DrewEckhardt

There's also a distinction between competitive and recreational swooping that usually goes unrecognized. With competitive swooping the goals are as fast and far as possible. Winning requires accepting the same risks that your competitors do. Taking the Formula One Drivers Championship means doing 200 MPH racing inches from the competition with totaling the car likely and dying not improbable. With recreational swooping the goals are fast and far enough. There's a lot of latitude in setting the risk knob. Negative outcomes are a lot less likely when you eschew wheel to wheel racing for driving at less than 90% on the local road course open track day with no passing allowed in the corners. This is less about equipment choice (I know a guy who bought a Porsche 996 GT3 Cup car for track days) and more about how it's used. In swooping there's a lot of latitude in the sorts of turns made regardless of equipment choice. A slow turn rate carving front riser turn from high altitude can generate a lot of speed while keeping the jumper out of the corner and providing plenty of room to fit the turn into whatever altitude (hundreds of feet between high and low are possible for a ninety degree turn) and distance is required on the jump in question via both front risers, harness input, and in extreme cases arriving at the landing heading in a carving flare with both toggles for the jumper who's really botched his approach or is just having fun. That will never win a competition but that's OK when winning is not a near term goal. This is overlooked by the majority of skydivers who will never swoop competitively or for whom that's years away and I speculate the pro-swooping approach played a role in Emily Berkeley's death. When I learned to swoop there wasn't any canopy coaching and we just figured it out. I used to fly my Stiletto 120 to an appropriate altitude and location, give a hard yank on one front riser and be along for the ride until I ended up a bit too low, dug out, popped back up a substantial distance, and set down hard from the resulting stall. It hurt to walk and shift my motorcycle for a few months. I realized I could still get a lot of speed in a less aggressive turn that covered more altitude with a lot more margin for error and made the switch. Now that canopy courses are common people needn't learn that lesson through first hand experience.

If they've run out of altitude they pull both toggles down to 3/4 brakes to kill their descent rate and forward drive, lift the outside one part way to get a nice balance between flat and a quick pivot, keep it there for twice the rotation they would at 90 degrees, and should be ready for a PLF if they can't get back to full flight before landing and aren't used to flaring from that sort of braked position. The difference in that flight regime between 90 and 180 degrees or with and without a short base leg between such turns in the landing pattern is not large. This works for all sorts of canopies - I own 105 and 120 square foot ellipticals, a ZP 135 square, and a couple of 245 F111 seven cells and it does the job on all of them. Here's a Scott Miller article circa 1998 http://www.performancedesigns.com/docs/98_low.pdf If they never practiced flat turns or slow speed flight and just yank the inside toggle they could be screwed, although the root problem is that they never learned what their toggles could do not that they've never turned 180 degrees without a short base leg separating the first and last 90 degrees.

For the legal benefits it provides. For instance all retired professionals not receiving pensions who've saved enough to continue a middle class or better lifestyle in old age are millionaires. When a married one dies his or her spouse can maintain close to the same standard of living because the estate passes to them tax free. When one with a domestic partner dies after 2013 the survivor looses 55% of the domestic partner's retirement income beyond the first $40K. Before then domestic partners with unequal incomes can't take advantage of the higher income cut-offs of education tax benefits like the tuition deduction and American Opportunity Credit. Not without changing all laws which currently read "married couple" to "married couple or domestic partnership"

What, because some one is accidentally going to slip and pull a 180 or 270 instead of stopping their turn at 90 degrees? I don't think so. It's not like eschewing high performance landings completely leaving people with no experience landing at faster than trim speeds which happens when they fail to turn flat enough at low altitudes and 90 degrees still yields enough energy for low-altitude and post-plane out carves.

