JayB

I've heard credible claims that Karl Rove is behind this. Factor in the fact that Canadian shale-oil deposits have become economically viable all of a sudden.....coincidence. I think not.

Speaking of Canada, what kind of strange madness has overcome the PM? Where has the airy transnational moral agnosticism and supine indifference masquerading as principle gone? Someone had better get the folks at www.truthout.org on this case fast. Someone better get Jimmy Carter on the cell-phone and get the reprogramming chamber ready.... "OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada will not hold talks with “genocidal” groups Hamas and Hezbollah to try to secure Mideast peace, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in an interview with broadcaster CTV, to be aired Saturday. “We will not solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem, as difficult as that is, through organizations that advocate violence and advocate wiping Israel off the face of the Earth,” Harper said. “It’s unfortunate because with Hamas, and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has made it very difficult to have dialogue — and dialogue is ultimately necessary to have peace in the long term — but we are not going to sit down with people whose objectives are ultimately genocidal.” “I think all of the civilized world is agreed — and it’s not just Canada — we can’t deal with organizations whose principle and only objective is terrorism and the eradication of the other side.”

Truth. I'm down with everything...except for the first sentence. Specifically, "...elitest pursuit..." Unless I'm misunderstanding the context with which 'elitest' is used, I tend to think that anyone can pursue this...if they have the cojones. Elitist may not be the best term to convey the meaning that I was getting at. Meritocracy might be a bit closer to the mark.

There's lots of car-to-car days that all kind of vie for first place. I don't think I've ever combined anything where both the climbing and the physical effort required to complete the round trip were super tough. All things considered, I think that Frostbite C-to-C wrecked me the most. Somehow or another we managed to make a wrong turn on the trail back to Kennedy hot-springs, and hiked 3.5 miles in the wrong direction before realizing our mistake, thereby adding a very unwelcome 7 mile bonus to the round trip. By the time we turned around we'd all been up for something on the order of 40 hours straight, and had spent ~19 hours on the go, and the collective hallucinating began. Between us we spotted a giant-yellow school-bus and wondered aloud just what in the *fuck* a school bus was doing way the hell out there, transformed a small, lichen-clad cliff into a Hansel-and-Gretel style cottage "Hey - look, a cottage....," mentally-morphed downed trees into pipes that *must* lead to Kennedy hot springs, which meant that we *must* have been on the right track and getting closer, all stopped after rounding a corner and confronting a bear/stump, and I personally started seeing ent-like faces in the bark in about 1/4 of the trees that we passed along the trail. The fact that we knew that we were starting to see things, and that are judgement was impaired, didn't help us sort through things a whole lot more effectively than knowing that you are tanked would help you operate a vehicle safely. We made it back to the car about 24-hours after we set-off, and the beer I chugged back at the car acted like a general anesthetic after about 30 seconds. From the time we left the summit I started fantasizing about chug-a-lugging a gut-full of ice-cold water, and soaking my feet in the stream. It was a great motivator on the way down, but as soon as I got one sock of and was about to dip the first toe in the water, I heard a rumbling about 10 feet away and saw six sets of eyes locking onto me from across the river - one mamma bear and two cubs. I left them to drink in peace, and in hindsight, reflected back on this moment as an omen of things to come.

a 40 year isn't necessarily a "bad" option. a forty year fixed keeps payments predictable, and can increase your cash flow, especially in an investment property. It can also get you into properties that otherwise wouldn't pencil out in the short term. ARMs and interest only loans I think are potentially the really dangerous and volatile ones (as people are starting to find out). But even these can be used to your benefit, IF you have a clear picture of what your goals are. If you had gotten into an arm 5 years ago in seattle on a $400,000 house at 4.5% and were selling now, you'd probably be looking at around 30 grand more in your pocket, along with the considerable appreciation you would have realized (which would be there regardless of your loan choice). Using arms or inrterest onlys without a clear picture of one's goals though seems to be a recipe for some potential stresses in the future. Appreciation seems to be a constant and a given in this analysis. Interesting. Interesting assumption. Based on...? The IF/AND statement that's at the heart of your example. The notion that clear goals have any bearing whatsoever on outcomes is also quite touching. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who combined exotic financing with exquisitely clear goals and are nonetheless hopelessly upside down, without a prayer of refinancing their way out of the jam that they in, who parlayed their clear goals into foreclosure and financial ruin. Attempting to predict the future performance of any particular asset class, and using that to guage the probability of generating a profit is like trying to use avalance forecasting to tell whether or not it's safe to cross a particular slope. Ultimately it all comes down to the balance of risks and probabilities. In my mind, anyone acquiring residential property at todays prices as an "investment property" is doing something roughly akin to walking underneath a tottering cornice on a wind-loaded slope overlaying an ice layer five hours after sunhit while the temps are rocketing upwards. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who won't make it across, but at the moment the balance of risks and probabilities are not working in favor of anyone who wants to traverse this path.

