JayB

Even if you accept that the link between private gun ownership and the maintenance of personal freedoms is a mighty loose one, there's still the matter of what impact granting the government broad new search/seizure/enforcement powers necessary to stuff this particular genie back into the bottle might have. When people were debating the merits of prohibition, criminalizing drugs way back in the day(you could still buy heroin through the Sears and Robucks catalog around the turn of the century), etc - there were a few folks that argued that the benefits that would arise from making these substances illegal would be dwarfed by the negative consequences they'd have - foremost amongst them being their effects on personal freedoms. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but worth thinking about IMO.

1. Ride bike too-from work 5X a week (20 min each way). 2. Lift 0-4 X. Hit whatever is next on the list, if I can remember. 3. Run 0-1 X. 4. Kayak, ski, or climb 1-2X. 5. Boulder/Climb 1X per week if there's a facility close enough. Try to get enough to eat, get enough sleep.

Yes, Greenpeace is where I'd go for an objective assessment of this one. -the carotene-yield figures are way out of date and strains have been produced in which the yields are roughly twenty-fold higher than those referenced in your quip. -There are also no published studies showing that the human body can't convert the beta-carotene in golden rice to Vitamin-A either. The argument here is essentially that we should assume that beta carotene from golden rice has mystical properties that render the body unable to absorb or convert it to vitamin A in the same way that it does from all other plant sources. -The notion that the strains would have to contribute 100% of the adult RDA to be beneficial is especially idiotic. If you are suffering from an extreme deficiency of any particular nutrient, even a moderate augmentation of whatever it is that you are missing in your diet is likely to be extremely beneficial and alleviate the most severe symptoms. What makes more sense and is more likely to succeed? Trying to convince hundreds of millions of people to fundamentally alter their diet and agricultural practices and the consumer preferences in markets in which they sell them - or to give them seeds that let them grow the same staple crops that they already grow and rely on that contain an essential nutrient that they need to help stave off blindness, infection, and death?

Check the history of Europe pre-1945 and compare with the post WWII period. Was it the gun laws that changed? How does the history of Euroland compare with that of Swizterland* on the stable democracy front? *"The gun policy in Switzerland is unique in Europe. The personal weapon of militia personnel is kept at home as part of the military obligations. This, in addition to liberal gun laws and strong shooting traditions, has led to a very high gun count per capita."

In most cases, the said product wouldn't exist without the profit motive providing the impetus for the research and development costs required for its development, and the resources that went into it would have been allocated to other ventures that offered a greater potential return. In the case that a private company develops a lifesaving product, and the public wants to insure that everyone who needs the product gets it, then the public should fork over the money necessary to pay for it and send it to those who need it. Doctors do life-saving work, but no one argues that they should work for free. Insisting on that would be a wonderful way to dramatically reduce the number of people who are willing to work as doctors, though. You could probably benefit society tremendously by resigning from your job and providing all of the skills that you are paid for on a volunteer basis to all of those who need them instead of selling them to your employer. Why not do that?

I don't find the "farmers are dumb and don't know how to evaluate crop strains or make informed judgments concerning how to operate their businesses as well as I do" argument much more persuasive than the "gun to the head" argument. As far as altruism is concerned, whether a company develops a technology out of avarice, greed, malice, or any other motive is considerably less important than the objective benefits of the said technology or innovation. If you had an otherwise incurable disease and someone developed a drug for the sole reason that they wanted to make money, would you refuse it on principle? I know a few doctors that do lifesaving work, yet were at least partly attracted to the field because of the money. Are their contributions to society less valuable as a result of their motivations for entering into the field?

The lab work may well be innocuous, but this issue is not confined to the lab; on this point you sound naive. My concerns are not about devious mad scientists in lab coats devising the latest diabolical threat to mankind, but about manipulative business practices that corporate giants are using to secure increases in profit share at the expense of family farmers, public health, and the diminishment of future food-group bio-diversity. Again - is someone putting a gun to farmer's heads and forcing them to grow these crops, or are they making a choice to plant them based on the expectation that increased yields will more than offset the increased prices they pay? Is there any credible evidence - or rather, evidence that people who are have the scientific expertise necessary to evaluate these claims broadly agree upon - that public health is threatened by transgenic crops? More seed choices with a wider variety of characteristics will reduce food-group biodiversity?

