JayB

if you are concerned about lives, think about this. much of our civilization's efforts, technology, and means of distribution are devoted to maintaining the current global population. a corollary of this is that the current global population is unsustainable using pre-industrial and pre-agricutural revolution technology. so if civilization ends, probably 95% of the current human population dies. who are those people who die going to be? sure as hell not the people on top of your current "violence hierarchy". so how is ending civilization going to benefit them? they'll be the first to die. on the other hand, the benefits of our current technological civilization with respect to reducing our footprint are only starting to be realized. therefore we need to intensify these efforts rather than ending them. also, the effect of Western civilization on reducing birth rates and shrinking population is well documented. so continuing this lifestyle and extending it worldwide is really the only realistic solution to reducing human populations to a desirable level. Couldn't have said it better myself.

I'm amazed that there's still an audience for this, but I suppose I shouldn't be, as the Prophet of Doom has been around as long as there's been civilization. On the right you've got the avid readers of the "Left Behind," series who are eagerly awaiting the moment when all of the nonbelievers who have strayed from the righteous path will get their comeuppance courtesy of an angry God. One the Left you've got all of the permutations on this guy who are eagerly awaiting the moment when man's technological hubris (and insensitivity) finally get the best of him. Subsitute a pissed off Old Testament style deity for "Mother Nature" here and you've got more or less the same thing. There must be some books out there that outline the common beliefs that unite these folks. Narcissism, messianic tendencies, misanthropism, broad suspicion of technology, belief in a bygone golden era/golden future, devaluation of the present, etc, etc, etc. It's not a scientific book, but I think that Eric Hoffer's "The True Believers" covers this ground pretty well. What I always wonder about these folks is - do they think they'd be spared in the event that their prophecies came true? Seems like the "Rapture" crew is pretty convinced that they'd be chilling out with Jesus, catching all of the despair and mayhem on the flatscreen in the giant suburb in the sky, but what about the enviro-doom folks? You've also gotta wonder if they are forsaking modern medical treatment in favor of herbal teas and chanting, and I wonder if their kids had diabetes or cancer or whatever if they'd be willing to walk the talk and watch them endure the same kind of agonizing death that they are wishing on the rest of the population?

90% of people over 30 with goatees still think that they look cool. Fact.

"Essentializing." Now we're talking. I think you need to whip out some more of the undergrad pomo-speak "Decontextualizing the humanity of the other in a counterhegemenonic metanarrative..." to jazz up the unsolicited third grade history lesson. Maybe you can work it into a lecture where you astonish us with the news that white settlers displaced Indians, and go one step further and rivet us with the disclosure that this process was actually neither welcomed by the Indians nor advantageous for them.

The Ad "The Spot: A title card reads "The Debate." We fade in on a couple standing in their kitchen, arguing about whether to buy a new house. The wife is the aggressor; the husband has his doubts. "Suzanne researched this," says the wife in exasperation. As we're wondering who Suzanne is, the ad cuts to an image of the couple's kitchen telephone. "This listing is special, John," says the voice of their real estate agent over the speakerphone. "You guys can do this." The husband caves. "This is awesome," says the wife. We see a picture of the agent's Century 21 business card. I've gotten a few e-mails about this ad—all of them negative. One of my readers called the ad "creepy." Another felt that the wife in the spot "comes off as a nagging harpy." And a third asked me to explain "why a woman bullying her husband would make me want to buy a house." As for "The Debate": It's terrifying. The problem lies in the performances. That beleaguered husband, dough-faced and weary, seems highly sympathetic as he expresses a few doubts about this major life decision. Meanwhile, the wife (who looks like a more hostile Mary Louise Parker—though she lacks MLP's patented bone-dry delivery) just knits her eyebrows at the guy like he's unfathomably dense. Later, she jabs him with an accusatory "What?!"—her eyes wide and wild, her neck muscles flexed, her head twitching in disbelief at what a ninny her husband's turned out to be. The capper comes when their real estate agent, who we discover has been listening in on what should be a private and delicate moment, takes sides with the wife and thereby crumbles the husband's defenses. Don't listen to her, John. Of course your agent wants you to buy a house you can't afford—she gets a bigger commission!" Moral - if you want the McMansion with the McLuxury items like granite countertops, the key is to marry a sackless doughboy who will roll over and consent to decades worth of debt slavery when he signs on the line for the 100%LTV, no-doc, interest-only, neg-am, payment-option ARM/suicide loan they'll need to shoehorn their way into the plywood palace that runs 7X their annual income. Yeeha.

