JayB

There really aren't very many pure Keynesians around anymore in the realm of practicing economists, other than New-Keynesians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Keynesian_economics IMO the main one-line-summary difference I can detect between them and the new-classicals is that they tend to believe in fiscal stimulus and the new-classicals tend to believe in monetary stimulus. Other than that I from what I can tell they're pretty much the same page when it comes to being preoccupied with constructing and perturbing highly formalized DSGE* models of the economy that assume many of the conclusions that they're attempting to prove. Good summary of the problems with that approach below. http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/03/the-unfortunate-uselessness-of-most-state-of-the-art-academic-monetary-economics/ IMO the main problem for folks like you is that you have had massive asset bubbles everywhere from highly liberalized economy's like Irelands, to places with heavily administered mercantilist-cartel models like Japans, and its very difficult to identify a plausible set of crazy-ass Friedmanite market zealots calling the shots everywhere that leveraged speculation has ended badly in the past 40 years, much less in the historical context ranging from the South Sea bubble onwards. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_stochastic_general_equilibrium

Quite a bit tougher when there are no children to move in with, no?

Someone needs to get those results in front of the regressive/neocon/warmongering corporate shills at the NYT, post-haste! http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html

Also - the gullies on Huntington's Ravine are a great resource for developing steep-snow/moderate-ice skills that you can put to use in much larger settings. Should be more than enough to keep you engaged there for a fair amount of time if you have to delay your plans to head out west to larger peaks. Also - check out Mt. Shasta/Adams as possible targets before you get started on some of the other peaks.

Ditto on the suggestion to emphasize familiarizing yourself with the skills involved in glacier-travel/crevasse-rescue. Good book on the topic here: http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Glacier-Travel-Crevasse-Rescue/dp/1893682064 The only other thing I'd emphasize is the importance of respecting the weather when and if you make it out for a round of volcano climbing. If you're coming from out of state, particularly before the second-week of July or thereabouts*, be prepared to seek out alternate objectives if the forecast is unfavorable. The weather on Mt. Washington is no joke, but IMO you're a lot farther from home on a 10,000 foot-plus Volcano if the weather turns foul. Morever - the storms can and do last for many days, and even if you've got the gear and the skill to ride them out, there are much better ways to spend precious vacation days IMO. There's been more than a few accidents and tragedies that have resulted from folks that have flown in intent on bagging a PNW volcano without due regard for the weather. *We typically get a fairly stable high-pressure pattern started in or around the second week of July, which often makes for much more predictable weather for climbing - but most of the crevasses are wide open by that point and some popular routes are pretty well out of condition by that point, which is why quite a bit of climbing gets done before then.

True - in Ireland's case it's Ireland's taxpayers that'll be bailing out the Northern European creditors that lent them hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel a speculative property bubble that should have been obvious to anything with an IQ higher than an amoeba's. Amoebas. Are you referring to the banking elite that have the gold-plated educations in economics from the world's finest universities that are and will continue to enjoy absurdly opulent lifestyles as a result of them taking the country down the tubes or are you talking about the Irish citizenry who, like Americans, have been forced fed and stupidly believed the free market, deregulatory, trickle-down, home-ownership horseshit from political elites and business-friendly media? There are many kinds of amoebas, but if you're referring to New-Classical/New-Keynesian economists that fell in love with idealized mathematical models of the economy - then we're talking about a special kind of Ptolemaic-astronomy stupidity that is a couple of orders of magnitude dumber than the folks who found themselves terminally leveraged without a greater fool to sell to.

You sure about that? Do you really think it's primarily official tax regimes that explain the difference between France, Germany, and the countries with massive housing bubbles? If you can point to a specific set of tax policies that are present in Germany/France and absent anywhere that a real-estate bubble has developed that'd be very interesting. I suspect that the answer is more elusive than that - but link away if you've got good evidence to support that idea.

Lots of real estate bubbles around the world in places with vastly different tax and regulatory regimes. What's the secret that makes them all have the same effect on a particular asset class?

just in case you have lingering doubts the 100 billions bailout of Ireland wasn't for southern Europe. True - in Ireland's case it's Ireland's taxpayers that'll be bailing out the Northern European creditors that lent them hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel a speculative property bubble that should have been obvious to anything with an IQ higher than an amoeba's. Since debts that can't be repaid won't, Ireland's politicians should have made the tards that lent them the money pay the price for making idiotic loans. The only thing less likely to be repaid than loans to a guy building the 40th luxury condo tower in Limerick are loans to fund Southern European welfare states - which I suspect even the folks getting the loans know full well, but at least they're smarter than Ireleand's politicians and will refuse to repay them at par, when it's clear that they never will be able to repay they at par.

They are apparently close enough to the UK to see what a shithole that country has become. I do like how you are starting with "Europe" the monolithic block and sequing into the Southern Europe cleptocracies who were supporters of the war in Iraq and all other kinds of endeavours you supported. True - the UK was in top form in the 70's and was a shadow of its former glory when John Major's term ended. The beauty of the Euro is that that between lending the Southern Euro's hundreds of billions of dollars, and being obliged to bail them out - they've effectively imported the worst of the imploding birthrate/exploding pension dynamics and added them to their own.