By taking their canopy through its paces (landing cross-wind, down-wind, up-hill; making carving landings; swoop accuracy parking it in the pea gravel; etc.), getting proficient with 90 degree turns, and putting at least a few hundred jumps on it (although a few hundred more are better). It's also not that slow. When one of the car guys broke out a RADAR gun at our DZ I got 48 MPH from a mellow carving 90 under my Stiletto 120 around 1.5 pounds per square foot which is like the stall speed of a Cessna 152 with the flaps down. Better piloting and/or a more modern design trimmed steeper would have been higher. That's plenty for a guy with 500-700 jumps. The Lodi 90-only swoop contest winners clocked 71 MPH through the gates (VX86 @ 2.4) and got a 206 foot toe drag (Velocity 84 @ 2.3). While not competitive at the world level that sort of performance should be ample for the fun swooper with more experience. That's fine. With a turbine DZ it needn't take even six months to rack up a few hundred jumps on a canopy (when they let you out at 3000-4000 feet you can be packed and waiting before the plane lands) which is more than it takes to stay within accepted wingloading guidelines like Brian Germain's WNE.

Being a practicing cannibal didn't keep JFK out of the White House.

The governments buy food for people who can't feed themselves, subsidize apartments for people who can't house themselves, and provide medical care for those unable to afford it. It wouldn't be a big stretch to provide government brothels for people unable to meet and mary mates of their own.

You think THAT'S the biggest issue? The male:female ratio is a zero sum game. (Assume gay males cancel out gay females.) If one guy has two females, it means there's some guy out there without any. Nope. There are plenty of single people having sex with more than one partner and I've known people in open marriages that were allowed to have sex with people other than their spouse.

Personally I find one wife plenty although whatever consenting adults want to do with each other is fine with me - one man and two or more women, one woman and two or more men, or two plus of each. People seem to do OK with paternal love for more than one child; and the college classmate I ran into who had a husband and a wife seemed to handle marital love for more than one person. In the 1970, the typical family with one working adult had 46% of its income available for discretionary spending after covering fixed costs like housing and insurance. In 2000, the typical double income family had only 25% of its income left. One or more additional adults in each household would help to restore the American standard of living. I'm not sure what the fairest tax treatment would be. Maybe brackets, exemptions, deductions, and limits set to n x a single person's regardless of the number of adults.

It works great, In spite of the recession in 2009 the health insurance companies had a 56% increase in profits (facilitated partially by dropping unprofitable subscribers). Things aren't going nearly as well for other American industries.

The Olympics doesn't include any sports which require motorized equipment (while we have ski lifts to make life easier, it's possible to skin/snow shoe/hike up and ski down) and shouldn't make an exception for skydiving. BASE jumping would fit OK though with freestyle aerials and landing accuracy.

My Samurai opens on heading nearly all the time. I'd be inclined to blame packing, body position, canopy trim (Spectra brake lines have shrunk too much after just a few hundred jumps) or manufacturing variations (about half a dozen people at my DZ got Spectres with built-in turns which PD fixed) before pointing my finger at the airlocks.

It is very hot and the wind tunnel runs on outdoor air instead of recirculating potentially air-conditioned indoor air. Someplace in California would be much more pleasant.

I know college graduates turned down for hundreds of jobs where given their work ethic and history I can only conclude that the employer wants some one who is unlikely to leave for a job utilizing their degree with better pay. Every field isn't open to every person. My company had three openings for software engineers which would be open to about a million out of the 135 million people in the labor force which is somewhat less than a percent. Every job within a field isn't open to every applicant by virtue of skill or work history. When getting candidates through recruiters I think about 1 in 200 to 1 in 100 have been worth hiring.

Exactly. To survive as a skydiver one needs to be able to handle out landings where there are a lot more obstacles than on a dropzone, the area is unfamiliar which makes late action to avoid the obstacles more likely, and where the area is likely to be a lot tighter than a grassy DZ (road, backyard, etc.) with all that combining to make into-the-wind landings less likely. Part of that is mechanical skills - adding opposite toggle to get a flat turn, flaring faster to fly over obstacles, flaring more while turning, etc. That can and should be practiced in the controlled ideal environment of a wide open dropzone, without conflicting traffic, when a jumper is current and not hung over. Part of that is muscle memory and a low enough mental arousal level from just landing a parachute in odd ways that a skydiver is less likely to do something leading to injury. We know a skydiver has that when he's been doing all those things in unusual situations; although getting into the unusual situations often enough to establish a pattern indicates a lack of judgement that contraindicates adding risk factors like a smaller canopy. When a skydiver hasn't had the opportunity to demonstrate he's acquired those skills we don't know and need to fall back on a statistical approach. Most skydivers who take some time to do canopy exercises formally or informally seem to do OK with the per canopy jump numbers implied by Brian Germain's 1.0 + .1/100 jump formula. With neither the skill demonstration (which is disqualifying for judgement reasons) nor experience to imply automatic responses are probably there down-sizing is inappropriate.

