DrewEckhardt

If you're young and healthy without pre-existing conditions you can get individual health insurance for a _lot_ less than you'll be spending on the injuries over the decades you spend doing interesting sports before moving into an unaffordable age category. Thousands of dollars in deductables aren't a big deal; it's the tens of thousands in surgeries and hospital stays you need to have covered. I'm going to get my insured butt to the hospital on May 4th for a bone graft to be as good as new. Woo hoo!

Get used to it. Some people are worse than the cliques in high school which wouldn't have them as members. Drop zone attendees represent a cross-section of society with skydiving as their only thing in common. A few people and skydivers both care about childhood cliques and didn't outgrow the rejection. Bring beer with you for any one who'd care to join you for a drink. Arrange to have at least one skydiving rig and friend with you where ever you're going (at least call ahead and see if some of the people you want to jump with are there) and ignore any one who doesn't want to play nice. They'll either come around or be irrelevant. I've jumped simultaneously at both student mills (that were close) and small drop zones (that were far but casual) and had pretty much fun at both (although when it got hot we only went swimming in the river at the converted crop duster strip). As far as Dropzone A, most skydivers (there are a few exceptions like sky surfers and classic style+accuracy people) see the sport as a social one. It's like sex - while masturbation is fun, you want to be doing the real thing with one or more partners. If you don't have people to jump with you're going to get bored. If you're not going to bring your own partners (Dude, lets go to the dropzone Saturday at noon?) and the DZ A people won't accommodate you (small drop zones don't have all students all day long, and people in the sport for fun should be making recreational jumps when not instructing) you're going to have to head to Dropzone B more often. You could also be that guy with the hairy palms who lives in his mother's basement. There's room in this world for all types of people, even sky surfers.

Seems like that would be something I should remember. I don't get it. ??? How can you forget The Dude? The Dude abides, and is easily in the top five list of the Cohen brothers' characters. The rest might be the McDunnoughs who are outright funny (who'd want to steal a baby?), Anton Chigurh who is just twisted with the captive bolt gun as a murder weapon and peculiar philosophy (flip a coin for your life?), and Marge Gunderson whose both pregnant and a rightous Joe Friday like detective. A picture of The Dude is attached for your edification. Culture is not just about Pavaroitti and Cats at one end of the spectrum and Survivor + Nip/Tuck at the other.

I think we have too many drug and gun laws. Law abiding adults should be able to buy whatever they want in both categories and use the products where ever it's safe for other people.

As far as I read it, the taxes are on the insurance package itself. Have a $1000/month family plan; pay $280 a month in taxes or whatever. It might get interesting for large employers who self-insure (presumably they'd setup a wholy owned insurance company that they bought insurance from at cost).

My question should maybe start a new thread but the answer might be so obvious I'm the only one wondering that.. Why should the reserve be about as big as the main? Because when you have to use your reserve you're going to have less altitude to get to an optimal landing area, be more likely to be incapacitated when landing it (you may have a broken femur from a hard opening which blew up your main), be much less familiar with how the canopy flies compared with your main, and want to have more square footage to minimize your chances of breaking something when you land down-wind in a parking lot or other bad location. The reserve is there to land you safely like your main. Exactly.

I've seen that lead to the reserve deploying before the cutaway in a hard cutaway situation.

If you turn a small canopy too low and bail out you can kill your forward speed, pop back up to roof top height and land hard enough that if you don't PLF it will hurt to walk for a few months. In high enough winds (we had gusts to 45 MPH when a storm blew in) you'll be coming straight down regardless of how small your parachute is. Mis-timing the flare is likely in this situation. So the PLF is still a useful skill to have. With a lot of forward speed you'll want to do a baseball slide (not on your ass, which can lead to back injuries). A modified PLF can become a baseball slide. If you skydive long enough you're going to have bad landings with a PLF helping in some cases.

I can do that comparison too. Prior to 1913 there was no federal income tax. The 1913 income tax law allowed a $3000 exemption for single people ($62,197 in 2007 dollars) and $4000 for married couples ($82,930). The next $20,000 ($414,650) was taxed at 1%. Robber barons raking in $500,000 a year ($10,366,244) paid the top tax rate of 7%. The current exemptions are $9350 for singles and $18700 for couples, which are off by a factor of 6.6 and 4.3. The lowest tax bracket is 10% capped at $8350 and $16700 so the rate there is off by a factor of 10 and bracket end off by factors of 24 and 49 for single and married people. The highest tax bracket is 35% starting at $372,950 with a rate off by a factor of 5 and minimum income a factor of 27.

