DrewEckhardt

So? You can hurt yourself with anything... Newer PD designs are all intentionally detuned to be less sensitive to control input because John LeBlanc observed jumpers having problems on landing with roll axis stability under Stilettos. Most other designs feel like driving your father's Oldsmobile compared to a Stiletto of the same size or even larger. It's way easier to unintentionally over-control a Stiletto. With just 600 jumps under my belt when I switched from a Batwing 134 to a Stiletto 120 at 1.6-1.7 pounds per square foot the thing didn't always go in a straight line on landing. After turning too low one time I gave it too much input, popped back up to a high altitude, and bruised my heels bad enough that it hurt to walk for months (obviously, this beat needing to see the orthopaedic surgeon which lots of my friends did). All pilot error, all with three times 200 jumps experience, all on a 120 that's less sensitive to control input than a 107. Then there's the Stiletto recovery arc. If you don't have an interactive approach where you maintain roll angle and adjust turn rate/steepness as you go you're a lot more likely to turn low and dig out than you would be with a modern canopy where you can turn high and let the canopy descend to a good planeout altitude. The simple Stiletto approach is more likely to lead to situations where you don't dig out or stall the canopy.

I'd like to see some consistency. Cars are far more dangerous than gun (40K annual fatalities vs. 11,000 murders with firearms and under 1000 fatal accidents). Swimming pools are a hundred times as dangerous to small children (500 children under age five die versus 40 in gun accidents, although we only have 5 million households with pools and 43 million with guns). Household cleaning supplies are more dangerous. If I'm not liable when a punk kid steals my car and broadsides a school bus, I shouldn't be liable in the unlikely event he takes my gun and tries a columbine. If I'm not criminally negligent when my own kid eats poison, I shouldn't be liable when he shoots himself. Or I should be liable when he dies due to negligence regardless of what was involved.

DSL is fast enough to stream HDTV from Netflix and other sources. Even when your neighbors are using the internet. I scrapped cable and satellite years ago when I realized that I hadn't watched anything in six months (times $60 each). A good local video store did the trick and now I have Netflix.

I just like good food. Today I had tasty little morsels like a pimento pepper stuffed with dungess crab. Scallop crudo in a nice squid ink vinegarette. A chorizo empanadilla. I wanted a little goose confit served with tomato marmalade but they were out. I ate my wife's tasty potato salad with red potatoes, the skins on, and cayenne pepper. Plus her killer salsa (it has secret ingredients) with the scoop-shaped chips. I ate a little extra with a spoon - it's that good. I like beer too. First there was the Drake's IPA. Then there was the Arrogant Bastard. I indulge myself in other ways on other days. My mouth waters thinking about dates stuffed with chorizo wrapped in bacon with a nice maple glaze. The frittatas. The tacos - asada, cabeza, tripa, al pastor; obviously served with a grey-market cane sugar coke in a glass bottle. Sometimes a German pancake for breakfast. I always liked eating. When I got married I realized that I could travel for both sports and fine dining. On my honey moon I had cabrito for the first time, fresh sunfish, the most decadent flan ever, squid in their ink, and churros y chocolate from a place that had been serving them since 1894. When I broke myself and got old food became my favorite hobby. Yum.

190-210 for a first canopy depending on where you fall in that weight range since you'll be 185 - 205 pounds out the door.

When you're going to be stupid you need to be tough.

Absolute income and disposable income are completely disconnected. I had more left before housing and family obligations with a salary a third of what I make now. That wouldn't be fair. Applying technology to the problem would be a much better idea, especially since we have strong legal precedent for prior restraint in other areas. For example, we should make it illegal to sell new cars which can go faster than the highest speed limit (75 MPH) and which don't have a breathalyzer interlock on the ignition. Similar laws worked great for firearms - the 1986 prohibition on new machine gun registrations reduced decades worth of deaths from legally owned machine guns from one in decades to zero. That's an infinite percent increase. Starting with 15,000+ annual motor vehicle fatalities involving alcohol a year our percentage won't be as impressive but the lives saved will be more numerous without any need for locking people up or fining them unfairly. With the government able to decide whether the American automobile industry goes bankrupt or not now is a perfect time to start. In two years there shouldn't be a Chevy or Chrysler sold which doesn't have an alcohol interlock and GPS speed governor. We'll all be able to buy cars which don't impede our freedom in any way, they'll just cost 10X more although that won't necessarily be a bad thing. Although real-estate isn't a stable wealth store, Ford Mustangs worth 10X what they cost before at $200,000 a pop will be. I'm surprised no one else has thought of this way to save lives and the economy at the same time. I'll write my president tomorrow!

