Doc

Quite possible, but the historical track record says no. The thing about the market is that if distributed properly and planned right, it keeps pace with inflation. Those pensions that do not have inflation adjustment clauses can wind up to be a starvation income in 20 years if you should be so unfortunate as to live that long.....lol. I know of several households that had a very impressive pension at their time of retirement, who are now finding social security is their larger source of income.....lol. Inflation has taken that impressive pension and turned it into chicken feed. I'll stay with the markets. Of course, anything can happen with the stock market (that is why we diversify), but inflation is a sure thing and can erode improperly protected pension funds.

I was advised to wait to maximize the benefits, and it paid off. That is a decision that each generation has to make for themselves with a realistic assessment of the system when the decision has to be made. The sky may be badly cracked, but it isn't falling ...... yet. My advice: use it like "found money" and make sure that your retirement is well funded outside of the S.S. system. And don't wait until your 50's before you start saving and investing. Earlier is better. Every year delayed is thousands of good compounding dollars lost.

Well, it has turned out to be a bit of a Ponzi scheme, but so far it is barely holding together. Most of the problems and uncertainty are coming more from the design and management of the system rather than the basic concept. I guess it beats the alternative of maintaining a publicly run "poor house" for the elderly or perhaps debtor's prison. Had it been designed and maintained to be a market driven enforced retirement investment plan, recipients would be floating in money right now. But it has been given the "welfare touch" and used for every purpose under the sun, and has become a basic slush fund for trying to balance budgets and fund cradle-to-grave welfare schemes. So with so many things being drained from it, and no real ties to inflation, it is stumbling and has a bleak future. One of the things that makes it all look like a loser is the election system that has ever-expanding elderly voters with a self-serving, vested interest, that forms a political block that resists any credible efforts to modify and save it. The geezer vote makes any attempt at reform become the kiss-of-death for any politician dumb enough to enter those waters.

Yup! I guess the bugs got to get some benefit out of it all too.....lol. You can't hide from them forever. How will you get all that work done?

Seriously, this weather has raised hell with the farmer. I have seen fields that will not support combines right now. And some corn fields that are only going to add to the expense part of the ledger, with no income. Cute little corn plants and some large areas of drowned plants that will never come back this year. It's a shame.

One more thing that needs to be stirred into the pot. There has been a huge run on Lifetime Licenses with some great deals for some of us who met certain age requirements a few years ago. I got mine for $50. What that means is that I am now taken out of the annual license sales pool forever. Statistically, it makes me and all other hunters holding lifetime licenses look like we simply exited the sport. They'll be getting no more annual license sales from us. They have messed around so much with licenses, and prices that it is darned near impossible to compare apples to apples anymore. So you can look at the revenue loss and still never know exactly what all the factors are that influenced the loss.

Organized bowhunters have only the power ceded to them by the apathetic.

It doesn't take a crystal ball to figure out that it is just a matter of a year or two before crossbows have inclusion in all of bow season. And so the crossbow people have a vested interest in this issue. But apparently they do not possess enough insight or actual interest to martial their members to fight something that is sure to affect them within the next few years. If you want to talk about petty, just examine the attitudes that amount to cutting off your nose to spite your face. These are the brilliant people that bow season has inherited. The ones who have no interest in anything that does not involve a crowbar.

It appears that there is no link on the internet. The entire publication is not available for free in the internet. However, for a total investment of the whopping sum of $2.50, you can go to any well-stocked magazine stand and buy your own copy. As a matter of fact, it will only set you back $24 to subscribe to a whole year and stay in touch with most of NYS's hot-button issues. As to the DEC putting something on their web-site, I wouldn't hold my breath. The DEC site is generally way behind in publishing of any info there, and in many cases, such things never do make it to their site. It sounds like most or all of this info is coming from the state's Conservation Fund Advisory Board, and they are the people who would know.

Whether we want to admit it or not, a release is a kind of a crutch. We don't usually use a crutch before something is broken. Let the need for a release drive itself and be the child's choice when, and if, he decides he needs it. Actually using fingers is the most natural and intuitive way of loosing an arrow. It is the easiest to teach and quite impossible to accidentally misfire.

I think comments like these are necessary for giving credit to the only organization who has even mentioned the fact that the DEC is trying to balance the deer population on the backs of those least like to be able to influence it. When somebody is doing something right, you're damned right I will give them praise. And when others are ignoring such things, I will make that known also. And whether gun hunters or the Crossbow Coalition get on board or not is up to them. But there is nothing wrong with pointing out the fact that they are not.

I do agree that the DEC cannot regulate that you become more skilled at hunting, and a lot of this AR crap seems to indicate that there are people who believe they can and should. We have to come to grips with the fact that we as hunters consist of every level of skill, opportunity, and set of goals. That's how it is and how it will always be. We are not all experienced. We do not all hunt in "buck-rich" parts of the state. And we all have different things that hunting means to us. There seems to be something inherently wrong with adopting regulations that benefit only a certain portion (most likely even the minority) of the hunter population that have all of these things.

Yeah, it's not the wife that is barrier to new gun purchases. I'm just too damned cheap and keep coming up with all these good reasons why I don't need more guns. And the fact is, I really don't need any more.

The thing is that the gym does great things for the body, but a good day of hard work does the same AND gets some other good things accomplished. Kind of a "two-fer".

