JayB

The funniest thing is someone who could literally be a great-grandparent still self-identifying as a member of a Youth Movement of any sort. Don't trust anyone over -what - 90?! Bwahahahahah

No really. Did the Woodstock Retrospective come out on DVD with new interactive features? Is Geritol coming out with a new liquid formulation that nostalgic older folks can soak into psychelic looking sheets of blotter paper?

Spill it. What news? Peter, Paul, and Mary getting back together? David Crosby publish a new book of poetry that he'll read aloud at your house? New Jerry Garcia talking doll with lifelike "Dragon Chasing" action and soot smudged beard issued by Hasbro? Not sure what else could have you feeling so giddy about "The News."

What news? You happy about the bombings in Iraq? "Boy all of those dead Iraqi civilians should really hurt Bush's poll numbers! Yippee!" Or are you referring to some other news? Were you at a March in DC recently? Allan Johnson, a high school English teacher and debate coach from Fairfax, Va., held a sign saying "U.S. Troops Out of Iraq. Bring Them Home Now!" at Saturday's "End the Occupation" rally in Washington. In fact, though, Johnson isn't sure he wants to bring the troops home now, or to end the American occupation of Iraq. At least, not yet. "We've made a giant mess," said Johnson, a handsome man who wore his long snowy hair in a ponytail and had a sparkling stud in one ear. "I would hate for the Bush administration to halfway fix things and then leave, and then blame the Iraqis if things go wrong. Once you go to somebody's house and break all the windows, don't you owe them new windows?" Why, then, was he marching at an End the Occupation rally? "I don't agree with all the people here, believe you me," he said. But his own sign? He glanced at it, startled, and explained that someone had handed it to him. "I didn't even look at it," he said. "I was just waving it."

j_b said "It will be funny if the Republicans are hip all of a sudden and the left is suddenly me, you and our high school English teachers lecturing about the triumph of the 60s." Give us a Kumbayah while you are at it homey...

Bring it on Bob. I'd definitely be interested My vote is for Stone Gardens.

For exhibit A of this phenomenon see above post(er).

From Salon.com Dazed and confused about Iraq ANSWER supports "the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance." Military Families Against the War wants to bring their loved ones home safely. Others who rallied Saturday just hate Bush. Can this antiwar movement be saved Article

....can you leave me out of it? Cough. Cough.

Damn dude. Nice effort. Stuart looked nasty when we were leaving the Enchantments.

Yup - melt out easily and get blown over, and get buried failrly quickly in melting snow. If you are in a situation where you will actually depend on the wands, these are not what you want.

I've come across quite a few people who start climbing, get passionate about it, then quit just as abruptly as they began. I have also met a number of people who have just returned to the sport after giving it up for quite a while - some for as long as twenty years. I have always wanted to ask the folks who quit all of a sudden what it was that caused them to do so. Injuries, a near-death experience, death of a partner, marrying somone who forced them to choose between continuing climbing and continuing their marriage, the arrival of children, not enough time - are some of the reasons that I have heard of second hand, but I have never actually managed to get ahold of an ex-climber and grill them about what convinced them to hang it up for good. I'm especially curious about the folks that develop a passionate interest in climbing and quit for no apparent reason. Some seem to have the recreational equivalent of ADD, and skip from one-pasttime to the next, but most seem to quit for reasons that are not easily discerned by a casual observer. I'm also interested in what compelled ex-climbers to begin climbing again after being away for many years, and if they came back because they were missing what they left behind or were seeking out something new. Since I started climbing in '96 I have taken three or four multi-month breaks from climbing, all as a result of injuries. I took 8-months off in en effort to fully recover from tendonitis that I had been aggravating for a couple of years without a break long enough to to any real healing. I was fed up with the constant pain and decided to try kick it once and for all. I followed that up with a couple of 2-3 month breaks while recovering from torn ligaments in my knees that I sustained while skiing. I spent most of the 8-months away peak bagging and fly-fishing, and actually sort of enjoyed the break from technical climbing as it forced me to indulge a bit more heavily in activities that I had been neglecting in an attempt to step-up my climbing. After I came back the primary difference in my climbing was that I more or less gave up sport climbing for a couple of years - both because I found that I was more interested in long, moderate trad and alpine routes, and because I no longer had the specific strength necessary to climb sport routes that I had once enjoyed, and found myself getting a bit frustrated after getting shut down on routes that I had once climbed as warm-ups. I would have been able to console myself on routes in the sub-10 range, but there just weren't many of those around at my favorite sport area (Shelf Road) so I could never get away from the fact that my abilities in this arena had gone down hill in a big way. Another injury-induced vacation from rock-climbing got me into ice-climbing, which happened mainly because all of the trad-routes were frozen over, my knee was too messed up to ski, and I was looking for some more variety while climbing. The variety has been a good thing, as doing everything (except aid climbing) and a lifelong love of the outdoors has kept me interested and given me an outlet no matter what kind of shape I am in. Anyway - I have been wondering if anyone else on this board or that reads this board has taken time away from climbing. What caused you to quit, how long were you away, and what brought you back. Is your focus any different than it used to be? Posters/lurkers - let's hear it.

Finally checked out the Enchantments on one of the most beautiful days of the year. Left SC parking lot at 7:00, got back to the Stuart Colchuck Trailhead at 5:30, picked up the stashed mountain bike and rode back to the car by the light of the Tikka.

