DrewEckhardt

Just keep it. Used snow sports equipment is worth so little but is so much more comfortable than the rental gear you might use if you sold it and got rental gear on a company ski trip or whatever.

In this day and age, Bill Clinton was a conservative with his wellfare reform and relatively balanced budget. Compare and contrast to Bush 43 with the largest ever (as a percentage of budget) increases in discretionary non-defense spending.

That's not socialized, then. Sure it is just like defense. Although the government writes the checks for defense, all our weapons and up to half our soldiers come from private companies which add their own markups. Right. Low cost services require low overhead. Cutting the profit out of it couldn't hurt either - I get better interest rates on CDs and paid less on my mortgage from my not-for-profit credit union than I would at for-profit bank like Wells Fargo. Of course, a group which existed solely to provide health coverage for its members wouldn't be legal.

When the people paying for it get fed up, renounce their citizenship (America is one of the only countries which charges its citizens income tax regardless of where they live), and leave the country for a tax haven (some nice central American countries have 15% top tax rates, houses for $40K, live in household help for $200 a month, and are getting medical systems which match ours since we can't afford to retire here and bring our doctors with us when we leave). As of 2005 the top 10% of the wage earners were paying 70% of the income tax bill, 5% 60%, and 1% 40%. We live in a time when ideas are the most valuable property, we can communicate instantly between continents, and you can be anywhere for business within a day or two. Or when the total tax burden (we have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world) and resulting cost of living (people have estimated that our money would go 8X farther without taxes taken out at each step) renders us uncompetitive with countries that have labor costs 1/3 - 1/10th ours and the economy collapses with mass unemployment and hyper-inflation. Taking the profit out of health care and introducing quantities of scale would let us do it for less than we're spending now. The French and Canadian governments spend less for universal health care than we do on medicare and medicaid; the later which we charge people more for than private group plans. Unfortunately about half the tax payers have little incentive to be efficient since as of 2005 they were only covering 3% of the costs supported by income tax. The 50% of the population not paying for government is going to use your money to take care of their wants. The best you can do is influencing an implementation which hurts less than the alternatives.

Have you ever mailed or received a letter? The US postal service provides universal mail service, with pickup/delivery from your home 6 days a week, for some of the lowest prices in the world. In 1996 when the dollar was worth something, we charged $.32 cents when the Europeans were charging 50-100% more. Unlike other government provided services, the US Postal service exists as a separate not-for-profit corporation with a day-to-day operation not dictated by lobbyists and healthy commercial alternatives to its premium services (like overnight mail). I'd LOVE government health and retirement plans run like that. France and Canada provide universal health care ($2080 and $2048 respectively vs $2364 in 2005) for what we spend just to provide medicare and medicaid (with outrageous premiums compared to group plans) for a subset of the population so this is demonstrably possible. In practice I know it'll end up like Social security (negative to 2% return on investment) or government education (where 2 of 3 school employees aren't teachers where private industry gets by with 2 or 3 out of 10 people in administrative/support roles) because the health industries lobbyists are going to keep getting their money; the insurance will just come from the government which then taxes the people instead of directly from the people paying for it.

There's your problem. Since emergency rooms are the only free medical care in many places (federal law requires to them to triage any one who walks through the front door regardless of ability to pay) people go there instead of other doctors who'd want an insurance or credit card. Naturally this makes for long lines. You want to go to urgent care clinics any time you need medical care during normal business hours without needing an ambulance to get there. The waits are usually much more reasonable; often under an hour.

If you're getting back that much you'd be a few hundred dollars better off each year if you filled out a W4 claiming the correct number of exemptions, put the difference between your old and new take-home pay in a decent savings account (Countrywide is still paying 5%), and didn't withdraw it until the next tax year. The IRS has a toll-free tax question number.

