DrewEckhardt

Yeah, I don't understand why Livendive can see so much of Obama's bullshit and still keep saying that he's got his vote, but is "losing points." Just how many points does Obama have to lose with Livendive before he actually loses his vote? For lots of us Obama doesn't loose our vote unless McCain has a stroke, Palin resigns from the race, and the Republicans run some one like Ron Paul instead. Even though he smells like liberal Lindberger.

The NRA isn't about gun rights. They're for gun safety, hunting rights, firearms competition, and political power. They support gun-control when doing so helps their sporting contingent or political aspirations as in the National Firearms Act of 1934, Gun Control Act of 1968 or granting better letter grades to anti-gun Republicans than pro-gun independants or more neutral Democrats. I stopped renewing my membership after reading an election report card and a separate instance where they ignored some significant local issue while embelishing .something unimportant. Come to think of it they're a lot like the Republicans. Reagan signed the 1986 ban. Bush 41 was responsible for the 1989 import ban. Bush 43 decided that something like the 1994 ban could be applied to pre-existing magazines which were outside the country. The Republicans talked about being pro-gun and a repeal of the 1994 ban when they lacked the votes to override a presidential veto but stopped once Bush 43 was elected and they could actually do something. While the NRA and Republicans sometimes slow the erosion of gun rights they rarely reclaim ground or move forwards. With or without the NRA the end result is going to be the same; they just change how long it takes to get there and the speed change isn't always slower. If you want to belong to an actual gun rights organization you need to join JPFO or GOA. Regardless of what cards end up in your wallet, you need to read the actual text of proposed legislation, cross-reference it with the legal code being modified (which is really easy now that everything is on the web), and think about how it will be used and abused in the future because I've yet to see a politician, group or press office which didn't filter and spin according to their own agenda. A few are honest about that spin (Time magazine said they were no longer going to be neutral in the debate about gun control) but most aren't. Personally I'm getting sick of the whole thing. There are bigger problems than guns. If it's crime you're worried about, drunk driving does more people in than hand guns. If it's what people do to themselves, more people commit suicide slowly with McDonalds and Marlboros than quickly with guns. If it's accidents, household cleaning supplies are a bigger problem. People should get some perspective. OTOH, maybe I should just accept the nanny state and try for things that might make a difference in my life. If people are going to get their panties in a knot over my sport utility rifles and ban them, I could get upset about their sport utility vehicles which are more likely to kill me than my guns them even if I had an average chance of being a convicted felon belonging to a street gang. The current neighborhood limit is 6000 pounds on vehicles; maybe I can get that dropped to 4000 pounds. Second hand smoke is a bigger threat to me too. One of the neighboring towns is working on banning smoking in parks; that would smell nicer. Fat people too lazy to cook for themselves and without a loving spouse to feed them are driving up my taxes when they get heart attacks binging on fast food; how about a crack down on chain restaurants which displace local joints with decent menus? The state ban on trans-fat is just a start - even without real grease a 1500 calorie double cheese burger large Coke large fry combo is just too much. That's what it boils down to. Once it's appropriate to infringe on other peoples' rights because it might make some difference in public safety it's just a question of how far you go. We'd all have more fun if we realized this and undid the damage which has already happened.