At 1.8 pounds/square foot canopies have sharp pointy teeth that you lack the experience to avoid although many people get lucky enough that is not an issue. How are your out landings with a low 90 degree turn to avoid unseen powerlines/barbed wire for a down or cross-wind up or down-hill landing on a paved road on the sunset load? That's the scenario you're sizing your canopy for, not nice swoops into the wind onto a flat grassy wide open field. If you haven't been doing that you lack the required experience for that down-size, and if you have you lack the judgement. Put a few hundred more jumps on a bigger canopy and learn how to really fly it. You'll have more fun with low carving approaches than slightly faster landings in a straight line. This ignores cross-bracing which often leads to detuned control inputs so the canopies aren't too twitchy at the higher wing loadings they enable.

Which is where Vietnam and newly good Burma come in. And why Foxconn (of Apple manufacturing infamy) bought their Juarez manufacturing facility from Cisco in 2011.

For what should I worry? As a happy legal weapon owner, I do not fear anything. As long as one follows the rules given .... 6.5 million Jewish people who formerly resided in Germany or German occupied territories would disagree if they were still alive.

It worked great for the German government in 1938.

Nope. Apart from 2009-2011 after the minimum wage reset but before inflation took a bite it's as high as it's been in real (CPI) dollars since 1985. In 1989 I worked for minimum wage as a lifeguard netting $3.35 an hour which is $6.20 in 2012 CPI adjusted dollars. Federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 which is 17% more generous. The minimum wage was first introduced in 1955 with a rate of $0.75 in nominal dollars. Adusted for inflation that's $6.42 with the current minimum 13% better. In between Eisenhower and Reagan there were years with a higher minimum wage; although with emerging economy residents able to work as engineers instead of in garment factories, American women wherever they want instead of the home (or as school teachers, secretaries, operators, and other stereotypical low wage professions unless blessed with some combination of opportunity and luck), and communication/shipping anywhere about as fast as you want things are rather different now. I'd like a return to historic income tax rates, specifically like they were in 1913. The 1913 income tax law allowed a $3000 exemption for single people ($65,331 in 2010 dollars) and $4000 for married couples ($87,108). The next $20,000 ($435,544) was taxed at 1%. Robber barons raking in $500,000 a year ($10,888,595) paid the top tax rate of 7%. I'll happily support a lobbying effort for a package deal bringing back that piece of history and the inflation adjusted minimum wage from the cherry picked year of your choice.

Here are some monthly costs: Room in a house or larger apartment close enough to employment for cycling/walking/public transit : $400 Share of utilities including pre-paid phone minutes, heat, basic cable: $75 Food $250 Basic medical insurance $100 Bus pass $70 total: $895/month $10,740/year 7.25/hour minimum wage * 2000 hours = 14,500 annually The standard deduction and personal exemption total $9650 leaving $4850 of taxable income and a $485 federal tax liability in the 10% bracket. Social Security is 4.2% with the Obama rate cut and Medicare 1.45% or $819/year. That leaves net income of $13,195. Looks manageable but not luxurious unless some one can't get affordable medical insurance due to pre-existing conditions; although we'd be better off fixing that problem by getting the profit-making insurance company middle men out of the way instead of changing the rules so they make even more money. In a historical context from 2000 - 2010 minimum wage workers got over a 10% increase in real dollars which is better than the rest of us did - except for the geographic increase I got with my move to the west coast I'm making the same inflation adjusted wage I did in 2001. Come to think of it I haven't even had a take-home pay increase in nominal dollars since 2008, let alone the 10% we gave minimum wage earners over that period.

