DrewEckhardt

There isn't a single meaning. The FAA says they start below 200 feet, turn more than 60 degrees, and have at least 45 degrees of roll or pitch change. Some DZOs call anything over 90 degrees a hook turn. Some think it's any turning speed inducing maneuver. A lot of people would say that it's an abrupt speed inducing turn. That's a bad idea because canopies change, density altitudes change, and you can get more speed with better accuracy other ways. But when "hook turns" were "black death" better ways weren't common knowledge, you couldn't take a class, and enough people got away with it enough of the time lots of us did it for oodles of fun. I've seen video of my canopy top skin (Batwings were built with psychedelic fabrics on top in a chord-wise construction, and span-wise white and green stripes on the bottom. PD's Stiletto was better but not nearly as pretty) from the ground without all of me in the picture. I always yanked on a front riser because we knew toggles weren't a good idea and it worked until I got a stiletto. It was lots of fun but there are faster, more reliable ways to get speed.

You can buy B-shares for a reasonable amount of money.

You're bettering paying off whatever you can IMMEDIATELY. Even if you have good car loan (7%? it's been a while since I bought my car) and savings rates (4% down at the local credit union which becomes less than 3% after the government gets their cut) the spread is huge.

Homes are worth what people are willing to pay for them which cannot be more than they can pay. Although home prices remained essentially constant in inflation adjusted dollars since the end of WWII with a couple of peaks 20% above the average which quickly collapsed, at the current peak we were up 80% although real income had only increased 15% over that time period. If at current interest rates people can only buy at $180K, that's the value. House prices only went higher than their value because enough people bought into loans where they didn't have to pay the costs that went with the prices. Prices will have to fall or the dollar will have to devalue another 30% for home prices to reflect their actual value. If you've owned your home for years you're paying less than you would in rent and it doesn't matter. If you bought at the peak and stay put for enough years it won't matter then either. It's only people who bought high and had to sell low that got burned. We probably should have been realistic and not thought that things would keep going up, up, up unlike what they'd done for nearly 60 years. I'm glad we only lost $10K (having no agent minimized the loss) on the home we bought and sold in 2006/2007.

Guns should only have been a matter for the states if there was no 2nd amendment and we had to rely on the 10th which leaves everything not specified to the states and people. If gun regulation was unique among the bill of rights as something the states could regulate, the second amendment would have another phrase "except that the several states may pass laws as they see fit"

Obviously, one cannot say for sure, but from what we know, a recent fatality in Indiana would have likely been prevented if the jumper's rig were equipped with a MARD: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3287376; There's also some intersection between fatalities following cutaways with failure to deploy a reserve and the sort of skydiver who skips conventional RSLs to avoid severe line twists on a potentially overloaded reserve. I won't jump a conventional RSL on fun canopies (it's so much more relaxing to chop, flip over, stop spinning, and then deploy) but would probably opt for a MARD + Stevens lanyard combination if I was buying a new rig and it was available on a rig with fun+safe main+reserve container size combination (that rules out RWS and Sunpath; Mirage has a few OK combinations).

Sure did, they were talking about doing it from a balloon next but had conerns about the rig. Its not like you can borrow a nav260 from any DZ... Or can you? Edit: Not sure about Sluggo but Mr.Bill was doing his 110th jump Lots of guys have big rigs for demos and BASE cross-training. I have an old J7 built for a Manta 288 although we've free packed down to 222s and I bet you could squeeze something bigger in there. If you wanted something that landed better with a 2-up wingloading demos from PD, etc. are cheaper than a single jump from a novelty aircraft. OTOH, don't like it when people I don't know die and really don't like my friends dieing.

it really sucks that the dems need to bail themselves out at our expence. if it wasn't for clinton starting this shit we would not be here today. this news article puts blame were and when it should be put. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/09/25/1999-ny-times-article-revealed-true-cause-current-fannie-mae-crises i don't know how to make it a clicky sorry. but this is good reading. Pity that theory has been totally discredited by the facts of this crisis. So you're saying that the NYT lied? The NYTimes article says nothing about what sub-prime loans were related to the debacle. Annecdotal news reports have people going under on their sub-prime loans where they can't refinance at an affordable rate, while the cited article has sub-prime people automatically getting a prime rate. They're not the same loans. Annecdotal reports have people going under when their interest rates reset to over 10% not just a percent over prime loans. They're not the same loans.

