JayB

Yeah - no kidding. They have a significant natural advantage since they produce their ehtanol from sugar cane, which is way more efficient, and it'd make way, way more sense for the US to import Brazillian ethanol at prices that are way lower than what it costs us to produce ethanol from corn, even with the massive subsidies. Now that MTBE is being phased out, and we dont have the infrastructure needed to get the ethanol to the refineries on the coasts, or to prepare the final mixtures for delivery to the stations, or the ability to make enough ethanol to replace the MBTE - it'd make a hell of a lot of sense to get rid of the tarrif wall that keeps cheap ethanol from Brazil out. Why have ethanol delivered right where it's needed by ship, at a way lower cost, when we can burn tons of fuel shipping more expensive ethanol to the coasts by truck? Quite the populist retardation on display here. Should be quite the expensive megacluster by the time we arrive at peak driving season.

There's something in the neighborhood of 2 trillion worth of ARM debt scheduled to reset before the end of '07. In most coastal markets mortgage-to-rent, mortgage-to-income, and the percentage of homes purchased by non-occupants have reached all time highs (40% of all purchases in '05). Equity extraction via HELOC and MEW and cash-out refis have reached all-time highs. The yen-based carry trade is unwinding, the value of credit-default swaps for MBS portfolios has been skyrocketing, and people are starting to get a tad worried about the fact that the valuations that underly the MBS portfolios reflect systemic appraisal fraud. What's it all mean? My prediction is that San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Coastal Florida, most population centers in New England, Phoenix/Tucson, Las Vegas, and a big chunk of Colorado will see rising foreclosure activity, ballooning inventories, and price stagnation through the end of '07, with real price declines occuring at various rates through '10. Seattle is tougher to call, but the population/wage picture doesn't look terribly conducive to future appreciation. The fact that I've spoken to MD's who have ruled out Seattle due to the cost of housing should give the RE cheerleaders a bit of pause IMO.

The LED thing is cool and will probably make a significant dent in power consumption. Biodiesel is a cool way for hobbyists to use grease - but that's about it. Once you start running the numbers and look at the environmental impact of increased biofuel consumption, it doesn't look nearly as appealing from an environmental, efficiency, or economic perspective. Read this paper straight through and I suspect you'll be less enthused about biofuels. http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/patzek/BiofuelQA/Materials/RealFuelCycles-Web.pdf Increasing energy efficiency and conservation of conventional fuels and quite a bit more nuclear power, along with a smattering of wind/solar/biofuels is what we'll eventually end up with, but not handing a few dozen billion to the folks producing subsidized, tarriff protected ethanol.

I'm not surprised that the conservative finds the Yellowstone Club idyllic Definitely the only place with rivers, mountains, and ski lifts in NA. Besides, if I had that kind of money I'd get a place in Whistler. Might be kind of a pain to have the WSJ delivered there though. Good article on the Brazillian resale market for recycled mercury from the US on the front page today, not to mention the hedge funds piling into credit default swaps for MBS's. If anyone reading this is the proud owner of a zero-down, no-doc, neg-Am, interest-only "mortgage product," you can take comfort in the fact that Wall Street is betting heavily against you.

Delphic as usual, comrade. While I understand your point, it might be a useful excercise for you to descend from the lexical aether and express yourself in concrete terms.

Oh, how droll. He's emerged from the paneled room and Corinthian leather seats to treat us with another stellar stereotype stripped from the Wall Street Journal oped page. Jay, do tell us the joke about Ayn Rand, the Communist, Stalin and Roosevelt again! Reading room with the WSJ on the table, underneath the brass lamp with the green shade, big leather chair with the footstool - add a troutstream in the backyard and a ski-lift a quarter mile away and I'd be in heaven. But back to reality. Given that I deliberately left the investment company gig behind four years ago, and voluntarily took a big, everlasting paycut to work in basic research labs tackling cancer and HIV, and you work as an optical engineer in for-profit tech companies - it seems kind of strange that you'd constantly be chiding me with this stuff about chasing/worshipping the dollar. Should I hang a scarlet dollar sign around my neck while I listen to these sermons?

Oh, oh please don't go! This fascinating discussion just wouldn't be the same without your priceless contributions! Maybe you're just taking a break to consult a few reference texts before returning to drop another informational firebomb on this Dresden of a thread. Oh, we can only wait and hope...what to do until JayB returns, what to do until JayB returns?! Oh, I can hardly stand it. I need a cup of Sensitivioso au lait to calm my shipwrecked nerves! Hahaha. You get that drafing certificate yet? The proceeds from that should keep you well stocked in the obscure comic books, "Mother Jones" articles, and bad punk music that constituted the foundation for your perspective on the world.

I think you could say the same thing about owning a climbing gym most of the time.

The only other point I'll make is that there was plenty of dissent and strife within the US - quite a bit of it much, much more intense than anything that we've seen since the advent of the Iraq War - and even though pretty much everyone knew what was at stake in Europe, there was hardly a mass-consensus behind going to war there. Even in England, Churchill was widely despised as an alarmist warmonger, until the facts on the ground proved him right. There's also a reason why Roosevelt had to sell assistance to England under the terms of a "lend-lease" deal, etc, etc, etc. If Roosevelt had decided to go to war as soon as the Germans invaded the Rhineland, or Sudetenland, or Poland - public opinion would have turned against him in a massive way. Pearl Harbor changed all of that, and some sort of attack by Germany or Japan was probably inevitable - but without such an attack it's hard to argue that the average American would have seen going to war in Europe or the Pacific as something that was justified, or that doing nothing would eventually bring about a much more grave and dangerous situation for them or the rest of the world. This wasn't too long after WWI, and there were quite a few people around who concluded that the conseqeuences of doing nothing couldn't be any worse than getting involved in something like that again.