The lightly tapered used 230 of your choice (Lotus, Omega, Pilot, Sabre 2, Safire, Silhoutte in alphabetical order) would be the perfect place to start. Whatever is affordable and available in your preferred cell count would be next. A Triathlon or Sabre 230 would do if money is really tight. Something with only 200 jumps on the line set would be ideal, because then you can make a couple hundred jumps and it'll be easy to sell because the next guy won't have to reline it. If you get to 175 pounds and some more jumps a 190 or 210 might be appropriate but a pound per square foot (with the rig weighing 25 pounds) is a generally acceptable place to start. If you're progressing poorly listen to instructors who tell you to jump something bigger, but having lost count of the number of broken bones (mostly femurs and tibia/fibulas, I only knew one guy who got paralyzed) I've seen nearly all by people who exceeded Brian Germain's recomendations I'd take his Wingloading Never Exceed formula (10,000 jumps, teaches canopy flight, designs parachutes, studied sports psychology) over local skydiving instructors ' comments about going smaller regardless of whether they knew me personally. A rig made in the last decade which fits it and a matching reserve size would be good. Every recent rig will be fine for any sort of flying you want to do although people will have their preferences. PD reserves have better reinforcement than a lot of older designs and land nicer. A 235 would be the most appropriate size at your current weight; a 193 if you get down to 200 pounds out the door. Other designs will land well enough at your wingloading although having seen one unreinforced reserve split into 2 and 5 cell pieces connected only at the tail seam I think having a modern reserve with span-wise reinforcing tapes that's more likely to survive an over-speed Cypres fire is a very good idea. PISA added reinforcing tapes to the Tempo in 2001 (older ones don't have them). The Raven R-Max was the first Precision design to have span-wise tapes (the -M had span-wise construction which was better than nothing). The Aerodyne Smart is new and has decent reinforcement. You want a Cypres. It'll run about $12/month in depreciation and maintenance. Lots of people (even a jumbo jet captain) who should know better end up having too much fun and neglect to have their parachutes open by a thousand feet. I've seen one fire where the woman dislocated her shoulder and didn't bother pulling with the other hand. I've seen two fire because people got knocked out only one of whom was doing blatantly stupid things, one five second reserve ride without a cypres, and had one friend go in with no cypres and no pull. Assuming you keep jumping and don't suffer from abnormally low levels of testosterone poisoning you'll want something faster in the next year. That's fine, but what will be appropriate then isn't now. When you're ready to down size and sell your old main - If you got a fair deal buying and selling, you'll have spent $1/jump in depreciation - If you got a good deal, you'll break even when you sell - If you got a great deal, you'll make a small profit Most rigs with the main closing loop mounted on the bottom of the reserve container or floor of the main pack tray will accomodate two down sizes. After that you figure out what you really want, come up with a nice color scheme, and pony up the pennies (potentially 45,000 of them) for the new container+reserve+AAD combination of your choice. After up to six months of waiting it'll show up, but that's OK because you could get a decade plus out of it and you have something to jump while waiting for the skydivers building it to stop jumping and get to work. Smaller parachutes are progressively more of a handful; eventually you'll figure out a size you'll want indefinitely and buy a new main in your colors.

Bush 41 arguably won against Kerry because guys would rather have a beer with him as a manly man (who wears a mouth guard mountain biking) instead of that effeminate snob Kerry (who actually served in Vietnam). That's what gets people elected in this country. In this election we have the Harvard Law Review editor versus some one who kills and eats moose with boobs. Tough choice. Then there are the actual issues which matter. For lots of us that's abortion, guns, and taxes. Some people would argue Obama is a baby killer. He supports banning sport-utility guns. Allowing the Bush 43 tax cuts to expire is a tax increase now (next year doesn't matter). How stupid Palin is, McCain's history, and the party platforms aren't too relevant to much of the country.

Most annecodtal stories in the press read something like: John or Jane Doe got a sub-prime mortgage with a teaser rate they could afford and regular rate that they couldn't when applying Fannie/Freddie's conforming 28/36 housing cost/total debt percentages to their income. The lender told them that if their credit was better by the time they got to the unaffordable stage they could refinance, without saying that the loan may still be unaffordable (while there was only a 1.3% surcharge for subprime mortgages in 2007, some of these loans were startting at 0-2% when 30 year fixed prime mortages were 5.5-6%) or guaranteeing it would be an option. It doesn't appear to have been a problem of more sub-prime people getting mortgages and then being unable to make the original payments. I don't blame the writing of more sub-prime loans. They were just the first to go because they lacked substantial savings to fall back on when reality hit. The same thing is going to happen will happen to early-career bay area people as the jumbo option arms they needed to buy reset, become unaffordable, and they exhaust their 401ks. Home prices were up 60% over any previous inflation adjustead peak in the last 100 years and 80% over the long-term average in the last 60 years (things were more expensive in the early 1900s because we didn't have mass production). Since wages haven't inreased (this decade didn't line up with womens' acceptance into the work place and the birth of DINKs) that means costs had to have decreased which was only true in the short term given teaser interest rates and option mortgages that let borrowers make less than full interest payments.

