DrewEckhardt

I thought we were talking about spending cuts. The one time I collected unemployment in Colorado (2003) it was capped at $400 a week regardless of how much you made or $1600 a month and $10K on total benefits.

No. Over a hundred jumps at the same wingloading under a more modern design (take your pick, Safire, Sabre2, Pilot, etc.) where you learn low turns (including after plane-out) so you're not an unguided meat missle would be prudent. This is the most reasonable reference out there http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/bas-sizingchart.pdf Brian Germain knows way more than your local instructors and random internet people.

no - parachutes are not designed for the purpose for killing I'm more concerned about the end results which demonstrate that parachutes are 60X more dangerous than guns. Given 80M gun owners in America and 1200 acciental deaths the rate is less than 1 in 60,000. With about 30,000 active parachutists (as measured by the USPA membership required to jump most places) and about 30 fatalities our parachutes kill 1 in 1000.

Relax. At terminal velocity you have your entire body weight plus 20-30 pounds of gear bending you. It's like laying on a Pilates ball backwards with jogging weights on your ankles and dumbells in your hands. You don't really have to do anything to arch. You just can't be tense. If that happens your friends will all fall faster, and you won't get to join in the party. You might potato chip too. Unless you get all tense and stiff like a board in which case you'll fall too slow to keep up with your friends who are relaxed and enjoying themselves.

A lot of those people like to use the old testament as an excuse. If they didn't wear cotton-polyester blends and spent time outside Red Lobster chanting No fins! No scales! No sale! I'd buy it, but the way they ignore the rest of Leviticus means it's just an excuse. The only logical explanation I can come up with is that some of those conservative men are closetted homosexuals who are affraid that with governent approval they'll leave their assets and lives behind to chase men. The wives are affraid that their nancy-boy husbands are actually gay and in more danger of leaving them for a man if the government approves.

Glushenkov, 1400 HP replacing the 1000HP PZL R1820 clone. The popular Walter 601 engine is a Czech small PT6A clone that may be good for half that depending on variant. A twisted person might do a conversion like the Soloy Dual Pac with a pair of M601s mated to a common gearbox and propellor. Solloy flew the conversion on a DHC-3 Otter and their stretched C208. Or a Piper Twin Comanche, where the engine gets replaced with a nose cone and pair of nacelles added. Any one know the magnitude of those airframe changes?

And so that when they do something boneheaded on landing their injuries are reduced. Tandem students sometimes plant their feet on landing and a few get carried off on stretchers with tibia/fibula fractures. Increasing the tandem pair's kinetic energy on landing isn't going to reduce these incidents. Ocassionally this doesn't go well and you end up with a double fatality. Modern tandem skydiving isn't about the instructor having fun or teaching students. It's about providing a "skydiving" carnival ride to as many paying customers as you can. Anything which limits the risk expopsure is probably good for business.

You don't have to. An unorganized resistance consisting of less than 1 in 1500 out of an otherwise non-combatant population is enough to prevent a military victory.

Yes. It costs nothing to send E-mails to potential victims. It only takes a couple bucks to mail a bogus cashier's check. The return on that investment can be a few thousand dollars which is more than a year's wages for semi-skilled labor in a lot of thee countries.

1/3 of Americans pay NO income tax at all. You need to reach the middle quintile before the average tax rate becomes slightly positive at 3% and the fourth quintile is only averaging 6%. Most Americans don't have a personal interest in reduced spending.

Because we haven't had a conservative in the white house for the last seven years. Even Clinton was more of a small-government fiscal conservative tan Bush 43.

In theory. In practice the president has the most legislative power when his desires aren't too numerous or fall into a number of big spaces where congress has ceded authority. You should be aprehensive about this regardless of what your politics are because the other party is going to get its turn and effectively pass laws you disagree with. 1) The president can kick bills back to congress where a near 50-50 split along party lines makes it impossible to get a veto-proof super majority and allow them through once they include his pet provisions, with 51% of Congress agreeing once there's enough in it for enough of them and their districts. Clinton got his 1994 ban passed this way, with HR3355 growing to 19,000 lines of text before enough Congress critters would vote "Yea" on it with the ban intact. 2) Congress has ceded legislative authority to various entities both separate (the FCC) and a part of (the Treasury Department) the Executive branch where the heads are appointed by the president. They call the legislation "rule making" but in my mind anything which can send you to jail or subject your assets to seizure is effectively a "law." For example, Congress left the Treasury Department in charge of what firearms could be imported. In 1989 president Bush implemented an import ban by telling them what could be imported. Congress left the FCC in charge of who gets broadcast licenses, with its head appointed by the president. They've effectively legislated against free speech by granting monopolies to a small number of news outlets, restricted dissent by limiting affordable low-power licenses, and moved towards a state religion (theism) by preferentially granting licenses to religous organizations. Congress left the FDA (part of the executive branch) in charge of treating food animals for diseases. They've made it illegal to sell beef which has been tested for mad cow disease. Bush 41 and Clinton both demonstrated this isn't the case.