My only comment on this thread is that people's perceptions of WWII seem to be overly rosy. There was plenty of dissension and strife in the months and years leading up to the war, and the war itself was pretty much a straight-up fight to the death. The pilots didn't think twice about unloading their payloads on population centers, the Marines fighting their way from island to island made sure that the Japanese soldiers weren't just "playing dead" when the fighting was through, they had no illusions about what would happen to them if they were taken alive, etc, etc, etc. The bottom line is that we won that war because we were able to destroy their armies and societies more effectively than they were able to destroy ours. The fact the free world prevailed over the totalitarian states was the best thing that ever happened to the world - IMO - but things could have just as easily gone the other way if, for example - the Germans had developed the bomb first, or the cream of the German Army had been deployed to repel the D-Day invasion, rather than fighting the Russians.

Hey NattyB - could you expand on that last bit? If I hear you right, it sounds as if you're able to sneak through the application process without ever being asked about risky activities, and you're able to get a policy without lying about them - then two years after the policy goes into effect and the "suicide exclusion" clause expires, you are covered for pretty much anything? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said - but it sounds as though it'd be pretty tough to get through the application process without anyone asking about what activities that you engage in. BTW - any idea how WW kayaking ranks in the insurance companies' hierarchy o' risk? It's always felt way more risky than climbing to me, and I'd be curious to know if the insurance companies feel the same way.

Mogul skiing is great, but having done both moguls and rails I can say that rails are way harder to learn and way more likely to mess you up than moguls - but you are definitely right that mogul skiing is the more practical/transferable of the two skillsets.

I'm not sure which is funnier - Newschoolers in moguls or Oldschoolers on rails, but it's pretty clear that the Oldschooler+rail combo is way, way more likely to result in hospitalization.

Now the triple-threat softshell pants with zippable polypro, softshell, or gaiter legs - there you'd have something. Too bad it's too late to do the "Triple-X" branding/tie-in with Vin Diesel.

I think Layton filed a patent on the khaki-or-sage nylon shorts with zip-off polypro bottoms at least 2-3 years ago. I have to say, I think that Jaee has stepped it up a notch here with the polypro+zippable OR-style gaiters. I'm really not sure how you can top that. Maybe Seattle-Sombrero style hats with flip-down glacier glasses built into them?

I think there's a hit-squad that'll hunt you down and kill you if you don't couple the polypro with the khaki-or-sage shorts with the zip-on legs. Someone needs to invert the paradigm and wear polypro longjohns coupled with the zip-on nylon legs.

I'll second Will's recs. If you want to double up on the hand-size pieces you could go with hexes and/or Tricams and still stay within the $500 budget. I've found hexes and tricams pretty useful in alpine settings. They're lightweight, and great for icy cracks or other weird placements, and I'd much rather use a hex or a tricam for a leaver/rap anchor in the event of a retreat.

A sweeping generalisation guaranteed to raise the ire of the left with little basis in fact. There's the JayB we love Hunter Gatherers Jayb; stewardship isn't as foreign a concept as you suggest. The stewardship you are talking about was pretty much involuntary. The preservation that you are talking about occured simply because they lacked the technology and the population that they would have needed to wipe out the resources that they were dependent upon - at least most of the time. Check the lit on megafaunal exctintions, Easter Island, etc for some real examples from the past - and take a look at what happens the moment that they get their hands on technology and it's their choices and behavior, rather than their impotence before nature, that dictates their relationship with the natural world. Doesn't jive too well with the utopian eco-fantasy of the golden, edenic past.

Amazing. First time in recorded history when there's been a Brazier/Brayshaw tag-team beat down. I'm sorry if this seems a bit harsh, downfall, but you can hardly expect much in the way of popular support for this kind of thinking - any more than you could expect all of the non born-again folks to respond enthusiastically to folks fantasizing about/eagerly awaiting the moment when all of the folks who have yet to sign up for the PTL Club's mailing list will be enduring incalculable grief and suffering. Just out of curiosity - how old are you and what is your educational background?

What you really have to wonder is how someone who has a loved one who is affected by these diseases isn't able to question the causes of them, techological civilization. I don't have any data on this but it seems the more technocological/advanced/whatever we get the higher the rates of these diseases we have. That's only because people are living long enough to succumb to them because of the improvements in public health and nutrition that science and technology has brought about. Give most people a choice and they'll take a swollen prostate at 75 over watching most of their family wiped out by periodic plagues, infections, starvation/malnutrition, having a significant number of their wives/sisters/mothers die during childbirth, etc.

There's a reason why the environmental movement started in the most prosperous, technologically advanced societies. The first is that miserable, starving people generally don't give a shit about the environment. The second is that without advanced science/technology no one would even have the means to understand the nature of environmental problems, much less propose solutions.

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.