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What is stupid is making health insurance a "perk" offered through the workplace, and sometimes only to management. In the civilized world health insurance is universal. One consequence of that is that businesses are not burdened with having to pay for insurance for any of their work force.

And that the Conservative justices so clearly know that as a matter of law they should have found against the coach, they had to flat out lie about the facts of the case in order to justify their theocratic decision.

My sister had two abortions when she was younger. The third time she got pregnant, she decided to keep the baby. When I asked why, she said that getting an abortion was too mentally difficult and she just couldn't go through that again. I respect all of the decisions that she made as they were hers to make and she chose what she thought was right for her at the time. Where my problem comes in is that she is now pro-life and thinks abortion should be completely banned in all instances. So, she was able to make the decision that she felt was right for her at the time, but now that she is in her 50's, she doesn't think others should be allowed the same choice she had. That is hypocrisy at it's finest and it seems to be very common on the far right. -OK

Why shouldn’t we pick on CEOs? The colossal gap between worker wage increases (or real world decreases right now) and CEO wage increases can’t be ignored. They are earning actual orders of magnitude more than they did a few decades ago. With inflation this year hitting 9% already I was listening to a radio show that was full of experts warning that you can’t help out ordinary people on low wages by paying them more because it’ll have all sorts of knock on effects that’ll increase prices even further. I can’t remember the last thing I listened to that made me so angry. CEOs’, Directors’ and other executives’ salaries have been skyrocketing unabated for decades and it has simply happened. It will have had all kinds of drastic effects on society as a whole but who cares, it’s just a thing we have to deal with. Inflation is 9%, CEOs’ average compensation jumped 19% in 2020 alone. Not to mention with so much emphasis on share price linked bonuses those CEOs and Directors are in a position where they can simply manipulate a company’s financial performance in a way that suits their bonus scheme with stock buybacks etc and it’s all completely legal. Callous conservatives like to complain about poor people voting for liberals and their social welfare projects as ‘voting for bread and circuses’ - bullshit. Already insanely wealthy CEOs artificially bumping up their already obscene bonuses is what ‘voting for bread and circuses’ really looks like. And it doesn’t come for free. It costs money to do that. It doesn’t help the price of goods and services and it doesn’t help the spending power of an average worker. But talk about paying more to people who work a full time job and still struggle to afford central heating in winter and we have to be careful not to upset the system! Bunch of fucking arseholes.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/supreme-court-dangerous-independent-state-legislature-theory.html The beginning of the end, folks. The goal of the supreme court is to abolish democracy under the bullshit guise of ‘state rights’, it’s as simple as that. When states can deliberately manipulate election voting parameters to force a particular outcome or (another case they’ve agreed to hear) call elections invalid if there’s a ‘suspicion’ of voter fraud and then declare their own result, democracy and the Great Experiment is dead. Completely and utterly. And you republicans might cheer at this. The crying libs got owned. Fuck the Democrats and AOC!! But you know what history has taught us about dictatorships? It’s not the fucking rubes like you that come off well from it… You’re nothing more than a vehicle to power that will get used up and tossed to the side when you’re no longer useful. The last presidency proved that. I hope everyone is planning an out.

When we did testing for the RI MOJO, every jump was an opportunity to lose the prototype device sewn to the reserve bridle. I added a pocket for a Tile, and it came in handy a couple times. No effect on packing or deployment. Of course, on a production freebag/bridle, this would be an alteration requiring FAA or manufacturer approval.

Funny how the conservatives preventing the US from enacting universal health care is Obama's fault. Funny how EVERY OTHER industrialized country in the world has that sort of health care.

You mean abstinence right? Everyone one knows that the only acceptable and proper form of safe sex in a Trump Loving Pro-life state is abstinence. Wait for marriage if you love Jesus, unless you want to consider "the loophole". (If not glaringly obvious, the video contains language and imagery that may not be suitable for work.) /

Well, you're here in the nick of time. Assuming you are the lawyer, and not another last minute sock puppet, please enlighten us with what 61 judges could not.