Seems like any guided climb would be just about as distasteful as the circus on Everest. Abdicate your responsibility for planning, skill, fitness, decision-making, routefinding, looking after each other, etc and what have you got left? Seems like it'd be about as meaningful and satisfying as fly-fishing excursion where someone else hooks the fish and then hands you the rod.

I would love to partake, but I'll still be serving my sentence on the East Coast at that point. The pain, the pain.....

Don't blame the owner, blame the bacteria.

I know this last bit is tongue-in-cheek, but we're already there. The transmogrification of character flaws like addiction, gluttony, and sloth into medical disorders that the population has no more responsibility for or control over than cancer played a significant role in bringing us to this sorry juncture.

This paper is actually being published in Nature, so most of the questions that are popping into my head must have been addressed by reviewers. I'll have to read the original at some point, but I'd be amazed if this actually holds up over time as anything more than an exceedingly minor factor relative to energy balance, or has any clinical relevance whatsoever. What's most interesting about this story is not the science, but rapidity with which the population will grasp at any finding which in any way exculpates them from any responsibility whatsoever for their body's composition. Billions of years of evolution and somehow every other organism on the planet with a digestive tract has managed to avoid the cruel scourge of the obesity bacteria. Ditto for all of recorded history except the one period where we've had a sustained agricultural surplus and removed physical toil from the average western person's working life. Ditto for any society where food is still scare of any kind of physical exertion is required to secure sufficient calories to survive.

I thought of Chuck when I heard the bit about this research on the radio today. Somehow I suspect that prolonged starvation will thwart the waistline-inflating ravages of these bacteria. We'll probably discover a gazillion endogenous and exogenous factors - ghrelin, leptin, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, that cause time-limited micro-permutations in weight and obesity, but the ratio of caloric input to expenditure is always going to be the overwhelming determinant of one's body-composition.

I think the tables are about as far as anyone's realistically going to get when it comes to educating the American consumer, a goodly percentage of of whom believe that real-estate - unlike every other asset class - only goes up in all places, at all times, and never mean-reverts.

a 40 year isn't necessarily a "bad" option. a forty year fixed keeps payments predictable, and can increase your cash flow, especially in an investment property. It can also get you into properties that otherwise wouldn't pencil out in the short term. ARMs and interest only loans I think are potentially the really dangerous and volatile ones (as people are starting to find out). But even these can be used to your benefit, IF you have a clear picture of what your goals are. If you had gotten into an arm 5 years ago in seattle on a $400,000 house at 4.5% and were selling now, you'd probably be looking at around 30 grand more in your pocket, along with the considerable appreciation you would have realized (which would be there regardless of your loan choice). Using arms or inrterest onlys without a clear picture of one's goals though seems to be a recipe for some potential stresses in the future. Appreciation seems to be a constant and a given in this analysis. Interesting.

Bwahahaha. LOL 707 LOL. I'll go one step further and state that this has not been the most clearly telegraphed, abundantly forecasted development in the financial markets in recent history. Good thing this isn't only the tip of the iceberg.

I'd like to see something along the lines of the regulations that govern the securities industry which, despite the bad rap, are actually well thought out and reasonably well enforced - at least at the retail level - though they could also be improved a bit. The basic rules that come into play there are all about insuring suitability and full disclosure. Before you can even trade stocks, you have to disclose your total liquid assets, investing experience, etc - and someone has to review that information and approve you for a certain level of trading. Pretty much anyone can trade stocks, but if you want to open a margin account, or get into options trading, much less commodity or currency futures you need to have assets and experience that are commensurate with the risks that you are taking before you get the clearance to work with those kinds of instruments. I'd like to see something similar for exotic mortgages. At the very minimum, anyone selling a mortgage needs to fully disclose how he or she will be compensated for what they are doing, and who is compensating them, and insure that the people that they are selling the loan to fully understand the characteristics of the loan that they are getting into. At a minimum this means printing out a table showing them a chronology of their payments, disclosing all pre-payment penalties, and in the case of neg-am loans, showing them a table that shows what happens to their payments when the LTV hits a certain threshhold. I'm all for letting people make bad choices, so long as they do so with their eyes open. There are quite a few other elements of the real estate business that need to be cleaned up so that market participants have accurate information. The buying/selling, and appraisal processes are especially flawed and rife with massive conflicts of interest, but thats another topic.

