DrewEckhardt

Same thing. Whether he accepts or doesn't he costs the tax payers (who were already generous in supporting him for a year with fewer strings attached) less. Eliminating or at least reducing government subsidized unemployment is a better idea.

Hmm. It appears that the Germans provide better unemployment benefits to women who refuse available jobs than the state of Colorado does. There your unemployment can be reduced if you refuse a job offer after receiving benefits for a year. Our benefits at the maximum run out after 6-7 months regardless of our willingness to work in the sex industry one a year is up. People giving out handouts are free to attach whatever conditions they want to those handouts. The Germans have decided that after a year of looking for work people who want to receive full unemployment benefits need to take any job available for which they are qualified. Other people are free to set up an alternative unemployment fund where the requirements are to have turned down a sex industry job and the benefits are the difference.

Skydiving is a calculated risk just like skiing, riding a bicycle, or crossing the street. Your chances of dying during each are dramatically reduced by doing everything right (not crashing or crossing the street without looking both directions) and controlling the setting (not skiing out of bounds, not riding after dark in traffic, not crossing behind a blind curve, not jumping into tight landing areas) but you can still die when you do everything reasonably right (out-of control skiers kill people, old and drunkdrivers run people over, people speed through red lights with pedestrians in cross-walks, a few people have died from skydiving equipment failures). If skydiving's suicide then anything but cloistered living is.

If the brakes are set 0.5% long, the pilot will only get 99.5% of the flare. Nope. Stall speed is a function of wing loading, wing shape, and angle of attack. In steady flight conditions you've got your weight at one gravity loading the canopy, the flaps are down, and hauling on the brake lines hasn't change the angle of attack that much. The slowest possible landing is a dynamic event. Towards the middle you sink so your feet would be below ground level and pop back up at the end. With a little brake input the canopy slows down faster than you do, you pendulum forward, and get a big angle of attack change. With such a landing under a modern ZP canopy you're getting a full flare without having the toggles anywhere near where it takes to get a stall in the steady state situation. Brake lines only somewhat too long to get a stall in steady flight conditions will not preclude a stall (intentional or unintentional) under dynamic conditions - you can stall sooner when you pull the toggles down faster or increase the wing loading by pulling G's. The steady state behavior is something to be aware of but not relevant in getting a good landing - I've jumped parachutes which wouldn't stall in steady flight without taking at least one wrap arround my first two fingers. It varies radically between different canopies. My Dagger 244 takes less input under steady conditions to stall than my Samurai 105. With a big stable seven cell you might want to fly backwards that's a good thing. My Stiletto 120 was much shorter - it would stall way above waist level once the lines shrunk some.

1. Shop arround. I pay my accountants a flat $75 for personal taxes. They _don't_ work for a big national company with its overhead. 2. Unless your financial situation is more complex (I was self-employed for half of last year) your accountants probably can't do much better than your favorite tax program and then it's more likely to be a pre-emptive thing. (Example: they had me work as an employee of my LLC which withheld taxes, paid unemployment insurance, and gave me a "reasonable" salary according to the IRS. They had me take half my profits came in the form of distributions which are subject to my personal income tax rate but not the 15% Medicare + FICA surcharge). After the !@#^%&* Turbo Tax copy protection fiasco where I had to buy a copy of Tax Pro too I decided that for $75 it just wasn't worth the hassle even if it couldn't save money.

1. Turns greater than 90 degrees can point you at people you can't see, can confuse the people landing behind you, and/or break the landing pattern. 2. Speed comes from altitude lost and not how far you turn. You'll get much more speed from a carving 90 degree turn over a few hundred feet than a snapped 270 in less altitude. 3. You can get plenty of speed from a carving 90 degree turn. While landing with some induced speed is a _fine_ idea as an alternative to down sizing (It's better to have the speed when you want it than to be stuck with it when you don't) turns over 90 degrees have disadvantages.