Ordered some WB-400 pants about a month ago. The service was terrific - I entered an incorrect measurement and called to correct it and the response was instantaneous. You can monitor the progress of your order in real-time on the website, and when I got the pants in the mail a week after ordering them, fit was perfect and the quality was top-notch. Anyone who doesn't have soft-shell stuff yet should definitely check them out - fully custom garbs for quite a bit less money than off the shelf stuff. Definite

Kelsey just came out with a "Technical Slot Canyon" Guide to the Colorado Plateau that you should be able to peruse for ideas that will get you away from most of the crowds. Freeclimb clearly knows what's up as far as where to go. All of the areas he mentioned (that I've been to) are amazing. Also - March is cold as all hell there. There have been a couple of threads about this in the past that you can also peruse for ideas and photos.

Did the Snow Creek over Asgard to whatever the hell that trailhead is traverse through the Enchantments. Downhill MTBing by the light of the tikka back to the Snow Creek parking was the shiznit.

The PPM analogy comes in because there are a number of costs - the time and expense of filing claims, taxes, bureaucracy, lost income, diminshed production, etc - that act like the economic equivalent of friction when one is replacing property that has been destroyed. Such expenses mean that when a country has to expend capital to replace material goods that have been destroyed, the nation in question always suffers a permanent loss of wealth that can never be recovered. But you were right. It would have been more correct to say "analogous to" rather than "the equivalent of."

This read's like a chapter from Bastiat's Click Economic Fallacies <-- Book Expenditures relating to the accident may go up, but the theory that the said expenditures represent a net economic plus for the country is entirely false. If this premise were true, then the best way to generate everlasting prosperity would be to destroy everything and rebuild it over an over again. The amount of wealth in and property would go down with every iteration, and the pool of capital necessary to repair the damage would shrink drastically every time - but somehow we'd all be better off. This becomes more clear when you use your own finances in the place of the economy. Let's say everything you own is destroyed in a tornado which also hospitalizes you for several months, and you have to use your savings to cover the losses (assume that they are adequate to do so). Once you cash in your savings and replenish all of your property are you any better off? No. In fact, you are worse off by the exactly the amount of property and wages that you lost. The savings that you spent to replace what was destroyed are no longer available to invest in anything that will generate income for you, the amount of property you own has not increased, and if you are forced to cover such losses again you'll be in much worse shape. The same is true for the economy. In reality no one insures themselves, but the analogy holds because the funds expended to cover the loss of property, wages, etc simply replace what was lost and in no way add to the net productive capacity of the nation. There is no net increase in jobs or wealth that results when accumulated capital is expended to replace such losses. The expenditures do lead to more work for those directly involved in replacing the property - but the net increase in property or wealth on a national level is zilch, and the said funds will not be available to invest in a new factory, more efficient machinery, additional infrastructure to further expedite the movement of goods and services, etc, etc, etc. In economics, as in thermodynamics, there is no free lunch, and increased prosperity through destruction of property, health, etc is the economic equivalent of the perpetual motion machine.

I think the merits of the DB are real enough, but the eight has become second nature, I can inspect it at a glance, and it is at least as safe as the DB so I don't expect I'll ever make the conversion.

Granite Gear's Ice Sparring gloves are pretty good in this respect. Sturdy leather palms, removable liner, good balance between warmth and dexterity with a tilt towards dexterity.

Sounds like a good deal - I'm sure that you'll get a taker eventually - but I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone in a one piece suit in the lower 48...

Or selectively edited

5'10" and 170-175 equilibrium weight. I've been able to hone my physique to perfection by using the "Eat Whatever the Hell You Can Get Your Hands On That's Cheap" diet coupled with the "Workout at Random Intervals When You Have the Time" program.

For most of us driving is a necessity, not an activity which we have a passion for such that we deliberately organize a significant part of our life around it. Your analogy would be more apt if you were talking about amateur race-car drivers that dedicate most of their spare money and time working on cars for races that they spend many of their weekends engaged in. I would bet that when one of their fellow enthusiasts dies on the track it affects some of them quite a bit more than when someone plows a minivan into a median on their way to the grocery store. In any event, no one ever said that feeling even a hint of sorrow for the dead or vague feelings of sympathy for those left behind is required of anyone. Some people will feel these emotions in response to a given accident, some people won’t. If you couldn't give a shit - that's fine, but I hardly think it's necessary or proper for anyone to make a specific point of saying so. For me most of the time my response to tragic news depends on how much I know about the accident and how the deceased's passing has affected those left behind. If all I read is so and so died on this peak on this day – then I am usually pretty indifferent. If there’s quite a bit of detail about their life, their family, and/or a narrative by a wife, best-friend, etc talking about what kind of a person they were, how the deceased absence has affected them, and the like then that’s a different story. I’m not sure how you can presume to tell people which of their feelings are authentic or not, or that what are most likely sincere expressions of condolences are nothing more than inauthentic posturing (though some may well be) without a bit more interaction and engagement than postings over the internet can permit, let alone mock or dismiss them because they expressed feelings that you didn’t happen to share.

and this would explain why, say, tv people are paid the way they are relative to teachers? education has nothing to do with free market economics. if conservatives ever figure out that education and similar fields should not be held accountable for not generating direct profits, the school system may have a chance. Who is talking about profits? Market forces play a much more limited role in public sector performance than private enterprises, but public enterprises are not completely insulated from them either. Take a look at tertiary education, in which institutions have to compete for students who have a choice as to which institution they attend - envy of the world. Compare that to the remainder of our education system. And market forces have nothing to do with the shortage of qualified teachers in the sciences? The bottom line is that if there is a prolonged shortage of workers in a given field, employers offer higher pay to attract more applicants. Incentives do influence behavior.