JayB

Since I only get first tracks on the deep blower stuff at resorts a couple of times a year, I didn't want to spend a thousand bucks on a superfat set-up that I'll only want to ski ' till noon a couple of times a year. After doing a fair amount of bargain hunting I think I found the answer: 190, 145-115-132, $159. http://www.levelninesports.com/Ninthward-Nick-Greener-Twin-Tip-Powder-Skis They've also got the slightly more forgiving THA187 for $179.

Sole verbal response from Italy's secretary of the treasury to bondholders on the on the last conference call, if I remember correctly.

Totally agree with that. Part of the deal with lending money used to be taking big losses when you made bad loans. I'm not sure if anyone is certain that the Eurozone will still be solvent when and if that happens, but debts that can't possibly be repaid, won't be repaid so it's probably best to default now instead of forcing taxpayers to endure many years of pointless debt-bondage coupled with default-by-inflation as a prelude to the inevitable default. Repost for old times sake: [video:youtube]

Should be fixed: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2011/speech525.pdf Great read. I think you'll get a lot out of it.

"According to a report from the Utah Avalanche Center, Pierre and an unidentified companion hiked into Snowbird from Alta on a recreational outing. Neither resort has opened for the season, and no avalanche control has been done. But both ski areas are on National Forest Land, which is open to the public, although Snowbird posted signs on Saturday saying that the resort was not open. At about 2:30 p.m., Pierre dropped into what is called the South Chute in Snowbird’s Gad Valley, elevation 10,300 feet. Although Pierre was known as a skier, he was riding a snowboard when he apparently triggered a slab avalanche on the 40-degree slope. The 16-inch slab swept him 700 feet down the rocky, narrow chute, said Brett Kobernik, a forecaster with the Avalanche Center. "It was a pretty good slab he knocked off," Kobernik said. "It’s not unusual to have weak snow this time of season. This year, it’s a little weaker than usual." The earliest season avalanche fatality among Utah skiers and boarders was on Nov. 7, 1994, according to Bruce Tremper, director of the Avalanche Center. Sunday’s fatality ties as the second earliest fatality with one on Sunset Peak in 1985. Pierre was dead when rescuers reached him. Kobernik said that although he was not buried, he suffered trauma as he was swept over the steep, rocky mountainside." http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/52914397-78/pierre-skier-avalanche-season.html.csp

Glad that all blew over. Phew! "Italian Yields Reach 7%, French Debt Slides as Bond Rout Deepens Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Italian bonds led a slump in euro- area government debt as investors abandoned all but the safest assets amid rising borrowing costs at auctions and concern the region’s financial woes are deepening. “It’s a confidence crisis,” said Elwin de Groot, a senior market economist at Rabobank Nederland in Utrecht, Netherlands. “Investors have no confidence that the euro zone can solve its problems. They will look for the most safe place they can store their money, which is Germany. Everything else is suffering.” German two-year rates dropped below 0.3 percent for the first time, while the extra yield investors demand to hold 10- year bonds from France, Belgium, Spain and Austria instead of bunds all climbed to euro-era records. Italy’s 10-year yield rose above 7 percent as prime minister-in-waiting Mario Monti wrapped up talks on forming a new government. Spain and Belgium sold less than the maximum target of bills at auctions today as financing costs increased. Italy’s 10-year yield climbed 37 basis points, or 0.37 percentage point, to 7.07 percent at 5 p.m. in London. It rose to a euro-era record 7.48 percent on Nov. 9. The 4.75 percent bond due September 2021 slid 2.285, or 22.85 euros per 1,000- euro face amount ($1,351), to 84.57. The spread investors demand to hold 10-year French debt instead of German bunds widened 26 basis points, the most since the euro started in 1999, based on closing-market rates, to 190 basis points. It touched 191 basis points, also the most since the common currency was introduced. The yield on the 10-year bund fell one basis point to 1.77 percent, less than half France’s 3.67 percent rate." http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-15/italian-yields-reach-7-french-debt-slides-as-bond-rout-deepens.html MF Global is not available for comment.

I've got the answer! FW: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2011/speech525.pdf‏

That's fascinating and I'm very glad to have an expert on hand to challenge the popular misconception that you can't power a diesel train, a supertanker, an oven, a refrigerator, a blast furnace, a toaster, a moped, an MRI, a datacenter, etc with passive solar generating capacity. What percent of the total power consumption in each of the sectors below do you anticipate being powered by passive solar and how soon? I'm just glad to know all this worry about where we'll be getting our energy is behind us.

I had no idea that passive solar was a real contender to replace coal, gas, and nuclear for power generation. Amazing. This is wonderful news. Thank goodness for experts!

We are taking losses and have been for a long time. Maybe they'll pay off some day. The problem is that the size of the losses can only be so large relative to the non-loss making parts of your economy. If the Chinese want to take the losses on our behalf - so much the better. ~95% or more of the economic benefit from technological innovations accrue to the users. If they want to ship us a gajillion solar cells at a loss - great.