You want to avoid situations in the future where you can't skydive as much because you're paying credit card interest or a higher mortgage (because you used your available credit). The standard answer here is 1) Make more money, preferably by learning to pack parachutes. It pays up to $60/hour with some practice, in cash if the source is individuals. 2) Cut other expenses. 1/3 of a 3-bedroom property with room mates can net you 4 jumps a week compared to a one bedroom apartment. Fast food is much more expensive than sandwiches made from nice deli meats, bakery bread, and fresh sandwich vegies and doesn't taste nearly as good. Biking to work and on errands instead of driving will net you a jump every couple weeks and you won't have to buy new jumpsuits because you got fat. Netflix is half the price of a cable package with something worth watching. Etc. $1 towards your 401K or IRA in your 20s does as much good as $2 in your 30s or $4 in your 40s without a corporate match. A match may make $1 now go as far as $6 at 40. You want the freedom to stop working full-time and enjoy things like skydiving when you're still young enough to be mobile.

>When the cut is made. (flying slow with shifting weight) When bad things happen and the pilot doesn't screw up (example: pull out too hard and rip the wings off, fail to recover from a flat spin) too badly it's not a real issue. I've been upside down in a King-Air. Apart from the people I was going to jump with getting scared and bailing out after the plane was back right side up it wasn't a big deal. Sure climbed quickly going back up to 12,500 feet AGL.

Group plans work that way. There's a guaranteed issue amount and/or salary multiple. Underwriting questions only get asked and considered for policy values beyond the cap. With my current group plan the number is a flat $100K. The last job was 4X salary on life insurance. I've yet to see an extreme sports exclusion on a group plan. All of them since 9/11 have excluded acts of war and terrorism.

Orange or lemon? Tomato and garlic (maybe with a little red onion) marmalades are nice on crostini.

You don't want to do that. Anything they find will go on your permanent record. Anything you disclose to a life insurance company or which gets found in a health screen ends up in the MIB (http://www.mib.com) database which is checked by other insurance companies. Health insurance companies also feed into it. A doctor friend of a friend suggested getting a big term life insurance policy before any tests that MIGHT find something and cancelling in the rescission period when it works out OK, because after your health insurance finds out about anything major there will be no way you'll ever get a cheap policy again. OTOH, 80-85% of insurance applications don't result in a negative database entry. "The only time an insurance company would report information about you to MIB would be if a medical condition, test result or other information that would affect your health or longevity were found during the underwriting of your application. Most people do not have an MIB record. Out of every 100 insurance applications, only about 15-20 result in an MIB record." You could just take your chances.

A healthy start on skydiving is about $20,000 in the first three years (student program, used gear, jumpsuits, 500 jumps, some training and travel). That's in the United States. Other countries are more expensive. Get through school, find a career, have fun, and your parents will get over it. Statistically speaking you're more likely to get injured skiing and die skydiving. Fatal skydiving plane crashes are also more common than fatal ski lift accidents.

At least they're cutting out the middle man. The Republicans do the same thing less efficiently by indirecting through companies like KBR and Boeing. Of course, with half the country only covering 3% of the income tax burden needed to cover most of the bill things aren't going to change regardless of who gets ellected.

When Obama says he'll "cut taxes." he means that he'll cut taxes from what they'd otherwise be when the Bush 43 tax cuts expire. For some of us, that means an increase compared to what we're paying now. The top 5% of earners cover 57% of the income taxes and top 1% 37% of taxes. Where Obama admits to raising taxes there's a bigger pool to draw from than where he claims to be cutting.

If the canopy is small for the bag you can make a long, hard tube shape that tends to catch in the corners of the main pack tray and cause line twists if one end pops out before the other where the bulk of a pro-pack would be uniformly distributed and less snaggy. Otherwise there's no problem.

One. In the 80's a corrupt police officer in Ohio used his personally owned MAC to murder an informant.

Not if it was made before May, 1986 and not registered as a dealer sample. In that case the transfer gets approved by a chief law enforcement officer, the gun gets registered, and transfer tax paid.

We can agree on that... BUT on the whole. the tax structure in this country FAVORS those who indentify themselves as rich. The tax structure in this country favors the poor, with the lowest two quintiles having negative real income tax rates due to refundable tax credits while the wealthy pay up to 43%. Although one can claim that dividends are taxed at a lower rate than earned income, this isn't the case because most C-corp profits have been taxed at 34% before the left overs are taxed again at the 15% dividend rate thus yielding an aggregate rate over 43%. When it comes to capital gains, the poor are exempt while the wealthy pay 15% on long term capital gains. The poor's favorable treatment carries forward into retirement, where they get a better return on their investment in Social Security. Where those at the top only have 24.8% of their wages replaced by social security up to the cap, those at the bottom who are being taxed at the same rate have a 53.6% replacement and the average worker has 39.9% of his working wages covered at retirement. You can argue about whether this is good (the poor would literally starve if taxed at the same effective rate as the wealthy) or bad (when you're not paying income tax there's no direct incentive to be against increased spending that the taxes that should go with that) but can't contradict the simple numbers.

