JayB

No respect due. Thanks for the feedback.

If anyone's watching the coverage that can log-in and summarize the disclosures at the news conference for the the people who may not be able to tune in themselves, I'm sure that there are quite a few folks viewing the thread who would appreciate it.

Agreed. Please be mindful of this thread's primary purposes and it's audience when posting.

Scrolling through that thread is like looking at an avatar Mausoleum.

Phil/FFOC: What you guys don't seem to understand is that the equipment that these guys brought with them on the climb is the climbing equivalent of a life-jacket. No one who knows anything about mountaineering, and the equipment that's appropriate and necessary for a climb of this nature has found fault with their planning or execution, so one would think this would prompt you to question the assumptions and perspective that you've brought to this discussion. Moreover, neither the SAR crews, nor the air-crews, nor the climber's families have voiced the critiques that you are presenting on their behalf, so one wonders why you've presumed to speak for them, and have appropriated the risks that you are not taking, and the grief and worry that you are not bearing, to advance your arguments here.

This is only relevant for the first two years of the policy. After that you're golden. Care to expand on this one for us non-legal types?

Good info. Thanks for sharing. Does the "edoc" handle mean that you are an ER doc? If so any word on how your colleagues who have come into the profession more recently insure against income loss? Disability is a scary enough prospect on its own, but servicing the debt that most residents carry along with them into practice would be pretty much impossible working in any other capacity, unless perhaps they've picked up an MBA along the way. Given the number of M.D.s and attorneys out there with substantial debt and business obligations that also ski/climb/whatever - there must be some kind of supplementary insurance that they are using to cover themselves against disability brought about by the kinds of risks that are typically excluded from coverage.

JayB- most churches "highly suggest/require" tithing of their members (you know, the people who attend more than Christmas and Easter) - for the mormon church it's 10%. My earlier point with the picture of the Gulfstream was that many churches have much higher overhead than other charities (and that overhead is subject to much less scrutiny - witness the head of the Getty Trust who was fired because the Getty purchased him a $100k SUV. Apparently $10 million Gulfstreams are ok for preachers). No, the key element isn't giving away your money; if that were true we'd be lauding patrons of stripclubs who give exorbitant tips in the hopes of some action. underworld - I suggest you look at the average workers "lavish" home in a coastal megapolois. Perhaps they don't want to commute 4hrs a day from some cheap Central Valley shithole. Some people have to pay the taxes in this country - you'll note that the Blue States receive less than they pay out in taxes, where the Red States receive more than they pay out (headed by Alaska!). Perhaps the blue states wish for more federal government spending because they see so little of it? True - but how much you give is entirely up to you unless you belong to a sect that stipulates a given amount as a religious duty. I was going to add "giving without the expectation of recieving any tangible benefit in return," but I figured that'd be obvious enough so I left it out. You and I would probably agree that if their objective was to help the needy, there's more effective places to send their donations, but I wouldn't dispute the claim that a charitable impulse is what drives most religious tithing. This is consistent with what I think will be one of the few claims that Brooks advances that will withstand scrutiny, which is that religious folks give a greater percentage of their income - even to secular charities - than non-religous folks do. Where I think Brooks engages in a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand is conflating religious observance with a conservative political orientation. That may be statistically more likely, but there's a significant number of religious folks out there who self-identify as liberal, so I don't think the religious = conservative grouping that Brooks has put forward is accurate. With regards to the blue-state/red-state tax imbalance, it'd be interesting to see what the political affiliation of the folks who are paying most of the blue-state taxes happens to be. Given the breakdown of total federal taxes paid by income level, I suspect that the most of this "tax-charity" that Democrats claim to be handing over to Red State Republicans would go away.

Unless you are a member of a church that requires you to give, then I don't think that religious giving should be completely discounted here. The key element here involves making a choice to give away your money.

One other tidbit I've learned is that if you have group coverage provided by your employer, and they pay the premiums, the benefits are taxable, whereas benefits generated by a policy that you pay for yourself are tax exempt. Or so I understand. For most people 60% of income, free of taxes, is relatively close to their after-tax, take-home pay, so 60% coverage should be enough to cover most of the shortfall.

