DrewEckhardt

The top 5% of income earners do a lot more for our country, shouldering 60% of the tax burden to pay for all those government employees and spending packages. You could draw the line at the top 10% (70%) or 25% (85%) if you preferred. People who won't suffer directly from out of control spending (like the third of American workers who have no income tax laibility, or even the bottom 50% of the population who shoulder just 3% of the burden) being able to control it tick me off. I'd suggest that we weight votes by tax dollars contributed to the government if I didn't think the tax payers would exploit the other citizens in non-monetary ways. If nothing else that would be more democratic - right now you only really get heard if you're wealthy enough to buy lobbyists or media coverage. Entrepeneurs also do more for our country, creating jobs so the babies being born will have something to do other than being dependant on their parents for the remainder of their lives. Orthopaedic surgeons are great. More people would be crippled if we didn't have doctors who could bolt us back together after accidents. A few American artists of various sorts enrich us in other ways.

Bad: My corner pub charges $11 for a large beer. Better: The have Racer 5 IPA on tap, a Great American Beer Festival gold medal winning IPA. Best: I ordered a "Large" and found it to be proper Maß. Yum.

Sure. Yup. It'd be better for society as a whole to give them all the heroin they care to shoot or smoke in clean government facilities than dealing with the crime which pays for the habbit and diseases spread by those who've turned to prostitution without safe sex or paying piles of money to lock them up (California spending is now $40K per inmate). Domestically legallizing vice would reduce the size of the parallel economy where the under-educated can earn a decent living at the expense of violence which results in collateral damage. Internationally it would mean less money for nasty groups like the Taliban.

Just a technicality - is it not the BASE canopy (rather than the rig) that's safer on a low pull? It's both. Most skydiving rigs mount the closing loop on a tongue attached to the reserve container. Most pin-closed BASE rigs mount the closing loop(s) on one of the flaps. A line is more likely to half-hitch around the closing loop mount with the skydiving rig. Sure. Most people don't have a big enough one lying around though.

Yup. Saint John Moses Browning didn't come up .380 Automatic Colt Pistol until 1908, making it a bit newer than .45 ACP which dates back to 1904. The Germans would call it 9mm Kurz for short and those new fangled metric guys 9x17mm. The Walther PPK is chambered in .380 ACP. .38 special has a big case because it was originally a black powder round operating at low pressure. It evolved from .38 short Colt which was used to convert civil war era cap and ball revolvers to fixed cartridges. Modern cartridges double its pressure for way more power and velocity.

Nope (maybe you're thinking of the hollywood shoot out?) And the first or second hit was a lung shot which the coroner said would have been fatal even with immediate medical attention.

More likely assholes with not enough money. They settle for land close to an airport because that's what they can afford, and then start complaining about the noise and traffic that's the reason for low property values.

No. While one round of anything is more than enough to kill a person that's not relevant. You only use lethal force when you're in physical danger, at which point the goal is to stop the threat. It doesn't matter if they live or die. Unfortunately dangerous animals (with two legs or four) can take a LOT of damage before they give up. The FBI gave up on 9mm after the infamous 1986 Miami shoot out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout After being shot twice with 9mm slugs including a fatal wound, one of the suspects got out of his car. Although being hit four more times, he killed one FBI agent, shot another in the neck, shot another agent, and killed a second one with two shots to the head. He was going to drive away but one of the wounded FBI agents was able to work his 12 guage with one hand dumping rounds into the car until it was empty striking the two criminals multiple times. The crook got out of the car, fired three rounds, and got back in the car. The injured agent who'd emptied his shotgun ended the fight by emptying his revolver into the suspects. It took 12 shots to stop the tougher of the two crooks, with him getting off at least 42 rounds from a mini-14 and three each from a pair of .357 revolvers. That was without _any_ drugs or alcohol in his system. People high on PCP and other drugs have even more fight in them.

The two purposes are mutually exclusive. For home use you want the most "stopping power" you can get and don't care what it looks like to people scared of guns because you aren't going to take it outside the house and range. 12 gauge, 18" barell, extended magazine. For concealed cary you want something small and concealable that you'll take with you. While a nice 1911 with a crisp single action trigger is pleasant to shoot and aesthetically pleasing it's not going to be more reliable or more accurate in practical situations. Apart from double stacks like the Para Ordnance with magazines protruding beneath the grip it'll hold less than a full-sized Glock too. A 12 gauge shell with 10 pellets of .360" 000 buck shot beats just a couple of .355" or .452" bullets.