I'm sure that most of the audience would agree with your assertion that using a Britta water filter completely negates a person's ability to put forth an opinion an just about anything scientific. And I'm sure your putting forth THAT opinion enhances your scientific standing among that very same audience. This argument is not about science as boogeyman, as you've erroneous (and uniquely) framed it. It's about very large companies, with non-altruistic motives, pushing an agricultural agenda that benefits their bottom line; not farmers, not consumers, not poor little Bagladeshis, and certainly not the environment. This agenda flourished (or is it fluorished?) during a time of plentiful rainfall, huge water projects, and lots and lots of irrigation, a lower population, lots of unused land, and very cheap fossil fuels; your so called "Green Revolution"; all of which are fast becoming things of the past. Eating local and organic is a must for a sustainable future, whether you're an African dirt farmer or a Belltown yuppie. It also just happens to result in a healthier diet and greater profits and self determination for farmers and local communities. The Green Revolution world we've built is an unsustainable, short term, environmentally damaging solution developed during a time of plenty that is fast drawing to a close. I realize that this kind of dynamic thinking is difficult to swallow when put forth by a water filtering cretin such as myself, but there you have it. Dude. You were arguing that fluoride in drinking water has adverse health consequences. This is completely at odds with the evidence and the scientific consensus. The fact that you opted for unsanctioned paranoia over evidence in this case is an indicator of the manner in which you assess scientific evidence and form opinions based on the same. "It's about very large companies, with non-altruistic motives, pushing an agricultural agenda that benefits their bottom line; not farmers, not consumers, not poor little Bagladeshis, and certainly not the environment. This agenda flourished (or is it fluorished?) during a time of plentiful rainfall, huge water projects, and lots and lots of irrigation, a lower population, lots of unused land, and very cheap fossil fuels; your so called "Green Revolution"; all of which are fast becoming things of the past. Yes - disease, drought, and pest-resistant crops with higher yields and are clearly of no benefit to anyone, certainly not the hundreds of millions of people who have *literally* been spared misery and starvation as a direct result of them. Unsustainable? Unsustainable in that millions of people will face starvation if yields reverted back to the levels that they were at prior to their introduction? Take away the yields and what happens to large sectors of the world that depend on these crops today? "Take comfort - your death brings us one-step closer to sustainability." Here's a scary biotech crop that should be nipped in the bud, pronto: http://www.goldenrice.org/ "Dietary micronutrient deficiencies, eg lack of vitamin A, iodine, iron or zinc, are a major source of morbidity (increased susceptibility to disease) and mortality worldwide. These deficiencies affect particularly children, impairing their immune systems and normal development, causing disease and ultimately death. In Golden Rice two genes have been inserted into the rice genome by genetic engineering, to account for the turned-off genes, thereby leading to the production and accumulation of beta-carotene in the grains. The intensity of the golden colour is an indicator of the concentration of beta-carotene in the endosperm. According to the World Health Organization, dietary vitamin A deficiency (VAD) causes some 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Blindness and corneal afflictions are but indicators of more severe underlying health problems: more than half the children who lose their sight die within a year of becoming blind. VAD compromises the immune systems of approximately 40 percent of children under the age of five in the developing world, greatly increasing the risk of severe illnesses from common childhood infections." Better start chanting outside the labs before this one gets too out of hand, lest those gains against childhood immunodeficiency and night-blindness get out of control. Way more important to stoke our overfed and unscientific eco-narcissism. Jesus.

"genetic modification has nothing to do with improving life or even improving production." Why would farmers buy a seed that, in addition to having no tangible benefits over the myriad alternatives, must be repurchased as seed from the vendor year after year? Are they being forcibly compelled to grow the crops, or are they assessing the costs and benefits of the various choices at their disposal and electing to grow them? If the "control" that Monsanto or any other agribusiness exerts over the food supply is contingent upon farmers choosing to plant with their seeds, then this is a rather tenuous form of control.

Yes - but you were also holding forth at some length about the dire consequences in store for those who imbibe tap water which it, which says quite a bit about your capacity to evaluate scientific evidence and render rational judgments of the same. My own little humdrum example is quite relevant in that it demonstrates just how easy it would be to for someone to use scary sounding generalities in order transmogrify some wholly innocuous, and potentially useful/beneficial work into something that the average person will be both needlessly afraid of and diametrically opposed to. Take any particular GMO crop, and ask the team of scientists who developed it to explain their research and I'm betting that the average person would get a much more accurate and nuanced view of the potential risks and benefits than the folks orbiting research labs with their megaphones or their fellow travelers elsewhere are able to impart. One day I hope to find a diabetic who's dependent upon recombinant insulin out there ranting on about the dire consequences that genetic engineering has for (the rest of) mankind.

This from the guy who is gravely concerned about the health-effects of fluoridation. I'll stick with the consensus judgment of people who are qualified to persist in the conversation - crop scientists, plant geneticists, etc. Thanks. Mercifully, it looks as though marker assisted breeding will provide a different means to the same end as transgenic crops and does so in a manner that will be harder to chant repetitively. "No crops with desirable traits selected by classical breeding massively accelerated through the use of genetic markers!!!" BTW - in the time that's elapsed since my last post I just finished splicing HIV DNA into another chunk of DNA that will confer antibiotic resistance on the bacteria that I transfer the said chunk into. "OMG! The next superbug!!!! Sound the alarm bells - somebody stop this madman before we're all wiped out."* *Won't alarm anyone with a basic knowledge of subcloning and the expression/purification of fusion proteins in bacteria, could conceivably alarm those without.