Go for it if you think that you won't have a problem finding a new job before you've made an uncomfortable dent in your savings (gaps in your resume, short times at each employer, how obscure what you do is, how much competition there is in your profession, etc. are all factors).

The toggle movement to induce a stall varies with how quickly you apply the brakes. When you pull quicker the canopy slows down, you don't, you move in front of the canopy, and the angle of attack increases from steady-state flight. When you pull slowly you stay underneath the canopy and change the wing shape without doing much to the angle of attack. Stall speed is a function of angle of attack and airfoil shape. Lift is a function of speed, angle of attack, and airfoil shape. You hit the ground when the canopy has insufficient lift to support your weight whether or not it stalled. At moderate wing loadings (relative to the canopy design and density altitude) many canopies are going slowly enough with a slow and steady flare that putting your feet down once they have too little lift to support you produces acceptable (or even elegant) landings. This will be the case with your first ZP parachute and failures to land well come from putting your feet down too soon. At the same wing loadings other canopies do not. They're going too fast once they lack the lift to support you and you do not get a comfortable (or even standing) landing. The same thing happens when you increase the speed with a higher wingloading. When that happens you need an angle of attack change to get a comfortable landing which is to say you must finish your flare quicker than you started it. Sinking through the swoop so that your hips are less than your leg length from the ground and popping back up at the end works very well. You can also change your wingloading by sliding so that the canopy is not supporting your full weight.

Forming a corporation or LLC really cuts your tax bill especially when you're not making a lot of money. 1. An entity which has filed form 2553 does not pay corporate taxes. Profits "pass through" to the owners where they are taxed at the individual rates. 2. Only salary is subject to the FICA/Medicare taxes which total 15% for employer/employee share until you reach $89.700 of salary. As long as you pay yourself a reasonable salary you can take the rest of your profits as distributions. In my case my accountants thought this number was 50% of profits. With less income FICA makes up a bigger precentage of your total tax bill. 3. Companies can provide benefits for their employees like health insurance so you're not paying taxes on that. Another advantage is that you're an employee, not self employed. Your employer (you) pays state and federal unemployment insurance premiums so when you run out of work you can lay yourself off and collect unemployement. Caps and federal credit for state payments mean this does not cost a lot.

Try a Ruger Mk II with a heavy bull barell. It just stays parked on target. I really like mine. Paid under $300 for it years ago; don't know what current prices are although you should be able to get one used for that. For centerfire I'd try a Makarov - under $200. .22 is a bit over $30/1000, 9x18mm Makarov is about $120/1000, 9mm is about $130/1000, and 40 S&W $180/1000.

At my last job I had an office, balcony,and great view of the mountains (Boulder Flatirons). For the first time in my career (over a decade) I have a noisy cubicle with no natural light. The good part of it is that I can listen in on other people's conversations and chime in when I want. I don't have to worry about other people's farts and burps though they get mine. I drink 6-12 diet cokes a day and often belch.

I like narrow chest straps since they're easier to loosen under canopy, especially when wearing gloves.

People are too stupid to live.

The US is NOT too litigious. People have the right to work in the field of their choosing - farming, manufacturing, etc. Where these jobs would die out the government provides subsidies. We need to keep lawyers employed. Be patriotic and support lawsuits.

vs a semi auto : They handle better, are more reliable, and the two barells have different chokes for the first and second birds. vs a pump: They handle better and the two barells have different chokes. vs a side-by-side: I like how over-unders look.

Never. It's muscle memory.

Sure if its locked open, but how many accidents have you heard about someone "cleaning their gun and shooting themselve?" It's impossible to clean all popular firearms without disassembly. Most firearms do not require you to drop the hammer/striker to take them apart. I think the "it went off while I was cleaning it" is just a weasly way to get out of trouble when some one is negligent with a gun. Reports of "cleaning accidents" usually don't say anything about manslaughter charges when a fatality results, discharge of fireams within city limits, reckless endangerment, etc.

