champu

I see the problem here and it's actually kind of funny... Here's the chain of posts if you put them back in context... I've posted that data several times, I then post: THE CLASSES ARE SPEADING EVEN MORE, SO APPARENTLY THE TAX RATES ARE TOO LENIENT. So you think taxation should be so high as to prevent people from spending? Hate to break it to you, but consumer spending counts for 70% of GDP. So you want to tax people so they stop spending and kill the LARGEST driver of the economy? That's why it could be income tax, capital gains tax (applies to sellers) and many other taxes. Let's not oversimplify the argument to sales tax. And the rich are so sick rich that it will just be an irritant, it won't diussuade spending; did it in the CLinton era? Lucky... was concerned about the classes "SPEADING" which Ron interpreted to mean "spending" and clearly replied as such. Lucky... is apparently paying so little attention to what anyone is writing in this thread that he just went on arguing to defend a point he didn't even know he was trying to make. It reminds me of the monty python sketch I came here for a good argument. No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument. An argument isn't just contradiction. It can be. No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. No it isn't.

I count to 8

I may just be having a particularly unimaginative day, but I'm having a hard time visualizing how this is happening. Can someone (Kelly? Trunk?) take a picture of a closed container packed as it is believed the malfunctioning containers were with the main flap open and the pilot chute and pilot chute side of the main bridle held up above the container (simulating the configuration and direction of forces immediately prior to the pin going through the bridle?) If I take a butter knife and lay it flat (broad side) against my chest and then move the knife in the direction it is pointing I would not expect to be impaled by it.

Well... there's a few things in this thread I could comment on, but only a couple I'm going to. In regards to the original post... Observing someone's stance on an issue, drawing a box around them and everyone who shares their stance, making an assumption about their motives for having taken up that stance, attributing these motives to a lack of empathy / social perspective, and then further attributing this lack of empathy to a developmental neurological disorder is not just an ironic thought process, it's sociopathic. A few posts back you made a comment that charity as given by individuals is no good, or maybe just not good enough, because such charity gets distributed towards people and/or causes according to the decisions of the individual. Because the decisions of an individual may include prejudices, you are arguing, the individual should be relieved of the decision making and the government should do it instead. To illustrate why this mindset is unsettling to a number of people I ask these... Are there other decisions currently made by individuals that may involve a prejudice that you feel the government should take ownership of? Are there decisions currently made by individuals that may involve a prejudice that you don't think the government should be involved in?

Like most undercover stings like this, it's a fine line, and there's not going to be enough info in a news article to determine which side of the line the agents were acting on. That's why we have courts though. Taking these articles at face value, however, it's hard to see a problem. Both men chose targets, parked the truck in position, and attempted to detonate the bombs remotely. If you assume they didn't know the bombs were fake, I think you just caught a couple dangerous people. At worst they were especially malignant and would have found someone to help them procure a bomb. At best they were useful idiots broadcasting their desire to fight and would have eventually been recruited.

As I've said, a thorough re-evaluation of priorities and a staged reduction has the promise to trim the fat out of the military budget (it happens that the former two aircraft I mentioned cost a lot less than the latter two.) Don't undo that benefit by earmarking every dollar saved for a social program. When you play teatherball there are no winners because you're playing teatherball. Deterrence only works against people, organizations or countries that consider consequence. N. Korea, Iran and the insurgents for starters don't really care about that, so they cannot be deterred. Just as a serial killer cannot be deterred, either they think they will never get caught or they don't care if they do. Sound like some Muslim extremist groups? The N Koreans back in teh 50's didn't back down, the Viet Cong didn't back down, AQ tried twice before they took down teh WTC, this deterrence is a joke. First off... throw away the idea that I'm arguing that AQ is afraid of our carrier battle groups or our fifth generation fighters, I'm not. I'm disagreeing with you painting the picture of deterrence against non-state actors as an impossible one. Sweden has troops in the ISAF, which I doubt AQ distinguishes from OEF. Also, it's funny you happened to pick Sweden as they have found other ways to "fuck with people and proliferate war".

As morbid as they are to defend, these are actually some of the things I was talking about in my post immediately preceding this one of yours. I'd rather my tax dollars be spent on more MQ-9s and RQ-4s than more C-17s and F-22s. Also, there's a collection of articles in this document that talk about strategic culture, state actors, and addressing non-state actors and their culture. It's a long document and I'm not going to make an asinine claim (like those often accompanying links to the zeitgeist movies) that you have no business commenting on it unless you've read the whole thing, I'm just throwing it out there for reference. In the meantime, remember that while deterrence isn't likely to work against a single suicide bomber, our goal isn't, and shouldn't be, to simply stop the next bomber.

