DrewEckhardt

Mick Cottle made at least one Reflex with a leather container which was pretty cool apart from the 60 day repack cycle that goes with natural materials.

There are plenty of people smart enough to put down $40K on $200K homes instead of taking a FHA loan. Where prices are correct (read as cash flow less than rents) even investors are getting in the game, buying the properties, covering operating costs completely with rent, and turning nice profits. That's a 100% guaranteed 23% "return" on your additional $33K of downpayment over the first year (no $4342 FHA up-front mortgage insurance charge at 2.25%, no $2219 annual FHA mortgage insurance charge at 1.15%, and $1230 you don't pay at 3.75% interest with a 30 year FHA loan), 10% the next year, etc. (FHA mortgage insurance doesn't even go away when you hit a 80% LTV). My credit union rocks but still only pays 2.26% on the first $25K in each of two accounts. So I put down at least 20% on my last two homes. The smart decision is based on the relative costs to buy and rent (including transaction costs like loan closing fees and sales commissions amortized over how long you're likely to be there) not the down payment and inconvenience of any repairs which are unlikely to reach $30K on a $200K condo where you don't own the roof and exterior walls. I didn't spend half that putting carpet, nice engineered floors, light fixtures, a couple of baseboard heaters, counter tops, blinds, and random smaller things like towel racks/replacing the cabinet bottom where the sink drain leaked/etc into a 1200 square foot town house before selling it. Where you don't want to do the work yourself labor costs vary radically - you might pay a lot less for a day laborer than a handyman and factor of 2-3+ variations aren't uncommon (for example, I paid a husband wife handyman team $800 to replace a few sheets of siding with competing quotes up to $2500 and one handyman that would charge me just a bit less but only cut out damaged trim and replace it with wider pieces). Since people buy with credit lax lending standards caused purchase prices to skyrocket in expensive areas to match the money supply. Since people rent with cash rental prices couldn't increase as much. So in expensive areas it can cost twice as much to buy a property as to rent it (ex - there are houses that would cost be $5000/month to buy after the tax breaks but just $2500 to rent) and smart people pass.

How do you plan to pay your personal defense lawyer when the elderly decide that you're violating the fair housing act and get a lawyer working on contingency to sue you? Your house is underwater so you can't sell it or tap a home equity line of credit and don't make much money compared to a competent lawyer's hourly rate or even the cost of living in New Jersey. One of my friends took a job in Antarctica with good pay and nothing to spend it on to pay his legal team although I wouldn't want to do the same thing. I personally prefer living next to old people over breeders. The grandparent types' TVs get a little loud, but their parties aren't too raucous, and loud grand children only visit occasionally. When youngish people outgrow their omg-no-parents stage many make a hobby out of making babies that often don't develop indoor voices until their teen years. Little is as horrible as a screaming little girl.

The bridle will come out, catch air at a nominal 120 MPH, and vibrate. Since today's skydivers are such wimps the closing loop may be loose enough for the bridle to pull the pin out giving you an open container for 10 seconds. Maybe a toggle starts to catch air and come loose or something else and the flapping parts get caught on your Go Pro as you open. Or maybe the bag is a loose fit in your container since you've down-sized a bunch and it starts to come out. Maybe you can cut-away the malfunction and break your neck due to the go-pro hangup. Maybe you fire your reserve into the trailing mess and die. Oops. Pulling the pilot chute out is like pulling the pin on a grenade without having a firm grip on the handle. Something is likely to explode with bad results for the operator if he hangs on to it. Or maybe nothing happens.

C-19 fits 6'2" to 6'3" http://sunpath.com/web_en/index.php?menu_level1=3&menu_level2=4 My custom rigs are 19-20" and I'm only 5'10. The rule of thumb is height - inseam (measured, not pants size) - 20. If the rig is not local taking measurements per the order form and calling the manufacturer with the serial number is a fine idea to get feedback on the fit.

Assuming your neighbors are reasonable like most people. My wife and I had our bedroom below a psycopathic upstairs neighbor who'd leave her untrained (they got thrown out of obedience school for her daughter's poor behavior) dog home alone to bark for four hours straight and had her crotch fruit playing in the kitchen from 7am to 11pm running around with its shoes on and bouncing balls on the hardwood floor over our bedroom. Polite requests for wearing socks inside or taking the dog with them were ignored. One day after the demon spawn ran around my wife outside screaming I heard her ask her smiling mother "Mommy, was I being loud enough?" suggesting it was intentional. Fortunately she was as inconsiderate of the landlord's property as she was us - little things like installing a dish washer without permission and doing a bad job so water was leaking out the garage ceiling and they started the eviction process (for at least the second time in her life) and began doing background checks on replacement tenants. Unfortunately that took over a year of hell and we moved before she was gone. I know other people with meth dealers/users living in the apartments above them.

You say that like it's always a bad thing. One of our neighbors had an animated holiday display up that squeaked until they took it down. Flood lights aimed at your bedroom windows aren't too pleasant either. As long as the rules don't change after you moved in you know what you're getting into for better and worse.