Me too...but nowhere close for me to shoot it. Can't use it in the little indoor ranges here in the city. 1. There are pistol caliber uppers (9mm, .40 S&W, 10mm, .45 ACP, you name it). The lower receiver is the regulated part so these don't need to transfer on a form 4473. 2. There are .22 conversion kits. 3. There are dedicated .22 uppers which have no gas port to clog and chambers which shouldn't have the excess leade of a conversion kit. Enjoy!

There's a skeet range a couple minutes from my house so I've been meaning to buy a Baikal IZH27 Sporting for some time. Friends' handle and shoot well, I _love_ over-unders, and you cannot beat the price ($500 is almost rediculous). It'll be my first shotgun (it took twenty years after I fired a rifle for the first time and about a decade since I bought my first handgun for me to shoot a shotgun!) I've also been wanting a HK G3 (nice sights, doesn't stop working when the extractor fails) or .308 Galill (what's not to like about a sport utility rifle that has a built-in bottle opener? ) ARM. My accountants' plan to have me withold enough over 9 months to also cover the 3 months before I started witholding plus extra automatic tax payments once I stopped being self-employed meant I became way over-witheld, the job change meant I paid too much social security beyond that, and my last startup finally died so I can write-off some of the worthless stock. The resulting huge difference between expected and real tax liability means I should be able to buy some toys

Perhaps my english is no that good in technical terms but is this not the combination what you mean? http://p4961.typo3server.info/fileadmin/user/pdfs/The_Rage_Principle_A4.pdf No. Like a bicycle tire or air mattress. You could get 100 or 1000X the pressure you get from the wing moving through the air.

Atmospheric pressure is about 14.7 PSI. The pressure differential isn't going to get that high until you're in space where a wing won't work. Even there it's not going to be a dangerous over-pressure. Filling the entire canopy is unlikely to work - you'd need to build it without stiching holes (adhesives, plastic welding, etc. could work arround that), use a vacuum to pack it, come up with absurdly thin/strong materials to fit it in a container (substantial pressurization into > 50 cubic feet is going to take strong, thick materials), and keep it deployable. Inflatable frames, spars, etc. are a different story. 1" diameter tubes made from synthetic fabric (kevlar, etc.) with air-tight bladders (latex) woudln't add too much bulk compared to the reinforcing tapes used on reserves and Big Air canopies and their flexibility is not going to cause deployment problems.

Still the Rage sounds like that. Closed nose; high pressure airlocks, nose down (closed, just open in front, just after the nose) Not as in "the user jumps with an air tank." A couple PSI is going to beat what's in front of a canopy flying at ludicrous speed like Luigi's 39. We have quick disconnect fittings for hundreds of pounds and SCUBA tanks are good for thousands of pounds. Although your planform and other parameters are limited by deployment,you could effectively match a solid wing's rigidity. People have demonstrated various inflatable wings and the kite guys now have inflatable leading edges. Some one is going to apply the technology to canopies.

Nope. Wing structures (leading edge, bracing, etc) inflated with an external high-pressure source look like a nice idea for purpose-built swooping canopies (nose-down trims, detachable slider/pilot chutes, etc. are already taking us down this path). Most pilots aren't there.

Sabres work as well now as they did when the freefall canopy choices from PD were 7/9 cell F111, the Sabre, and Stiletto (which isn't appropriate with fewer than 300-500 ram air jumps) which is to say just fine. While they don't open as slowly as more modern designs, reasonable attention to packing produces openings that aren't uncomfortable. The same can be said for Precision's Monarch (ZP, square, about the same). I couldn't say the same for my jumps on student gear which left black, blue, and yellow bruises. There are better choices in brand new parachutes although at under $500 a used one with a few hundred jumps remaining on the lineset would make a fine first canopy.

Sure it does. Gun control means using _both hands_. I'm a lot more accurate in a Weaver stance than trying to shoot one handed.