DrewEckhardt

It's about 2.4%, but I spend more to live close to work + entertainment and only have to buy a tank of gas every three weeks so I'm spending only .8% of my take home pay on gas. That's probably a more reasonable metric, since people living in areas with low population densities are going to be filling up their tanks much more often.

A standing pro-pack takes less room than flat-packing. Your fellow skydivers will be less happy with you if you're using as much space as three of them, especially if the packing hanger is air-conditioned and it's hot and sunny outside. The standing pro-pack also lets you roll the tail to control opening speed. It's easier for students to figure out what's going on in a flat-pack - you can see the slope from front to back and S-folds happening where the perspective seems less intuitive with the pro-pack.

At just 94,526 square miles the whole UK is smaller than the 11 largest US states. They don't need as much gas to get around their country as we do our 3,537,441 square miles.

You might give Brian Germain a call and inquire about the swooping lineset with its longer length and steeper trim.

We can't have THAT! Exactly. The big banks need to be able to buy their congress people ... I mean pay their lobbyists.

Yeah, it's better to hire CEOs that come from an environment where mistakes mean taking away a nine-figure package and not broken bones or death.

Because that wouldn't be politically expedient. Only .16% of the population is potentially stuck with a bad active-duty military contract. Even including Reserve and National Guard members doesn't bump the number up past .5%. Few businesses have a vested financial interest in military service peoples' finances. The worst markets have over 1% of their home owners in forclosure, everyone is worried about falling property values, and the big banking companies are loosing billions on their bad loans.

Wrong. You can only consume so many calories in a day (or beers before being at risk for a DUI arrest) and it would be a shame to waste your quotas on a beer that's so close to Budweiser (just without the rice). If you must drink a Belgian beer, try a style with some flavor like a golden ale (Duvel). If you're at a restaurant which caries Stella Artois because it's popular and innocuous, they're likely to have other popular beers that are a bit more interesting. Bass and Moretti la Rosa are about as popular but much more drinkable.

Don't forget about sufficient disability insurance. The 60% of base salary you get from typical group plans is still taxable when the premiums are paid for with pre-tax dollars. Companies can let you pay the taxes on the benefit which makes the insurance pay-out tax free if you need to use it.

Lots of equipment spends years in cool, dry closets. Years passed between my first rig's original owner made the last of his 80 jumps and sold it, my Stiletto (DOM 94) has been in a bag since 2003 apart from two Mr. Bills and a couple jumps I made recovering from an injury, I doubt I've put 200 jumps on my Monarch (DOM 92) since 1999 (nearly all wingsuit which I don't do much of).

Pretty much anything fun you do in skydiving is going to involve RW. Just the body position, suits, and fall rates will differ. Some people even do it with wing suits or open parachutes. Doing it competitively is challenging regardless of the body position, but the bar is a lot higher for recreational VRW. I didn't build my first successful 4-way vertical round (2 head-up, 2 head down) until I had about a thousand jumps. The other three jumpers all had at least 500 jumps each. With belly-position RW nearly any group of skydivers with compatible clothing can successfully build formations. It's the greatest common denominator and provides more immediate gratification.

Get a day laborer recommendation from a contractor you know. Local price is $12/hour per.

Around here, you're either a COMMUTER (given just 6 non-working waking hours, do you want to spend one or two of them in a car instead of home?), RENTER (a nice 1500 square foot, 3-bedroom 2-bath house just went on the market for $1,399,000. Mortage payments and property taxes would run close to $100K/year while house rentals can be found for under $36K/year), or APARTMENT OWNER. In a popular semi-urban to urban settings it's often the least bad option.

Two. The price was much more reasonable than houses in the same location (170K vs. close to 300K; 425K for a nice 5 year old town-house vs. $600K plus for something which needed "updating" or $700K+ for something new). Living with less space inside city limits beat having more farther away which I couldn't enjoy as much because I'd have been living in my car more. One was a nice end-unit with good party wall construction and quiet neighbors. One had decent party wall construction and a (mediocre) rock drummer bought the property and moved in next door. That stunk. Not having to maintain a yard is nice, but the same thing is available in houses. The checks just go to a gardner instead of an HOA.

Sure. No. The gear is tested in both configurations.

A few crew members or citizens licensed to carty wielding 9mm pistols filled with blue Glaser Safety Slugs could have done fine against attackers only armed with box-cutters.

