DrewEckhardt

If it's not a seller's market (with the first place I bought I made the second offer the first day it went on the market at listing price with no contingincies) the property will need to be in move-in condition to sell it soon. Decent condition floors, carpets, paint, light fixtures, wall plates, towel racks, window coverings.... If a property you're considering isn't in that shape fix the big things (floors, carpets, paint) before you move in. You'll be fixing them anyways and might as well get to enjoy the results of the renovation. We neglected to do that on the last three properties. Also note that there's a _huge_ variation in pricing there especially on paint. Paint quotes varied from $1200 labor and materials to over $5000. Some guys don't really want your business.

Depends on the local real estate market and taxes. Could be six months, could be six years. If Washington state didn't have a real estate transfer tax we'd have pretty much broken even on a property we bought last June and sold this February (7 months, FSBO). Depends on the ratio between rents and purchase prices including property taxes, HOA fees, and the other things which would be rolled into rent. If I'd stuck to a 30 year loan when I refinanced my first place I'd have been paying less than it took to rent it and after five years I cashed out $80K more than the $10K I'd spent on down payment and $20K on mortgage principal. I also got all of my principal back which landlords don't do when you move out. Would have done better if we hadn't left town and could have sold it ourselves. Depends on your personal tax situation. If you live in a state with state income tax or have other deductable expenses that get you above the standard deduction arround $5K for individuals and $10K for married couples, every dollar (over 80% of a conventional 30 year mortgage payment) you spend on interest and property taxes can be paid with pre-tax money. If your state and federal rates are 33% combined each dollar goes 50% farther that way. Depends on your credit. Makes a big difference in interest rates. You need to talk to a couple of banks with good rates, get an itemized list of closing costs, differentiate between transaction costs (title insurance, the appraisal, etc) and things you have to pre-pay (a couple months deposit on taxes), look at what's been happening with property values (you're gambling if it hasn't been slow-and-steady), etc.

Scam. Paypal works great for transactions between countries, it just costs you an extra ~1%. Obviously paying 5% to avoid that would be silly. When you use paypal to accept payments for merchandise they'll charge your account back if you can't provide proof of postage and delivery (probably among other things). Scammers send money to you via paypal for a shipment, you send money via E-gold, some one claims non-receipt, there is no tracking number, and a hold gets placed on that amount of money in your account until the dispute is resolved which it never will be...

When you become inelligible for your employers' group plan you can pay for the same benefits for a year under COBRA at whatever your employer was spending on you (IIRC, the numbers were pushing $400 a month for an individual the time I used it; and I think my last employer with its no co-pay plan was closer to $500 for an individual or $1000 for a family). After that, other group plans are required to cover you with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions. Various professional organizations offer group plans to their members which include self-employed people. While potentially costly and hard to find, health insurance is available in all those situations. Given no pre-existing conditions you can get other insurance. If your age is lower than average or you have more Y chromosomes than average it'll be less expensive. Because you can't work arround the bloat inherent in the legislative process.

The governent already has a universal retirement savings plan. If I wait to retire until elligible for full benefits, I'll need to live five years past my statistically expected lifespan to achieve a zero percent rate of return on my investment assuming they never increase the tax rate. Since that will be insufficient to sustain my current standad of living I need to put just as much into a private plan so the universal solution has doubled my costs. I want no part of a health plan that works like that. A safety net where the government provides a minimum benefit would be fine and is what we already have with health care. Anybody can walk into an emergency room and get care whether or not they can pay for it. If they have a low income which makes them unable (as opposed to unwilling) to pay for private insurance there are government programs (Medicare as used by 44,000,000 people in 2001 and various state programs like Colorado's indigent medical care) that will keep creditors from going after them when they use the service. Some level of preventative care to keep them from making it to the emergency room would be an improvement. Extending the safety net from the quantifiably poor to the effectively uninsurable without requiring them to first bankrupt their families would be another. But without competition any plan that tries to cover everybody is either going to be of insufficient quality (I get 1/3 of the retirement benefit I would with a private plan of the same cost) or cost far more than private alternatives.

We'd also never recommend loading a F111 main at more than half the 2.0 pounds/square foot which is the highest placarded maximum for a PD reserve (PD126R @ 254 pounds) and don't want brisk openings. TSO C23 imposes maximum opening distance, descent rate, and forward speed limits on reserves which porosity will increase. The TSOs say nothing about mains. For practical purposes I think of F111 reserves at contemporary wing loadings as ZP canopies. The standard PD reserve lands better than a ZP Lightning and they claim the new low bulk units perform more like other ZP mains. When talking about his companies reserves, George Galloway has stated that repacks cause more wear, and that there isn't a performance difference between his F111 reserves and F111/ZP topskin hybrids. The TSO limits and ZP-like performance beyond F111 wing loadings aren't going to be there when the canopies have gotten porous.

You're neglecting that it's impossible to deploy the reserve without packing unless you're doing something exceptional that's not part of normal skydiving like unpacked jumps from balloons, helicopters, or fixed objects. Since the rules allow up to 25 deployments which require 25 repacks or 40 pack jobs by themselves,15 repacks must equal 25 deployments. 15 repacks/25 deployments = .6 repacks per deployment. This is the upper bound. With 24 deployments you would not have to send the canopy in for inspection until after your 40th repack meaning the deployments have had no effect on the inspection schedule. The lower bound is 0 repacks per deployment. So one deployment is treated as less than 60% of a repack's wear :-)

Helmets and seatbelts don't have appreciable side effects and can easily be undone should the need arise.