I plead ignorance to most of the math surrounding this stuff, I'm a right-brainer. I agree with, and entirely embrace compensation tied to performance. But...when performance went to shit, how much reduction did any CEO, manager, director, VP, or any other "higher up" of which you speak, make on their contracted compensation? To read stories of quarter-billion $$ salaries is grotesque. If you took the salaries of the top 100 earners on Wall Street over the past year (I'm not talking earners based on performance, just gross salaries), I'd bet it could sure cover a huge hunk of the proposed bailout value, yeah? They aren't getting $250M in salaries. At high levels most compensation is in stock which pays off after the fact if the company does well, hopefully in reaction to something you did as opposed to the market as a whole where high tides float all boats. Some of it is signing bonus or golden parachute. It really sucks to change jobs and find you've flushed half your paycheck for a couple years based on things that weren't true (That division you were going to run - so sorry, you can be vice head of the one we're reorganizing it into). The guys up top have enough leverage to get a fraction of what they earned at their own job if things don't work out. Hopefully it discourages their bosses (the CEO reports to the board) from being too arbitarry with them. Too bad the rest of us can't get the same thing. A lot of it is deferred compensation. If you don't need all your salary to live on it would be nice to set it aside until you do, allowing it to grow tax-deferred until that happens. Executives have that deal, where they get paid years later (when they may have retired or be closer to it) for work done last year. Most of their pay package comes from stock which went up in value hopefully due to their actions. To use one example, although Larry Ellison of Oracle reported a .5B increase in net worth he only took home a $1M salary. The 7 million new options weren't too shabby having reached $14M beyond the strike price by the end of the year. The big $541M win was exercising options he'd picked up before increasing share holder wealth $19B in the last year alone. Executive pay packages aren't relevant in the way you think they are to the collapse. The biggest pieces of executive compensation come from sustainable increases in the company's value. The executives aren't getting anything significant they didn't earn years ago in the jobs they're getting fired from or a previous job.

In the aggregate that's not the case. Credit card companies are about making lots of money. If students defaulting them cost them money they wouldn't give students cards. It's a simple game where the odds favor the house. Various risk categories get rates which mean that the credit card companies win even when more than the expected number default. Since most people don't change credit cards students might get slightly better rates, since most will graduate, get higher limits, and continue to live beyond their means running up bigger charges on their higher incomes. With a few exceptions ( rewards programs when you pay off your balance, the annual fee isn't out of line, you can put lots on there like business travel or rent, and the tiered rewards don't keep you from winning; balance transfers onto an otherwise empty card you never use for anything else where the rate was substantially less than prevailing interest, capped for life, and transfer fees were capped) the only way to win is not to play. Cheap cards charge 8%. Living within your means and saving for vacations, car repairs, etc. pays even bigger rewards than that because the government doesn't tax what you don't earn. With high taxes not paying 8% interest is like earning 13% which you can't even do in the stock market.

There's a limit to how close amplifier output can swing to either supply rail and you're starting with a DC offset. There's a limit to how fast voltage can change. Each cycle is 2 pi radians. Omega is angular velocity in radians per second. The op-amp isn't going to overshoot. You can figure out where the limit is and specify a step function where you get circuit gain at or below some value of omega and something else based on the slew rate and frequency above. You might read _Op amps for everyone_ by Ron Mancini. It's available on-line and has the back ground on everything you forgot (school as a long time ago) or didn't learn (computer science students weren't trusted with soldering irons and only had a few digital classes in the EE department).

You don't need to IAD a Mr. Bill. With the increased likelyhood of an unstable exit you probably don't want to, especially since people have gotten tangled up that way. With a big door you can have a nice, stable, Mr. Bill-to-the-wind exit where Sluggo pitches as soon as you're clear from the aircraft. Something with a slow jump run speed (Otter) will make it easier for Mr. Bill to hang on without breaking anybody (broken bones happen during Mr. Bills) Hand signals to get Mr Bill off if the exit doesn't go well would be a good idea. You don't want to build air speed and then dump (that broken bone thing). Helmets are a good idea. Hook knifes are good idea. Mr. Bill climbing on Sluggo's shoulders is a bad idea, because if he pulls on the wrong lines the canopy is going to stall hard and fast. Entanglements have happened that way. A canopy which opens nice and isn't sensitive to body position would be a better idea. Do not be Mr. Bill more than once a day. Mr Bill gets tired hanging on and may not feel his arms too well when it comes time for him to pull. I've done a few Mr. Bills including one successful one under a Stiletto 120 and one not so good one under a Batwing 134 which I might have chopped at a lower altitude. It's really not a good idea.