It used to be that experienced jumpers took it upon themselves to teach new jumpers packing and basic RW skills. It's a nice thing to do and keeps the sport alive as people retire. Skratch Garrison taught me and another jumper how to pack (in his living room) on the condition that we each teach two other jumpers. I brought some beer for good measure too. These days some dropzones have packers teach periodic group packing classes for $10+ a head. I learned to pack when I bought my own rig and made #13 on my own pack job. The next couple took a little assistance to help me remember stuff like the buritto thing you do with the tail. This is where the two plus cases of beer you bought (one for graduating from AFF and one for your first solo) come in. You meet people. Combined with hanging around at the dropzone after jumping and during weather holds you should have a reasonable chance that some one will take the time to teach you packing.

Not directly, since in 2007 43% of tax return filers had no liability or had a negative tax rate due to refundable credits and the trend is towards ever more progressive income taxes with America currently ranked first or second in the OECD for having the highest share of the income tax burden borne by the top earning decile. If you just look at the ratio of tax percentage to income percentage we're first ahead of Ireland, Italy, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, the Slovak Republic, Luxembouorg, Belgium, Austria, Jorean, Poland, Japan, Norway, France, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Switzerland. http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/23856.html The Economist has printed more interesting graphs which are broken down at least by quintile; maybe some one can dig them up. Indirectly, 100% of us will have a higher tax burden since we depend on imports and the influx of money is going to devalue the dollar. With the costs of living so much higher in the first world, we're not going to bring manufacturing home to compensate.

Jobs pay well when demand exceeds supply. Usually that's because supply is limited due to things that are hard to correct, like it taking 10,000 hours of practice to be good at anything, professional organizations that have created a high barrier to entry (years of apprenticeship; doing well at pre-law/law-school/the bar; pre-med/med-school/residency), or the job being objectionable enough that people don't want it (sewer diving). Where there aren't any skill requirements the pay is rapidly going to drop to minimum wage or even below (on-line you're competing with people for whom middle-class living requires a $3000/year salary as in three-thousand with no missing zero). I'd bet on at best some small fraction of people doing well enough with most of the profits being had by the people selling franchises, info packets, web-site access, or whatever you actually get for your "investment". At worst you're dealing with guys in internet cafes in countries where a few dollars a day is a good wage. If you want to make "real" money at home, you need to pracitce a real skill with a market which most people can't (restoring vintage automobiles, accounting as a CPA, doing under water basket weaving, writing software, building fine furniture or instruments, making tube wood and fabric biplanes in your airport home...) or won't (drug dealer, prostitute of either sex) do.

It's probably silly to be buying a new canopy at 100 jumps, since most people want to down size beyond that and doing so isn't imprudent 150 jumps later (not even a full season for people who live near turbines and good weather) provided that you have worked on canopy flight. When it comes time to sell that canopy with 150 jumps you're competing with canopies with 600 jumps and new lines that fly exactly the same. You're likely to either sit on your canopy for a while or loose hundreds of dollars more than the usual $1/jump depreciation assuming you got reasonable colors. With unreasonable colors it'll be worse. I didn't buy a brand new skydiving canopy until I got to a point where I wasn't going to down size any farther and had been happy to make 600 jumps on the previous size. As long as you're buying a new canopy you might as well get colors you like because stills and video of you look better to you that way.

It depends on how urban your neighborhood is, whether you've acquired an American sized ass and gut which makes walking onerous, whether you're some place with alchohol delivery, etc. Personally, I'd walk over to the nearest grocery store or 7-11 and pickup 6 22oz "bomber" bottles or 2 six packs of a tasty micro-brew. It's legal, cheap, fast, and might burn off one beer worth of calories.

One year at Quincy we got weathered out for the day and some Brits I was hanging out with hired Mike Mullins to fly his King Air in parabolic arcs for half an hour. While not as spacious as 727s, the hourly operating cost on King Airs is a _lot_ lower.

I like going around corners. My summer tires are Bridgestone S-03 Pole Positions although I'm too frugal to buy a really fast car. Try an Ultima GTR as a kit or turn-key setup. Basically a street legal GT prototype with 1970s can-am horsepower via large small block chevy V8s and price tag you can afford. The factory now builds a 720HP normally aspirated flavor. Various other people have installed twin-turbo packages good for the chassis ~1000HP limits. "stock" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKX2KZruc3E&feature=related "not" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-jubA-fl3k http://www.spectrum5racing.com/Projects/KurtGtrproject.htm http://www.schwartzperformance.com/projects.aspx?projectid=18

Obviously. When you spend more on your military than the rest of the world combined and don't use it to build an empire, it's about something other than defense and offense. That something is stimulating large American companies like Boeing who employ lots of people without those people showing up on the government payrolls and making it look like we're a socialist country. With that in mind, economic impact should be the PRIMARY goal when it comes to DoD spending. We could also trim our defense budget back to what's needed for a country of our size. Canada did fine with $18.2B while we spent $741B on the DoD plus 54B on Homeland Security. Given the money which is up for grabs, better operation of America's #1 jobs program is the best we can hope for.