When the phone company insisted on having a phone line to go with my internet package I opted for a metered business line.

Anarchists and libertarians agree that governments suck because people suck. The anarchist solution is no government. Libertarians are practical enough to admit that would lead to some one seizing power and instead want a minimal government to enforce anarchy and perhaps contracts between individuals.

Sure. A 50 liter Givi hard case is a perfect fit for many rigs. An airline carry-on bag is easily bungee netted to the passenger seat. With hard luggage and a bag on the seat you can get two rigs, a tent, sleeping bag, and rain gear to the DZ. Try not to forget the sleeping bag and Thermarest though. While I found sleeping inside my canopy OK the camping setup was a lot more comfortable. Wheelies are more likely with a rig in a trunk on a rear rack although otherwise it works great. If you have a premature deployment, you're going to stop when the bike keeps going. My helmet was always covered with bug guts, dirt, etc. I don't think I'd want my skydiving gear in that. It's also way more comfortable to ride 200 miles round trip when the gear is on the bike.

I am glad I am not the only skydiver that hates horses anad am deathly afraid of them!! I don't like horses that much. Hanging out in Mexico I'd rather jump off a cliff into a' landing area with no outs and changing winds from three converging canyons than ride El Guapo. That horse knew where he was going when he rode me into tree branches. Maybe if I hit him with a stick like the guide told me too it would have worked out better although I always figured animals were either pets or food and wasn't up for that.

A doctor specializing in flight medicine be the one to ask. If the liver transplant is healed enough for aerobatic flight openings should be fine since those forces are higher and longer than when skydiving. If oxygen isn't required in unpressurized aircraft below the FAA minimum altitudes he should be fine since we spend less time at altitude.

Heal fast!

Freefly pants don't provide any upper body drag which really helps for head-up flying. You need a full freefly suit. If you don't have a fast enough fall rate in it you need a RW suit too. There's no connection between jumpsuit price and quality. There's a big connection between what's popular and well advertised and how much you'll pay though. I've gotten well bit, perfectly fittied suits with good fall rates from experienced local riggers/seamstresses that had made a bunch of suits before.

Cleaned (gills, guts, and blood-line removed) and optionally filleted. Dipped in flour and pan-fried in butter. Yum! Squirt a little lemon on if you want to be fancy.

Yup. I don't pay $1200 a year to insure and register my German sports sedan, although since it's over a decade old and I had corrosion from running nearly straight water as coolant due to a leak I've averaged $1300 a year on maintainence over the last three years for a $2500 annual total. $6000 a year is ludicrous even when they're throwing in an AAA membership. Given the obscene cost of living in major metropolitan areas, affordable accomodations in the surrounding sprawl, and the low density there making public transportation non-viable low wage workers need cars. It's only a shame that the government is spending $6000 on the effort. Especially since the capital isnt coming out of their pockets and they're big enough to self-insure. The shame isn't former wellfare recipients having the government pay for cars to get them to work; it's the government more than doubling what they should be spending. If I lived there I'd be curious about who was _really_ benefitting from the arrangement.

There's a slight difference between households and people. I don't expect your babies to pay much income taxes, nor your gramps. (: 40% of workers pay no income taxes. The average income tax rate in the bottom two quintiles is negative. For 2007, the first quintile averaged -5.0% and the second -2.8%. The middle quintile was slightly positive at 2.8%.

How do you come to that conclusion? How does it make more of a burden on the person in Cali compared to the current income tax system? I used to live in Boulder, CO which was allegedly "expensive." In hind sight I realize it was cheap, cheap, cheap! I owned all the home I wanted within city limits (town house, 1200 square feet, basement workshop, and attached garage), walking distance to nice restraunts, cycling distance to work, etc. in an awesome school district on which I paid $1500 a year in taxes. Sold it for $266K. Moved to Redmond, WA and bought something similar enough within a month of when I sold the first one. Paid $25K and $2800 a year in taxes although that was offset by a 0% income tax rate. I've since moved to the Bay area. I might be able to get a comparable property + location for $900K. Property taxes would be $10K/year. On the same income I earned in Boulder I'd have $55,000 less left after housing costs so a flat tax rate would eat a far larger percentage of what I had left. This is small town-home or 1950s 1000 square foot two-bedroom territory. Modest ranch homes on typical suburban lots have asking prices of $1.2-$1.4M. 9.55% (10.55 including SDI) versus 4.63% marginal state tax rates make it more painful. In San Mateo County, families earning up to $150,000 a year and buying modest homes of $700,000 or less qualify for the county's moderate income loan program. At the other end of the spectrum, median home price is $7500 in Detroit.