Nothing like millitant milquetoast white folks beating their PC drum while restating conventional wisdom as though it's some kind of bold contravention of the status quo. "Racism is REAL!!!!!!!!!That's right - I said it....REAL" "Black people didn't immigrate here - they were brought here as SLAVES!!!!!!!!" Awesome. Treat us to some more of these keen moral and or historical insights. "Abusing children is WRONG!!!!!!!" "Lighting old people on fire is NOT OKAY!!!" "I am AGAINST stomping kittens and puppies to death. Yeah, you heard me!!!"

Off's right. Very lame. Just because you know you can troll someone and get them riled up by involving wives and kids doesn't mean that you should. Be the better man once in a while.

Nice.

Tax revenues are up though, Jim, and the same newspaper had this to say about it: "The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well. Most of the increase in individual tax receipts appears to have come from higher stock market gains and the business income of relatively wealthy taxpayers."

Sounds like Doug Coombs was killed in an avalanche in La Grave. RIP.

Don't forget the fact that there's no restriction on oil companies arbitrarily raising prices to line their pockets while thoroughly fucking the consumer! Yay, free market! I'm no expert on gasoline pricing, but if you listen to the people that are, they usually toss a few other factors like the ones that Will mentioned into the mix. I'm not sure how it works with the oil companies that own their own refineries and service stations, but there's a pretty simple mechanism to explain the pricing at independent service stations. They have to cover the cost of the next tankerfull with what they make by selling what they've already got - so they watch wholesale/crude prices like a hawk so that they don't come up short the next time that they have to fork over the cash for the next delivery. Slap some price controls on at the retail level and watch what happens to supply. You might have to ride that bike even in the depths of the fierce Portland winter.

What is happening here? The champions of the little guy going after the poor schleps in South Dakota and Bombay who have to have one of the shittiest customer service jobs in the world (which is really saying something)? Someone's going to have to report you two to The International so that a spirit of fraternite' and brotherhood will permeate your dealings with The Workers going forward. Usually the only time a customer service situation pisses me off is when I see someone getting irate over a triviality or an inflated sense of their own significance and abusing the frontline customer-service rep/flackcatcher who's sorry lot in life has put them behind the desk with a nametag, in order to bully their way into getting what they want. I'm pretty sure the revenge fantasy goes both ways. That'd be a sweet reality show BTW - customer service death matches. Put the angry customer and the rep in the cage and let the fists fly. I'd place my bets on the reps, as they'll most likely be unleashing years of suppressed rage....

I think that this summer may well be even worse than last summer in terms of gas prices. There's a slew of regulatory changes involving additives that's about to go into force, which look set to overwhelm the ability of US refineries to retool in time. Throw in the fact that the US can't produce enough ethanol to meet the new requirements, and the fact that there's a pretty significant tarriff/duty wall protecting the US ethanol biz, and you've got the recipe for a megacluster, no matter what happens to crude prices.

Dude - more congrats on the recovery. Pretty amazing. If you get a chance, post a couple of the overshot photos in the gallery. In the meantime, check out the overshot footage here: http://teddybearcrisis.com/ (click on "large teaser") and see how it compares to your own. The guy in the footage came away with a ruptured spleen and a broken pelvis - but he's 18-19 so I'm sure it would have been way worse if he was in his 40's.

I nominate Tieton for Washington's all-purpose grading standard for cracks. I've never lead anything there that seemed outrageously sandbagged - stiff, maybe, but not sandbagged - but I've also never lead anything there that seemed soft either. If nothing else I'd nominate Inca Roads for the 5.9 reference.

The "authentic" Ballard Barbie with the 600G bungalow might have to elbow Aurora Barbie off of the corner when the teaser period on the neg-am, i/o, payment-option loan ends and the LIBOR indexed rate kicks in.

Hahahaha. I was just thinking that the defensive point-by-point rebuttal, complete with the "Organic Gardening and Tele Skiing" Ken Doll had to be the only part of this thread that really, really screamed "Seattle." Hahahahahahaha. Good stuff.