Listen to this neocon drivel from the right wing goons at the NYT: "Indeed, experts warn of a looming demographic disaster in Southern Europe, which has among the lowest birth rates in the Western world. With pensioners living longer and young people entering the work force later — and paying less in taxes because their salaries are so low — it is only a matter of time before state coffers run dry." Pfft.

You should break this news to them ASAP! Contemplating a never-ending stunted pseudo-adulthood in your parent's basement is depressing enough, even without the prospect of diverting ever more of your meager income towards sustaining several 55 year old pensioners. As soon as they learn that the crazy-Thatcherite free-market fundamentalist neocons that have been running, say, Portugal, for the past 40 years are the ones that they should be angry at - I'm sure they'll feel much better. Someone should tell the bond market to - as soon as the folks with real savings to invest learn that it was all the neocons' fault, I'm sure that the bond-spreads their governments are contemplating will compress right away. “Now people are being sent into early retirement at age 55,” said Sara Sanfulgencio, 28, who has a master’s degree in marketing but is unemployed and living in Madrid with her mother, who owns a children’s shoe store. “But if I haven’t started working by age 28 and I already have to stop at 55, it’s absurd.” No worries Sara - as long as you remember it was the neocon's fault there's no reason to fret!

Nope. "Europe’s Young Grow Agitated Over Future Prospects" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/world/europe/02youth.html Increasing Pension Liabilities + Collapsing Birthrate + Rigid Labor Market Rigged for Insiders = Time to emigrate.

So is someone threatening you? Live in a dangerous neighborhood? Or are you just interested in target shooting?

If Tech/DH biking is your thing there's a pretty substantial mountain biking park ~1-2 miles from downtown. Plug "Colonnades" into Google for more info. [video:youtube]

If you need your character to economize, there are some great threads on dirt-bagging here somewhere in the archive. Don't think Willstrickland is dirt-bagging it any more, but he seemed to be a wealth of info on the topic. The only one of his pointers I can remember is something about all Taco Bell (?) franchises having locking restrooms, thus permitting you to use the sink and paper towels for bathing purposes without alarming other patrons, or paying for a shower. Not sure if you'll have your character going down that path - but the info's there if you need it.

I think everyone has had enough of your right-wing goon tactics.... how is that darn arithmetics coming? Ask these guys: "We calculate the present value of local government employee pension liabilities as of June 2009 for approximately 2/3rds of the universe of local government employees. Using local government accounting methods, the total unfunded liability in these areas is $190 billion or over $7,000 per municipal household. When government accounting is corrected by discounting already‐promised benefits at zerocoupon Treasury yields, the total unfunded obligation is $383 billion or over $14,000 per local household. If on a per‐member basis the unfunded liability is the same for the 1/3rd of workers covered by municipal plans not in our sample, the total unfunded liability for all municipal plans in the U.S. is $574 billion. This unfunded promise is above and beyond the roughly $3 trillion (or almost $27,000 per household) unfunded liability of all state‐sponsored pension plans in the U.S. Many U.S. cities are therefore carrying substantial off‐balance‐sheet debt in the form of unfunded pension obligations. We also identify 6 major municipalities whose current pension assets would only be sufficient to pay already‐promised benefits through 2020, and 20 whose current pension assets would only be sufficient to pay already‐promised benefits through 2025." http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/rauh/research/NMRLocal20101011.pdf

With aggregate budget and pension shortfalls into the trillions that show's coming to the main stage, and soon. The playbill's even getting notice in strange quarters, these days.... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26sun1.html?_r=1

Non-sequitur of the year.

I think everyone has had enough of your right-wing goon tactics....

What this thread really needs is JMcKay....

If the underlying economy grows at rate X^n, and the cost of government grows at rate X^n+1, then the cost of government will eventually exceed the economy's capacity to finance it. A boom in asset prices can delay, but not prevent the day of reckoning when the cost of government increases more rapidly than the underlying economy. I started worrying about a housing bubble in 2002, and posting about it here in 2004. Big deal. There's a few million of us in that camp. Then, as now - the content of the analysis mattered more than the specific prediction. There's nothing in Dean Baker's analysis that suggests he is correct about the cost of government being able to spiral upwards to infinity without being constrained by the rate of real economic growth sooner or later.

Any -10, 20, or 30 degree synthetic bag will just be waaay to huge to even consider carrying anywhere that you'd actually need it. A better question to ask the cc.com knowledge base would be "how to you keep your -10, 20, 30 down sleeping bag dry on extended winter trips?"

Great conversation. Just snagged a Patagucci micro-puff hoody a week or two ago on an impulse buy and was a bit worried I'd coughed up top-dollar for a synthetic jacket filled with cut-rate insulation. Just checked and was glad to see that Patagucci didn't stuff their "Alpine Climbing" synthetic jackets with cheapo-"eco" insulation.

Well this guy, and you, obviously didn't watch or pay attention to the 60 Minutes segment. The backbone of the reporting was on unfunded pensions. The increasing urgency of the ponzi scheme of state and local pensions was not created by the current financial crisis. But the veil of illusion was pulled out because of it. No matter what the tax revenues were, or are, these programs are not sustainable. Really, please do the math. Regressive = Progressive that can do math?