DrewEckhardt

It's simple economics. X people will trade a set of costs (IEDs, being away from home, living in a desert) for a given set of benefits ($Y a day, early retirement, college, etc.). You need to accept more of them, decrease the costs, or increase the benefits. Black Water pays its contractors between $450 and $650 a day according to its website, subject to all taxes and the employer's share of FICA + Medicare. Single Staff Sargents make about $85 a day tax free and ones married with children $170 a day tax free. If the military paid what the free market decided the job was worth they'd have more takers although the war costs wouldn't go over as well with the tax payers.

.01% of the population are active skydivers. 99.99% are not. Since we don't have 9999X the disposable income of the general population to spend on advertisers' products (especially with skydiving and cross-over activities like flying) something for them will be more lucrative. Besides, they wouldn't have a show left if they scrapped everything that wasn't nearly obvious to subject matter experts. Personally, if I were working for myth busters I'd go for the stunts that'd be the most fun, Skydiving is arguably fun. Building working ejection seats might be funner (I'm down to one car which is too nice to cut a hole in the roof)

Fixed wing pilots may have over 100 landings and 15 hours flying around before they're allowed to go solo. You have 21 landings, less than two hours in the air, and can't add more power to go around if you don't like how things are going. Some fear in that situation seems pretty reasonable.

An AFF-I rating doesn't magically bestow knowledge about all things skydiving. I know one AFF-I that hadn't learned enough about canopy flight in several thousand jumps to save herself from a low turn incident in which she nearly died from internal bleeding. Plenty of AFF-I's got away with bad canopy choices during their early skydiving careers and either don't run enough students through their programs to notice the statistical correlation between increased wing loadings and higher injury rates or don't have the powers of observation to notice. Unless your instructors are people like Brian Germain (> 10,000 jumps, designs parachutes, teaches canopy flight professionally), there are recognized industry experts that know more than your instructors. Advice from the experts (whether oral, written, or third hand) which is more conservative than what you're getting from your instructors should be followed. Brian Germain says that people exiting at 198 to 220 pounds should be under a canopy no smaller than 230 square feet for their first 20 jumps and that the absolute limit is around 230 pounds for that experience level. http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/bas-sizingchart.pdf Given student wind limitations, I don't think that a lower weight limit would be inappropriate.

Assuming traffic is reasonable. When I lived in Colorado, I could get to a rural DZ 100 miles away consistently in one hour and fifteen minutes when I had enough points left on my license. Without any state income tax in Washington, they don't have any money to pay for roads so there aren't enough lanes. It often took me an hour and a half to make it up to Mt Vernon (about 60 miles, for some reason people just slow down around Everett) and two hours plus to get to or from Shelton on nice summer days (about 90 miles, there's a big Tacoma to Olympia slow down). You will like the DZ and people, but might want camping equipment to make the most of the drive time.

12 states including Colorado recognize Common Law Marriage. In Colorado, a common law marriage exists when the parties present themselves as husband and wife provided they're adults and not already married. No license or solemnization required.

I'm an engineer, my wife is an engineer, we have a cat. He gets squeezed whether he's been good or bad. We thought it was both accurate and funny as heck. Except for Willard, who pretended not to notice.

You're an atheist if you believe there are no gods. You're agnostic if you believe we can't know whether or not gods exist. Belief in after lives and karma are orthogonal to belief in supreme beings. At most, based on your post you're unchurched.

1. The previous owners claims may not be accurate - I bought one "300 jump" canopy which never flared like I wanted it to until I measured it and found that it was way out of trim (like 600 jumps). 2. Vectran starts out kindof grey.

Why would people stick around to drink the cheapest beer available when they have something at home in their fridge which is much better? Buy decent beer. People will like it more. Although you'll be buying a lot of it at first (graduated from student program, new gear, license, first night jump...) it'll be an insignificant fraction of price you pay to skydive. Make 150 jumps in your first year, spend $1500 on the student program, $3000 on the rig, and buying 4 $30 cases of bear will be less than 1.5% of what you spend. You'll be a lot more likely to meet people who think that jumping with new skydivers and teaching them to pack is part of the sport. With coach jumps at slot + $10 it may even be less expensive than not buying beer at all.

Sounds lousy to me. Nearly all the time my insurance company spends less than $300-$360/year on those things and if I were footing the entire bill for insurance I'd do better paying the doctors for those things out of pocket.

Should tax payers subsidize health care for Jewish-Americans with Tay-Sachs, African-Americans with sickle cell anemia, or Northern-European-Americans with Dupuytren's Contracture? Those are all avoidable by not breeding with your kind of people. A nice uniform shade of brown would do wonders for eliminating genetic disorders especially those passed on with recessive genes. Should tax payers subsidize large families? $12M barely covers the cost to educate the school aged children from 200 large families. That problem would be easily avoided by using a little birth control or abstaining. Maybe we could mandate it, birth control after the first two, sterilization after the third. Heck, $12M barely covers the costs to educate 1000 normal sized families' school-aged children. Throw in the income tax losses from one partner staying home with the children and it's more substantial. Maybe we could just freeze the eggs and sperm, sterilize everyone, and only implant people who pay for a birth license (in cash or as a lien against real property) sufficient to compensate all the governments for the cost of raising, housing, and insuring their children until they become self sufficient (this is approaching 30) along with the loss in tax revenues. 6000 * 13 years of K-12 education or $78,000 would just be the start. I doubt $100K would do the trick. We could just concede that religious and reproductive freedom have their costs. Or go after the parents who committed crimes resulting in damages to their children and the tax payers. OTOH, punishing the children for their parents religious choices and secular crimes does have a nice Old Testament, original sin sort of feel to it.

