JayB

Lots of interesting studies on identical twins raised in different homes that raise interesting questions about how much parenting styles matter. Once you exclude the extremes most of the studies suggest that parenting philosophies matter less than we think.

As opposed to those politicians installed by finance capital. In practice, that'll mean concentrating the losses on public workers as much as possible. That'll be much more consistent their political instincts and their political philosophies than restructuring their debt vis a vis bondholders. I do like how political and class struggle is taking a greater role in your narratives, Jay! Seems to me that "finance capital" is a much more salient force on the national level than at the state and local level - but the folks who loaned state and local governments will certainly use whatever political tools are at their disposal to insure that the folks dealing out the pain inflict as little hardship on them as possible. At the end of the day - obligations that can't be paid won't, and the local political dynamics will determine who gets the shaft. My reading of the state and local incentives is that in the vast majority of cases those dynamics will favor imposing the bulk of the losses on bondholders. Imposing losses on bondholders - the bulk of which are individual retirement savings aggregated through pensions and mutual funds - imposes pretty steep costs on both people who work for and depend on whatever government is defaulting, but creditors shouldn't be insulated from the consequences of making bad loans anymore than unions that negotiate pension-time bombs should be insulated from the consequences of their decisions. Should be a particularly interesting dynamic when a pension fund representing public sector employees has a significant stake in a bond issued by a government entity that's defaulting as a result of un-fundable promises made to public sector unions...

http://www.ericandlucie.com/New%20Zealand/New%20Zealand.htm How much time will you be spending on the North Island? If you're landing in Auckland and driving to Wellington on the way South, it'd be worth spending a day in the Taupo/Tongariro NP area while you're en route. Will try to chime in with some more feedback later, but it's worth searching the archives as there are some pretty good threads in there from previous inquiries. Drinking wise - stick to NZ whites - amazing and cheap. Beer is overpriced and marginal IMO.

Good blog post on Ch.9 and comments/discussion here. https://self-evident.org/?p=878

that's not whats actually happened, but hey, sounds good Really? What's the actual breakdown? How about OC in '94?

Kids from uber-permissive homes tend to crash and burn starting in junior high, and kids from super-strict authoritarian homes tend to crash and burn immediately after high school.

I'll be focusing on moving the other direction. 5'10 175 now, will try to hit a stronger and leaner 180 by June - but I'll be spending pretty much all of my time climbing on slabby/moderate stuff. If you're not carrying around a fair amount of excess body fat it's hard to see much of a performance benefit from dropping lots of pounds outside of pushing the grades and perhaps long-distance stuff. Not really into either at the moment but I guess I'm in the minority?

Same. I'm also constantly amazed by how rapidly the vegetation makes roads up there impassible when there's no vehicle traffic on them.

It'll be interesting to see if the operative verb isn't "delayed" rather than "avoided" in ten years. http://americacanada.blogspot.com/2009/07/cmhc-and-our-government.html Housing looks like and even bigger house of cards up there to me. Mortgage-to-income, mortgage-to-rent, debt-to-income metrics in Canada are all looking very alarming at the moment. May be even worse than in the US at the peak of the bubble, and pretty much all sent to those levels by the actions of the CMHC. Not sure what about zero down mortgages with 40 year amortizations backed by the CMHC is "conservative," but we'll see what happens when the 5-year resets hit the folks that shoehorned themselves into homes that they can barely afford at the lowest rates they're likely to see over the lives of their mortgages. Might be a pain-free out of that if a positive black-swan of some kind materializes but the balance of probabilities isn't looking terribly favorable.

California, New Jersey, Illinois, Mass, etc are hardly the poster children for low taxes, kemosabe.

At least you've stopped the pretense of neutrality. If you'd followed Vallejo you'd note that the bondholders, as most shitbirds do, did better than people Bankruptcy means the states are fucked for borrowing. No new roads, new bridges, new schools. No repairs on the existing ones. "bankruptcy" and the attendant impact on the state would be HUGE - hell, the prospect of such being muted is huge to the bond markets. Bankruptcy does benefit the lawyers though, those "service" employees that Thomas Friedman fellates States where politicians depend on public employee unions for their elections will do what's best for them politically, irrespective of the impact on the state's borrowing costs in the future. In practice, that'll mean concentrating the losses on bondholders as much as possible. That'll be much more consistent their political instincts and their political philosophies than restructuring public employee pensions and benefits.

liar. The states are bankrupt for lack of revenue due to YOUR laissez faire/bubble crash and YOUR drown the state in a bathtub/anti-tax strategy. If all states were in an equally deep budget hole on account of declining tax revenues in the wake of a recession, then you'd have a better case. Ditto if the states with the highest tax burdens were all in the best fiscal shape. Again - not the case.

