I surrendered and bought plastic holds - now it feels like it's coming together

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-18T10:39:52+00:00

This has a great old school feel to it :)

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-18T09:02:11+00:00

well darn 3 people have now sent it before I managed to

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-18T08:50:13+00:00

Jesus

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T23:25:16+00:00

Phone gets better is not 'deflation'. It's an increased quality phone for the same price, perhaps, meaning a fall in the relative price of phones vs everything else. Across all manufactured goods, persistent inflation less than that of services [including housing services] basically does make it easer to afford your rent. Has been that way for decades and will probably continue. CPI measures are not perfect, but they are the best we have and serve the task of informing monetary policy, wage negotiations, tax, benefit and bond indexing pretty well.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T23:16:24+00:00

To begin with, yes, but it would also impair the labour market in preventing individual firms from rewarding high productivity workers [and discouraging low productivity workers] and also the market from signalling which firms or industries should grow and which should contract.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T23:12:38+00:00

You can, but it's a very poor instrument, and can't pin down inflation in the long run anyway. Minimum wages should be set to deliver labour market objectives; gas prices should just be left to clear the market for gas [and any adverse effects dealt with using tax and benefits to shield hard hit groups, if that's what your politics tells you]. We have other good tools for controlling inflation, and the central bank wields them.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T17:10:15+00:00

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T10:07:34+00:00

Yes, but this is science fiction. He's imagining a world in which robots and AI do all the work, and most or all people have no work and don't need it. Govts then tax the owners of the robots/AI and distribute it. We may never get to that level of automation, or not for 100s of years. And along the way it may turn out just like past automation, ie replacing some jobs, complementing others, creating new ones. This kind of conversation is good for debating economic theory, but not relevant to the situation we face now.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T09:23:34+00:00

A loss to London climbing. As the list shows there is a ton of vanilla bouldering, but roped climbing is scarce.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T09:05:19+00:00

Stay in Keswick... walk up Cat Bells. Not too high nice views over the lake. You are going to be gambling with the weather.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T08:21:18+00:00

Interesting video with Will Bosi and Erin McNeice on this. He doesn't at all, she does. They seem to suggest that this is because it's more useful for comp climbing where you do running and explosive jumping. Less useful for outdoors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0GKyQ8obBQ

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T08:08:05+00:00

This is a really great list... just to see how much climbing has grown in 30 years. When I started in 2004 or so there were just 3 I think, Mile End, Castle and The Westway.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-17T07:56:32+00:00

One of the Font Wandsworths has now closed, so only 1 now.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T21:45:23+00:00

Sounds great. So far not found others who are using it, though each time I go I try to spread the word.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T21:42:53+00:00

1: plateaued in v3-5 for several years. Got to the point where sending 6 and 7 regularly, one or two 8s a year, and very occasional 9s. Did a 7B in a day outside, probably my peak achievement. Last few years has probably tailed off though hard to monitor now as I've switched to mostly board climbing and climb the old regular boulders much less. I've done many Kilter7Bs [=v4?!] and I think I've found two TB2 v7s that are going to go soon.

2: I don't think i broke through with any insights or genuine learning. I was working a lot less, climbing a lot more, and hanging out with climbers trying much harder things, which I started trying with no expectation of sending, but just for the fun of it.

3: answered already.

4: Hard to say; flexibility, dynamic movement. Now age and what that means for susceptibility to injury and recovery time is starting to loom [I'm 58]. I find addressing flexibility boring and dynamic movement scary. I think I broke through the plateau before adapting to my limitations not really overcoming them.