This friggen drives me insane. Secure passwords have non-alphanumeric characters in them, but nobody reminds you on their login screen "alphanumeric and underbars only, at least six but less than eight characters" what's allowed and disallowed. I need a cheat sheet that tells me how to reconstruct each acount name "lower case no space" and password "the credit card password has two digits in it and a suffix that I'll probably remember" The "hints" to remember the password don't help either. Did I type in my entire highschool name? Abreviate the Sr? Leave it off? Was my favorite car just a brand or did it it include a type name? One company even truncated the last letter from my mother's (only moderately long) maiden name in their database, but accepted (and rejected) the whole thing on their web site. When I worked for my last big company which required passwords to be changed, not dictionary words, and not related to any previous passwords I just left a Post-it on my monitor until I remembered it.

Collapsible pilot chutes have become nearly universal among experienced skydivers and every one I've seen was sewn to the bridle. Even my Paraflite EOS built for a Turbo Z 205 (read as neither modern nor high performance) came with a collapsible PC. So many newer skydivers have no opportunity to deal with a larks head at the pilot chute end until they develop interests in rigging and/or BASE jumping.

You also want to make sure the ends of the 180 degree opposite reinforcing tapes line up with each other before you tighten the larks head. This will limit the bridle twists you have to undo when packing and make you more likely to have on-heading openings.

Fliteline built my second Reflex in a black and white checkboard and it turned out very nice. Thanks! That had to have been a lot work. For your second or third rig you often end up at a size where you won't want a smaller container and it takes a long time to wear out a rig when you don't jump much in desert conditions. You might as well get something you really like.

The F360CS went round the Top Gear test track 3.5 seconds faster than the Gallardo. So did the standard version of the 360's successor, the F430 I'd be too scared of scratching it to drive it anywhere close to where the difference in handling would become relevant. Accelerating in a straight line would be a different story, especially with traction control. 5 liters, 3.6 liters, no contest. There's also the V12 sound. Without a V12 under the hood it doesn't deserve a prancing pony on top of it.

We talk about things, eat, drink, play scrabble, and watch movies. I haven't had a TV which actually receives "channels" since 2002 when I realized that although I was spending $60 a month it had been six months since I'd actually watched something on my 100 channels of satellite TV. I'd watched more than a few movies, but they always came from the local independent video store with 60-70 years of decent films to choose from instead of the same stale cable re-runs.

It'll be about 5% faster at trim speed. All else equal it will take less to get it turning and it will dive longer. How you perceive the change is a separate and more important issue. It's not linear or predictable. If you want a faster + more responsive canopy, are current, and with your current size are comfortable building speed (with front risers), flat/flare turns, cross-wind landings, slight down-wind landings, and everything else Bill von Novak or Brian Germain recommend you should try it and see.

Its fine. Even if you freefly.

Lots. They can be tasty, especially some of the smaller Pacific varieties like Kumamatos. Some of the larger Atlantic species are grown because they mature fast and aren't nearly as good. Depends on the species. Buttery. Salty. With a slight metallic after taste. With notes of fruit. Like the sea, with a hint of iodine like sea urchin or Islay scotches. Mostly they taste like oyster. No. Advanced seafoods are things like monkfish liver (yum), sea urchin genitalia (yum), and jelly fish (not that good). Raw scallops are more innocuous. The local tapas bar serves them up in a squid ink vinaigrette. Tasty! Looks pretty too, with pale white scallop in a sea of black ink. I feel hungry now.

Surely you could use orthopaedic screws to attach a camera mount directly to your skull. If nothing else it would be cooler than the other skydiver's piercings and body modifications.

60 miles per hour = 88 feet per second. Yeah, but acceleration is not a constant 88 feet/second^2 because the car's torque curve isn't flat even when you don't shift and aerodynamics conspire against you at higher speeds. You might take 2 seconds to reach 30 MPH and 3.8 to finish getting to 60 MPH.

Yes, but I'd support an amendment changing that. Allowing exceptions to blanket prohibitions against infringements is a dangerous precedent. You end up no laws abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble WHEN they support the administration. Dissenters can be sent to free speech zones away from the press. You get no person being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law EXCEPT when the person is accused of terrorism, or racketeering, or drug law violations. You can't violate the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures EXCEPT when their effects are electronic and can be intercepted by a fiber optic splitter fed into a semantic content analyzer which lives in a secret government closet at the phone company. Laws don't mean anything when arbitrary exceptions are allowed without going through the same legislative process. When the Constitution doesn't reflect modern needs (like to recognize non-white males) it needs to be changed not ignored.

It says arms. Synonym for weapons. No exclusions specified - firearm, nuclear, chemical, or biological.