It's been covered pretty heavily in elsewhere. I personally think that state and municipal bondholders have more to fear from bankruptcy than public sector unions, since concentrating the pain on bondholders will be much less politically costly than imposing cuts/losses on public sector employees. Hose the bondholders and it'll have little or no immediate political cost for public officials, and the higher interest rates that states/municipalities pay going forward will spread the pain over the entire electorate for a long period of time. Imposing things like pension reform and structural pay cuts on existing employees will be political suicide in democratically controlled basket cases like California, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, etc, etc, etc. Think of the GM bailout. The same political dynamics that wiped out bondholders in favor of the unions will prevail in any state controlled by Democrats. Having said that - the multi-trillion dollar unfunded liabilities that will bankrupt states and municipalities have been obvious for years, and anyone buying state and muni debt should have insisted on interest rates high enough to compensate them for the default risks they were shouldering. Loaning money to Greece and California has certain risks, and people who did so will have to take their losses when the day of reckoning arrives.

I found the contrast between the reflexive response to the Arizona shootings and the Ft. Hood shootings to be quite interesting.

It was the visceral response that I was noting. I've seen it rear its head before. It's erupted in the middle of more than one dinner party - emerging in a sudden burst of bile and venom, from somewhere deep within the alumnus. The conversational equivalent the little guy in the cafeteria scene in the first "Alien" movie. Truly frightening to behold. Aggies have nothing on 'Greeners.

Portland is the status quo. No?

You've developed quite a robust theoretical framework to analyze the meaning of all of this....

I was definitely 10 levels lamer. Just the fact that I was wearing waterproof shoe covers and using clipless pedals settled that one. I was actually wondering if they were engaged in some kind of self-referentially ironic mobile performance art with a message several levels deeper than anything that I could even begin to understand.

Very profound questions. I was pondering them all a few weeks ago when a swarm of bearded "Critical Mass" people enveloped me on my ride home from work. Unfortunately, the only one I can remember was "Why is a grown man with a long-beard, skinny jeans, and a woven rasta hat riding a with a banana seat and plastic mag wheels? At night - in the rain, with no lights, and no helmet? The next one was - why is that guy trying to light a cigarette in the rain with his zippo while no-handsing it on his fixie? Then all of the questions faded away, much like the pack of "Critical Mass" people when we all headed up a steep hill and they reveled in the austere purity of a hill climb on bikes with no gears....

If only you knew how to visually assert your uniqueness through a tightly proscribed set of widely shared clothing, hair, and eye-glass frame options employed by millions and millions of other people to do the same thing. When "hipster" theme parties become the new 70's parties this jig is up. I hope.

Is alive in Portland... [video:youtube]

Thought so. You should be happy either way - no? De facto, de jure - both roads lead to Argentina/Greece. Same destination, different path.

My read was that Immelt was either taking the job out of a sincere conviction that he'd be able to serve the public in his capacity as an adviser or...use the political connections that he would have access to as an adviser to lobby for special privileges and pork for GE, that'd translate into higher compensation for him. Good way to score some "Green Jobs" pork, etc. Obama gets whatever political benefits that will accrue from having a business magnate on his team and/or those that will result from buying a businessman's support with pork. Soft cartelization/slouching towards Argentina.

Uh Jim? Fuck you. Saw that one coming Jimbo. I actually think pretty highly of Evergreen, but if I didn't I'd be careful never to mention that unless I'd already mapped out an escape strategy to extricate myself from whatever enclosed space I happened to be in Seattle, Olympia, Bellingham, or Portland. "[Pointing]Look - over there! Someone's being judgmental and intolerant[rapid transition to fleeing...]! 10 to 1 says that you could defend female genital mutilation as a practice that the proper application of multi-culturalism (not to mentionthe West's sorry neocolonial legacy, etc) renders off limits to critiques by Westerners and elicit little more than a yawn, but make a single modestly unflattering aside about Evergreen and you'll ignite a pious rage that even a third glass of organic, biodynamically cultivated, fair-trade Pinot can't squelch....