JayB

Hahah. So I look forward to getting a pitcher of my choosing from Josh and Matt in '08. Have a nice weekend.

Who cares, we have the Pacific ocean. You ever try to eat seafood in CO? Blech... Just on the off chance that JRCO is into that. Thankfully you can head to Eastern Washington if you are jonesing for some decent fishing, although it's mostly the vastly-inferior stillwater variety.

Unless you like anadromous species.... If heading out to the river with your snagging rig during a Chum run is your idea of fishing, maybe, but most Steelhead/King runs declined to waste-of-time level a generation ago.

I'd be willing to bet an inflation-adjusted pitcher of beer that neither Josh nor Matt could explain what constitutes the opposite of Supply Side economics without some frantic mouse-clicking.

The flyfishing in Western WA also sucks in a massive way compared to CO.

I've lived both places, dug both, bug I'd have to give the edge to WA on the variety of climbing here, and the relative lack of lightning in the Summer. The skiing in WA, both inbounds and BC, absolutely crushes CO - but the advantage goes the other way with respect to ice climbing. Be sure to check out McCurdy Park Tower before you leave CO. I've been wanting to get back there ever since I left.

Cool. Great photos.

Hahahahahahahahah. I almost fell out of my chair reading this. They've finally figured it out. "To hell with the bitter cold, cage-matches over the crumbs a few climbers leave at bivy sites, and fetid tunnels for shelter, man. [unrolls plan at top secret snaffle meeting] Check it out....Condos...Sunshine....and lots, and lots of old humans with meager apetites and even worse memories. Our time is now!" Oversized rodents overrun Prosser seniors housing "THE ASSOCIATED PRESS PROSSER, Wash. -- "The marmots are coming, the marmots are coming." Seniors living in Wine Country Villa probably wish they had gotten such a warning. Residents say the oversized rodents are swarming through the 75-unit development of manufactured homes near the airport of this Eastern Washington town, burrowing under homes, fouling front porches with their droppings and - according to some unconfirmed accounts - attacking people . Many species of marmots, including some known as woodchucks and groundhogs, are found across North America. They are closely related to ground squirrels and are among the largest of rodents, some reaching 30 pounds. "Can you imagine what they'd do to cats?" asked Dick Bain, 78, a Wine Country resident who dispatched two of the animals with a shovel Friday. Bain said he doesn't like killing animals but had to act after finding two marmots beneath a stack of carpentry wood next to his house. " My neighbor got tackled (by marmots) two years ago and got chewed up pretty bad ," Bain told the Yakima Herald-Republic. The account could not be verified by the newspaper. Bain would not identify the man, saying his neighbor was embarrassed. Also unconfirmed was an account that a resident got badly bitten after reaching into a water tank to remove a marmot that only appeared to be dead. Ray Borgens, 81, said marmots leave unsavory calling cards in his carport, burrow under his house and once scooted up a ladder he left leaning against the roof. "They were snooping around the air ducts up there," Borgens said. Concerned about the droppings, which Bain said often are tracked indoors "even though you think you've cleaned it off," residents say officials in the Benton-Franklin Health Department have told them there's nothing the agency can do because the animals pose no public health risk, including the spread of infectious disease. Police add that town ordinances prohibit residents from shooting the critters. Officials in the state Department of Fish and Wildlife say residents likely will have to pay if they want to eradicate the infestation, and then only after clearing some bureaucratic hurdles. First, they must file a complaint with the agency's Yakima office, which then may refer them to a certified exterminator. "These are not free services," agency spokeswoman Madonna Luers said. "We do not have the staff to go out there and deal with these situations." To make the area less attractive to marmots, she advised securing garbage cans and other potential sources of food or nesting material. She also advised trying to avoid marmot confrontations . "They've probably become pretty accustomed to people," Luers said, " and it's not an animal you want to tangle with. "

I love that area. Make the move, just don't buy a house for the next 2-3 years.

Sounds like a great project. Kudos to the folks that put this together. I'd be there if I weren't 3254 miles away.

