DrewEckhardt

We already do that. The average income tax rate for the bottom two quintiles is negative due to refundable credits.

That's not the right question to ask. Our leaders aren't stupid enough to risk inciting armed revolt which could stop the economy and cut-off the three hundred million million dollar gravy train they control. The right question is "Would you visit the homes of suspected terrorists, confiscate their guns, and take them into custody" Prudent moves would be identifying the most likely trouble makers by what they've read and transmitted to the web (the government is being sued for installing fiber optic splitters feeding semantic content analyzers at telephone companies), looking for people who buy a lot of guns (using illegally retained NICS records which they've also been sued over), run forward traces on the manufacturers' 4473 forms for people who like military guns, and perhaps credit card activity. Heck, they might just look for repeat purchases in the records which have been computerized from gun shops that went out of business. Dump all that into one database and ask for the top 10,00 offenders to round up. For the people doing the seizing, it doesn't look to a door to door operation they may object to. Especially if they are upset about a recent terrorist act. The government could also bring in the private contractors they've had practicing urban combat amongst a non-combatant population who may be less motivated by a sense of duty to the Country and Constitution rather than its current government.

Beware: melted ends can have sharp edges on them. And pulling the cord out too fast and/or without the closing pin between cord and loop will quickly (it can happen in one pack job) wear through the closing loop.

Open faced helmets will fit around one of the top corners of many rigs inside an airline-legal carry-on.

Have you met many surgeons? I went BASE jumping with one and was shocked he'd managed to live long enough for his hair to turn grey. The guy had worse judgement than the average 18 year old. I liked his plane crash stories and had a laugh about the tree landing I saw, but didn't particularly care for the wall strike he had after neglecting to track on our two-way from a 2700' cliff. Really ruined the vibe.

It's not about what we want. I want my investments to skyrocket so I can live off them an not have to work for money. As long as we have money flowing out to get resources which can't be produced in sufficient quantity domestically (oil, titanium, memory chips...) we need people buying our goods and services so we have money to spend on those imports. That means that our overhead (wages and taxes) needs to be competitive with other peoples', and over two billion of those people live places with salaries and costs of living 1/10th ours. There's enough profit to allow Chinese and Indian wages to raise and things like car ownership are increasing. They're wages are going to go up in real terms and ours are going to go down. The totals on our pay checks may remain the same, although they'll buy less from the ouotside world (big screen TVs might trade at $3000 again instead of $1500). The Yuan might be trading at $1 instead of $.14 so their pay checks might remain the same in local currency to. However it happens, our wages and theirs have to converge if we're not going to close our borders and enter a new dark age where the masses can't afford insustrial products built with scarce domestic resources.

Pressures from labor costs in the rest of the world were going to catch up with us. While you can't sneak a car carrier full of automobiles in built with $150/month labor versus $30/hour in the US and other developed countries, you can sneak in intellectual property built by top notch graduates earning $5k/year (enough to have live-in help, like a maid who does your laundry and cooks your meals) versus $50K/year (living with room mates in expensive cities). With automation increasing, that IP makes up an increasing percent of the value of consumer products. The government housing access programs had nothing to do with it, having default rates comparable to the market as a whole with a tiny fraction of the total loan value. Banks getting paid with every loan they wrote and real estate agents 3% of every sale had everything to do with it. Housing crashed because banks made money selling people loans they couldn't afford without taking any hit when they tanked years later when the interest rates adjusted to a sustainable level with a yield enough beyond Treasury instruments to compensate for the risk. Any one with a decent job who wants to actually retire put $15,500 into their 401K last year, $11,000 in for 2002, and whatever the legal limit was before that with more into accounts that aren't taxed advantaged. When things got out of hand those of us who were silly enough to get bad mortgages dipped into our savings and ponied up where the people who were living hand to mouth tanked. It wasn't that sub-prime loan holders were unique in getting in over their head; they were just the first to show up on radar because they had no other option to delay the inevitable. The real fun is just starting as pay-option arms reset and people decide between making a $3K loan + tax + HOA payment on a property that's hundreds of thousands under water versus a $1500 rental payment with bad credit for 7 years (easily a $300K difference in your net worth if you put the delta into savings). The smart choice is half the payment with bad credit since a smart person won't be buying property for a long time. More people are behind on their payments now than ever. Foreclosures would be way up if banks hadn't realized they had the option of loosing up to half their money now, or accepting loan modifications where they could wait 30 years and get balloon payments when properties are worth more or foreclosures on properties with some equity. People are going to get free trade whether they want it or not. The only questions are how much of their money is going to disappear into black market overheads and how painful the collision between first and third worlds will be. People need housing prices to crash so they can get loans in line with they can actually afford. Manufacturing isn't going to return to America until we drop the minimum wage below a buck and hour and reduce the cost of living so that's sustainable or freeze wages and wait for inflation to catch up in the rest of the world.