Whirly - now's probably a good time to start working on the grand compromise. Find something that you are good at, that'll pay enough for you to live on, and that you can stick with long enough to build up a strong skillset and some connections in whatever line of work that you end up in. If you end up working in the trades the odds are that you'll have all of the time that you need for climbing, skiing, etc - and you'll have enough cash for food, gas, and gear on top of your regular expenses. If you can swing it some type of apprenticeship or technical certification that'll get your foot in the door might also be worth considering. Whenever I've been marginally employed I've wound up climbing/skiing/etc way less than when I was working because I barely had enough money to eat, much less cover gas money. The only exception was when I had a start date a couple of months after I accepted an offer someplace, and new that I'd have some money coming in to replace what I was spending - but those times are pretty rare.

Paper route berry picker caddy busser/dishwasher video store clerk pizza parlor Custodian/Handyman Green's crew/landscaping Painter plastics plant pizza joint again low-end mass production cabinet shop newstand clerk night manager for student union building middle school janitor investment company Landscaper -dog colony for medical research. Pressure washing inches of shit and purina off of dozens of room sizedcages and much, much more -REI belayer -assembly. - HIV startup, two research institutes. Lots of other random jobs like unloading and stacking 18-wheelers full of hay, and others that I've forgotten.

The funniest part is my ancestry is roughly 1/2 French. I think you can see it in the nose. This summer I my parents and I made a pilgrimage to the ancestral homeland in Illinois and found the gravestones of the 1st generation to land in the US. One French couple emmigrated in the 1850's, two out of three of their sons were killed in the civil war, and their too-young-for-combat son spawned the six kids that ultimately led to the last free-market nightmare blighting this board. Mysterious ways.

I think that my mini-epic on an that most daunting of objectives - the West Ridge of Mt. Stuart, is a good candiate. Linkage

Wolfmother has some especially enlightening commentary that pertains to Chomsky's analysis. Click on "Dimension" and turn volume to high for commentary

Your just an asshole I'm guessing that it was the line-item veto bit that really sent you over the edge.

I beg to differ. It may be consensus among your Univ. Chi Friedmanite winger bretheren. Here's a list of 562 economists who would say otherwise: http://www.epinet.org/stmt/economistsminwage200410web.pdf An excerpt: We believe that a modest increase in the minimum wage would improve the well-being of low-wage workers and would not have the adverse effects that critics have claimed. In particular, we share the view the Council of Economic Advisers expressed in the 1999 Economic Report of the President that “the weight of the evidence suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage have had very little or no effect on employment.” While controversy about the precise employment effects of the minimum wage continues, research has shown that most of the beneficiaries are adults, most are female, and the vast majority are members of low-income working families. Yeah you can find lots of grist for whatever your particular mill is on the internet, but I was talking about papers more than form letters. I think you've got basically the Card and Krueger paper, but that's about it. What I think is kind of interesting here is the fact that you seem to be projecting negative motives onto me because I disagree with your conclusions about how to best help the poor and unskilled. I'm pretty sure we want the same thing, but after spending a lot of time thinking and reading about these issues - I just can't agree with your approach. Even though I think that adopting the policies you favor would actually hurt the unskilled and the elderly, I don't recall accusing you of intentionally advocating policies that would harm them, and it's not like I've just been making bald assertions here - I've spent a fair amount of time outlining my arguments, and theres decade after decade's worth of scholarship out there that backs them up. You're obviously a smart guy, so why resort to things like this "nigrah and messican" business and the like?

Hey Martin: Great TR - made me homesick in a big way. I think the Bend has the best trad-cragging in the state, but hopefully the word won't get out. That rock - nothing sweeter than dropping a hex or a nut into one of those constrictions when you are getting pumped out. FWIW I thought that "The Reckoning" was a bit more sustained but a bit easier than "Sugar Kicks," but after doing "The Reckoning" as a warm-up for Pure Joy towards the tail end of our days there, I always figured I was too pumped for the lead and either headed over to Ed's Jam or headed home. Sounds like I should have just sacked it up and hopped on Pure Joy instead. I do remember thinking that Introductory Offer seemed pretty damned stiff for a 5.9.