Will this kill off resort skiing, no? Does it have the potential to adversely affect the aspects of the sport that I care most about? I think it does. On our last trip to Whistler, I watched a novice skiier going way, way faster than his skills warranted cruise down a groomed slope and completely eat shit after colliding with a death cookie that had rolled onto the groomer from the cornice above. A groomed slope is every bit as "engineered" as a jump, so I can't see how the resort wouldn't be liable in the event of a lawsuit by the said gaper, or any of hundreds of other circumstances that would also expose ski resorts to liability under the same premise that this lawsuit is based upon.

I thought that the sarcasm the permeated that post would be obvious. Let's read this again: "A general acceptance of the merits of the jury system requires accepting that it works perfectly every time. If the OJ trial taught us anything, its that we can trust juries to reach logically sound, factually correct conclusions in all cases. Thank goodness there's no mechanism built into the judicial system that might mitigate, correct, dilute, or confound the eternal, sublime, platonic truths that emerge from their deliberations." I mean come on, folks.... I was trying to make the same point that you did in your post in response to Carl's assertion that anyone who contests the legitimacy of a single jury's decision is somehow attacking the jury system as a whole. I'm very sympathetic to this guy's plight, but I still think that the jury made the wrong decision, and that both this judgment and the precedent that it sets have the potential to be quite harmful to skiers and skiing, and that anyone who thinks that this will only affect park skiing is mistaken. I can think of a million other cases where this definition of liability would apply, and if the judgment stands, probably will.

I think democracy is valuable only to the extent that it operates within a constitutional framework that promotes the preservation of liberty, but that's a topic for a different forum. But,...Yes. A general acceptance of the merits of the jury system requires accepting that it works perfectly every time. If the OJ trial taught us anything, its that we can trust juries to reach logically sound, factually correct conclusions in all cases. Thank goodness there's no mechanism built into the judicial system that might mitigate, correct, dilute, or confound the eternal, sublime, platonic truths that emerge from their deliberations.

I think that the "accountability-for-all-actions-no-matter-what-the-condition-of-the-terrain" model being argued for here makes a lot of sense. Someone attempts to straight-line through in-bounds glades and dies, and the resort didn't have NASA engineers come out and insure that the distribution, girth, and limb-protrusion stats were optimized for a particular pitch and snow-conditions for all conceivable lines at all conceivable speeds by all conceivable skill-levels then the resort is clearly at fault and needs to be held accountable.

15 injuries in a season doesn't seem terribly out of line for me. I've seen a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, and a concussion on the same jump within 15 minutes of each other on a mid-sized jump that probably got hit over 10 thousand times in the course of a season. Gaper, Gaper, idiot-hucker backflip attempt. Last one is lucky he didn't die. Might as well outlaw mogul runs if injuries per season is the sole determinant of negligence here.

"I find it amazing that so many people say that jump was not safe for use, with some concocted notion of “proper engineering.” I hit that same jump only two days before that one guy died on it, and roughly around the same time when Kenny went ahead and got paralyzed. Despite being far less experienced than I am now, that thing was barely a blip on my radar screen; it just wasn't much of a jump." Eagerly awaiting the argument that resorts that don't encase all trees within six feet of memory-foam in the wake of the Sonny Bono incident are grossly negligent....

Now the real basis for the argument emerges. If all ski-resorts were run as non-profit collectives than the emotional perogatives that have substituted for logic and reason here would vanish. Not holding a resort liable for a case where someone made a decision to hit a jump that was clearly identified as such and partitioned from the rest of the run, and the same someone made a series of massively negligent and rash choices with respect to the manner in which he hit it, which resulted in him massively overshooting the landing and crippling himself hardly constitutes a blanket exemption from all liability. Holding resorts accountable for the gross negligence of their visitors is one thing, holding them accountable for their own negligence is quite another. You are clearly arguing for the former rather than the latter.

Yes. No one can hurt themselves on nordic jumps. I didn't watch an Olympic caliber athelete completely eat-shit on the immaculately engineered landing slope and get hauled off in an ambulance at lake placid last summer either, so the odds that anyone ever got hurt on the mythical ski-jumps of yore despite inferior training, equipment, and facilities is clearly zero. Your postulate here depends on the existence of big gaper-proof jumps and an a set of objective, ISO9001-compliant guidelines that provide a set of universally valid parameters for designing the same. No such things exist, nor could they ever. No matter how a jump is designed, built, and maintained, there's absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent people from injuring themselves on them, nor is there a statistical algorithm that could ever be used to transform injury rates into some kind of definitive "danger" classification scheme. What about rails? All rails are inherently dangerous, and when they're designed so that you have to clear a gap and pop-90 before hitting them, the danger increases. Throw in some kinks and the danger increases. How does your gaper-proof engineering argument apply here? What about cornices? Clearly dangerous. They are also there at the resorts discretion, as they could easily blow them away, design windfoils or some other such contraption to prevent them from building-up in the first place, build 50 foot chain-link fences around the lips, and hire off-duty cops to forcibly prevent anyone from hitting whatever remnant-cornices exist despite the precautions? Ditto for other cliffs. They could easily be "engineered" away with a judicious set of controlled detonations. Your commitment to this transparently absurd notion that you can eliminate all risk in terrain parks, much less anywhere else on the mountain, and that resorts are responsible for doing so seems to have more to do with ideological commitments that you've cultivated off the slope than any objective merits that this particular case actually has.

That would be the precedent set by those actions. Huh?

The nordic jumps that you are talking about are reasonably safe for highly trained athletes who have undergone a structured qualification process, and who are only allowed to use them under certain conditions, so the comparison here is completely invalid. Very few people that actually ride in the park at all would support the claim that you can construct any jump, much less a signficant kicker, that's safe for all ability levels under all conditions. A 17-year old park rat can hit a 40 foot table-top and pull a corked mute 900 one second and land perfectly, and a washed-up old gaper can kill hit the same jump two seconds later and kill or cripple himself while attempting a straight air. You clearly know this, so why you are choosing to tilt this particular windmill of an argument is beyond me.

Sounds like Rampage by KO. Maybe 1st round...