There's no energy source with no external costs. On the environment - gas seems to have far fewer external costs than the stuff we'll be using otherwise...coal. On the social level - unless you can raise productivity by as much as alternatives raise energy costs (under the assumption that you can actually scale them up to give you the capacity that you need to replace fossil/nuclear) you are looking at a real decline in everyone's standard of living that's proportional to the price difference. Guess what happens to manufacturing when you have to power your blast furnaces with energy that's many times more expensive, or what happens to heating/cooling bills, the price of everything that requires energy to produce, etc, etc. You could pretty nicely simulate the effect by imagining the effect that a ~20-40 fold increase in energy prices would have on the economy. I'll take the externalities associated with extracting and burning gas over those that come along with making energy massively more expensive.

-The environmental impact of every energy source has to be evaluated relative to the alternatives that will be used if it's not exploited. In our case - if the power isn't generated from gas, it'll be generated with coal. Seems like gas wins hands down vs coal in every category when it comes to risk and environmental impact. -Alternative energy sources are expensive, particularly relative to shale gas. Anyone who advocates alternatives over gas has to contend with the fact that high cost energy hits people who work in jobs where the energy component of production costs matter a lot (manufacturing) and who spends most of their money on consumption (working poor through mid middle class) particularly hard. TANSTAAFL

Jeez - there's no pleasing some people! If anything like our limey fanboy's predictions come to pass - we'll see a huge wave of insourcing and investment driven job growth plus way lower C02 emissions per watt from domestic sources. Sounds good to me.

We have a fan in England: Short summary: According to our admirer abroad, the frac-oil/gas boom + wages racing to the top in China = win for Team America. " World power swings back to America The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus." World Power Swings Back To America Not sure about the punchline but fracking is a game-changer on the energy front, and should have a significant effect on employment, capital investment, energy costs, and trade balances. The race to the top in China is also real, as rising wages relative to productivity and the declining differential via US manufacturing should lead to sourcing an increasing number of manufacturing operations in the US vis-a-vis China. Europlosion could also more than negate any benefit from all of the above in the near-term. Ditto for increasing compliance costs vs production. Having said that - reading the analysis had a brief but pleasant effect on my outlook. Probably will have had the opposite effect if you have placed significant bets on alternatives energy sources that require a continuous infusion of subsidies as they're going to get crushed by the remorseless math of fiscal constraints and the amplification of the practical and cost advantages of gas.

You are quite correct. They aren't the same thing, but look at the geographic distribution of the annual incidence murder and lethal child abuse in the US and you'll find that there's an almost perfect (or at least very considerable) overlap. If you turned the intermountain west and the PWN into its own country, it'd have social stats roughly comparable to Canada's. You could toss Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Utah, and the Dakotas without budging the child murder needle. Guess what would happen to Canada's stats if you annexed all of the bits of the US where there are lots of Baptists. Just for fun - I'll tell you. Your murder rate - for both adults and children - would skyrocket and your existing social services infrastructure would do little or nothing to alleviate the problem for many decades. It's all yours.

I think if you were doing a statistical regression between population characteristics and lethal child abuse the tightest correlations would be between 1) poverty and 2)being baptist or evangelical - so I agree with both Tvash and j_b. I'm quite certain that the reason that financially secure athiests, Unitarians, and Quakers aren't abusing their children to death isn't because of the constant surveillance from CCTV cameras.

My mix for one push stuff used to be half-strength cytomax, with a couple of vivarin and aleve tossed in...

I'm familiar with Pinker - but haven't read his book yet (saw the TED Talk). Here's his take on violence in the US: "My own guess is that Americans (particularly in the south and west) never really signed on to a social contract that gave government a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, as Europe did. Americans not only retain the right to bear arms but believe it is their responsibility, not the government’s, to deter harm-doers. With private citizens, flush with self-serving biases, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, body counts can pile up as trigger-happy vigilantes mete out rough justice. This may be a legacy of the long periods of anarchy in the mountainous south and frontier west, and of the historical failure of the police and courts to serve African American communities."

You sure about that? The stats are there - so if you find that the standard deviation in the annual number of deaths in big and small states is roughly the same let me know. I think if you have some awful abuse case in Wyoming it's going to make the incidence per 100K spike in a huge way from one year to the next - and it'll make much less of a blip in a state like CA with ~70X more people, and these effects will make the standard deviations in Wyoming's data series higher than CA's, but it sounds like you know stats way better than I do so if that's a misconception on my part I'd be interested in learning why that assumption of mine is wrong. I don't think it explains anything close to all, or even most of the difference between Wyoming and California on any social stats - but IMO you have to be careful when applying statistical analysis to relatively rare events and take sample size variations into account.