Order a dish cover so that it's convex instead of concave so snow doesn't accumulate (maybe dry snow?) and if that doesn't work (wet snow?) switch to heated dishes.

It's a good approximation. Initial acceleration is at 32 feet/second^2. The first couple of seconds you can't do much aerodynamically because you don't have enough drag; so you're accelerating about that fast. 60 MPH is 88 feet per second which is real close to 3 seconds of acceleration at 32 feet/second^2 less a smudge from when drag starts to become significant.

They let me jump an old 4-pin rig with a 1967 Paracommander, capewells, and chest mounted reserve. While the DZ owns the planes + hangers and could tell me not to jump it I doubt they would. The old dudes might tell me I needed french boots, a double zipper Pioneer jump suit, and a bell helmet to go with the chest-mounted reserve.

The new term for layoffs is "right sizing"

Ask HR. Most people have at-will employment where the company is under no obligation to pay any sort of severance. Being laid off (or forced out) only entitles you to collect unemployment insurance and that's not much. Some union jobs are different. Some companies are nicer. If you don't like your job you're generally _MUCH_ better off finding a new one while still employed. The one time I stuck around until my company crashed, I took an $8000 pay cut and spent $30,000 out of pocket on living expenses until I collected my last pay check. That was during "good" times. Unless you have a speciall situation (are going to start a business and have enough money to fund it until you turn a profit in a few years; have another job; just won the lottery) you probably don't want to do that.

Only for AFF graduates.

Last Thursday my wife made me a nice breakfast sandwich and said that I should take a look at the police out front. One was crouched in our bushes with an AR15, a couple with handguns were creeping around the neighbor's car port accross the street, another had an orange (presumably less lethal) shotgun, and there were a few more. They drove a couple of cop cars up and opened the doors to get more cover. One came to the door and said we should head to the back of the house and not stand behind the police car. Came back a few minutes later and said his sargent wanted us to evacuate. Since my car was in the shop and my wife's never driven car had a dead battery we had to evacuate on foot. Arround the other police with AR15s, two police cars closing off the end of the street, police car closing off the next street, etc. Turns out some cranky old guy flashed a gun at the city maintenance workers. He was arrested peacefully.

That's fine. After 70 jumps I could have thrown my first rig in the dumpster and come out ahead financially over renting. Since I resold the main and then the reserve+container I did a lot better than that, breaking even at around 15 jumps. If I'd sold everything as a package instead of downsizing a couple sizes with the same container + reserve I'd have done better.

Remember a bank's liabilities are its deposits therefore, the 2T is what would need to be covered Banks have diversified in the days since _It's a Wonderful Life_ Within the US, as of June last year the deposits in insured subsidiaries only totalled $260B with the bulk of $219B in Citibank, NA and only $89B of that actually insured. They've used that to get themselves into all sorts of other trouble.

1. It's a combination of height and inseam. 5'10 - 3" inseam - 20 = 19" main lift web; 6'3 - 36 - 20 = 19", or 72" - 33" - 20 = 19". 2. You can often have the harness modified for a lot less than the difference between a used rig and new rig,

That would probably be fine. As of last November, it had passed a 23:1 leverage on it's ON BOOK assets of 2.05T with another 2.9T not on the balance sheet. For citibank to survive, we need to cover those liabilities. For it to fail, we only have to cover the insured deposits which are relatively miniscule. I've been trying to find out how much it would cost us - how many dollars would actually be covered by FDIC if say Citi were to fail. Anyone have an idea?

The government wrecked it. The minority just gave them their exucse. Just like what happened in Boulder, where our mall crawl (up to 40,000 in attendance with a normal city population of 80,000) got killed with police road blocks and open container law enforcement.

Nope. They should split sports into open/unlimited and all-natural classes, where steroids and drugs may be a part of unlimited.

Sure. If you're traveling someplace nice where there are definitely fun things to do (your wife runs on trails in Moab while you BASE jump) you might take them. Otherwise you leave them home. Drop zones are pretty boring places for people who don't skydive. Boogies are the same, although more alcohol gets consumed afterwards when people talk about skydiving. Again, real boring for non jumpers.

In an appropriate size per Brian Germain's chart. Used. Made after 1995 or so.