Bike paths would be fine places to ride if cities installed an overpass or underpass everywhere they intersected a cross street, but they don't Car drivers don't watch for fast moving traffic parallel to the road way and routinely turn into or in front of it. While I've been hit by cars at bike-path road intersections I've never been run over while riding on the road itself. While car drivers almost never stop in the middle of an intersection, it's often unavoidable when it comes to road/bike path intersections. You can go in front (and risk getting hit) or around the line of cars which is a PITA. Bike paths would be fine, like little roads. Unfortunately cities build "multi-use paths" where lunch time walkers stroll 4 abreast, people walk dogs, parents have kids running in circles around them. They're often too crowded to be useful for transportation.

Eventually you run out of clothing to take off.

Ah... youth. Is wasted on the young.

To earn a comfortable living (have a private space to live in, eat tasty food, go on vacation, earn enough to have saved 15-20X your annual salary so you can retire) you need to do something that people want to buy and other people won't or can't do. I've paid house cleaners $25 an hour although that should take less training than being a Starbucks Barista; it's just not pleasant. I suspect sewer divers get paid a lot but wouldn't want to do that either. That leaves the can't part, where knowledge and practice from formal training (college, trade school, apprenticeship) or experience (which can be hard to get without formal training to get a job) is needed. I'd _much_ rather use my brain to solve problems other people can't than be stuck doing something unpleasant that other people won't. The other side is that people spend nearly half their waking hours at work. It's much better when its something you enjoy (I like solving hard problems some where between engineering and computer science; some people like building race cars or going through airplanes) than something you have to do to keep a paycheck coming in.

I've interviewed people with a masters degree in computer science who couldn't get that a linked list 100K entries was not a good idea. I've had my pager go off a dozen times between 12 and 7 am because smart people with masters degrees in computer science did not have experience building reliable software. One of the worst engineers I've worked with even had a PhD (the best engineer I've worked with also had a PhD so I know there's not a causal relationship). The degree just guarantees the person remembered enough to get passing grades on their classes and had enough patience to make it through everything else instead of starting work. Many CS programs do not require non-trivial projects, and I know one professor who was not allowed to continue teaching data structures because she had the audacity to fail people who couldn't write code that passed automated test suites. Most software engineers just need a solid understanding of complexity, the basic data structures, concurrency, and software engineering - probably half a dozen classes, a little statistics, a few non-trivial projects in school, and a couple things they need to maintain for a few years each afterwards. For that role I'd much rather have a drop-out who actually remembered something about complexity and knew to look for a priority queue implementation than some one with a degree who forgets that and causes real time constraint violations. Really interesting things require a familiarity with current research, a proven ability to innovate beyond that, and practical experience with simulation; but such positions constitute well under one percent of what's out there.

What if the battery is dead? Wouldn't the only danger be that it would not fire when needed? If that is the case, why wouldn't the rig be as airworthy as a rig without an AAD? You don't know the battery is dead unless you open the reserve container, unscrew the Cypres battery compartment lid, and measure with your trusty DVM. Until you've done that you don't know whether the Cypres battery is dead or the Cypres is on but functioning incorrectly with an inoperable display which might lead to a misfire.

I bought my Triumph Sprint brand new in 1998 and was paying less than $200/year for full coverage from Farmer's. Riding something sporty that's not classified as a sports bike will do wonders for your premiums. You might consider something like an FZ600 if you want a new bike and add a lower fairing if you ride far.

A W-2 means that a company admits you work for them, pays unemployment insurance, covers the taxes which don't show up on people's pay stubs which would make us worry about tax rates, and withholds state and federal taxes from you. A 1099 is proof that a company paid for services from another company (potentially a sole proprietor) and indicator to our government that they should see that revenue reported on that the payee's tax forms. It gets complicated with individuals, but generally employees do what you tell them how you tell them while contractors are merely providing services with the details of their choosing. A contractor could choose to work from home, noon to 9pm, with some work sub-contracted to off-shore vendors. A manifest worker who sits in an office sunrise to sunset is not a contractor. Companies sometimes abuse the system, paying "employees" on 1099 forms. The government does not like this because its easier to have taxes withheld up front than trying to collect from some one who no longer has the money and means that some people aren't being covered by unemployment, disability, retirement, and life insurance.