That's kind of a strange tack to take when I clearly wasn't disputing the data. It's there - but it's clearly distributed in non-random ways, just like gun violence. The US has 10X as many people as Canada does, and very strong regional differences that show up in things like crime stats. There are giant chunks of the US with a murder rate comparable to Canadas, and there are big chunks where the murder rate is at levels that would be unthinkable in Canada. If you really want to understand the "American" child abuse problem and why it's worse than in other countries (this is clearly not something that interests you, which is fine) the first questions you ask are "Where are the incidence and prevalence highest, where are they lowest, and what are the crucial differences between the worst and the best areas. It's that kind of analysis that can actually tell you things like whether or not there seems to be a negative correlation between having more social workers per capita and fewer dead kids. When you find those kinds of statistical correlations, that's a starting point for investigation rather than the end of it. Anyhow - here's per capita social spending. The child death stats are in the original link. If you can use both discover the secret that reveals a causal link between spending on social workers why people in Vermont are less likely to abuse their children to death than they are in Florida and Texas. Having spent some time in Vermont, I find the notion that they'd be abusing just as many of their kids to death as anywhere else if it weren't for a thin tweed line of case workers holding them back unconvincing - but if maybe that fits your model the best?

It's interesting to look at the actual study: Link The headline data are taken from 07-08, when there were 479 combat deaths in Iraq and 1,740 children who were confirmed killed from child abuse. The rate of children confirmed killed by abuse was 2.4 in the US, 1.0 in Canada, and 1.4 in France. The sample size in each state is small enough that there's considerable variation from one year to the next, but it's interesting to look at the data from 2008 and ask - were there any states that had lower reported rates than France and if so, which were they. Ditto for the worst states. Best states: Alaska = 1.1 Arizona = 0.64 Connecticut = 0.74 Delaware = 0.97 Hawaii = 0.7 Idaho = 0.48 Montana = 0.45 South Dakota = 1.01 Vermont = 0.78 Wyoming = 0.78 (Washington was 1.49) Worst States: Arkansas = 2.99 Florida = 4.62 Georgia = 2.67 Michigan= 2.47 New Mexico = 3.78 Texas = 3.32 Tennessee = 3.72 Missouri = 2.95 The first thing that I think of is that sample size matters, and it's easy for a state with a small population to look really good or really terrible depending on which year the data is from. The second is that the South and the Rust Belt come out looking pretty bad - which is consistent with virtually all of the other statistical surveys of crime and violence in the US. These are fairly populous states, and the sample size is large enough to render YOY fluctuations less important. I suspect that the spatial distribution of child deaths by abuse and neglect in each state is highly non-random, and wouldn't surprise anyone who knew the character of each city/county in their state when they looked at a 10 year long density plot. I also suspect that the more familiarity you have with the data the less confident you are that there's a simple and effective way to combat this problem. If there's a tidy correlation between per-capita social services budgets (there might be) it isn't immediately obvious to me when looking at the statistical snapshot in the paper.

I'm all for higher wages, but it's worth remembering that if you want to raise the real value everyone's wage to a minumum of ~$10 per hour, you have to raise the real value of everyone's output to $10 per hour + payroll tax (~15%). If you want employers to provide benefits, that number goes up to something closer to $15-20 per hour. Without increasing output - employers will lose money on every employee with a marginal productivity lower than the total cost of employing them. It's not clear that it's possible for all employers to either improve their production enough, or to raise their prices enough to do this. With regards to migrant workers - I think that farmers have successfully lobbied for special exemptions that mean that they don't have to compete with other business for labor. In a normal business when labor prices increase but prices don't, there's a huge incentive to substitute capital for labor. No one would make any money selling wheat harvested by hand, but you can make a ton of money selling wheat harvested by a combine that's thousands of times more efficient. Instead of a shortage of people willing to work for what farmers are willing to pay promoting 1) mechanized harvest or 2) shifting production to places where people are willing to work for prices that farmers can afford to pay we've discouraged mechanization and capital investment and brought in people who are willing to work for prices that farmers can afford to pay. If farmers had to compete in the same labor market as everyone else, we'd have relatively well paid people operating and servicing mechanical harvesting equipment in the orchards, or lots of orchards relocating to Mexico. Much better all around IMO. http://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/harvest/

I got a $600 a year GST rebate when I made $15,000 a year. In other words, Hey look, real numbers You can make the kind of consumption taxes that Canada has as progressive as you want by funneling some of the money back to low-income people/households via transfer payments. Consumption taxes are much better than income taxes if your goal is to promote savings, investment, and production instead of consumption. Increasing consumption taxes and using transfer payments to mitigate the effect on those with low incomes, while lowering income and corporate taxes like Canada has done is smart. The US should consider doing something similar.

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If Warren Buffet's secretary has an effective tax rate (north of 18% - e.g. paid more than $18K per each $100K of income - it's because he's paying her a salary that's well north of six figures or she's really terrible at doing her own taxes. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=2981