mkporwit

Donate to the unit you care about directly. They're all tax-exempt donations these days. I'm not familiar with the Washington Search & Rescue Association, and I don't believe that my unit (Everett Mountain Rescue) has any ties to it. They may very well be legit -- their contact page says they'll provide info on their financial and fundraising activities.

Well yeah DPS, no shit... but why plutonium? Did he work at Hanford? Does he glow in the dark? Does he have an atomic-powered pacemaker? Maybe he puts the stuff on his wheaties?

Pug, that's pretty awesome that your dad was able to pull that off. I hope to be able to still eat solid food and not be in a wheelchair at age 85, let alone be climbing. Why did you refer to him as Pu239 man?

And he managed to find time to be a US president while doing it Huh? I dont get it.. harding didn't survive his presidency though - he was one of the illustrive 40% of us presidents who either died/was killed in office or survived an assasination attempt Yep, you're right. He died of a heart attack while in office. On a related node,40% isn't bad odds. Now why did the current president have to fall on the other side of that line....

And he managed to find time to be a US president while doing it

Oh, it's real alright... a result of the industrial waste and toxins dumped in the arm pit of america northeast New Jersey

For some reason they remind me of Nightcrawler from the X-men...

No, FW, the debate is pretty much settled. Most climatologists accept the negative effects of humanity on the climate. The theory of global warming is the most commonly accepted model out there right now. Does that mean that there aren't smart people with PhDs claiming this is bogus? Sure there are. Some may even have a point. Heck, there's still researchers proposing different models of physics... However, trotting out an article by two researchers from a med school, published in a journal not related to the field is hardly a convincing argument for your cause. It is a theory. Not a proven fact. A lot of things in science are never proven facts. The theory is simply taken as the model that best explains current observations. That theory can be replaced by a better one, should one be proposed and validated experimentally. Until such time, the current model is what it is. And there's a lot more effort being put into the current

Hell yeah on the GT40 Either the original or the recent re-relase... especially in the Gulf livery

Oh come on... that split window is an abomination... and that pointy snout with the popup headlights isn't doing it any favors. I'd take this 'vette in a heartbeat, however... in the classic red/white color scheme preferably:

So are you bitching 'cause it chugs gas or 'cause it is ugly? Check some of the hypermiling forums -- one guy claims he's getting 38 mpg out of his Corvette -- so it isn't the car, it's how you drive it. Oh, also, if you really want an ugly 'vette:

My reg date > your reg date... Just been lurking a long time.

Maybe put on some crampons first... then he'd get all 12 (14?) points...

Them's going to be some lucky kids

Yep. Wow. You don't see how reporting an article about France is an act of "intellectual laziness?" Nope. Both France and the US are first-world, developed, stable nations, so comparisons across those two societies are valid. There's nothing intellectually lazy about this. And in any case, this was just an example. Want numbers for California in the late 1990's instead? They're not that far off. Higher percentage of marijuana use and a lot more crack than the French numbers, but the cost per person per year in 2001 dollars was ~ $1000 The French abstract was text, which made for easy copy/paste into the forum. The california numbers were in a PDF which did not allow for copying. So there was laziness on my part, but it wasn't intellectual...

Yep.

Hey, I didn't argue that the cost of drug addicts is comparable to the cost of alcoholics. It is clearly greater. I'm just bashing the intelectual laziness that comes from pulling numbers out of thin air and then couching them in bullshit acknowledgements when 30 seconds with a search engine would produce whole pages of numbers such as these here from France, 1997: Findings: The use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs cost more than 200 billion francs (FF) in France in 1997, representing 3,714 FF per capita or 2.7% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Alcohol is the drug that gives rise to the greatest cost in France, i.e. 115,420.91 million FF (1.42% of GDP) or an expenditure per capita of 1,966 FF in 1997. Alcohol takes more than half of the social cost of drugs to society. The greatest share of the social cost of alcohol comes from the loss of productivity (57,555.66 million FF), due to premature death (53,168.60 million FF), morbidity (3,884.0 million FF) and imprisonment (503.06 million FF). Tobacco leads to a social cost of 89,256.90 million FF, that is an expenditure per capita of 1,520.56 FF or 1.1% of GDP. Productivity losses amount to 50,446.70 million FF, with losses of 42,765.80 million FF as a result of premature death and 7,680.90 million FF linked to morbidity. Health care costs for tobacco occupy second place at 26,973.70 million FF. Illicit drugs generate a social cost of 13,350.28 million FF, that is an expenditure per capita of 227.43 FF or 0.16% of GDP. Productivity losses reach 6,099.19 million FF, with 5,246.92 million FF linked to imprisonment and 852.27 million FF to premature death. The cost of enforcing the law for illicit drugs occupies second place at 3,911.46 million FF, followed by health care costs of 1,524.51 million FF.

And why the hell would you need aftershave? Last time I saw you you were as fuzzy as an Ewok...

Well, actually if you follow the link they claim that the reaction causes no thermal damage to the surrounding tissues.

Hell, if the whole point is not to open your eyes so you can go back to sleep you can just pee in your depends...

Mike, meth or heroin were probably not nearly as prevalent when you were an EMT. My time as an EMT had me attend to quite a few drug cases, mainly heroin overdoses. Probably on the same order of magnitude as alcohol... (about 4x less -- this is in Palo Alto in 2002/2003). Most of those heroin cases were not yuppie recreational users, but rather hard-core addicts. Also, you miss the real cost of alcoholism, one greatly exceeding the 3am on a Saturday night perspective that an EMT would be most familiar with. There's a lot of reasonably well functioning alcoholics that never get caught in the DUI checkpoints that simply make life a living hell for their families, bringing up another generation of dysfunctional members of society...

Mmmm, I hear the faint popping sound of facts being pulled out of the ass...

Well, hexes are tapered on the ends, so endwise placements could be used to protect slightly flaring, not-quite vertical cracks... maybe...

And what stores carry it? So far I'm 0 for 3 in trying to find it (Redmond REI, Marmot, PMS). None knew that a new edition was even available...

They also have a sweet deal on cosmetically blemished BD Neutrinos, if you need them a dozen at a time: BD Neutrino 12-pack