The market has ALWAYS made money over a 15-20 year period even when you include drops like the great depression. As it stands, you may need to out last your statistically expected lifetime by most of a decade just to earn a 0% return on your "investment". Personally I'd rather have the market. Even if it lost half its value the day I retired I'd come out ahead. It's payment for work they already did or the job they left to take their current position. Get into a high enough position and a substantial fraction of your pay is in the form of stock options or restricted stock with a vesting schedule. At the low end changing jobs can mean you forfeit half your pay check for two or three years. At the top where you theoretically have a bigger impact on the bottom line not even 1% of your take home pay could be "salary" With that sort of compensation package it really sucks to change jobs and get laid off (it took just weeks to happen to one of the financial CEOs), to find you weren't going to do the work you expected (maybe you open new markets and they want an axe man to fire everyone) or have bosses (even the CEO has masters in form of the board. They will and do replace CEOs) that won't let you do your job how you want. The guys at the top take a lot of the income they earned with them. They have enough leverage to negotiate a settlement package where they keep a fraction of their old pay if they changed jobs recently. It just comes from the new company instead of the old one. I don't blame the CEOs who were being judged on quarterly results against their peers. They played the game well according to the rules as they existed at the time, where more mortgages created and repackaged as securities meant more profits and the bond rating companies confirmed that what they were doing was sound with CDOs stamped AAA the highest rating available. I don't blame the mortgage brokers. Most sales jobs are about selling people things where the consumer arguably has better places to spend their money on like education and retirement. Diamonds (worthless without the DeBeers market manipulations), new cars (which depreciate 20% when they roll off the lot), designer clothes made for nothing in sweat shops where the value is in the embroidered label, or mortgages for bigger better properties (700 square feet and a garage is pretty nice for a couple and a cat) are essentially the same thing. I don't blame the investors. While not risk-free, the bonds were stamped AAA. I don't blame the sub-prime borrowers or congress people who opened the market to them. People with sub-prime loans were just the first to fall because they didn't have other assets which allowed them to sell at a loss or deplete their savings making payments while the market recovered. I blame the bond raters like Moodys. Although long term inflation adjusted housing values have remained constant for over 50 years with a couple of small peaks which quickly collapsed, in a decade we shot up 80% over the average and 60% beyond the last peak even though household income didn't increase 15% over the same time. If the collateral reverted to its mean value as had previously happened there'd be a lot of people seriously underwater. There had to be a reason for the increase, and the reason was the apparent cost of mortgages (option arms, teaser rates) was not real. As soon as people had to bear the full cost of their mortgages a significant fraction went under. The bond raters should have seen how the current situation differed from their models and built better ones or refused to rate where the future couldn't be predicted based on past behavior. I blame Jack and Jill investor who leveraged themselves to get more properties in spite of this. People shouldn't be investing money that they can't afford to loose. I blame Joe and Jane home owner who stretched too far and got mortgages they couldn't afford when their ARMs reset from the teaser rates or optional payment plans that allowed the balance to grow. Most people should assume that they won't be making significantly more money in the future and not take out a mortgage that will require them to spend a lot more for their housing in a few years. Lots of us have bought smaller properties (town homes or condos instead of houses), moved to more affordable locations, or remained renters because of the mess. The government probably should have done more. We put warning labels on alcohol (glad I'm not a pregnant woman) and tobacco; why not mortgages? Caution: This mortgage payment will increase to $XXXX/month within 2 years. Since property values do not always go up you may be unable to sell without bringing $XXX,XXX to the closing in cash or refinance at a better rate. That would give people the freedom to be stupid (We let people gamble in Las Vegas, where the odds always favor the house) with a hint for the ignorant that what they're doing is not the best idea.

Most Americans won't have to. The bottom two quintiles have negative income tax rates thanks to refundable credits. 57% of income tax is paid by the top 5%. I'm not saying we should tax low income earners more (at the bottom they'd literally starve) although it does mean that most people are voting for politicians with expensive ideas they don't actually have to pay for personally. Even then we aren't covering the full cost of our government spending. Our children might pay for it in the form of interest on the debt. Or we might pay for it indirectly by way of a devalued dollar that makes imports and foreign vacations more expensive. Social security replaces 25-75% of people's income at retirement when they don't hit the wage cap (high-income at the low end, low-income with non-working spouse at the high end). Many of us are already counting on the government to give back what we've loaned them from every pay check.

Any altimeter mounted on your mudflap or chest strap. The mudflap is probably harder to fall on and hurt yourself with.

Since most drop zones and boogies won't let you jump without a USPA membership, USPA membership is probably a pretty reasonable estimate. Some people jump at non-USPA DZs and may remain non-members out of principles; although they get balanced out by people not currently jumping that still have USPA memberships.

No, I just work, sleep, eat, and drink beer when I'm not doing the other things.