That's been very interesting. Both the options-backdating scandal and the GNMA corruption scandal occurred on a scale that makes the Enron debacle look like someone snagging a couple of cents out of the "Need a Penny, Take A Penny. Got a Penny, Give a Penny" tray at the local 7-11, but no one seems to have noticed. In the case of GNMA, I would have thought that people would have been especially incensed given connections between that particular institution and the US government, especially the "implicit guarantee" that most market participants believe will leave taxpayers on the hook for any large-scale implosion. Here you had mega-malfeasance complete with a much more convincing evidence of the company buying political cover on Capitol Hill, yet zero reaction. There are some minor political reasons why this hasn't been noticed much, but the primary reason is that none of these events has been part of any major financial implosion that hit the investing public in the shorts, and the general public is not anxiously scanning the landscape for a scapegoat to pin the responsibility for their financial losses on. When things start to go critical in the subprime mortgage backed securities market, and especially in the most irrationally exuberant housing markets, look for the self-exculpatory language and the manic fingerpointing to begin, then the righteous indignation all around "How on earth could I have known that a stated-income, no-doc, pay-option, I/O libor-indexed ARM was the least bit risky!?," followed by the Mortgate exec perp-walk before whatever sub-committee convenes to sort things out. I think that at this point pretty much every single aspect of the US mortgage market needs a serious overhaul. The mortgage/real-estate business in the US today resembles the stock market of the 1920s, and it's kind of amazing that things had to get this ripe before it occurred to anyone that there was anything amiss.

Very much looking forward to paddling that when I finish my sentence out here. Had my eye on that one for a while.

No one saw this one coming. "WASHINGTON, D.C. - A record-high 19% of high-cost mortgages originated during the past two years will end in foreclosure, a consequence of the growth in risky mortgage products, according to new data compiled by an industry group. The nonpartisan Center for Responsible Lending predicts 2.2 million households in this mortgage segment, known as subprime borrowers, either have lost their homes or hold mortgages doomed for foreclosure in the next few years. This estimate comes a week after a grim survey from Fitch Ratings, which studies residential mortgage securities, showing a 16-fold increase in past-due subprime loans in the third quarter of 2006, compared with 1998. Subprime borrowers, who typically pay interest rates 2% to 3% higher than those with good credit, currently account for a quarter of all mortgage originations." http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/mortgage-lenders-bust-biz-cz_ms_1219bust.html?partner=links

you are going to be dead a lot longer than you are going to be alive.....better hope you are right Hey - it's Pascal's Wager. More on this argument here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/ Not an argument that I ultimately found convincing, but it's interesting to see how an especially intelligent guy tried to reconcile faith and reason.

Very bad news indeed. Many crossed fingers out there hoping that they'll resurface. There's another thread about their disappearance in this forum.

It had been a long time. A long-time indeed. Ron cinched down his figure-8 with a brisk tug, chalked up, and exhaled one last time. How long had it been since the incident on the Condor Wall? 12, 13 years? So much had changed, but for reasons that he couldn't quite explain, after lying awake with scenes from the past scrolling across the back of his eyelids for hour after hour, he found himself prying open the chest that he'd entombed in the darkest corner of the attic so many years before. The scent of the rope, the dull clang of the carabiners - suddenly it all came back. Now here he was, staring up at his old nemesis from so many years before. He took one last look across the valley, set his hand within the gnawing countours of the crack, and........"

I may be in touch about some prints as well.

I think that alpine climbing is an elitist pursuit in the best sense possible. Mountains can't be bullied, bribed, flattered, deceived, enticed or coerced. The mountains could care less who you are, where you were born, what language you speak, what race you are, who your parents are, where you went to school, what kind of car you drive, and will mercilessly and repeatedly expose the gap between your true self and the self image that you've constructed to flatter your ego like nothing else. Strength, experience, determination, fitness, judgment, skill, honesty, humility, loyalty, and integrity. In every day life you can flatter yourself and pretend that you have all these traits without ever putting them to the test. Not so in the mountains.

Even if the families, friends, or relatives never see the thread, which is unlikely, and we remove their sensitivites from the equation entirely for a moment, I really don't see the advantage in maintaining a thread thats evolved into a free-for-all where people to try find new and creative ways to mock the response to these guys' deaths. Theres a time and a place for gallows humor, but it's not just a few days after their fate has become certain, and it's not in a venue that's likely to be scanned by friends and loved ones trying to sort through their grief. I think that the emotions are going to be raw enough at this point that the distinction between making light of the tragedy itself, exasperation that's morphed into ironic insider chatter is not going to be entirely clear to anyone whose feelings and sensitivities we ought to be concerned with respecting. Even if they never see this stuff, I can't see how engaging in this sort of thing does anything but diminish the participants. How about confining this to e-mails, PM's, or the local barstool for a month or two?

Good points, good post.