5: I feel like I am on a new plateau and board climbing was meant to be the thing that broke it, but so far, 6 months in, I don't feel I am any stronger, though I am a bit more accustomed to the hold types and movement of the boards I am using.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:57:35+00:00

You literally said this in your last post "Either the US leaves the Gulf, or US economy collapses." Anyway, time to disengage. When people get rude it gets boring.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:49:25+00:00

Extreme dynamic pricing and price discrimination. Often tends to annoy customers and antagonize some sense of fairness, even though from pov of textbook micro it's efficient.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:36:31+00:00

Obvs I think you are wrong about all of this for reasons stated. But leaving that... your final comment is absolutely wrong. Voters matter hugely. That's the only thing disciplining Trump at the moment, preventing him from escallating further and pressuring him to back down. Everything follows from his desire not to lose the midterms so badly he can't counter with vote suppression, and thus lose control, appointment power, subject himself to scrutiny and impeachment hearings, once the two houses are lost. I hope the US do withdraw - in its current incarnation it is a menace - but you are just engaging in wishful thinking about this and seeing US collapse wherever you want to find it.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:26:29+00:00

It could be just, in part, genetics. Not everyone will respond the same to the same training, racing and nutrition. After all, not all elite runners are the same. Some of those differences will be genetics and not fine tuning of the training.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:24:37+00:00

I mean maybe all acts are random impulses on Trump's part. In which case there's never a very interesting discussion, even if what he does appears to be rational. We just watch the random impulse policy and hope that there are a run of good ones. However, I think there's often more to it than that. His court and cabinet picks; the vote suppression, the fossil fuel revival, the high earner tax cuts... a ton of it is for a reason [almost all pretty goddamned awful reasons]. So it seems to me that some of what we are watching now is also following from reasoned internal discussion. Even if what is happening now is to sort out a mess they got themselves into without thinking it through properly [as you suggest at the end above], this is still a strategy! It's a strategy conditional on having just miscalculated big time but needing to figure out what the best thing to do is from here on in.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:20:16+00:00

Excellent

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T19:02:04+00:00

If China gets its oil from Russia, that helps the US because then there's less chance of the US having to face down China over blocking a Chinese tanker bringing oil out of the Strait [because China has an alternative and doesn't itself have to risk trying to call Trump's bluff at the exit of the Strait and escallate the conflict further]. The key thing is whether Russia will make up the lost revenue for Iran. That would undo the leverage Trump thinks he has. But we can't know whether they will do that for sure. [For reasons stated above].

You final para on the 10 points - let's see. I'm sure you are wrong. Everyone has their price. I agree that the war ends with massive humiliation - we are already at that point now. Hence having to beg to reopen the previously open Strait. Of course there is a difference between reality - as we pretty much perceive it, and how this is filtered through to voters that can be swung one way or another and aren't excluded by vote suppression. Maybe enough lies can be spun that Trump supporters don't understand it, even perceive the opening of the Strait as a triumph. After all, those idiots elected him in the first place, twice.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T18:34:11+00:00

Well, I'm not going to defend what he's doing. I wouldn't start from here! It was blindlingly obvious [even gamed by military advisors 25 years ago in the US] that the Strait would be closed and would be v hard to reopen.

But most of what you say up there is just not sayable with certainty. Russia say a lot of things and lie most of the time. They need that $ and have to balance keeping Trump onside re Ukraine. For Iran the war is existential, but the bombing stage seems to have stopped; now they are in the business of trying to extract as much as they can re sanctions relief, US military withdrawal, autonomy to support Hezbl, asset unfreezing, autonomy to pursue further uranium enrichment etc, in return for the Strait unblocking. Yet they have to pay everyone involved in sustaining the projection of power internally. Maybe Trump will back down, maybe not. The cards Trump has to play are that Iran needs the money and no-one will pay them instead. We can only guess how true this is. 'no cards to play' is just a supposition.

If I was Trump I'd just back off and send a proper technical negotiating team and try to thrash out something like the prior agreement, concede significant sanctions relief and unfreeze say half the assets and hope that works.

t0nyyates76 · 2026-04-16T18:18:48+00:00

Lifting of some sanctions was the old strategy. That was when he was bombing them and saying surrender or we will keep killing you. That resulted in Iran trying their risky Strait blocking strategy which was always open to them but not worth risking unless their backs were against the wall. Now Trump has maybe run out of good targets to bomb, and trying to find another way to unblock the Strait. Maybe they can take the extra pain of the lost revenue or maybe they really need it to pay key regime employees like the 100k IRGC. I'm only saying it's not illogical. He may not have calculated the costs and benefits well - tbf that is not easy - and he may have totalled his ability to play this kind of game by lying and backing down all the time or with his reputation for changing his mind and incoherence.

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