AzTallRider

Think of it as a race that you can only win. Go all out, and whatever it is, it is...

sarals 

Yeup! I'll have training partner with me. She'll be the rabbit. She's going to Utah, too....not me.

Racer Ex 

Just got a GoPro Hero2. Tomorrow I'm going to go test it out on some MTB trails.

big john

Some of us are planning a mountain bike ride out your way sometime in Oct. Don't have details yet but the trail is supposed to be beautiful.

You're probably riding as I write this but I hope it's a great weekend. How many is this?

shovelhd

Cleave

Hi, saw Lily Tomlin last night and she was very funny. What was scary was the median age of the sold-out crowd. After we got home I checked the web and saw that Lily is 73 years-old. At that point I curled up into a ball and started whimpering. I remember her stuff from Laugh-In so well. I guess that show is now ancient history. Lily was unbelievably "spry" for being 73. There's still hope for me.

milmo

Anarchy and the "free market" are not the same thing. A free market requires a government that operates by the rule of law, recognizes and protects individual rights (real ones, not the "right" to be given a free cell phone), protects private property and enforces the sanctity of contracts, among other things. Somalia and Libya have none of these.

Racer Ex 

Actually "free market" is just anarchy applied to business rather than (non) government. Both are advocated by pin heads who are seemingly blind to an endless stream of historical examples of their ideological failures. The difference is that anarchy is advocated by smelly stoned hippies in drum circles and "free markets" are advocated for by academics and bankers in $1000 suits at cocktail parties so we tend to give the latter more of a hearing.

Like Marxism, these silly dogmas are underpinned with an assumption that that sheep can co-exist with wolves in some utopian wonderland producing free milk and graham crackers and teddy bears. Sadly even bright people like Alan Greenspan buy into this until they wake up and there are sheep entrails and blood covering their walls. While it would be apparent to most people that this is evidence of the failure of some fundamental assumptions, there are still those who will insist that the sheep/wolf togetherness program can still work, they just need to apply it differently.

Free cell phones is a complete red herring and off topic BTW. ADM's fine pretty much covers that cost in any case. This cell phone thing is one of those cause de jour cherry picks by the "keep the government out of my Medicare" crowd who's sense of entitlement, when dissected, is often far greater than the "hey, they're giving out cellphones" opportunists. They live in a Myopia Utopia where their "personal responsibility" mantras tend not to extend to some of the idiots they elect to run things.

I don't belong to a political party because my experience with parties as a teen leads me to believe that they tend to end in fights or pools of vomit and you wake up with someone you really didn't intend on sleeping with. This certainly seems to be the case of late. But now I think parties can work so I'm starting a new one: Hookers and Sandwiches. Vote for me and you get free one or the other or both. I won't bore you with the details because, come on, who doesn't want Hookers and Sandwiches?

shovelhd

A few thoughts.

There will always be big dogs in a free society. The key is maintaining the balance of power so they do not exude excessive influence.
Railing against corporations is also a cause du jour. I could make the same case against public employee unions when it comes to influence.
Free cellphones is just another example of a government program that started with a good idea and was abused into an entitlement.
I have no faith that Social Security will be around when I retire, which isn't that far away for me. I have planned without it.
I love my wife, but I also love me some sammich.

VanceMac

I try very hard to stay out of politics on the internet. I will just say that I suspect you and I are fairly well aligned. I spent a couple decades as a pretty ardent libertarian (small "l" -- Cato Institute seminars rather than Libertarian Party rallies). The beauty to me was that it was so compelling both in theory (logically, ethically), as well as in practice (results). I'm still undeterred on the former, but believe I was pretty naive about the latter.

Racer Ex 

What's funny is that asking for some concrete outlines of how someone is going to do "A" or "B" isn't being political. It's being practical. As is pointing out when someone has a bad idea that's been tried before. We tend to treat elected officials, especially the President, like royalty or religious leaders. What we ought to be doing is conducting a job interview because we're hiring someone. I don't care if my gardener cheats on his wife. I care if he can mow the lawn well.

If I actually had a party and a candidate I'd replicate Nevada on a national level. All elected legislative positions are part time jobs. Write the checks, sweep the garage, then go home and make a living.

My party has something for everyone.

shovelhd

Is that truly the case in Nevada, no career politicians? Because here in MA, they are the royal family.

nacler22

After following the recent posts in this thread, and enjoying (mostly) the level of civil discourse, I thought that starting a 50+ P&R thread might be a good idea.

