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Everything posted by JayB
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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.
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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!!!"
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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.
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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."
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Sounds like Doug Coombs was killed in an avalanche in La Grave. RIP.
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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.
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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....
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think that my mini-epic on an that most daunting of objectives - the West Ridge of Mt. Stuart, is a good candiate. Linkage
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Your just an asshole I'm guessing that it was the line-item veto bit that really sent you over the edge.
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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?
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[TR] Winter Cragging at The Bend- 1/22/2006
JayB replied to MCash's topic in Central/Eastern Washington
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. -
Please reconcile these: Productivy gains have been enormous over the last decade according to govt stats. In that same time period, real wages have been flat to down, while CFO and CEO salaries have roughly tripled. BTW, I don't think you can eliminate povery by just paying everyone wages that are above the poverty threshold. That is not my assertion. But I also don't believe that you automatically hamstring a business by requiring minimum wage. Further, I assert that when your employees are not having to work two jobs to make ends meet and not stressing the fuck out because they can't take a sick child to the doctor, you will increase productivity of those employees and to some degree offset the higher wage. I don't believe that it is moral, ethical, or christian nor a benefit to shareholders to pay corporate execs wildly bloated salary packages while the rank and file employee can't heat their home or feed their kids. You deem it socialist, I call it human compassion. I leave you with two thoughts: 1. As of 2005, if the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour. 2. In 1965 the CEO:Worker pay ratio was 24:1. Today it is over 430:1. In Japan today it is 55:1. And before you claim "they are worth it" take a look at Treas. Sec Snow's tenure as CEO of CSX Rail, or Ken Lay, Kozlowski, etc, etc. I guess it depends on whether you base your beliefs about this on feelings or evidence. There are a few papers out there that argue to the contrary, but the overwhelming consensus is that legislating a higher minimum wage actually ends up hurting the people that you want to help. There's a pretty solid 60+ year consensus on this one amongst economists, and it can be verified by simple thought experiments. As I said above, not only does it hurt the unskilled and uneducated, the inflation, monetary and otherwise that it brings about has a very real, very negative effect upon anyone living on a fixed income. I'm not sure how a policy which not only harms young people with no skills and old people with no earned income is actually compassionate. I can see that it's born of a compassionate impluse, but real compassion requires doing what works - in this case, actually reducing poverty - not what mereley makes us feel good about ourselves. The bit about CEO pay is pretty irrelevant unless you believe that every time Bill Gates gets paid more, it somehow undermines your standard of living. Besides, it would be more accurate to sum up all of the money earned by the CEOs of the Fortune 500 in a given year, and divide it by the total man-hours worked in the US economy, and see what difference it would make in average wages - not much. If corporations overpay for talent - that's between them and their shareholders, and paying a fortune for a guy that doesn't produce much, then that's a bad management decision that will eventually cost the company in market share, share price, etc. There's probably plenty of people in the country that think you are grossly overpaid for what you do - but the beauty of a market economy is that society's need for what you have to offer at any given time, not popular opinion - determines what you make. The only other quibble I have is that I bet your metric includes only money wages, not compensation. If wages are static and health care premiums are rising at 5-10% YOY, then flat wages + rising benefits = higher total compensation. If both really are stagnating, it's hard to imagine how increasing unemployment and inflation are going to help much - unless you think that a reduction in total wages will be helpful to the nation somehow.
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That's what I was wondering. Can't see any reason not to do that.
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Meanwhile, back in the real world "KPMG's biannual study measures 27 cost components, such as labour, taxes, utilities and real estate... France and the Netherlands are the most cost-efficient European countries, while the U.S. ranked seventh among the nine countries, the study said. Germany edged out Japan as the costliest place to conduct business." Spin, spin, spin... But Murray, if KPMG is correct, that just show's exactly how harmful France's labor policies actually are. If France is the 2nd most cost-effective place to do business in the G7 - at least in the abstract - then employers should be beating down France's door to open up shop there, and their average unemployment should be amongst the lowest in the G7. The fact that this is not the case suggests that something beyond the expenses that KPMG tabulated is seriously discouraging overall employment there. Seems like labor market rigidity is a good candidate for this, and this is consistent with situation where unemployment is concentrated amongst the least skilled portion of the population - which is exactly what you see there.
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I don't think that most people are actually looking to harm the people at the low end of the wage/skill continuum - but it is worth looking at how no minimum wage vs. living wage will affect them. I think it's pretty clear that if the key to eliminating poverty was mandating a sufficiently high wage, then all any country would have to do to turn itself into another Dubai would be to raise the wage to $100/hour or it's equivalent. Bingo - no more poverty. In reality, the only way to raise real wages is to raise productivity through better technology, training, etc. There's a reason why most of us live in a state of material comfort and plenty that would astonish our great-grandparents, and it's not because we are working any harder than they had to. But back to the people at the low end of the wage-skill curve. What actually happens to them is that when you raise wages above the value that a person with no skills and a GED can generate on an employer's behalf - e.g. the employer will lose money every hour that they keep them on the job, the employer will either shed staff, go out of business, move elsewhere, or hire only people with enough skills to make them more money than they pay out in wages. All that you have to do to confirm this is a quick mental excercise where you keep ratcheting up the wages a dollar at a time, and ask yourself whether or not the local McDonald's franchisee is going to pay $15 an hour to have someone man the till. We've been through this drill before, and what actually happens is that when you raise wages above a given threshold with no increases in productivity, you increase unemployment, and this unemployment is most heavily concentrated amongst the least skilled members of the workforce. Once unemployment gets high enough, the political pressure mounts and the central bank increases the money supply until inflation erodes the momentary gains in real wages that the increased minimum wage brought about, and purchasing power for those earning the lowest wages stays where it was - at best. Meanwhile those who have been saving money rather than borrowing it, and especially those living on fixed incomes - get thoroughly hosed by the ensuing inflation. Less than 3% of the workforce actually earns minimum wage, and half of all minimum wage-earners are under-25, and a high percentage of the under-25's are actually teenagers who aren't supporting a family with what they earn - so on balance I'd rather have a policy that keeps Granny from shivering under the afghan all winter and cracking open the Purina. There's also the fact that very few people who start out earning the minimum wage actually keep earning the minimum wage for very long, as the skills and experience that they pick up on the low-end of the job market eventually translate into higher wages. However, if you raise minimum wages high enough, you will effectively keep the least skilled/educated people from ever taking their first step, and raising the number of unemployable people in the economy, especially amongst the youth, will not have a very beneficial effect on the crime rate. Anyhow - it's interesting that even with your background in economics you support the notion that the way to eliminate poverty is through legislating higher money wages, as that's not a common perspective amongst people with your background. Not as uncommon as Biology majors who don't believe in evolution (actually knew one of those), but pretty rare. Is that something that you cam about through your training in econ or is it a populist working-class solidarity thing that you've hung onto despite your training?