It depends how you spin the numbers. Although qualified dividends are currently taxed at 15% that's after corporate taxes which are 35% on most healthy C-corps for an actual tax rate of 50% although only 15% is showing up on personal income tax rolls. Although long term capital gains are taxed at 15%, it's on money which the government has devalued to the tune of 2-4% a year. If I bought $100,000 worth of stock in 1998 and sell it for $150,000 in 2008 I pay $7500 in taxes. However since my basis in 2008 dollars is only $131,520 my real gains are $18,480 in current dollars and I've effectively payed a 41% tax rate on that although my return only shows 15%. Short term capital gains are probably being taxed at 36% due to inflation. Wages are being taxed federally at 37.9% due to the medicare surcharge. Social Security is more of a mandatory retirement program with a lousy rate of return where more contributions mean more benefits than a straight tax and isn't as relevant at these income levels.

Brand, loading, etc? I don't remember. Steve Erickson (spelling may be wrong, and may not be the right Steve since there were at least two with AFF ratings) , Mile Hi skydiving in Longmont CO, probably late 1990s. Jeff Sands was the other AFF instructor so it was before 2003. Might be between when I bought a Tempo in 1998 and PD in 2000. Very creepy to land and see a non-moving jumper with green grass separating the pieces of his square canopy. Surprisingly non-fatal. Not injury free. We had another reserve failure that was fatal in Colorado (you get harder openings at higher elevations, and on a hot summer day 3000 feet AGL can be at 11000 feet density altitude). Older design, overloaded, I didn't see that one and recall even fewer specifics.

At a pound per square foot it will land you nicely. Without span-wise reinforcing tapes it will be more likely to fail catastrophically in an over-speed deployment situation like when you're head down and going 160-180 MPH. You might have a premature deployment freeflying because some one takes a bad grip. You might forget to pull when freeflying and have an AAD fire. You might do an AFF, get knocked out when the student deploys, and fall head down. The reserve failure I saw came from the last cause, resulting in the single span-wise tape connecting two and five cell pieces. If you're using it in a rig you use for flat relative work, wingsuit jumps, classic accuracy, etc. those situations are exceedingly unlikely and there's arguably nothing wrong with it.

I've been watching CSI season 9 on Netflix Watch Instantly and just saw _The Descent of Man_ with its skydiving scene. That was _far_ funnier than I anticipated. I was laughing so hard by the end I had to rewind it to get "the wind is, like, it blows up your leg holes"

I sold a property located in Boulder, CO whilst living in Kirkland, WA and handled everything via fax, fedex, and notary public.

There aren't any wind conditions that I'd be willing to jump my 105 in where I wouldn't jump a 210. I've jumped my 245 in my accuracy rig with 180 pounds under it in 20 MPH winds. While I had to be smart about staying up-wind of the pea gravel it wasn't a big deal. Forward speed only increases with the square root of wingloading, so one size is only going to get you 5-6%, two sizes 11-12%, three sizes 18%. Forward speed numbers are spotty on sport skydiving gear, but Paraflite provides them for it's military setups. Their 370 square foot 11 cell is rated at 28.6 MPH at a .54 wing loading and and 37.5 MPH at .8 pounds per square foot. You'll be going plenty fast even at student wingloadings, and an extra 2 MPH for one size smaller or 4-5 MPH for two sizes isn't going to make a difference. The differences into how fast you penetrate into a head wind may be substantial (40 MPH of forward speed gets you 10 MPH ground speed in a 30 MPH wind which is double the 5 MPH you get with 35 MPH forward component of air speed) but you're better off learning to spot and not getting down-wind of the target. Land out if you really need to - you can go very far down wind if you really need to get away from obstacles by cutting your descent rate to the minimum with brakes and riding the wind past whatever is beneath you.

Just like when redressing a reserve/BASE pro-pack on the ground.