"While there have been impressive yield increases, particulary in Asia, these have not been linked with a corresponding decrease in world hunger." Guess what would have happened to the hunger stats without the Green Revolution? By this logic, we should abandon anti-HIV drug development since the arrival of combination therapy hasn't lead to a corresponding decrease in the global incidence of HIV since 1995. Not a big deal when you aren't the hungry one, is it? Guess what happened to the absolute yields during this time? "Hmmm - I'm starving, but the fact that this grain was produced such that yields and fertilizer use haven't grown in unison is so troubling that I'll see if I can dig for some grubs and chew on a piece of shoe-leather instead...." Contemplate the environmental - let alone social and humanitarian - impact of hundreds of millions of additional people in the developing world who are perpetually on the brink of starvation for decades on end and it makes any nominal downside attributable to the Green Revolution look trivial by comparison. There's also the fact that the local farmers assessed the options available to them and chose what to their perspective looked like the best solution. They knew all about traditional crops, local conditions, etc - and selected the crops that in their judgment would suit their particular needs best. If they hadn't worked out for any particular reason they would have abandoned the new crops and grown whatever strains they grew before in the same manner as they did before. I suspect their judgment of what's actually in their interest to grow is a hell of a lot more accurate than judgments rendered by well-fed agro-luddittes making their assessments from several thousand miles away.

Talk about evil. This guy, Norman Borlaug is second only to Hitler/Stalin/Mao in terms of the magnitude of the suffering and devastation that his "science" has inflicted on the planet. "Norman Ernest Borlaug (born March 25, 1914) is an American agricultural scientist, humanitarian, Nobel laureate, and has been called the father of the Green Revolution.[1] Borlaug received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.[2] He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply. More recently, he has helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa. Borlaug has continually advocated the use of his methods and biotechnology to decrease world famine. His work has faced environmental and socioeconomic criticisms, though he has emphatically rejected many of these as unfounded or untrue. In 1986, he established the World Food Prize to recognize individuals who have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food around the globe." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

"The powerful don't need to subdue the people by force anymore--it just tells them how and what to think, believe, buy, vote." Where do you personally fit into this grand conceit?

No it wouldnt and you know that, two completly different things you cant compare it to the most dangerous thing available and say see.. way way way to much tv man, kids who come from good families can experiment and figure shit out with out too much harm. life is about experimenting and figuring shit out, if you subscribe to the do it once and your addicted then your mistaken These were kids from good families. I don't buy the try-it-once-and-you're-automatically-addicted line either, but snorting coke at 15 suggests poor decision making, impulse-control, and peer-group dynamics that don't exactly suggest platonic, clinical-study level restraint is the most likely outcome for teenagers that fit into this category. BTW, which part of the comparison did you object to? The delivery method [Powdered cocaine vs crack vs syringe]- or the equation with meth and/or heroin? I'm certainly no expert, but these seem like relatively fine distinctions to me. The demographics of the hospital that my wife works at skews things to the crack side a bit, but even allowing for that, the level of fucked-up, miserable crack-heads that shuffle through the door seems to be right up there with the fucked-up, miserable junkies that they deal with.

I don't have an actuary handy, Bill, but I'd be willing to go out on a limb here and wager that sustaining the coke-intake has a much better chance of ruining the average teenager's life than the average parent's response. I got caught drinking at a school dance 13 and that was probably the single most painful event of my young life, between ruining the straight-A/boyscout halo-thing that I had going on (10%), and the pain, distress, and embarassment that it caused my parents (90% of the suckage) - and while I still managed to make bad choices and get into trouble at a fairly regular basis - in hindsight I'm glad it happened as it changed the way that I made decisions [taking their potential impact on other people into account, for one] and served as a generally useful inocculation against various other mistakes of a higher caliber. Also took a bit of the pressure off that I'd been putting on myself to maintain the straight-A boyscout thing, which was pretty much toast at that point, which also helped transform the response to future incidents from overwhelming shock and dismay to a weary/stoic "Alright...[sigh]...what'd you get into this time.." kind of vibe, which was also beneficial in the long run.