I have always wanted a board stretcher. One with a lot of sharp teeth to grab the board just right, but they have always been just out of my grasp. You can stretch boards with a saw (table saw and tapering jig for thin boards; bandsaw for wider ones or really thick ones that get resawn first, wood glue, clamps, and planer. Cut through the boards diagonally with a 10:1 slope in a bunch of places alternating directions, scarf joint them back together with some separation, and plane back to thickness.

Bacon stretcher, so your bacon doesn't curl up and cooks to a uniform consistency. Right and left handed smoke shifters, so the smoke doesn't get in your eyes when you grill regardless of whether youo are right or left handed.

With what other requirements? Do you want to lug the thing around on a bicycle? Do you want a desktop replacement you can use in morethan one room? Do you want a lot of battery life to watch DVDs on trans-oceanic flights? Do you use it for software development or just visiting web sites? I bought a Dell 1420 because it's reasonably small, big enough to do real work, fits 4G of memory, has a dual core processor for software development, and a 9 cell battery pack that stays charged through most longer business meetings. I'd have spent a lot less money and gotten a bigger screen if I needed something for around the house.

Quote . . . Under McCain's proposals, by contrast—including an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all taxpayers, a corporate tax cut, and a larger reduction in estate taxes than Obama would support—far more of the benefits would go to the top. If his plans went into effect in 2009, married couples in the bottom fifth of the population would see aftertax income go up just 0.2%, while those in the next quintile would see a 0.7% hike. But those in the top quintile would see a bump up in aftertax income of 2.7%. McCain's package is more fair when you ignore what will have to happen in the future to pay interest on his debt. On average the bottom two quintiles are getting money from the government in the form of refundable income tax credits (average income tax rates were -5 and -2.8% in 2007). By the top quintile you've reached a 14.5% effective income tax rate - 5X the middle quintile's rate and twice the second highest quintile. So if you were to cut effective tax rates by a fair fifth, the top quintile woould keep nearly 3% more of their income, the third quintile would do a bit better than .5% more, and the people not paying income tax would have a 0% change.

Because sometimes students get overwhelmed by the experience, stop thinking, and do stupid things. When they have to deal with malfunctions, fly, and land all by themselves it's more likely to lead to broken bones and soft tissue damage like this: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3326833;page=unread#unread than if they're on a tandem where the instructor will handle all real (and perceived) emergencies and they'll be fine unless they plant their feet and break their legs. After a recent tandem where they didn't freak out, they'll probably not be too overwhelmed by freefall and perform well enough to not break themselves. It's a smart idea. Fixed wing pilots often aren't allowed to land without an instructor beside them until their 100th try. When skydiving it's a good idea to skip landing by yourself until jump 2.

Sure. Cables with too little slack often don't come loose until you bend to far or something gets bumped, both things which are likely when people are on their way out of the plane. I've seen more reserve cable problems discovered the hardway (with premature openings) than I have problems found in the plane. Cutaways could be the same. On a flat two-way you should be very up close and personal, in a good position to see a three-ring that's flopping around.

"Fees" are creative "revenue enhancers," or, in plain English, taxes. Frequently when somebody says something akin to "Read my lips, no new taxes," they'll have to find some way of getting around their gaff to pay for things. Both sides of the aisle have called taxes various things over the years. I personally think it's bullshit because it makes it difficult to keep track of how many ways and how many times every dollar you earn is really taxed. Congress ceding legislative authority to executive branch agencies with rule or regulation making authority is one of my peeves. Where there are going to be civil or criminal penalties for non-compliance as with a law, call it a law and make it clear the legislative hurdles that entails. "Fees" are just a minor example of where this p roblem exists.

RIGHT! In the 2004 election 15% of people voting were Libertarians. We now have 65 representatives and fifteen senators serving in the US Congress.