Definitely good points. Since blinking from a motorized wheelchair while working as a Wall-Mart greeter could very well be considered an employment opportunity that will get the insurer off the hook, you should defnitely look at the "own-occupation." clause of the coverage and make sure that it's adequate. I think that there are policies out there that will cover the difference between your pre and post disability wages after you reach the limit of the "own occupation" coverage period. I'm leaning towards a two-year policy for myself now, given that there are any number of things that I could do that would pay at least as much as I'm making now, in a couple of years my income will probably become a less important component of the household income picture. Things are a bit different for physicians, attorneys, etc - who might not even be able to pay off their student loans, much less their mortgages, car payments, fixed business expenses, etc - in any other field.

Bump. I'm in contact with a broker concerning disability coverage right now, and it looks like the coverage they offer excludes pretty much any of the outdoor-rec activities that my wife and I participate in that are likely to cause disability. If I can't get this stuff covered, I suppose we'll have to just live with it, as were both still most likely to get disabled through disease or everyday accidents than anything that happens while climbing, skiing, etc. I just called Great Western Life, and the person I spoke with said that they haven't sold long-term disability policies for at least six years. I will try Unum Provident tommorow and see what they have to say concerning climbing, etc. If anyone out there is reading this and has had any experience with other insurers who do not specifically exclude climbing and other activities like it when issuing disability coverage, feel free to chime in. Own-occupation coverage that includes climbing? Possible? The broker that I've been in touch with has indicated that pretty much every major insurer excludes climbing and other activities with a similar risk profile, but I'd like to make sure of that before I commit to a policy. Not sure how many climbers this fellow deals with, so it's possible that he may simply not be aware of them. Given that he has a financial interest in selling his policies to me, its also possible that he's omitting this information, but he seems like an honest guy so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Both seem rather moderate to me, but I can see why both sides would want to claim them as their own. This still seems like one of the most salient and most overlooked points in the "Who's Better" debate: "One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. It is liberals who advocate "forgiveness" of loans to Third World countries, a "living wage" for the poor and a "safety net" for all. But these are all government policies -- not individual acts of compassion -- and the actual empirical consequences of such policies are of remarkably little interest to those who advocate them. Depending on what those consequences are, there may be good reasons to oppose them, so being for or against these policies may tell us nothing about who is compassionate or caring and who is not."

As I said it'll be interesting to see how the stats hold up under the kind of scrutiny that his claims will generate. He's claimed that people with some kind of religious affilition donate more money to non-religious charities than non-religious folks, which seems plausible to me, but the blurbs don't indicate how well the self-described "religious" category matches up with the self-described liberal/conservative categories. The other claim that the working poor are the most generous people in the country in terms of the percent of their income that they generate also seems plausible, and I imagine that finding will stand. My personal hunch is that the more passionate someone is about using the state as a means to compel maximal income redistribution, the less likely they are to voluntarily distribute any of their own income, but I'm not sure if there's any data out there to confirm or refute this.

Could you post a link to the video? I couldn't find it on the site, and I suspect that other folks who might be looking for information might run into the same problem.

"1. Liberals don't make enough money to donate. 2. Liberals have to work two jobs to make money, so consequently don't have free time to donate.... well this liberal anyway." Not true. From what I understand the author controlled for incomes, and looked at giving as a percentage of total income. The same data set indicates that self-declared liberals on average make more 6% more money than self-declared conservatives do, but donate less money both in dollar terms, and in "percent of income" terms as well.

In the video coverage of the Sherriff's press conference shown on the KATU website (also broadcast this afternoon), the Sherriff's comments suggested that their rescue resources were limited, and it sounded to me as though they'd consider volunteers with appropriate experience levels. I don't have much experience with mountain rescue protocols, but what little I can recall from previous searches is that rescue organizations have traditionally been quite leery of accepting such offers, since they have no idea how skilled or experienced folks outside of their organization may be, and don't want to run the risk of creating a compound-rescue situation, where the unnafiliated volunteers themselves need rescuing. There's also the matter of outside folks being familiar with the communications protocols that they follow, etc. If anyone out there is affiliated with the organizations doing the searching, perhaps they could chime in and clarify what, if anything, members of the climbing community can do to assist with the search and rescue effort. The anchor on the KATU broadcast must have interpreted the Sherriff's comments the same way that I did, as she closed her comments with remarks about the Sherriff looking for more experienced mountaineers to assist with the rescue. If this is not the case, now might be a good time to chime in and provide a correction, or to clarify if there's actually something that people can do, as I suspect that there's quite a few people on this board that would be willing to lend a hand.

