Al_Pine

Agreed we're up to page 4 now. Don't let people start calling you a welcher too! (actually he's probably working on it, just takes him a while to put all that info into one of those goofy flowchart diagrams )

Recycled approach is more practical in terms of making a larger voting block happy. The bottom 50% will like the no income tax part, although it depends on what percentage the VAT is whether or not they actually get taxed less or not. I quibble with recycled's statement that a VAT will affect the "wealthy consumers". How about just "consumers"; i.e., the poorer people who have to spend a greater percentage of their income will of course get taxed by a VAT at a higher rate (w.r.t. their income). No matter how you change the system like this, someone is gonna have to pay more because I don't think the total tax burden is going to go down. Someone is going to pay less. Recycled's plan is still going to make the wealthy pay less, and shift the burden to middle class types. I'll bet most of you are middle class types out there, why on Earth do you want to pay more taxes just to be "fair" to the more well to do? It just doesn't make sense.

Yes. Thanks Rob. Fixed it.

OK all you Flat-taxers, let's move away from Mr. Rourke's fantasy island, and see how the flat tax would affect you! Using PP's data on post 1, I've calculated some figures and put them in the table below. It allows you to look up how much it will cost/save you to make everything much more "fair" to those poor high-incomers. For example, if you are currently below the median (less than 28K per PP's post) then the cost of "fairness" to your brothers across the tracks is only paying 3.5 times more income tax. If you make between 29 and 56K$ then you have to pay 1.6 times more to Uncle Sam. But the bright side is, those people who make 300K$/year only have to pay half!!!! The system seems to be working(?), but hey, let's fuck with it and volunteer to pay more so those wealthier type people won't be unfairly burdened. As for you national sales tax people, that's even better! The lower your income, the greater percentage of your income you'll be spending on taxable goods, thus the lower income folks will be taxes at a higher rate (with respect to their income) from those in the upper end of the economic strata. Oooooh, sounds like a good idea. All you plebes go vote for it. At least it'll make those horribly complictated 1040EZ forms go away.

OK Wayne, even without the top-3 thread, this is looking like "2 or 3" pages to me. Let's hear it! Post your list. (and fuck the whiny naysayers, who are too embarassed to reveal even their real/avatar names at the ropeup )

I'm not talking about the FS. This would be going over their heads. It just seems like basically the FS is involved in managing resource extraction. "Land of many uses". Remember a couple of years back when a conservancy group outbid the logging companies for rights to log a certain parcel, but the bid was rejected because they actually had no plans to log? In one respect that made sense, because the FS is there to facilitate use of the forest to help our economy and provide jobs. Thus, if the FS banned bolting or climbing somewhere, couldn't a guiding company say that that inhibits their ability to use the national forests to make their money? It's obviously less destructive than mining and logging. Hell, maybe they could even get a road built for them, or at least one maintained. Maybe this whole point is moot though if bolts or climbing have not been banned in any national forest.

OK, I was up hiking yesterday thinking about this. Say the government bans bolts in some FS land (non-wilderness). Has this happened? It seems like this would be preferential to one type of resource extraction (logging, mining) versus another (guiding). Could a valid constitutional argument be made along these lines? It seems like the courts are usually quite interested in adjudicating disputes that involve people making money.

I've always really liked this one

But it seems like Dwayner got banned for saying just the opposite (after he was told to sit down and be quiet many times).

I think it would help the impact resistance, sort of like those big water ballon barriers they have at freeway offramps. As for the balance, I think it would be quite important to have the two beer placements at symmetric postitions on the helmet. Of greatest importance is two straws so that the volumes (and thus weights) of the cans remain equalized. This is all pretty common sense really, and I'm not sure you need any of this explained to you. What I am interested in hearing about is smoking on rappel. Which hand do you hold the lighter in? How about when the roach gets really small?

Gatoritas in the Camelback dude. No hands required.

The passive agressive approach! The answer to everything!

Sounds like he could sorta be making fun of Arnold's alleged Hitler comments don't you think?

I've found that road noise is a big issue for audio books. Some of the narrators have full enough voices, but many just don't cut through the noise unless crank the speakers so lound it gives you a headache after an hour. Aren't you always on the watch for the lawman anyway when roadtripping? Just take the damn headphones off when you're being approached by Johnny.

Well maybe it was a bit like an overlong Coors Lite ad, but don't you think it was fraught with anvilicious symbolism describing the possible difference between humans and machines? Or perhaps how we are just a slave to the machine of our body. Ooooooh...heavy . And it certainly was more to the point of "what is free will?" than the 80 minutes of kickboxing videogame "drama". The freeway scene rocked though!

Went down to Vogelsang on a backpack with some friends WHO DON'T CLIMB!!! . A bit frustrating to say the least, but I was able to ditch the buds for a bit and get some good scrambling in. There I am on this nice piece of rock called Fletcher Peak. A couple of probable 5.6 cruxes, but very short. Most of it was slabs that would be 5.6 if blank, but instead had cool cracks and tons of golfball sized crystals everywhichfuckingwhere. Awesome! Look at those other lines! Might be fun to bring a rope in there if it wasn't for the fact that there's tons of cool stuff up in Tuolumne that are not 8 miles from the road.

Here's mine. Posted it a while back. Short version: hiking solo, February, near Mt. Index, slipped, self arrested, found myself to be dangling over void. Eeek.

It's more difficult than Jazzy Document

The weather report just keeps getting worse too

Just visualize that the slab is a hot-tub wall, and if you skate, you'll slide down into the tub with Thinker

Ingalls does have cool rock and some wild boulders around the lake. But...if it isn't closed, it is a pretty sizeable drive from the Icicle (> 1 hour?)

The South Face of Jello Tower is similar to that stupid sport climb at Duty Dome that everybody loves (cover of guide one version ago), but kicks its ass in so many ways... ...course, it's not a sport climb. ETA: I remembered the name now, Jazzy Document.

How about one about trustafarians losers that bag out of climbs at the last minute?