I'm all for it, since it would be the first bailout in which the tax payers aren't the only ones being screwed and it's a bargain at a mere five million million dollars ($40 per tax payer).

No, we call it a 350 Chevy as in cubic inches. Unless you're a Ford guy in which case it would be a 351 Windsor, Cleavland, or Midland. Or some sort of GM weirdo with a 350 Buick. 350 Oldsmobile, or 350 Pontiac. Different GM divisions with tooling to produce completely different implementations of the same product probably have something to do with where they are now. 1978 Trans Ams had a T/A 6.6 decal on the shaker, but we just called the engine a 400 Pontiac (A wholly different beast from the 400 Chevy. The Chevy is a small block, the Pontiac a big block)

I bought my first rig in time for jump #13 and would have still come out ahead financially over renting if I deposited it in the DZ dumpster on jump #85. Instead I sold the parts for most of the $1700 I originally paid. I was probably under 190 pounds out the door at the time, and the instructors were pretty uniformly split as to whether I should get a 190 or 210. Picked up a 205, and the same rig was fine for two down sizes to a 155. The 135 fell out in the plane due to poor closing loop tension so I got a new rig.

Most guys with merely average levels of testosterone poisoning who don't downsize imprudently fast will go through 2-3 rigs and 6-7 main canopies before arriving at a combination they stay with indefinitely. The first rig might be good for only 400 jumps which is just two or three years at an average clip. Once you get to rig 2-3 you can put thousands of jumps on it (I've had the same rig size since 1998 and still don't want anything smaller). The time to really get on well with a canopy goes up (I put 600 jumps on my Stiletto 120) and you're not going to loose the depreciation game by buying your 6th or 7 parachute in your colors (unless you break yourself, develop a limp, get fat, and want to upsize). That breaking yourself bit is a lot more likely if you try to short circuit the process by getting something you'll "grow into" and "jump for a long time"

I'm going to get out and drink more. At work I've organized the Karoshi Club which will meet weekly to drink beers. It's even within staggering distance of the train station so people can get home safely.

There are very few one-piece 2.35:1 TVs.

Many of the classics made before 1950 - Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Some films are shot open matte. If composed to work at 4:3 and the crew doesn't get a boom in the shot they work. Full Metal Jacket was shot this way but "intended" for 1.66 and 1.85:1 theatrical releases (European and Domestic). James Cameron shot Terminator open matte. Some independant films are shot on video at 4:3. Time Code was shot in one take on 4 DV camcorders displayed simultaenously; it got cropped for the theatrical release but should be 4:3.

I prefer the original aspect ratio so I can see everything that's going on and not be stuck with "talking noses" (where the pan centers on the two characters noses, loosing the rest of the scene) or rapid MTV-style cuts between two interacting characters that detract from the screen. It's a little disconcerting to watch people who've been stretched out in some direction. If the picture's not big enough, get a bigger screen. In the last home I stayed put in long enough I installed an 87x49" front projection setup. 4:3 images were plenty big at 81" diagonal. Scope films were a bit small at only 3' high but I could sit closer to work around that. Next time I'll probably go with a constant height setup with seating around 3 screen heights (ex - 12' from a 4' high 115" wide screen, 9' from a 3' high 86" wide screen, whatever) This stuff has gotten pretty accessable (you don't need to be enough of a geek to bolt a 200 pound projector to the joists) and affordable (projectors can be had for less than a TV, and a white bed sheet on a frame is a nearly free acoustically transparent screen).