Every one in the middle class who bothers to plan for retirement is likely to have at least a million current dollars in the bank by the time that happens. Since you can only withdraw 4% a year without depleting your savings, each million in assets translates into $40K in pre-tax income. A million dollars isn't much. Max out your 401K and you'll have $2M to retire on after 30 years. Do the same as a couple and the number is $4M. Work for another decade and the numbers are 4 and $8M. Pretend raises don't exist and invest them instead, start with 3 year old cars and drive them for 10 years instead of eating the depreciation on new vehicles like your co-workers, buy a condo or cottage instead of a McMansion. It's not that hard if you don't have setbacks like health problems. The "rich" shouldn't be paying for your children's education and health care just so your family can live high on the hog spending money on a big house, cars, and junk.

Tunnel time is dirt cheap. An hour of freefall for flat 4-way with video runs $7500+ from airplanes and 2-way freefly with video $6000 but both are only $750 in a wind tunnel. Of course, that assumes everyone packs for themselves.

Final approach speed on a small parachute is 50+ MPH and a few hundred feet long. There are LOTS of places the parachutist can end up. Walking speed is about 4 MPH. Running unsustainably fast (for a non-olympic athlete) about 15 MPH. No matter how hard you try you can't outrun an unguided meat missle.

The analog here is a plane landing some place other than the runway and crashing into a parked or taxiing aircraft. If you're in a small well defined landing area like pea gravel or a swoop course that's roughly analagous to a runway, you should get out. You shouldn't have to fear for your safety just because you're at an airport or adjacent farmer's field.

Sorry but my FIRST responsblitiy is to ME and MY safety. Only when you limit yourself to making solo jumps into empy landing areas. Accepted pracice is for the people in the landing area to get out of the pea gravel or swoop course and STAND STILL. By doing something inherently incompatable with that, you're creating an accident waiting to happen.

Not without your buyer paying over $150 in taxes (I sold some electronics to an Australian, and made three shipments a week apart to work around the rules). Imports worth less than $1000 AUD are tax/duty free but that's only $700 US. If the value is more than that, there's a 5% customs duty on the value plus 10% GST on the summed value, shipping, and duty. The same USPS forms which have the insured value and shipping costs go to customs. Other shipping methods are hundreds of dollars more or take weeks to get there.

Sure. You just have to adjust for inflation. $1.50 in 1990 dollars is the same as $2.35 in 2007.

I spent $3.45 on my last tank. It was quite groovy. What really shocks me is that the gas station in town I usually use is only $3.65 without the cash discount while the 76 station is still getting about $4.35! I lauged when I saw a hummer pull in there instead of the $.70 cheaper station a couple blocks away.

I disagree, when you land you are standing in the middle of a road. it is far easier and safer for the person on the ground to take one or 2 steps to the side to avoid being hit. Pay attention to your surroundings when you collapse your canopy and dont frigg about in the midde of the road. If you're silly enough to stand in the path of a moving vehicle prepare to get hit. If you're outside the swoop lane and pea gravel pit, you're off the road. It's like riding on a bicycle path and getting hit by a car (been there, done that). If you can't avoid hitting people who aren't moving you shouldn't be jumping that canopy. Planes around the landing area, wind socks, trees, etc. NEVER move. People on the ground have no way of knowing if you are going to avoid them or if they're going to move the same direction you are, so the accepted practice is for them to STAND STILL. Your first responsibility is to avoid them. Second is to avoid breaking yourself. Last is to look pretty when landing.

I like that. I've been blaming my belly size on getting too broken to exercise and too few hobbies after moving other than beer drinking to compensate for a stressful job but now I can just say that my growing gut and pant size are a simple consequence of me being at the center of the universe.

The police can either do less or more than you might when they catch the asshole. When a young punk stole my $500 snow board I found his car and talked to the Summit County sheriff's office which sent out officers to wait for him to leave the ski area parking lot. He got popped for felony ski theft, and since Mommy and Daddy's SUV was used to transport the goods they decided it was involved in the comission of a felony and therefore subject to forfeiture. Oops! The sheriffs taking a $40K SUV was _way_ more than I could have done.

Congratulations on avoiding injury. They didn't let me solo a Cessna until I had a hundred landings. With skydiving there wasn't any radio help after the first 5 jumps and I was cleared for self supervision after 7. It's amazing skydivers screw up as little as we do. Yeah, that would have gotten you a nickname. I knew a "Ram Tough" (Dodge), "Like a Rock" (Chevy), and 34B (the hanger she landed on, not bra size).

Even if you corrected that relative to American standards for semi-skilled labor, you'd still be competing with Chinese autoworkers who make under $2000 a year. The problem isn't unique to manufactured goods. American engineers are competing with guys in the Pacific Rim and Eastern Europe making $5000 a year and body shops which can still turn a profit reselling people for $20/hour instead of $100/hour. There's a _big_ crash coming. While we could be protectionists and slap tarriffs on anything shipped via boat there's no simple way to tell the difference between software or tax advice which came from America or overseas.