The Republicans are the party of _SMALLER_ government. Just IMAGINE what would have happened with the DEMOCRATS in charge. Unless we've been brainwashed and there really isn't any difference.

It doesn't matter what I'm technically responsible for as long as I have a regular "job" (with wages the IRS can garnish) or real property (against which the IRS can get a lien).

You can't limit average G-forces but you can do wonders on the peaks. Brian Germain said that parachutes should open quickly but comfortably and built the Samurai to do so; I'd expect the Lotus to be similar. I've jumped parachutes where there was too much up front followed by a reasonable average, slow snivel followed by an increase, and slow uniform long snivels. I'd consider all three cases to be bad designs for canopies engineered this century.

I didn't have the patience for sight seeing until my late twenties and fifth trip to Europe unless you count the inside of taverns and Amsterdam while under the influence. Now I'd only go acompanied by my wife, who I find sexy and interesting regardless of where we are. Our idea of sight seeing is getting a plane ticket and one night hotel reservation. We walk in increasingly large concentric circles eating anything that looks tasty, look at the interesitng sights we pass, and proceed onward to the next location when we get bored. That usually works well. We found a small fishing village on Gran Canaria where they'd yet to build hotels for tourists (just rooms at the yacht club) with the tastiest little sun fish served with the local mishapen potatoes + garlic aioli and abandoned beaches to walk on in the moon light. We did run into one town closed for the season, but got directed to an apartmento we could rent for one night and the one remaining restraunt and a little more advanced planning would have let us time things so we could take the direct flght to Marrakech. Travel for sports was always OK though. Snowboarding, cycling, skydiving, BASE jumping. Come to think of it, while I like to spend a little time perusing works of the Dutch masters or Antoni Gaudi's buildingings for me it's still mostly about what I can snowboard down, jump off, or eat with an ocasional show thrown in for good measure. As a mature adult I haven't become much more appreciative of culture in large doses, I've just added eating to my list of reasons to travel, having better memories of the best flan ever in Las Palmes and squid in their ink from Madrid than the couple of museums and famous buildings we visited. You might talk to the kid and see what he actually likes. I know that as a 16 year old I could eat a large Pizza Hut pizza or 10 pack of Taco bell Tacos and lament wasting that capacity on such mediocre comestibles. Maybe the 16 year old would be more into food tourism too. In San Francisco, I'd recomend the Swan Oyster Depot (like your neighborhood butcher but for sea food and with a counter where you can inhale all the tasty raw food you can handle) and Zuni Cafe.

\ It just goes to show that the Democrats are all show and no go when it comes to environmental issues (reduce, reuse, recycle - where re-using existing brass is obviously better than wasting energy recycling and then remanufacturing).

I can roll the nose and tail on my Monarch 135 all I want and it won't open as softly as my Samurai 105 does when I just leave the nose hanging symetrically with just a couple of rolls in the tail to hold everything together when I set it on the ground. I can roll the nose and the tail on my Dagger 244 with a mesh slider as much as I want. While not as hard as if I just left the nose exposed it opens quicker than the monarch. The canopy design (including slider configuration+size and brake setting) sets a lower limit on opening time which you can't work around without changes (like a bigger or lipped slider)

Um - I'm afraid that it is a different thing. It's not called "salary." It is called "bonus." Contract has such thing as what is called, "efficient breach." I've had bonuses for showing up to work which were a way for a company to pickup relocation costs I had to reimburse a previous employer for and to provide a competitive salary until my restricted stock package vested (which would ultimately be 1/3-1/2 of my total annual compensation) without requiring them to make an exception for me in base salary. Some companies in the financial industry like to make a bonus paid annually a significant fraction of the total compensation package as a form of golden handcuffs. People are less likely to leave for greener pastures when 1/3-1/2 of their salary is contingent on sticking around until fiscal year end. Multi-year deals make things even messier for changing jobs. "Bonus" is just a name.

.1%, is in one-tenth percent. Because it shows that Obama is aligned with "Main Street" Americans who are unhappy with the way the fat cats are being compensated without threatening the way Washington runs (bills bloat to hundreds or thousands of pages before there's enough them for everyone to vote 'yea').