DrewEckhardt

We can withold tax when money is moved by people who can't provide sufficient evidence that their income is being reported and taxes paid. This can be handled with the infrastructure already in place for sales taxes. Merchants can withold an additional 42% sales tax and exempt social security card holders the same way they do people buying goods for resale or on behalf of government entities. Wire transfer services can do the same.

I skipped my A-license because once I had gear I'd be B-qualified within a month. I skipped the B because once I had my water training it would only be a couple months for the C. People didn't seem to mind too much at the dropzones in my state, so I figured I'd just wait for a D. With a couple hundred jumps and no real problems at boogies I pretty much forgot about it. The currency rules for non-licensed skydivers are stricter, although in nine years I never went more than three weeks between jumps (my jumping streak was broken after I herniated a disc sneezing. Oops.). I was going to get a pro-rating to jump into my wedding, although the parks manager veto'd that idea and I passed. After 10 years, I decided to move to another state where no one knew me, and figured having my D-license might save some hassles.

On my last malfunction (note to self: do not borrow a canopy that's been loaned out to dozens of people and attach it to a rig without repacking it) I picked up the canopy and freebag, hung up the main and untangled it, hooked it up to my second rig using the correct D-bag, and was jumping within an hour. On the one before that I didn't have a second rig with me so I inspected and repacked my reserve but wasn't going to rush to get done before the sunset load.

I get a kick out of warning labels on small rigs and high performance main parachutes that say the user should have completed a program of instruction in using the equipment OR have 100 jumps and read the instruction manual. I'm surprised that I've yet to hear of a lawsuit stemming from such a label making the equipment sound too safe. I also like the original Birdman warning label that says you shouldn't land the suit.

I did it twice. Before I got glasses, I couldn't tell which end of the windsock was the pointy one at altitude so I just landed in the same direction as the people who got down before me. This failed when I landed first. So I got glasses. The first time I saw a tetrahedron I ate the carrot just like on a windsock. Flew out of the grass area surrounding it, onto the taxi way, and crashed because I was watching the taxi light I just passed instead of wear I was going. Wore through the outer layer of my reserve container.

The government needs the $220 million more than the students so that this year's deficit can be about .04 - .07% lower (given an original projection of $423B and claimed potential to only go $300B deeper in debt) than it would be without the tax increase.

According to USPA you should meet the B-license requirements: 1. Skydivers participating in night jumping should meet all the requirements for a USPA B or higher license.

In the United States we have a lifetime $1,000,000 gift allowance. Gifts in excess of an $11,000 annual exclusion count against that limit. Once you hit the limit, you pay a 47% tax. The gift tax is there to keep people from getting arround the estate tax by giving their heirs property before they die.

Nope. How people react to parachute performance differences is not predictable based on previous experience under larger and/or less agressive wings and changes between such canopies. I started with a Turbo Z 205, made a dozen jumps between a Sabre 170 and Monarch 175, and downsized to a Monarch 155 without issue. I'd passed AFF in seven jumps and guys who'd been arround since before I was born said I had talent. Going between a Batwing 135 (elliptical) and Stiletto 120 (elliptical, similar turn rate, more sensitive to control input, and with a longer recovery arc) was a much bigger deal than going from a 205 to 155. I got away with grass stains and bruised heels which hurt for a few months. Going from my Monarch 155 to the Stiletto 120 (2 sizes, 1 shape, just like the original poster's friend) or Batwing 135 to the Samurai 105 I have now (2 sizes, same shape) would have put me in the titanium club or worse. People who think that skipping sizes and combining size and major shape changes are acceptable just haven't been jumping long enough to learn they're wrong from first or second-hand experience. Unpredictability means that it should apply every downsize. One can argue that diifferences in training, learning, and focus change the minimum prudent number of jumps between changes. The other side of that is that because performance under low-stress situations is not a good predictor of how people perform when things go wrong, people should spend enough time under each size to have adapted their muscle memory and actually had bad experiences. The problem is that there are other people who should be under bigger/more conservative canopies that you don't know about until they screw up. It's not hard to land highly loaded canopies straight in with minimal experience. Based on a couple of demo jumps I didn't think an Extreme FX 104 was a big deal compared to my Batwing 134 when I had 500 jumps. I made another hundred jumps on that Batwing. got my Stiletto 120, and made 600 jumps on that. In that time I learned how wrong I was. It might be interesting to split these polls up into over/under 1000 jumps (if you keep downsizing you will eventually be surprised) or over/under 10 years (hang arround dropzones long enough and you will see enough people learning the hard way).

I was in Vegas for a trade show and won often enough at the quarter slots that I was putting less money in them out of my pocket than I'd be spending on the beer that wouldn't be free if I wasn't gambling.

You can only deduct medical expenses to the extent they exceed 7% of AGI. Tax preparation fees are in the miscellaneous category where you're only allowed to deduct the total which exceeds 2% of your adjusted gross income. Realistically, you're probably only looking at deducting other taxes with real-etate taxes and state income taxes being the big one for most people. Personal property tax based on value like that paid on your car is deductable, although the rest of your registration fees are not.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/gruesome/crushboy.asp

When you start skydiving, jumping out of airplanes and being in freefall can be scary and exciting. That decreases as you get more experience and jump frequently. One that happens most people find that skydiving is most enjoyable as a social sport which revolves arround the interactions with other people in the time between exit and landing. This can take the form of formation skydiving, canopy relative work, freefly, tracking dives, wingsuit flocks, etc. Ocassionally reliving that initial excitement by trying new things is a great idea. I've tried round parachutes, sky surfing, night jumps, wing suits, baloons/helicopters, etc. Once you get a few hundred jumps (more experience will better prepare you for handling emergencies) and are competant at head-up vertical flight (can get there immediately from any position, can rotate about all three axis) you should try skysurfing; although if you're like most of us you probably won't want to do it on a regular basis. Sky surfing was very visible in the early 90s with the X-games, and a lot of us in the younger sitfly/freefly crowed tried it. I bought a board, but stopped jumping it because being with other people was a lot more enjoyable.