Your posts say otherwise. And yet on each thread, there you, and others like you, are posting saying those that wish to be able to be armed are inncorrect, foolish, juvinile....ect. For someone that claims not to care...You sure do post a lot about it. Yes. I do. Again: Look at the threads. These were replies. No one from "our" side of the pond did start a thread attacking the gun-lovers. It's always has been a reply from our side. Replies, dear Ron. Replies, just explaining why we do not want to be fully armed We do not start a thread attacking you for having guns. Your gun lovers showed a lot of incidents, in which people were killed. Let's say, on a daily basis. We do not like to have it here. So just leave us alone with your 2nd amendment, which is not matching our society at all. Go on posting shootings, killings in schools, restaurants, whatever you like - this just is confirming that you guys are wiping out yourself. At our current firearms murder rate it's going to take 5000 years to match the body count from European governments over the last 100 years. A million killed by the Turks, 20 million by the Nazis, 20 million by Russians, a few hundred thousand in Bosnia, it adds up. That's what the second amendment is about preventing.

I've tried that and found that it doesn't work with many people because their position is based on emotion. I've pointed out facts about people being safer where there are more guns, white people being safer in Seattle than Vancouver, crimes against people going up and down with new gunlaws making posession/cary harder (more crime) and easier (less), the small number of accidents, etc. I've talked about how frequently formerly law abiding citizens misuse guns, like the single crime (by a corrupt police officer) involving a legally owned machine gun. I've pointed out that only cosmetic differences separate "semi automatic assault weapons" from normal guns like a bayonet mounting lug, and that the most popular American made example isn't legal for deer hunting in most states because it's not powerful enough. After a lot of pressing, the real answer comes out as a simple emotional statement like "I just don't like guns" or "If you had children and something happened to them you'd be against guns" Having them shoot a .22 pistol doesn't help. The only thing that has converted those people is the current state of America. I've gotten some anti-gun people to conceed that we may need guns to protect ourselves from a tyranical government or the rest of the people when civilization collapses.

Nationally, at their peak inflation adjusted value homes were up 80% over where they've held pretty much steady since WWWII, and 60% over the peaks we hit in the 1970s and 1980s. The first 20-25% of the eventual decline we need does not make for a good time to buy. Obviously there are local exceptions (some places you can buy a house for $125K, rent it, and make the mortgage payments.

Huh? No dangerous hobbies that is. When you apply for an individual insurane policy the rates are all about you. When the insurance company knows that you have a healthy weight, test negative for drugs, have normal kidney function,etc. they can give you a term life rate half what you'd have spent through your group plan which assumes an average risk of having health problems. OTOH, if you're a bigger statistical risk than average you might find yourself spending $2500 more a year when the insurance company knows you have a 100% chance of skydiving on a regular basis instead of .01% (30,000 USPA members out of 300,000,000 people).

Your employer. Group plans assume you have only an average chance (1 in 10,000) of being a skydiver and are priced less than individual plans where they know you have a 100% chance of jumping. Group plans are only a bad value when you have average health and dangerous hobbies.

I think making *reasonable* attempts to help folks keep a modest house to live in is more palatable than making any attempts to help people keep a second or third house. Roof over the head = basic need Rental properties = luxury Blues, Dave The modest (2-3 bedrooms) houses I've seen for sale have all listed for $800-1.4M. If some one stretched for one of those even though they couldn't afford fully amortized payments but could squeak by on an option arm instead of buying a $500K condo or renting a $1500-$2K/month apartment do they deserve to be bailed out? Or should the government let the forclosure happen and prices fall 80% to their long term inflation-adjusted average price which has held steady apart from a few small peaks so that people who had enough self control to stay out of the market craziness can once again afford homes? Witholding hosues from the people who behaved themselves seems less fair to me.

No. Two relatively centrist parties are the inevitable side effect of a first-past-the-post voting system. Contrasting our Democrats and Republicans against the parties in countries with real proportional representation will show that the Democrats aren't that Liberal and Republicans aren't that conservative. When you want viable political parties that are sufficiently different you need proportional representation. Assuming that happened and Libertarians voted for "their" party we'd end up with 65 Libertarian representatives and 15 senators in the mix. To apply that to the executive branch we'd need co-presidents.

I bought my first rig for $1700 used. Interest was $0/month for 0 months. Depreciation wasn't more than a couple hundred dollars total when I sold the main in less than 100 jumps and container after 2-3 years. There are lots of really nice rigs with a few hundred jumps selling for $3-$4K. How low are you going to have to drop your asking price to sell it quickly when you down size?