Then I remembered that:

There is a reason that I discard most of my "ideas"
&
Age knows no boundaries on entrenched bias, ignorance, and arrogance.




I suffer from all three.

Racer Ex 

Other than the executive folks (governor, treasurer, Etc) and national folks, everyone's part time. A few like Reed (who it's rumored is one of the characters in the movie "Casino") stay in government. But for the most part they tend to come and go.

milmo

I was responding to your earlier post in which you equated anarchy and free markets: "If the "free market" solved everything then Somalia should be heaven on earth and Libya an economic superpower, because there's no government interference in much of anything in those places at the moment."

Even a not so careful reading of what I said should make clear that I was arguing that instead of free markets being enabled or enhanced by political anarchy they are in fact dependent on order brought about by government (enforced private property rights, protection of contracts and intellectual property, the rule of law). A fairly good discussion of this is in "Why Nations Fail", a recent best seller by a pair of economists from Harvard and MIT.

A free market is not an anarchic market (which is a contradiction in terms, and even if one existed it would have the lifespan of a Higgs Boson), just as being a free people is not necessarily living under political anarchy.

Racer Ex 

You're point was taken and I agreed with your prior comments and would add some collective freedoms in there which I'm sure will make the Ayn Rand followers pull their hair out. And why lord, do we succumb to Russian philosophers when their home country has been utterly dysfunctional for recorded time. Faberge eggs have blinded us to reality I suppose.

By definition definitions depends on who's definition you use. But if you drive down the middle of what most people who have written on the subject use, you'll find little to no contradiction between freedom and anarchy. State control is the litmus test for the "best/worst" scenario is in both cases. Anarchy and freedom go hand in hand. And what's interesting is while my comment was tongue in cheek, the world Bank found that living standards went up a while after Somalia's central government collapsed, which I think had more to do with horrible governance than anything else.

As it applies to markets, a truly "free" market is absent any government control (which is what many Libertarians advocate). It's self regulating and self correcting (I guess if you are working in geologic time this would be correct), and by it's nature completely chaotic and disorderly; any order out of this chaos is at best a facade until someone finds a way to undermine it to their financial advantage.

Some anarchy is healthy. But most people will cheat, lie, and steal without a framework of disincentives (there are several good books on this subject). And I think we tend to give "old" regulations far less credit than they are due. Most of the financial sector laws from the Great Depression (now that's a contradiction in terms) came about not because some liberal wanted to give away free radios, but rather that greed and an inability to do simple math brought the developed world to it's knees.

Sort of like today without as many breadlines. Anyone who thought 20% annual increases in property values in the face of 25 years of a stagnant median wage was sustainable and that you could give away houses with no money down please do not have children.

BTW I'll check out the book. Right now I'm reading "1491" which goes through the pre-Euro "discovery" period of North and South American civilizations. Very interesting read.

Racer Ex 

We could use more of this.

.be

sarals 

So, do you think I should race this? 17 pounds (a little heavy), stiff, but responsive and very, very smooth. Stable, accelerates really well, and OMG is it pretty!

shovelhd

If you're comfortable at speed on it, why not?

sarals 

Cool! First, I have to ride it at speed. I've only had a short ten mile ride on it so far. By the way, it really needs a standard chainring. The compact chaingring is totally wrong for the weird cassette it has on it (13t 39 or something like that).

Cleave

Sara, your L'Una is just as I remember them. As most know I have a soft spot for Bianchis and an even softer spot for the L'Una.

As shovelhd notes, you can race on anything that you like. If it's not comfortable at speed, don't race on it. That's why I sold my Cervélo R3 after one season. I was not comfortable racing it in criteriums.

AzTallRider

Okay, so how long should someone accept sounding like they belong in a TB ward, before deciding it's more than the effects of pushing the envelope racing?

shovelhd

3 days

AzTallRider

Thanks. I'll wait to go to the emergency room until then.

I gotta say, I pushed harder/longer than I ever have, and I am totally thrilled to have done that. In times past, I was more likely to have given into the whisperings of my wimpy central governor and shut it down. Time to double down and do the other things I know I can and should do, but so far haven't. After all, I need to be able to chase you down when you head off the front on those funky bars of yours in Ohio.

shovelhd

Which I removed for Nats. Booyah.

Jury duty tomorrow. Screws up the commute. Showing up in my kit might make for a short day, though.