"BROOKS: For me, it was a surprising truth. And the reason for that is I was under the stereotype about charitible giving in America, which is that those who are most charitiable are the people who say that they care the most about the needy in America—and that typically involves the political left. And what I found when I started doing analysis on this some years ago was that actually the opposite is true: that political conservatives, or at least declared political conservatives, give more of their resources, even proportionate to their incomes, than liberals do." http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/12/12/PM200612126.html From the Author's Website: "The political stereotypes break down even further when we consider age: “Anyone who is not a socialist before age thirty has no heart, but anyone who is still a socialist after thirty has no head,” goes the old saying. And so we imagine crusty right-wing grandfathers socking their money away in trust funds while their liberal grandchildren work in soup kitchens and save the whales. But young liberals—perhaps the most vocally dissatisfied political constituency in America today—are one of the least generous demographic groups out there. In 2004, self-described liberals younger than thirty belonged to one-third fewer organizations in their communities than young conservatives. In 2002, they were 12 percent less likely to give money to charities, and one-third less likely to give blood. Liberal young Americans in 2004 were also significantly less likely than the young conservatives to express a willingness to sacrifice for their loved ones: A lower percentage said they would prefer to suffer than let a loved one suffer, that they are not happy unless the loved one is happy, or that they would sacrifice their own wishes for those they love. The compassion of American conservatives becomes even clearer when we compare the results from the 2004 U.S. presidential election to data on how states address charity. Using Internal Revenue Service data on the percentage of household income given away in each state, we can see that the red states are more charitable than the blue states. For instance, of the twenty-five states that donated a portion of household income above the national average, twenty-four gave a majority of their popular votes to George W. Bush for president; only one gave the election to John F. Kerry. Of the twenty-five states below the national giving average, seventeen went for Kerry, but just seven for Bush. In other words, the electoral map and the charity map are remarkably similar. These results are not an artifact of close elections in key states. The average percentage of household income donated to charity in each state tracked closely with the percentage of the popular vote it gave to Mr. Bush. Among the states in which 60 percent or more voted for Bush, the average portion of income donated to charity was 3.5 percent. For states giving Mr. Bush less than 40 percent of the vote, the average was 1.9 percent. The average amount given per household from the five states combined that gave Mr. Bush the highest vote percentages in 2003 was 25 percent more than that donated by the average household in the five northeastern states that gave Bush his lowest vote percentages; and the households in these liberal-leaning states earned, on average, 38 percent more than those in the five conservative states. People living in conservative states volunteer more than people in liberal states. In 2003, the residents of the top five “Bush states” were 51 percent more likely to volunteer than those of the bottom five, and they volunteered an average of 12 percent more total hours each year. Residents of these Republican-leaning states volunteered more than twice as much for religious organizations, but also far more for secular causes. For example, they were more than twice as likely to volunteer to help the poor. Surely Jimmy Carter would have been surprised to learn that the selfish Americans he criticized so vociferously were most likely the very people who elected him president." And a fitting summary from Thomas Sowell: " One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. It is liberals who advocate "forgiveness" of loans to Third World countries, a "living wage" for the poor and a "safety net" for all. But these are all government policies -- not individual acts of compassion -- and the actual empirical consequences of such policies are of remarkably little interest to those who advocate them. Depending on what those consequences are, there may be good reasons to oppose them, so being for or against these policies may tell us nothing about who is compassionate or caring and who is not." It'll be interesting to see how well these stats hold up to the furious cross-checking that will no doubt ensue as the word of these finding lights up the righteous-indignatiometer on campuses all across the US. I hope this guy was smart enough to secure tenure before shopping this manuscript around, and has plenty of friends outside campus, as I imagine that he will be feeling the lack of personal altruism that he identifies amongst self-professed leftists in a very personal way quite soon.