A Stiletto is _not_ an intermediate canopy. It's the most sensitive to toggle input out of all the PD canopies ever made. Subsequent PD designs were been detuned because John LeBlanc (he's been designing canopies at PD for 25 years) observed experienced jumpers having problems keeping the canopy level while landing Stilettos. Failing to have good body position and deal with openings will also lead to cutaways on a Stiletto.

You want to have a competant canopy coach evaluate your landing technique (as in some one like Brian Germain or Scott Miller, not the random person who'se getting people through their A-license card). Most skydivers don't manage their energy and flare nearly as well as they could. With jumpers who aren't much worse off physically than average under canopies that aren't much smaller than average this doesn't have any practical effect. Get a small enough parachute and/or become creaky enough and it's an issue. With 200 pounds of exit weight, an 8000 foot density altitude, and no wind you can still stop a modern 105 square foot canopy in a few steps with good technique. The same thing applies to larger canopies with friendlier atmospheric conditions.

Because it's simpler to ask "How many jumps do I need for my B-license" than finding that information in the on-line SIM. Competant engineers and lawyers do.

Sounds like a great cost saving measure. A 500 pound guided bomb costs nearly $20,000. Some times I drive by flower farms selling a dozen roses for $5.99 and even the FTD markup doesn't run them much over $60.

I just flop the two halves of the nose inwards towards the center on my Samurai 105 and leave it alone. It opens in a reasonable time (as in quicker than the Spectre, Omega, Safire, Crossfire, Diablo, and FX) without being hard like an old Monarch or Sabre (still softer than a Batwing). Nearly always on heading. Very nice. I pretty much considered the Samurai what PD would build if they made a Stiletto 2 (the Katana wasn't out yet) and hadn't continued the trend of longer opening times. Control responsiveness was better than modern detuned designs like the Crossfire, pressures were great, and while the recovery arc was more conducive to modern swooping the canopy isn't as ground hungry as an FX. Brian said parachutes are supposed to open like that. I'd guess that the Lotus would be similar.

I didn't know if skydiving was going to be enough fun to was a full 2% of the year's weekends on ground school and an AFF jump so I did a tandem. After deciding it was fun enough and waiting for the local DZ to open I finished AFF in three weeks.

Having made dozens of skydives with a tail pocket on a free packed main I'd say it works fine.

Assuming you haven't moved things around recently enough to incur penalties, aren't dealing with funds that have a front-load or back-load, don't have company stock that's depressed below the market as a whole, and move into comparable mutual funds you don't loose anything unless the market makes a significant upswing when your money is "cash" (I don't know when the sell and buy parts of a roll-over happen). Although your X shares of a given group of companies are worth 60% of what they were, you're going to roll them into other mutual funds that have suffered comparable losses

Many people ask the wrong question because they don't know any better. Some people are nice enough to answer the question they should be asking. That's a good thing since the consequences of being wrong can be death and more or worse. BTW: A Cypres costs ess than $2 a month to maintain. I don't know if that's what you're getting upset about; but if you post generalities you get generalities and speculation back. Frieds dying is my least favorite thing about parachuting sports, followed by getting broken and then people I don't know getting killed and broken. I'd guess that other people feel about the same and that a lot of the responses you get are motiviated by that.

There aren't any comparable countries. As a young adult, after lecturing in Germany I took a detour and hung out for a few days with European drug addicts living on "social money". In some big European cities, it's possible to have a reasonable existence (your own apartment, reasonable food, etc.) without working. In big American cities, working full time at a menial jobs still isn't enough to pay for your own apartment to say nothing of food. In college, I hung out with European exchange students living on a government stipend. In America, the government doesn't even pay for the education needed to earn a living wage. In America, the school systems reflect the local populations' desires and pocketbooks. I went to a public high school where 95% of our graduating population went to post-secondary education and lots of us finished with a year of college credit. That doesn't happen in middle class neighborhoods. In many lower class neighborhoods the schools are just a place to wharehouse your kids until they become adults and can graduate to poverty and/or prison. So in America we have a financial underclass for whom the "right" thing to do is join street gangs, deal drugs, and perhaps get killed where in Europe it's to go on "social money" and stay in your own apartment. The fatality rate associated with the American system is a lot higher. In theory, the American system should be cheaper. In practice I'm not sure that's the case, since we spend $40,000 per year per inmate on criminals in California.