Used units with a lower price tag can still cost more per year to own after the discount when it isn't enough to offset the reduction in time remaining on the lifetime and maintenance cycles (plus batteries for original units).

Legal and sensible. Some one limited to a 3.5% downpayment is less likely to have the cash reserves to weather a loss of employment or other financial emergency so the association is more likely to need to cover their share of maintenance costs and deal with the lien and foreclosure process. The government shouldn't be assuming the risk and socializing losses for loans written by for-profit private companies, especially when the increased money supply leads to higher prices for everyone. People just getting into the housing market are also better off with $150K properties with 10% down than making the same combined down-payment and FHA up front mortgage insurance premium on a $260K property. With fewer new home buyers able to purchase $260K properties prices will stagnate and get back to normal. Recovering your investment isn't going to happen unless you wait for inflation to catch up because in expensive areas prices are out of line with incomes. They'll be more more out of line when interest rates revert to historic norms with 50% higher mortgage payments and real US wages drop towards the developing world's where $6K/year is middle class and professionals can have live-in servants on 1/5 of the salary they'd earn in the US.

That's only relevant when you have an average chance of not having attended college, average chance of being an arts and parties major if you went to school, average chance of being a young person with no experience, average chance of being an old person perceived to be too expensive, are an average employee... There are some engineering positions where we can't hire enough people and are ecstatic to fill positions after six months of interviewing. You would be surprised at what people can negotiate. I was briefly working at a job where my project status was questionable, co-workers quitting weren't getting replaced, and the guy I signed on to work with got promoted where they told me I'd need to reimburse them for $xx,xxx in relocation costs if I left before my year was up. I was pretty pissed about getting dragged halfway across the country and hit with that news, interviewed with another company, brought that up when we started talking numbers, and got a signing bonus big enough to cover it. Getting your problems covered and relocation costs might be a bit much, but those are very manageable when you get a small company instead of paying some mega company with semi trucks $x a pound + $x a pound for temporary storage. That's the wrong attitude. We don't loose less if Mitt's tax rate goes up. Prior to 1913 there was no federal income tax. 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%. The current standard deduction plus personal exemptions are $9650 for singles and $19300 for couples, which are off by a factor of 6.8 and 4.5. The lowest tax bracket is 10% capped at $8500 and $17000 so the rate there is off by a factor of 10 and bracket end off by factors of 51 and 26 for single and married people. The highest tax bracket is 35% starting at $379,151 with a rate off by a factor of 5 and minimum income a factor of 29. The right question is why cant we share Mitt's (still double the historic robber barons') rate or at least get things like higher education and health insurance thrown in when our state + local + federal rates add up to those in "socialist" countries that include such things.

But only due to having lived there for a *considerably long time* - since 70s when prop 13 passed? Or does a direct family inheritance avoid a step up in tax basis? Last year I bought myself a fine double wide in a nice mobile home park and under California law I'm only taxed on the legally defined depreciated value of the building. They don't consider the fraction of my purchase price for the option to rent my perimeter space with a yard because the land is owned by a corporation. The corporation in turn is taxed at a 1.25% rate on no more than 210% of the land value in 1975 due to proposition 13 (although each 1975 dollar is worth $4.01 in 2010 dollars). I owned a home in Colorado, sold it and bought a place when I moved to Washington State in 2006, and was lucky enough to sell that for only a $10K loss six months later. I was renting as real-estate prices returned to normal but California house prices where I'd like to live were still out of line with incomes with ownership costs sometimes doubling rent (in other words I expect them to drop farther), rent was getting excessive (not something you'd want to eat while waiting for prices to revert to the mean), and for a lot less money (cash flow is $600 - $1400/month better than the adjacent 1-2 bedroom apartments) I got my 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, central heat/air, 1990s construction, nice deck/garden, and no common walls with neighbors.

Northern NJ is nuts! Average home today still costs $400k. It is not a cheap place to live at all! But for now it's home, even though my property tax is $6k I live in Sunnyvale, CA and pay $400 (two zeros, not a typo) a year.

Nope. People have been religiously buying Vector and Javelin rigs for the last decade in spite of long delays, significantly lower prices from competitors, and construction that's at least as good. MARD options make their buyers even less likely to go elsewhere. UPT and Sunpath 1) Have been around for decades. 2) Probably get most of their money from the military market which is much larger than the sport skydiving market. Their continued market presence a few decades from now is likely.

They're doing a fine job meeting customer's expectations of delivery times. If they weren't they wouldn't have an X month backlog inspite of prices that are substantially higher than competitors like Sunrise Rigging. Sport skydiving gear demand is seasonal. UPT can either hire workers, train them, keep them busy during high demand months, lay them off, and then repeat the process (greatly increasing costs for them) or note that customers still buy their products when production gets spread throughout the year.