Hey Pax: I don't think this is a likely development, for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that Lay/Enron tried to get some help from the administration back in the days when Enron was imploding and they got none. Hard to imagine them getting any now. Another interesting aspect of the Enron debacle concerns the mechanics of the implosion. I've forgotten most of the details, but the company went tits up as a result of something roughly akin to a margin call. They had tons and tons of loans that were collateralized with their own stock, and these loans contained contracts that stipulated that Enron would have to come up with cash to cover any shortfall in collateralization that resulted from the stock losing value. One of the key triggers that lead to the said loss in value was the investigative work done by a guy who managed a short-fund, who noticed that the off-balance-sheet partnerships et al made the firms accounting/financial reporting financially unsound, and made it a point to share his analysis with everyone in the investment community who would listen. Word eventually got out, this put pressure on the share price, which was already way, way overvalued by any measure, and the ensuing declines lead to the margin-call/collapse. The market gives, and the market takes away....sometimes even more effectively than regulators. Check the share price of all of the companies involved in the emerging options grant fiasco. As far as Mark Rich is concerned, I am much less concerned about that guy than the retards in the government who invented the brilliant "old/new" pricing scheme for oil that Rich exploited to make his fortune, which cost the country far, far more than Rich made by exploiting the price controls. I'm not a fan of his, but the fact that he may have played a role in bringing about the demise of this scheme means that he may have inadvertently done the country a favor.

That's all small potatoes in comparison to the cash they're paying me to defend them here on cc.com.

Hey - good burn! Surely as an attorney you could have dredged up some more exotic synonyms for "pompous" and/or "asshole" though. Background I'm not sure how the Enron trial is an indictment of anything, given the fact that the parties involved have been tried and prosecuted. Ditto for Tyco, Worldcom, etc. These scandals generated a fairly substantial legislative response (Sarbanes-Oxley), which has resulted in some pretty significant changes in the manner in which companies report their financial results - none of which could have happened if the congress was hopelessly enslaved to Corporate Interests. With respect to the options scandal that I'm referring to, the overwhelming majority of abuses occured prior to the inception of the new standards that companies had to abide by when accounting for options grants ('02, I think), so I'd say that it's already resulted in a fairly significant change in governance. Ultimately, though, it's up to Congress to write the rules for how companies disclose their financial information, and up to the oversight agencies that are tasked with enforcement to go after the folks that break the rules - but not to decide how much anyone gets paid. That's between the board and the shareholders, and as things stand there's a layer of middlemen (fund managers) that are supposed to serve as proxies for the millions of retirees, folks contributing to pension funds, etc - that just haven't been doing a very good job of holding board's accountable. That's mostly because they don't really care what the board does so long as the value of the stock is increasing and their investors see a positive return on their quarterly fund statements, and the same goes for the investors themselves. There's no simple mechanism to fix this problem, barring compulsory courses in financial literacy for the entire adult population.

Matt - think of this as an opportunity to understand how the words "stock," "options grant," and "executive compensation" are linked together. You'll be able to rail against all three much more effectively if you take some money out of the "Kucinich/McKinney '08!" change-jar/campaign fund next to the spot where you leave your car keys and spend the dough on the WSJ instead.

I just couldn't pass up the chance to plug the WSJ and fling some gratuitous derogatory comments out there.

If any of you commie homos could tear yourself away from the holistic regression therapy ads in the back of Mother Jones and read a real newspaper like the WSJ you'd know about the potentially huge options grant scandal that's unfolding (repricing option grants to coincide with share price dips that preceded big price increases) thanks to their investigative reporting, as well as the massive, multi-year, earnings-maipulation megacluster at FNMA that will probably make Enron look like someone stealing change out of a street musician's hat.

Hey Pax: Good post. What I've noticed is that when word gets out early that an accident involved someone from the board or a friend of theirs, there's lots of sympathy and support and things generally stay on topic. When no one seems to know the folks involved, there's less social pressure to keep the commentary/speculation within the same bounds. I don't think anyone meant any harm, but I also think that being on the other side of an accident - e.g. actually there - changes your perspective quite a bit.