It depends what you need to do with the rest of the money. I had more left over when I had $2400 in taxable income from my summer job as a life guard living with my parents than when I got my first "real" job making $24,000 a year from which I had to pay for rent, insurance, food, etc. In expensive states the salaries don't compensate for the increased costs of living. Buying a house some place expensive like California can run $40,000 more a year in mortgage + property taxes than some place more modestly priced. You could make twice what some one did someplace more affordable and still have less left over.

Tax burden is the average tax rate with all things considered; that's an average tax rate not a share of taxes. As of 2000, 66% of income tax came from the top 10% (with 40% of income), 54% from the top 5% (with 29% of the income), and 34% from the top 1% (15.4% of income). By 2005, the numbers were 70% from the top 10% (46% of income), 60% from the top 5% (with 36% of income), and 39% from the top 1% (21%). Average tax rates were 18.8%, 20.8%, and 23.1% for the top 10, 5, and 1% with income spits of $104, $145, and $365K. In contrast, the bottom 50% of income earners pay just 3% of the income tax bill while earning 13% of the income with an average tax rate of 3% on income up to $31K a year.

I'm too broken to run and fat (its amazing how fast you grow when you can't exercise) for the main I usually jump, so I might find something nice in the 135 size range. Or if walking fast is out of the option, I might just stick to the big seven cells and skip the new gear, except I like a .7 wing loading to get a nice sink which will also call for something bigger there too.

The deployment brake settings may also affect things. Canopies have been rigged to open everywhere between just short of stalling for the owner (where lighter people open in a stall) and full-flight. Each step beyond identical Super Ravens in both containers is going to make things less certain.

I think it's actually 5 parts. Walt 18 USC 922(r) makes it illegal to assemble a rifle in a configuration which may not be imported (under current law, which includes the 1989 import ban, when you use more than 10 parts from the enumerated list. The AK47 includes sixteen of the enumerated parts, so you must replace 6 to be legal. Magazine bodies, followers, and floor plates are included in the parts list although using them for your count would make installing the wrong magazine a felony. That's silly. The other legal alternative would be to comply with current law on importable configurations. IIRC that means unable to accept a high-capacity magazine. That's silly. Unless you've moved to the People's Repulik of Kalifornia in which case things like the FAB10 (fed by a stripper clip when the receiver is open) are the best available.

Note that provided you shopped around for a reasonable dealer markup and don't make more than 500 jumps in two years with a Cypres-1 (which would require early battery replacement to comply with SSK and therefore FAA regulations), owning either costs $11-$12 a month (With the original you pay Airtec for batteries, while they get the money up front for the Cypres-2) One can argue that it doesn't cost anything to upgrade to a Cypres-2 if your needs (water-proof, speed-option, > 250 jumps a year) warant it.

Galil. Diopter rear sight for daylight use, flip-up buckhorn with tritium inserts for night use. AR15 magazine adapter for the .223 Galil. Folding stock. Built-in bipod which also functions as a wire cutter and bottle opener.

Right. But on your back the error is only a few hundred feet high, so its not like the thing is unuseable.

I've always used a chest mount, since it's easily readable in any body position and the people across from me can read it on flat jumps. It only reads high when you're on your back, although you shouldn't be on your back by the time you get to pull altitude so that doesn't matter and any place else being 300' off isn't going to make a difference.

A Cypres costs about $11-$12/month to own in depreciation, maintenance, and batteries. Lift tickets to average 150-200 jumps a year are running $250-$400 a month. AAD ownership constitutes less than 5% of skydivings costs' to an active jumper. Accounting for inflation, jump ticket prices are about what they were a decade ago (in spite of $4 a gallon fuel) and non-premium rigs (Wings today vs. Reflex in 1996) cost about the same. The wind tunnel makes serious training a fraction of what it cost when we were stuck with airplanes. An hour of 4-way with video is $700 not $7000. 2-way freefly is $700 not $5000.