Sure. I've sold other stuff for more money remitted via paypal than the last car I sold (probably for a personal check from someone I knew). But your response is an obvious scam. A real person responding would probably refer to it as something other than "it", would ask more specific questions "how often did you change the oil? will that scratch buff out?" and make other non-generic comments "I can't wait to roller blade with my wife" and then there's the incongruity between what you're selling and shipping. Most people don't open at full price, except when they perceive it to be a bargain and try to pay as soon as possible so no one else gets it so by itself the full price offer doesn't rule out an attempted scam. Right. If you waste your time corresponding with the respondent you're likely to get something back like "I'm working on an oil platform and can't see it personally, but my agent will be by"

Or $20K/year over five years assuming you pay it (for instance, some states' foreclosure laws are single action so banks getting judicial foreclosures have used up their one act and can't then sue you for the deficiency judgement). With your six figure salary that'll put a dent in your toy budget but should bring you more happiness.

Corporatism where most of the corporate groups are formed within large industries (banking, health care, military suppliers) just like the Republicans. If Obama was a socialist he'd have kicked the health insurance bill back to Congress until it had enough riders to pass with a single-payer provision instead of accepting one that mandates all Americans buy product from for-profit companies, gives poor Americans government money to buy product from for-profit companies, and preserves the favorable tax treatment that has most Americans buying more product than they need from for-profit companies.

In the late 1990s the big gear vendors like Square One used to buy slots and turn them into stock rigs if no one ordered. That might still be the case.

3000 on most jumps, 4000 on wing suit jumps, 2000' on hop-and-ops with a big seven cell in a skydiving rig and my own pass, 3000-5000' for swooping hop-and-pops, 1000' for BASE gear from aircraft, 2500' hop-and-pops from Mike Mullin's King Air when Quincy is otherwise shutdown due to a low cloud ceiling....

I don't. An instructor rating doesn't imply much. I knew four instructors who lacked the judgement necessary to avoid killing themselves under canopy. Fortunately only one killed some one else on his final jump. I know one nice grandma type with thousands of skydives and AFF rating that didn't realize how much she didn't know until after her ambulance ride. Assuming we're talking about Brian Germain, Scott Miller, or one of a few other people (xx,xxx skydives, makes a living teaching canopy flight, etc.) he'd need to see the jumper in question handling malfunctions successfully, landing out, making turns from 50' up, landing cross-wind and down-wind, doing post-planeout carving turns around obstacles, etc. That's unlikely. If that were the case it might be enough to approve a single down-size but not skipping one because perceptually the differences between sizes are personal and non-linear. Instructor's opinions are only relevant when they're telling some one to be more conservative than accepted practices because the target of their advice has physical (can't run, lacks depth perception) or skill issues (has a penchant for landing on the hanger roof). plus becoming an unguided meat-missile who runs into someone else in the landing area because he has accuracy issues and is too scared to turn after starting to flare. I'm glad you were lucky unless you've yet to learn judgement and end up doing so under a smaller canopy where the lesson is more severe than it would have been earlier in your progression. That said even if you're willing to cover another jumper's medical expenses and lost wages you're not going to be the one suffering and your one sample point is insufficient basis to suggest other jumpers be less conservative.

I'd bet on the jumper in question making a visit to the orthopedic surgeon and hope that a neurosurgeon isn't required too. They'll probably be lucky enough not to kill themselves although that's a possibility.

Given a verbal offer from company B I'd give the hiring manager at company A a call if I knew their identity and the HR person you talked to if not stating that you're about to accept another offer but would really like to finish exploring your options at company A before you do that. One week expiration dates are typical on written offers which should be sufficient to get through the company A hiring process if it's a mutual fit. Some latitude often exists before (I've told people to please wait before fedexing documents because I'm exploring other options and not yet ready to accept a formal offer) and after (companies have offered to extend offers). On the hiring side I find that other companies also like promising candidates I'd like to take farther in the interview process. Where there's the potential for that to be in both sides' mutual best interests I'd prefer a call first after which adjustments can be made to schedules (we could even do a 6-10pm in person interview). I'd also be happier if candidates tell me to wait for a while (where good people take six months to find waiting to fill a position for a few weeks longer doesn't change the time frame appreciably) instead of accepting and leaving within weeks (if some one else equally qualified comes along at the same time one can always call back and say a decision is needed sooner).

How come it works for the super rich, but not for Shah or me? The super rich are part of the 0.4% whose tax savings let them make reportable campaign contributions the majority of which are $2500 ($5000 for married couples) per donor for some Congress Critters and even bigger contributions to Super PACs. I'm betting that neither you nor Shah are doing your part to keep the Congress Critter Gravy Train running and therefore don't deserve any sort of quid pro quo.

While interesting to note that the Democrats have more lawyers (123 in the 110th Congress) in Congress than the Republicans (just 81 at that time) comparing the two parties is a divisive distraction from the real issues. Rank and file Congress Critters get paid just $174,000 a year. Compare and contrast to equity partners in the top 100 law firms with compensation ranging from $360,000 at the bottom to $4,945,000 at the top in 2007. Compare with the $1.7M/year it costs to become a senator (with the average successful campaign running $10M for a 6-year term). The arithmetic only works where Representatives and Senators are getting something more valuable than the salary they forgo (power) and where organizations pick up their election tab because they get something valuable in return (power through puppet). This holds for both parties.

White can become a dirty brown if you jump someplace dusty.