When I was in highschool I spent a semester in Australia as an exchange student, and headed up to the Great Barrier Reef with my host family for a week's vacation. When I was that age I spent alot of time outside and had kind of a perma-tan in the summers, and between that and a relatively dark complexion for a white guy sunburn was never really an issue. After making the move down there, I pretty much missed summer entirely, and by December I had spent a full year out of the Sun. So when we headed out to the Reef on an anodized aluminum catamaran type cruiser, I laid out on the top deck during the entire 2-3 hour trip cruise. Then I spent a solid six hours snorkeling, then I kicked back on the top deck for another 2-3 hours on the way back. Sunscreen? Bah. By the time we docked I had a pleasant warm sensation all over, and thought I'd take a bit of a nap before heading back out for the last bit of Sunshine. Then I happened to catch a glance of myself in the mirror. My skin was literally brick red. Sleep was out of the question, so I ran to the store before it closed and snagged about a gallon of aloe and various other after sun lotions, and for reasons that I can't quite recall - I think one of the locals told me to do this - spent the entire night chugging my way through several gallons of gatorade while sitting in the sauna and slathering on coating after coating of aloe/aftersun stuff. Somehow I came away without blistering or anything worse than the normal sting associated with a sunburn, but about 10 days later I did get the instapeel that left me looking like I was well into a losing battle with leoprosy. I try to remember the sunscreen now.

...for a low-tech amurican POS engine. Japanese and Euro manufactuers have been getting way better numbers for years by simply designing engines not based on 1960s technology. My subbie's 2.5l 4cyl turbo makes 370hp and gets over 27mpg on the highway. Not to mention it gets to 60 nearly 2 seconds faster than this straigh-line amurican POS. Is that the new engine for the WRX? I had a friend with one of those, and remember him saying that it had something like 240hp, which is still a hell of a lot for a 4 cylinder engine, even with Le Turbo - and the thing was superfast. I can't even imagine a small car with 370hp. I just hope that you are making sure that you only accelerate from 0-60 at a rate equal to a Prius so that you can keep that anti-SUV rage going with a clean conscience.

"OT: Stealing Peace In Central VT" Is this the name of some hippy jammy-jammy chicken-clucking retard band? I can't bear to look and find out." Hahaha.

Other Excerpts: "The problem is not that children are leaving for private schools, officials said. It is that new people attracted to the city tend to have higher incomes, having already raised a family; are retiring; or are single and unlikely to have children. After interviewing 300 parents who had left the city, researchers at Portland State found that high housing costs and a desire for space were the top reasons. "

"Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children" By TIMOTHY EGAN New York Times. Published: March 24, 2005 Linkage. "San Francisco, where the median house price is now about $700,000, had the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any large city in the nation, 14.5 percent, compared with 25.7 percent nationwide, the 2000 census reported. Seattle, where there are more dogs than children, was a close second. Boston, Honolulu, Portland, Miami, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin and Atlanta, all considered, healthy, vibrant urban areas, were not far behind. The problem is not just that American women are having fewer children, reflected in the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the country. Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families." Pertinent Stat "From 1990 to 2003, Portland added more than 90,000 people, growing to an estimated 529,121 residents, but the city is now educating the fewest students in more than 80 years. " Kid shortage = Teacher Surplus. Why this proposition is controversial is beyond me.

I like mammut ropes the best, but usually just buy something in the 10mil range that's cheap, and rotate through a bit more quickly.

Hey Bill: It might be worth checking out some of the Districts just East of the mountains - I would be willing to bet that the demographics over there are much more conducive to hiring than in Seattle. I would be willing to bet that quite a bit of the school closure action in Seattle can be attributed to the fact that Seattle's population has one of the lowest percentages of people under 18 in the entire US. I think only San Francisco was lower. The bottom line is that there just aren't that many families that want to try to raise kids in a $500,000 "Artists Loft," and even amongst those that would - there aren't many who have the moolah you'd need to handle that kind of a mortgage without regular plasma/organ donation. I'm sure the fact that the burbs are perceived as quiter/safer/having better schools etc is part of the equation as well - but this is true of all cities, not just those in coastal areas, so if this was the major factor driving this shift you'd expect to see roughly equal percentages of kids in cities with comparable sizes - but I think the main reason is that people with kids have effectively been priced out of coastal cities. Tons of school closures and declining enrollments in the pricy bits of Socal, and elsewhere.

Recycled seems to be one of those rare souls who's perspective has been shaped by market experience that extends beyond the last 10 year cycle. Thanks for sharing. Speaking of sharing, check out this gem: Montlake Ranchero Yours for only $300K + remodeling, insurance, closing, interest, and the annual tax assesment. A steal at twice the price. Don't worry about filling up the garage with a bunch of your own crap- that's included in the price! Check out that kitchen! Can't quite come up with the cash to service the mortgage - never fear - the property comes with its very own meth-hut in the back yard. You can be cash-flow positive from day-one! And couches - let's not forget about couches! This baby's got it all: There's even some toys for the kids! $300K!