JayB

I think a much better approach to this problem would be to address it through argument, reason, and persuasion rather than state-enforced compulsion. Worked against fur, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work here.

I think it's clear that the fashion magazines and the unhealthy body images that they promote were responsible for the women in 15th century Venice deliberately swallowing tapeworms to maintain their figures too. Ditto for all of those corsets and whatnot - definitely all the media's fault.

Didn't catch the whole thing, but the portion concerning health-care contained some long-overdue changes in the health care market.

The best teacher I ever had taught my 11th grade English class. She left behind a more lucrative career on account of her love for the subject, and she was extremely motivated, talented, and inspiring. She also had zero seniority, so when the enrollment dropped a bit, guess who had to go? She was clearly the best teacher in the department, if not the school, but the dead-weight POS lifers stayed, and she got shipped off to an assignment that was a total mismatch for her talents and aspirations, and she gave up on the profession a couple of years later. Anyhow - here's a question for the teachers out there. Could a competitive voucher system where drive and talent matter more than seniority possibly produce a worse market for your skills that the one you're in now? Could the pay and respect afforded to teachers be any worse than it already is in the current system? Is the status quo - which brought us the situation that I described above, and millions more like it every year - really producing such great results for students and teachers that any attempt to disrupt it will invariably lead to something worse?

True. Between longer-radius turns and the propensity to sideslide, the advent of boarding has not been kind to the zipper-lines. They seem much harder to find these days.

Great location, love the sun-deck on sunny afternoons, everything else is pretty marginal.

I've noticed the same thing, and chalk the decline up to a few converging trends: the advent of snowboarding, the rise of park skiing, and the aging of the folks from the "mogul era." In addition to diverting a significant chunk of the demographic most likely to become aggressive mogul skiers away from skiing and into another activity, the rise of snowboarding seems to have had a negative effect on the mogul population. Between the larger turn-radius, and the propensity to side-slide through difficult portions of the slope, the rise of boarders seems to have lead to fewer and fewer regular zipper lines of moguls. With regards to skiing, I think that to a pretty big-chunk of teenage skiers bump-skiing seems like a relic from the daffy-era, and they'd much rather hone their skills in the park. That's an interesting development, since it was bump skiers like J.P. Auclair and JF Cusson and others that more or less invented the Newschool scene, and quite a few of the older pros that are still competing in the park comps have a background in moguls. I don't think that bump-skiing will go the way of ballet, simply because they'll continue to be a fact of life on the steeper stuff, but most young skiers will aspire towards something else. urWJzuvOO9M

I pretty much tell anyone that I buy anything from in this forum that they're more than welcome to wait until my check clears before shipping. The fact that Clint wanted to wait until a relatively unknown lurker/poster's check cleared before shipping anything is a sign of prudence and good judgment, if anything. I'd totally buy anything from Clint with no worries and I've never even met the guy.

I'm going the other way on purpose! VNQ1JS1V6WA

How about a weight-change contest. I've gone from around 168 to ~181 over the course of the last 5-6 weeks.

One important distinction that seems to be missing from most of the commentary that accompanies these episodes is that Islam is a system of beliefs that one voluntarily adheres to, not a racial category that one is confined to. Once anyone is old enough to think for themselves, remaining a Muslim is a matter of choice, not an accident of one's birth. I am not terribly surprised that CAIR and others have adopted the tactic of attempting to exempt their beliefs from debate and scrutiny by claiming that any criticism or suspicion of Muslims is analogous to racial persecution. What does surprise me is how well this strategy has worked for them. They've largely succeeded in transmogrifying a debate about an ideology into a parable of racial victimhood.

My goodness. Is the new Al the same as the old Al or is someone else in charge of this avatar?