Remarkably blase' attitude towards 15-year olds getting into coke on display here. Is this a bit of 70's era sentimentalism getting the best of folks, or....? Would the response be the same if the said coke happened to be consumed via crack-pipe or syringe? How 'bout heroin or meth? Not my kids, not my problem, but an unscientific mental survey of the few people that I was aware of in high-school that were into coke or drugs of that strata reveals that ~80% turned into fucked-up losers of the highest order. Like "running off with all of the savings and all of the wife's painkillers to score more coke/meth/oxycontin when she's all of 24-hours post-op" [really happened]fucked up. I know that getting older and putting considerations that rank above the maintenance one's mental image of one's own hipness are...like, a total downer, man...and don't jive well with the mental images of one's future elder-grooviness that one constructed as a teenager a long, long, long, long fucking time ago....but that's adulthood for you.

Used to ride or jog past that thing quite a bit when I was at UW. Public art, supposedly resembles elevated tracks used as part of a motorcycle stunt in a carnival/circus/fair, where the rider would do laps around an elevated, banked track.

True, but this assumes that increasing prices will never have an effect on the number of people who are both willing and qualified to become equity donors for the move-up folks. I'm not so sure that this assumption always holds.

If there are fewer first-time buyers who can qualify for or afford the sub-median home in numbers equal to those who want to sell their sub-median homes for some increment over their initial purchase price then what happens to the equity that the move-up buyers are counting on to afford the more expensive home that they want to move into? Price too many first-time buyers out of the market via any mechanism of your choosing: increases in home price that exceed increases in real income growth for X-number of years, tightening lending standards, increasing interest rates, etc - and this will have a negative impact on appreciation. Do the reverse, and increase real incomes, reduce interest rates, and/or reduce lending standards and the opposite will happen.

I can remember seeing a figure of $429K for detached SFH but can't remember where I saw the figure. Did the Seattle Times data include condos/townhomes? If so, that might explain the discrepancy - or maybe the figure that I saw was just plain wrong. From what I here there's nothing in Ballard south of $400K, and 2BR 1B stuff in Greenwood(!) is going for over $400K, the 425-450K figure doesn't seem too terribly out of line, but perhaps if you toss Ranier Valley, First Hill, White Center into the mix you get into the sub $400K Range. Any effective regulation would have to apply to all originators, regardless of where they hang their shingle. I still think the rules and regs that govern retail investments in securities would be a good model here. Clear professional standards coupled with internal enforcement mechanism (losing license, etc) and backed up with criminal penalties where necessary. Doesn't totally eliminate the sharks, and the greedy/foolish can still lose their asses in a hurry, but they do a reasonably good job of keeping the most flagrant abuses in check. At the very minimum the origination process should require that qualifying for a loan includes the ability to repay the said loan at the fully indexed rate.

I agree, but the list I was referring to the "Senior Scientist" and other positions near the top of the scale that Carl posted, and even the median for those was under $100K. From what I've seen at small start-ups you have almost exclusively PhD's, but once you move from discovery, validation, etc into a realm where part of what you do involves cranking out millions of doses of Flacitrel the skill set mix starts to include "Senior Production Tech" and "Jr. QA Associate," type jobs, as well as admin, shipping/recieving, etc - all of which will shift the median salary down rather than up. I'm not sure what's supporting the $450K median in Seattle, but it certainly isn't the scores of highly compensated folks working in Biotech/Research.

STFU Whitey. When transportation changed from the horse to the automobile we had to update the rules of the road to reflect the changes. Now that mortgage lending has moved from the "originate and hold" model to the "originate, repackage, and sell" model, different regulations may not necessarily equal more onerous and less effective regulations. The regulations that govern the retail securities business seem to have worked reasonably well in terms of protecting the gullible and the inexperienced while still allowing those with the means, experience, and appetite for high-risk investments to play in the deep end. Selling grandma an I/O Payment Option ARM with a 1 month teaser rate is roughly akin to letting grandma speculate on naked currency futures with her pill money. Not good for the market or grandma.

~14K = gross federal taxes on 100K if married filing jointly. Read the first post you responded to and you'll see an estimated tax benefit of ~11K for the mortgage interest/property tax deduction. Might have been confusing since I referred to it as a subsidy rather than as a deduction. The other point was that I'd be surprised to learn that the folks who service the mortgage will allow a borrower to deduct the estimated tax benefit from the monthly payments and send them the difference when the tax refund check arrives. E.g. you need to have the cash in hand each month to pay the monthly expenses associated with owning the property.

No - but where's the error? I think that most back of the envelope type calculations assume that the mortgage interest deduction will generate a tax benefit equal to roughly ~30% of interest paid for the average person in the first 10 years of a 30 year fixed, and progressively less each year thereafter. 0.3*25K = 7500, not too far off from the results generated by the calculator. Whatever the actual value is, I doubt it's sufficent to render a $425K mortgage something that I'd consider "affordable" once you stack the rest of the typical household's fixed monthly expenditures on top of the payments.