Even if only 2% of those of us who would suffer no remorse from killing engage each other, there are going to be lots of deaths. Grossman said that by Vietnam 70% of front-line troops were firing their weapons. That's a recipe for masacre.

USPA put the SIM on line years ago. http://www.uspa.org/publications/SIM/2007SIM/SIM.htm It even includes a license study guide and the relevant FARs. Imagine that!

There are places with good weather year round (not necessarily the same place), it takes me approximately seven minutes to pack, turbine aircraft get to altitude in less than 15 minutes, and you can easily be making a jump every half hour. Packing and humping arround skydiving rigs gets to be a lot of work though. I've never made it past ten before I felt like stopping. It also assumes that the people you want to jump with are going as fast as you do which may not be the case. It assumes sufficient lift capacity which may not be the case - if it takes two hours to get on a load and double manifesting isn't allowed you aren't going to make many jumps.

Even if the people they're targetting are allegedly child mollesters, terrorists, drug dealers, white supremists, or cultists? The government has a lot of lattitude in defining who the enemy is.

The goverment provides food stamps (which can't be used for tobacco or alcohol) for a portion of the population, too. Does that allow it to prevent everyone from purchasing tobacco or alcohol? Prohibition is an orthagonal issue, although protecting their citizens' from potentially harmful substances is one of the governments' many jobs which US courts consider to be constitutional.

Seems reasonable. As long as a government has an obligation to provide medical care for its citizens through things like Medicaid and state indigent care programs it should have some say in preventative measures which will reduce total expenditures.

Maybe not all kids, but a large enough amount do play with guns and end up killing themselves that it warrants this protection. Look at Billvons post before and see how many cases there were of children that found a gun and accidentally killed themselves. It is in a childs nature to explore, touch, and feel things, many of which are dngerous. You cant blame them though because their children, what you can do however is protect them. Hence the use of things like plasic protectors on outlets, child safety locks in cars, locks on cabinet doors which contain household cleaners/poisons, and fences around pools. A gun safe or child proof lock is no different then any of the other protections above. The only difference I can see is that only gun locks create the controversy that people think their second amendment rights are being taken away when really it is just a precaution to prevent kids from hurting themselves.

Their goal is pacification of a rebel force. And they not succeeding. How is that different from a homeland situation? (Other than Americans won't tolerate the Army getting overzealous in destroying multiple buildings to hit a suspected cell). Sherman used some pretty strong tactics against rebels and their supporters. Sherman was involved in a conflict between nominally independant states with well defined borders. Our second civil war isn't going to be that simple.

PD requires reserves to be sent in for inspection and permeability testing after 40 repacks without a use or 25 deployments. So one deployment is treated as less than 60% of a repack's wear.

1) It won't but doesn't have to because the government cannot use heavy weapons against resistance that's indistinguishable from the non-combatants. Especially when it doesn't want to obliterate its own industrial and tax base. 2) That's why the second ammendment says "arms" and not "handguns, shotguns, and rifles." In the founding fathers' time wealthy merchants had privately owned canon and warships.

When we were considering having me jump into our wedding, I asked my Farmer's agent in Colorado about this and he passed the question to the underwriters. While there are some exclusions for aviation, skydiving is covered by both my home owner's ($250 or $500K?) and umbrella policies ($1M).

Ok, but you show me where in the constitution it says all americans have the right to own firearms! Where The People refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community, including but not limited to those of us who are citizens.

Ten years ago we were officially on our own after making as few as seven student jumps. We jumped with each other and learned from people with no formal training in instruction. The USPA coach program is an inexpensive solution to both of those problems. You could set the coach rating requirements to 500 jumps and intensive training at which point the rating would be indistinguishable from AFF-I, the number of holders similar, and jump prices comparable. That's just not needed. All that's required is for the coach to fall straight down, follow a dive plan, and maintain situational awareness which are all skills they should have picked up shortly after AFF. They also need some basic instructing skills which USPA provides in the Coach course. Some one just off AFF has been cleared to jumpmaster themselves. They shouldn't need a baby sitter.

No, although they get lost temporarily and permanantly sometimes. Some one picked one of mine up and turned it into the police. Although the local farmer McNasty had contacted them about us and we were the only parachuting operation within 100 miles they didn't bother bringing it back to the drop zone. I took out an ad in the local paper's classified section, and a few people called me about it indicating that the police had reports of a found parachute elsewhere in the same paper. I watched another jumper cutaway and went looking for him and his canopy. Found the canopy floating in a lake before it had sunk all the way, stripped to my boxers, and swam in to get it. I gave it back and told the guy he needed to buy his case of beer for the dropzone.

Yes. You're going to go in a straight line, in whatever orientation you were during the spin, and may get a little angular velocity from the risers not releasing at the same time or aerodynamic forces.

My birthday dinner included sea urchin genitalia (Uni), monk fish liver (Ankimo), and raw quail egg (Uzura) atop flying fish roe (Tobiko). I was looking forward to a cured tongue sandwich tonight, but the salumi shop was sold out. No lamb proscuitto either. I also really like raw ground beef (steak tartare), crispy beef thymus (sweet breads), raw thinly sliced beef and venison (carpacio), beef heart, and beef tongue (unfortunately the salumi shop was sold out of cured tongue today. I order my Pho with tripe and tendon. Jelly fish, duck liver, and duck heart are ok. The pig skin tacos I had at my favorite carniceria were not. Alligator, antelope, elk, ostrich, and rabbit are all tasty. Escargot with olive oil and garlic can be yummy.

No deal. While BASE jumping is extremely dangerous and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, if BASE is in your nature it'll find you and you'd be missing a lot without it.