The so-called American Right sometimes uses correct ideas to market itself. A middle class lifestyle results from the difference between net income and basic expenses - shelter, clothing, food and arguably both medical care and education. Our problem isn't on the supply side. The bottom 10% of our gross income distribution is still in the top 30% of the world's and poverty now comes with a color TV (as opposed to without windows or running water in places like Mexico). The government lets us keep more of our money than they do in the rest of the world with the most progressive income tax system (defined as the top earning decile's share of tax to share of income) out of the OECD 24 including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, The Slovak Republic, Sweden, Switzerland, and The United Kingdom. Our problem is on the expense side. Our corporatist government colludes with powerful organizations to enrich their electors at the peoples' expense. Housing prices are propped up by Government Sponsored Enterprises buying and guaranteeing home loans larger than the free market would (the Realtors(TM) used to have the biggest PAC in the country). Health insurers get special tax treatment that gets people into more expensive plans and exclusion from anti-trust legislation so they have more latitude in jacking up prices. The government pays as much to private for profit health care companies to take care of the old and unprofitable as other countries do to take care of their entire populations. Special treatment of student loan debt (like exclusion from brankruptcy protection) has facilitated education costs going up at 4X the rate of inflation. Where other governments spend tax revenues on not-for-profit services for citizens ours direct their spending towards powerful lobbies, like the California Correctional Peace Officers Association which has quadrupled our prison count and incarceration rate to fill them or military industrial complex with total spending matching the rest of the world put together in bad years (although we were never in any danger of the rest of the world all ganging up on us). This is an inherent side effect of the American electoral system. Jobs that cost $1.5M/year to get but pay only $170,000 get employees open to a little quid pro quo with the people covering the net loss. Two very similar groups of such systemically corrupt people that act about the same once in office are the inevitable result of our first past the post voting system. The politics and shrinking of America's middle class caused by it aren't going to change until citizens in states which give them legislative abilities via ballot inititatives get proportional representation which they use to elect governments acting on their behalf instead of the corporatist interests.

Absolutely! There are more jobs for those of us designing and building machines when increasing labor costs make automation relatively affordable. For instance the high pay for grocery cashiers and baggers from unionization meant that machines to replace them became relatively affordable. When I go down to my corner grocery store they no longer employ either; just a set of machines with one person clearing stoppages and checking IDs for alcohol purchases. There are more jobs for people in developing countries when increased first world labor costs mean their labor comes at a steeper discount. As of 2009 GM UAW workers were averaging $28/hour and the Chinese were getting only $150 a month. More new jobs went to China although it didn't go so well for US workers with plants like NUMMI closing. The more I think about it, the better an American minimum wage increase seems. "Middle class" means having 1/3 of your income left after taking care of basic needs like housing and food. With a starting point of just $3000/year in developing countries each American minimum wage job that goes away because the cost of the labor exceeds the value of the product will free up the money needed to elevate FIVE foreign families from poverty to middle class!

4.25 CURRENCY JUMPS Experience shows that proficiency in any skill is in direct proportion to the frequency with which the skill is exercised. This is especially true with skills which require presence of mind, coordination, sharpness of reflexes, and control of emotions. The second jump of the day is always easier since anxiety is reduced—the jumper has already experienced one jump. Long lay-offs between jumps not only dull skills but heighten apprehensions. Because of this human characteristic, these procedures are presented to establish currency. D. Students and Novices—AFF and Tandem/IAF: 1. Who have graduated from the AFF or Tandem/IAF program but have not yet obtained a USPA A license and have not jumped in the preceding 30 days should make at least one jump and demonstrate the ability to start and stop turns, maintain altitude awareness and the ability to maintain stability during deployment. This jump must be made under the direct supervision of a currently rated AFF JM.

with Hawaii still being the outlier. Ranked by Gini coefficient Hawaii is tied for 8th least income inequality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient Perhaps there aren't more disproportionately wealthy people there because it is an outlier - as a working professional you'd have a harder time transacting business with the rest of the United States out in the middle of the Pacific ocean (I wouldn't live there for that reason). All the 10 most peaceful states except Rhode Island are in the half of our states with the least income inequality ranked by Gini Index Maine 12 Vermont 19 New Hampshire 4 Minnesota 13 Utah 1 North Dakota 8 Washington 16 Hawaii 8 Rhode Island 39 Iowa 5 All of the 10 least peaceful except Nevada (which would be 25th without three ties for each of 8th and 13th place) are in the half of our states with the most income inequality Louisiana 47 Tennessee 40 Nevada 21 Florida 46 Arizona 27 Missouri 27 Texas 43 Arkansas 30 South Carolina 32 Mississippi 40