There's been a few threads on this topic where folks have shared the names of some good companies/agents/brokers. Might be worth looking into disability insurance as well, as you are way more likely to be disabled than killed, and the financial consequences of un-insured disability could be at least as bad or worse than death if you require extensive medical care. I'm working on putting disability coverage together right now, and will let you know how things go if you are interested in looking into this kind of coverage.

I can understand why someone plodding away at the local desk cranking out single-paragraph blurbs wouldn't bother to get in touch with an expert source if they weren't familiar with an activity. In a longer story or feature this would be less excusable, but from the stories that I've been reading, it looks as though the folks in the media are at least making an effort to use expert sources. Doesn't stop a bit of editorializing on their part, and the absence of "What were they thinking?" or "How much is this going to cost?" in stories involving recreational boaters, snowmobilers, hikers, etc, etc, etc - but it looks like at least most people writing more than a paragraph are seeking out expert sources and incorporating their persepectives into the story. The info they get's only as good as their sources, but given the number of different opinions that climbers have on most things, it stands to reason that they may not print opinions or perspectives tbat are universally applauded by the climbers that read them.

Man - just heard about this on NPR out here in Boston and had a bad feeling that I'd know, or know of, some of the folks on the Mountain. After learning more about the skill, experience, and character that these guys have on their side, I'm still very hopeful that they'll make it out of this okay. I hope that this knowledge can inspire the same kind of sentiments amongst the friends, families, and rescue crews. My thoughts are with everyone that has a stake in this thing - especially the three on the mountain. Just keep fighting until the weather clears, guys.

I would venture that while there are some similarities between Castro and Pinochet, one key difference is that on two occaisions subjected his rule to a plebiscite, once in 1980, and a second time in 1989. He won the vote in 1980 and used that as the basis for an extension of his rule, and the results of the second election in 1989 provided the basis for a change to civilian rule. Chile is prosperous, stable, and free. Cuba is a ruined totalitarian state in which the regime has shown no intention of moderating its grip on power, that thousands of people risk their lives to escape from every year. There also seems to be a host of popular fictions that have become articles of faith for the Left. Specifically, that the people of Chile were on the verge of achieving an equalitarian utopia and all but the uppermost echelons of the elite were united in rapturous adulation for Allende, then the CIA and its minions stepped in and robbed them of their golden future. While Allende won a three-way election with 36% of the vote, he hardly had a universal mandate, and upon election increasingly ignored both the constitution and the Chilean congress in an effort to impose his economic program on the country, which required a stifling of dissent and the seizure of property. By 1972-3 these economic policies had brought about hyperinflaction, decimation of the middle class, and widespread shortages of essentials - not to mention rising lawlessness and chaos, within which vocally opposing the regime was often met with violent retribution by the regime's supporters. The social and economic conditions that Allende's rule brought about in Chile are what galvanized widespread opposition to his regime, and what motivated the coup that brought about the end of his administration. While I'm sure that the CIA's assistance didn't diminish the coup's chance of succeeding, I don't honestly see how anyone could look at the conditions in Chile in 72-73 and conclude that the coup was something dreamed up in langely and foisted upon an un-receptive population, much less that the millitary even needed the CIA's support. The other key difference between Pinochet and Castro is that he's never enjoyed the uncritical adulation amongst the Western Right that Castro has enjoyed amongst the Western Left. I have yet to meet anyone who has viewed Pinochet as a regretable character or necessary evil that arose out of a cocktail of cold-war politics and the Allende administration's disastrous reign, and tarnished the sound economics that ultimately delivered his country from disintegration and ruin with violent political repression and murder. There are plenty of good resources out there that deal with this period of Chile's history in a way thats both fair and impartial, in which neither Allende nor Pinochet are spared criticism and scrutiny.

I've noted this before, but it's not clear how slab-routes fit into P&D's ethical taxonomy. Perhaps one of them would be willing to explain.

http://tetongravity.com/viewer/Clip_RECORDCLIFFHUCK.aspx Certainly stuck the landing.