Be more efficient. Stowing your brakes after you land will keep them from getting tangles that need to be undone. You might note that if you land your canopy on its side there are no twists that need undoing and it has less air left in it to squeeze out once you get to the hanger. You might also notice that if you hold the lines in your left hand, count out the nose with your right hand, pull it vigorously out, and push it back the canopy pretty much folds itself so you only have to cleanup the folds instead of digging around in the pack job. Be faster. After 100, 500, or 1000 pack jobs you'll be quicker even though you're mostly doing the same things. With enough practice you can pack in 6-7 minutes even though you're making all the same folds you did when you were learning to pack and took 45 minutes.

You talk to the 23-69 people who take one of the beers you buy for graduating from the student program, doing your first hop-and-pop, or getting your A-license. You: "Man, now all I gotta do is get a rig with a 190 main and reserve" Joe Jumper: "I have a big rig sitting in my closet..."

I'd be surprised if any major vendor isn't cutting their canopies with a giant computer controlled plotter equipped with a hot-knife or laser cutter. Smaller companies use the same equipment because they contract out the actual manufacture. It's all CAD files that have been manually adjusted for different sizes to meet the performance expectations because things don't scale (as a trivial example, the line surface area only decreases with the square root of size so line drag is much more significant on small canopies).

Because you do your much safer landing straight into an obstacle you didn't see at altitude (sooner or later a pilot will dump you too far off the airport to make it back, perhaps after the winds pick up, perhaps when your group takes too long climbing out) and can't turn to avoid it. Or you turn to avoid a canopy flying the wrong direction in the pattern and your standard toggle turn puts the canopy into an attitude from which it cannot recover at low altitude. Or the wind changes and you turn into it like everyone else rather than making a down or cross-wind landing and that turn runs you into the ground. Ever since the advent of modern ZP canopies the incident reports have been full of "not hook turn type people" who didn't have the low-turning skills needed to avoid people and obstacles. IMHO you're safer adding speed to a larger canopy when everything was right (current, made a few jumps that day, steady winds, no traffic) than being stuck with the speed and control sensitivity when things are going wrong under a smaller canopy that you usually land "safely." The number of jumps at which you add speed, how much, and by what mechanism is a separate issue.

There were also a few incidents where people got hand/wrist mounts tangled in their lines.

I broke my tibia+fibula five months ago. After three months the X-rays showed no evidence of healing but the nerve pain had dropped enough I could start putting some weight on it; and I'm finally walking reasonably fast without a cane. This week's X-rays looked like there finally was some bone growth.

My wife traveled 1000 miles to fetch me when I broke myself, has driven me everywhere (like to work 5 days a week) for the five months I haven't been driving, moved 9 times so I could find the next job I was passionate about, lived in my bachelor pad (think construction project just complete enough to have a 250 pound projector hanging from the living room ceiling), lived in two states where her kids don't, found me my current killer job, sold three properties and bought one without a real-estate agent, acted as general contractor and laborer on four remodeling projects, and found our current apartment. She's a geek too (we met at our last startup. Turns out she was sleeping in her car when I slept under my desk) and completely understands what I do at work. Scores about the same at Scrabble so it's interesting. Likes the same movies and most of my music. She's adopted my cat in spite of having asthma. He's her baby now, getting lots of squeezing and love. She shops at Asian and Mexican markets, feeds me all sorts of tasty food (like home made cheese cakes, goat, german pancakes, wonderful omlettes) and buys my Arrogant Bastard ale. She travels light (we only took one carry-on and a small day pack with us for our 10 day honeymoon) and goes with me on jumping trips even though people have died just 10 feet away. My birthday present this year is a plasma TV so I don't even have to get out of bed to watch movies with her. My birthday present last year was an artist's loft in downtown Seattle so I could play with my toys and power tools even though we were living in a high-rise. That's just the start of how freakin cool my wife is. We've been friends for six years, a couple for four, and married for two so we're just getting started. Our wedding was exactly 10 years and 10 days after my first skydive so the date is easy to remember.

My sister left her helmet at home one too many times. When I first visited her at the hospital she no longer had any (60 seconds was too much) short term memory. She ran up thousands of dollars in medical bills and was out of work for months. While not wearing a helmet on a bicycle is unlikely to kill you, even a minor slip can be enough to really screw up your life. As far as bike paths, the road is safer because cars are watching for traffic there while they're not looking at the paths that run parallel to the roads. I've only been hit by cars while cycling on bike paths.

That more people who list Democrat, independant, or decline to state on their voter registration forms cared who got the party nomination for the 2008 presidential ticket and believed their vote could make a difference.