You can't make this shit up:

I have very little doubt that the current Supreme Court would have zero issues justifying that. Given the three major decisions the past couple weeks, they have no scruples, no restraint and no shame. None at all.

airdvr, let me try again. It's not about "abortion" per se as some abstract stand alone issue but about the real suffering that the ruling will cause for a lot of innocent people. Not just the women, although their interests should be paramount, but the impregnator, their families and on and on and on. What you guy's don't seem to get is that the welfare of people we don't know is important to us because we know that the benefits of organized society depends on suppressing the reptilian part of our brains and looking out for each other. If it's not your hearts desire to see organized society disintegrate then step back and look at the actual effects of Republican policies, not the FOX News drivel, in America and ask your self which party is more likely to help folks and continue our fragile experiment in government by the people.

I spent an hour rereading all the memories posted about Chris. Sad & Fun... Blue Skies my old friend!

Hi X-1 [ my bad ], The better thing IMO is simply to get rid of all political parties. One should have to run as the person they are & what they stand for. Remember, Trump once made an attempt at the POTUS nomination as a D. Jerry Baumchen

Oh, this explains it!

No raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors on midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the door of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass., 1987) Now we have 5 Borks on the SCOTUS.

I have only good things to say about Winx. I’m happy owner of one, and my next main will also be Winx. However, my friend experimented with deployment methods (shamefully have to admit that it was due to tips I gave him) and got heavy line twists. It ended in cutaway, twice. The fact that he has Winx did not help. Even Winx has its limits. I see Jet project mentioned. Here is my version :-)

So what? Many anti-abortion activists turned out to have paid for abortions along the way.

The US is a dumpster fire right now.

Bullshit. You can work hard, achieve success AND understand you may have had some help/luck/privilege along the way. It isn't a zero sum game.

You aren't meant to. It's just troll bait.

I've been jumping the WinX 120/135/150 and 210 (WS Jet stuff) and have over 4500 jumps without a cutaway or issue with openings. It has a good glide, is fun (assertive) in flying, and has an actual flare where you dont need a surge or front risers to have a decent landing. And swoops nicely as well (though low, as it has a very fast recovery arc:) I couldn't be a bigger supporter/fan of the canopy if I tried. I think best advertising for the WinX is that (Atair) doesn't do any real advertising, and it's incredibly popular. Seeing practically no WinX for sale on the 2nd hand market, is a good indication people are happy with it.

You've missed my entire point (my fault, I thought it was obvious enough to be made implicitly): Health information is confidential/private and protected in a special way that no other information is, and it's a cultural taboo for USPA to be concerning itself with it. If USPA has some policy or procedure to review health information of its members, that needs to stop *immediately*. USPA policy should be that if it stumbles upon any health information accidently, it should do its best to forget. Edit: I'm going to add some context here. As a medical doctor, USPA member, and FAA medical certificate holder who was recently diagnosed with cancer, I find this incredibly disturbing.

Interesting discussion. In the unlikely event that anyone doesn't know, Chuck Akers is President Of USPA (Captain Obvious, at your service). Kinda cool that someone at that level in the sport is participating in this. Something I didn't see (or missed) is the concept of "Safety Culture" at the DZ. Dan BC is big on this. He's written a lot of stuff about it, and it's worth reading. One reason behind 'safety culture' is that with the bigger DZs, and the dependence on tandems for revenue, having a DZ in the media for accidents isn't a good thing (yes, I know the stats that jumps go up after an accident). People who want to do tandems often ask about the accident rate. Even though we can (truthfully) say that the majority of accidents are experienced jumpers who make foolish mistakes or exhibit bad judgement, many of the students just want to hear that 'there haven't been any accidents here for a long time.' So the DZO has an incentive to promote a safety culture. Not all of them do, but the big DZ I (normally) jump at has a very strong attitude towards safety. Nobody gets ridiculed for pulling off a load when the wind picks up. Or for making any sort of 'conservative' decision. I don't know for sure, but that sort of attitude seems to be a lot more prevalent than the old 'cowboy' or 'daredevil' attitudes of the past.

The older I get, the more I miss the people who affected my life in such a positive way... God Speed Chris Bickerdyke