One thing that seems to go zinging over everyone's head is that once you drive hunters out of the sport, either through irritating regulation, excessive costs of licenses or whatever, they tend to stay out. Guns get sold, new hobbies are invested in and enjoyed, and even if you dramatically cut costs of licenses, they simply are not coming back. We are just barely hanging on to our hunters as it is. Drive them out and then implement incentives to come back? ..... It just ain't happening. They're gone.

Actually that isn't really true. Deer populations kept in balance with their habitat is what makes for healthier deer. And of course that does not mean that they need to be whacked until sightings become scarce ..... lol. It seems that people always jump to extremes and take what the DEC is saying way past what they meant. Less deer does not mean healthier deer unless the population is so high that it is stressing the habitat. Then you want fewer deer. And a word about the relationship of hunters and the DEC. Without hunters, the DEC has zero control over the herd. Hunters are the only herd population control that they have. So they are put in a position of not only managing deer, but managing hunters as well. The declining hunter population does neither the DEC or the deer any good. It is a good idea not to drive hunters out of the sport through excessive, needless or worthless regulation. It's a balancing act that the DEC has done pretty good at until recently.

Yeah it took our county 2 times, but those were procedural screw-ups. I'm talking about the board of supervisors proposing it, and public opinion shooting it down. It seems to me that if the legislative process is followed without legislative screw-ups, it turns out to be a done-deal.

Lol .... After you hit 65, most of your friends will be dead whether they smoke or not. Wait until your 50th high school reunion. Yipes!!!! it starts getting real scary.

It could be an area infested with Gypsy moth caterpillars or tent caterpillars. That is the way the hills look in one of these infested areas.

Quote: "Is bear meat worth the effort?" I have often pictured shooting a bear the better part of a mile at the rear of my property. And then I start wondering about getting this big bag of jello that has no handles, and weighs a few hundred pounds all by myself. And then not even knowing whether the taste of the meat would make me puke or not. All things considered, I have to say that no, for me it probably is not worth the effort.....lol.

2/18/08 was my last cigarette. I still enjoy the smoking section of the casinos ..... lol. Also, there are still times when I miss my cigs, but nothing like while I was trying to quit. It was such misery and anguish to get rid of them, that there is no way I would ever go back. But I have no problem with those that still smoke. I know how much I enjoyed cigarettes, and I also know how tough it was to get off them. I remember how obnoxious smokers who quit were. They loved rubbing it in just a little too much. So I try real hard not to be one of those cigarette-snobs. I used Chantix. I'm not sure whether that really was the cure or just the fact that I finally was really ready to quit.

So how do you suppose a deer would get a split ear? I can see how it would happen on a buck, but it seems that it would be very odd on a doe.

Once kids respected and obeyed their parents. Once, people were expected to be married before they became pregnant. Once, supporting your own family was actually important. Once, being on welfare was a bit of a humiliation, and there was an urgency about getting off the dole and back to productive employment. Once, you didn't need locks for your house. Once, people tried to live within their means. Once, families took care of their elderly. Once, neighbors actually knew their neighbors by first name. Once, you could walk down any neighborhood any where in the U.S. without fear. Once neighbors would help out those down on their luck instead of assuming the government would do it. Once, people would let the homeless into their homes for a meal occasionally, because they knew if they didn't, no government agency would. Once, being employed was something that was expected of you. Once individual responsibility was a majority attitude. Once, most kids had fathers in the home. Once, welfare recipients didn't have TV and exactly all of the luxuries that other working people have to work for. Once, criminals were treated like criminals and jails were not really places you would ever want to back to. Once, community leadership was not to see how big a scam you could pull off, but rather how well you could serve and how well you would be remembered by history. Once, legislators and trusted public employees feared being caught at illegal and immoral activities. And on and on..... If you have a pulse and all of your basic senses, you are getting the picture. Yes, some of society's progress has been in good directions. However what many are trying to progress toward today raises some serious alarms and do not really have all that good of a track record. What some of this "progressive" thinking is actually doing to the American human spirit is a bit frightening. So when somebody proudly walks up to me and pronounces that they are a progressive, I have to ask them exactly what are they trying to progress toward. Because as an ideology, I have to say that most of those progressive people's accomplishments and goals are truly pretty damned scary.

I have been on hound hunts at night which is a real effective way of getting them, but certainly cannot be called "easy" from an exertion point of view. Also, those hounds are not really all that inexpensive to buy and maintain. I spent many years trapping them when their prices were up, and they were no real challenge as long as the population was on a high cycle. All of these styles of hunting/trapping were driven only by the cost of the fur. Low prices, no one hunting them. High prices, they get pretty good pressure. It's all about the fur, and expanding their season does nothing to motivate that. I am not saying that occasionally something weird won't rarely happen like what you have described with your neighbor and his per trees. But even at that, there is not a whole lot of motivation for anyone to head out to the pear tree in the middle of the night waiting for some coons to show up.... lol. Especially some time in the summer when the fur is trash. So I suspect you could make the season open all year, and never see any positive impact in the turkey population. You can increase opportunities without really increasing motivation.

Isn't that weird. They actually have put their emotional attachment to horses into laws that prohibit the sale of horsemeat. What a ridiculous waste of legislation. They are just another good source of protein. I suppose there are laws against eating cats and dogs too. Can you legally eat your parakeet? .... lol. These legislators have way, way, too much time on their hands.