What his friends think is completely irrelevant. Facts: 1. While quantifiable differences in forward speed, turn rate, control sensitivity, etc. are the same for everybody how people react to them varies. What one person does on a given size/shape change is not a good predictor of how another person does. Perceptions don't change linearlly with size. Doing well with one change doesn't mean you'll do well with the next one. I never had any problems switching from a 155 to 135 square, or 135 square to 135 elliptical; but changing from a 135 elliptical to a more responsive 120 had me not allways landing straight. 2. When everything goes right it's not hard to land a highly loaded canopy with minimal experience - I tried an Extreme 105 after maybe 500 jumps without issue. Things are a lot messier when you are cut-off on landing, have to land out on a night jump, etc. 3. Most people have a different frame of reference that's not going to translate. Jumping elliptical canopies loaded over 1.6 pounds/square foot for much of a decade makes it easy to forget that they have sharp pointy teeth. Experiences with lower wing loadings don't translate either. Implications: It's not appropriate for people to recommend any change in wing loading beyond "follow accepted practices." It's unwise to change more than one size or shape at a time. It's unwise to change size or shape without having had 100-200 jumps to explore a canopy's performance envelope and make mistakes which show what happens when things don't go well. Since wing loading changes about .15 - .20 per canopy size, putting 150-200 jumps on each canopy is a perfect match for the accepted 1.0 + .1/100 jumps wingloading rule of thumb. That said, you learn more in 600 jumps on one canopy than 200 jumps on each of 3. Something like a Sabre-2 170 would be the conservative recomendation.

Social Security does a number of things. It provides disability insurance, life insurance, and a safety net for people who reach the ends of their work lives with insufficient savings to retire. Nearly everybody agrees these things are good although we disagree on who should pay for them. It's also a mandatory retirement savings plan with horrible benefits. I have to make it six years past my statistically expected lifetime to earn a 0% inflation adjusted rate of return on my investments and can't leave anything to heirs other than my wife. If I invested the same money in stock and bond indexes I'd probably have triple the annual benefits. This should end. It's an excuse for a regressive tax which costs low wage earners 12.4% of their income of which only half shows up on their pay stubs. This should end. I'll put $15K into my 401K this year, my take home pay will increase if I become disabled (60% of base pay, but without any taxes or retirement savings deductions), and our mortgage gets paid off if either my wife or I die...

S-fold the top of the canopy, put that end in the bag, and S-fold the line-end into the bag. Simple!

I think you meant irrelevant. When you're spending 2600 billion a year, 6.1B on presidential helicopters is the sort of fraction I'd spend of my income to take my wife out for a nice dinner. 2600B a year is truly obscene.

I saw a pelvis, lumbar vertebrae, cocyx, and sacrum breaking landing at under a pound per square foot. All of us screw up. It's just less likely and tends to hurt less under larger parachutes.

A larger canopy will have slightly more forward speed than a smaller one of the same model at the same wing loading because of a lower ratio of drag to suspended weight (the lines and seams don't get wider for the larger canopy and heavier jumpers tend to have higher sectional density - when you scale up the same body shape mass is a cubic function while frontal area and therefore drag are square). Both practice (small people seem to bounce more on hard landings and large people seem to break bones more often) and theory (large people have more kinetic energy at the same speed) show that crash landings are more likely to do real damage to bigger people. At the same wing loading, the larger canopy just isn't going to be as responsive and exciting as the small one.

Because life gets boring and a little debate is a lot more entertaining than just posting "what he said".

The fact that a reserve did work doesn't mean that the rigging was correct. For example, mini-links on a reserve seem to work fine for sub-terminal deployments following a cutaway but might not be too good for a head-down CYPRES fire.

Mine too. This week we dropped below 400 to a mere 399. Here are a few good films we've watched from seven different decades: 40's: Dark Passage, The Maltese Falcon 50's: Rear Window, 12 Angry Men, Dial M for Murder 60's: The Manchurian Candidate, The Birds, The Graduate 70's: Network, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter 80's: Blue Velvet; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover 90's: Jackie Brown, El Mariachi, True Romance 00's: Kill Bill, Amores Peros, Goodbye Lenin, I Heart Huckabees

It's a LOT quieter than Arizona, a pleasant temperature at all times, and a smidge smaller.

If you get a good job you'll want to work more than eight hours a day. At my last company I worked five days a week. Took 5-6 hours off each day to sleep, half an hour for lunch (except when I took two hours off to fly), and an hour for dinner and beer. It was more fun than skydiving. Longer vacations during those two years included summer snowboarding in South America and a Mexican big wall BASE trip with a chartered helicopter. While I could care less about having a big house and new cars, earning more than you need just to live opens up a lot of recreational opportunities.

No. No. When you build the same shape in different sizes it won't fly the same. So when most manufacturers introduce a new size, they build a prototype, jump it, change it, build another one, etc. Since the manufacturer isn't going to be able to "do it right" when making a custom size, some makers won't do it. Many canopies are cut with a computer controlled hot-knife or laser. Pattern availability shouldn't be an issue.