Yeah - hopefully one day we'll all be as enlightened as Ahmedineja and we'll obtain the objective clarity necessary to dispute the occurence of the Holocaust too, won't we, SC? Ahmedinejad has served at least one useful function. He's doing a pretty good job of galvanizing all of the Sunni powers against him. Look for this dynamic to become more prevalent in the months and years ahead, and for official and/or public opinion in the Middle East to become steadily less favorable towards Iran's armed proxies in Lebanon and Palestine. Were it not for the beginnings of this dynamic, Siniora's government would probably have already fallen.

Just offering an OT observation for anyone who might find themselves doing some cold-weather camping with the s/o and thinking "Hey, let's zip the bags together, it'll be warmer..." Best of luck on whatever route it is that you are pondering.

Once again, "Shocking." In other news, "Experts Say: Law of Gravity Still in Effect." I hope that - for the rest of the people who happen to inhabit that second-most-dismal-and-perpetually-fucked continent - at the very least the future plight of the Venezuelans proves edifying in a way that the previous 50 "Peoples Revolutions" in South America have not been.

How - exactly - would trading power generated by burning fossil fuels for nuclear power "selfishly fuck future generations with a hotter planet"?

I'd be perfectly happy to make that trade, and I expect that I'll have plenty of company before long.

Hey - CBS and I agree on something. The price of crude will determine when and to what extent the oil sands are exploited. Using nuclear power to extract the oil from the oil sands will result in a drastic reduction in the amount of CO2 released per gallon of fuel generated by this process. The opposition to nuclear power amongst folks who are ostensibly concerned about global warming is a wonder to behold. If the most significant and immediate threat facing the environment is global warming, then there can be no serious opposition to expanding nuclear power on environmental grounds. Most of the more vocal folks in the environmental movement seem to be less concerned with addressing the complex trade-offs involved with mitigating environmental problems than engaging in a sustained rhetorical assault on the modern market economy. Too little analysis, too much fantasizing about magically taking mankind back to an organic-tribal-pre-modern-paleo-eden that never existed in the first place.

I think the total cig-count is up to ~20, so I think that if I ever bought a pack, they'd disintegrate before I ever got around to smoking them.

I have this pack-a-decade habit that I'm pretty concerned about as well. If I'm having some beers around a campsite and someone offers me a cigarette, I usually take it. Seriously, though, I think you could probably treat yourself to a smoke now and then without it having any effect whatsoever on your longevity. If you are a climber, especially one who enjoys alpine climbing, the occasional smoke is probably one of the last things likely to cut your life short. The only caveat is that if you doubt your ability to use willpower to voluntarily limit your nicotine intake, you should bash the bejesus out of yourself and expect, descend into a state of acute self-loathing, and expect to find yourself hunched over and hacking out roofing-tar in two years or less.

WTF? That'd make some good stock material for anyone that wanted to sell some tire-chains.

One other comment is that both in terms of volume and margin-per-sale, coffee will probably end up generating most of the sales for this kind of a business, so I would think that the goal of a coffee store that also happens to sell climbing literature has a much better chance of succeeding than a place that sells climbing literature and also happens to serve coffee. Another thing that might be worth considering is that I would bet that climbers would be most likely to swing by and hang-out on weekday evenings, so you'd need to do what you could to capture consistent local business during the rest of the day, whether that be from commuters, students, stay-at-home parents, or whatever the prevailing species happens to be where you set-up shop.

Might be worthwhile to meet with folks that actually run independent coffee-shops and bookstores and getting their insights, so that you can get a sense of what they have to say regarding major challenges that they have to deal with, what kind of numbers you'd need to make the venture work, etc. Launching this right next to or in conjunction with an existing shop, like Second Ascent might help generate some FF/REI type synergy. Climbers looking for gear head over for a bit of reading and coffee, climbers that stop in for coffee head next door looking for gear, etc.

I get the "Ro" part, but where does the "Bo" part come into play here?

Bobo's aren't all bad. Whenever I've been to a dinner party at a Bobo's house, they've had good food there, and so long as I put on a scopalamine patch a few hours before hand I manage not to puke when I have to listen to them wax poetic about the qualities of the wild siberian hummus or the Tunisian slate countertop or any other of a gazillion equally nauseating topics.