I worry about small areas that don't have as loud of a voice but actually get their job done. I'm not saying reductions can't or shouldn't be done, but a lot of congress people and senators need to be re-enlightened to the fact that a world exists outside their constituency so we don't end up throwing out the baby and 20% of the bath water in order to claim "victory." Some of the loudest proponents in congress of military cutbacks don't have me convinced that they really share this concern. Proper staging of reductions has promise.

There's no such thing as a "skydive" without a skydiver, so these statements seem somewhat at odds.

The great minds of a nation and the leaders of that nation do not always coincide.

The term "Star Wars" comes from Reagan's Administration. It was used to help explain and sell the program, not discredit it. What?!?

Just that one side is hoarding....BIG TIME. ...I never said "all." You made a snide comment, effectively stabbing him in the eye with the olive branch he was extending. How the hell did you expect the conversation to pan out after that?

True, but I don't like breathing the smoke of people spinning their wheels on an issue. There's no end to how little you can accomplish by setting out simply to grow the size of a group that believes someone somewhere ought to do something about something. That isn't leadership, that's leadership theatre. Agreed. When it comes to living in society you need a weighting function to balance your interests against everyone else's. Like anything else you can go wrong in both directions to include, "me first goddammit no matter what." and also, "how dare you have nice things and save for your kids' educations, x million people out there need y million things." Agreed. Ireland. No Idea.

If doing a pin check is going to cause a premature opening then I dont want that person giving me a pin check or on the same plane as me. As a matter of fact they should be skydiving! I know this is a blanket statement but are we going to dumb down skydiving to the lowest commen denominator like school? Bill summed it up pretty well, but the potential situation I was trying to call attention to was one where there already was a problem waiting to happen, and the pin check is the last straw that caused the container to open. I was not suggesting we keep the door closed to protect ourselves from incompetent pin checkers. Although I'll tell you what, even in your situation I'd rather chew the person out and ride the plane down than chase my d-bag out the door.

It's been recommended a couple times on this forum not to perform pin checks with the door open, but it's usually buried down in the thread somewhere. It's been a few years since it has come up in discussion and I've seen several people do it recently so I figured I'd revive the advice. Pulling flaps open and poking around has the potential to dislodge a pin that wasn't seated very well, and if it's going to happen, you don't want it to happen with the door open. I think it's of greatest concern in the situations where it most commonly happens: on hot days when the door is open above 1000ft and there's a hop and pop on the load getting a pin check. Not only are both the door and the jumper's pin flaps open, but the jumper is also seated/standing right next to the door. If the person doing the check accedentially gets ahold of some bridle along with the main pin flap (and this is entirely possible on just about any rig out there) then the potential for a bad day is very high. I'm also of the opinion that the door should remain closed after everyone takes off their seatbelts at 1000ft until people stop moving around. At some dropzones, if the load is full, it is customary for one or two jumpers at the end of the benches nearest the door to move to the floor so that everyone has more room. Again, this is a lot of moving around, shifting, and leaning back against rigs right next to the door. It would be a good idea to have the door closed until you're settled in. I'm originally from the midwest. Ask anyone that knows me and I'm sure they will tell you I'm amongst the grumpiest people they know when it's hot out at the dropzone. I don't like the extra 10 seconds of being hot. I deal with it. You can deal with it too.

Who died and made you God? Have you been ordained with the authority to label people as Christians and non-Christians? I have two rubber stamps to label people that way. I keep them in a bag and pick one out randomly for each person I meet. Usually they don't even say thank you - they just go off and wash their foreheads instead and mumble angrily. A man came up to me and said, "I'd like to change your mind..." "...by hitting it with a rock," he said, "though I am not unkind."

My hang up with the way this article was posted here is that you don't necessarily need an application like the one in the article to prove the principles behind the existence of a multiverse. In fact, along the lines of Tegmark one might jokingly argue that the more specific your application, the less it demonstrates. I find it interesting that someone creates a quantum computer that is another step less academic then the last one, the article is stuck on breaking RSA (who cares? cryptography doesn't have all its eggs in that basket), and everyone's favorite dropzone.com one-man syndication team suggests this "pretty much confirms" a theory in abstract cosmology. I think it demonstrates once again how you can go wrong by looking too high or too low at a problem. Now, on the other hand, if one were to look at a problem from a superposition of both too high and too low simultaneously...

hmm... I'm watching the video and I'm not seeing the riser twisting you're talking about. It looks like you're just pushing your risers together and waiting for the twists to work themselves out. In otherwords, during the process you are still spinning yourself out of the twists relative to your canopy. (which, don't get me wrong, may have its own merits.) The riser-twisting technique I'm familiar with involves intentionally inducing line twists low in the risers, below the toggles and very quickly, to counter the twists forming above the risers. This involves no net rotation between you and your canopy which is what makes it almost effortless regardless of how many twists you have or what your canopy is doing. What it allows you to do is get your hands above the twists and get the canopy flying level, and once you've done that you have all the leverage in the world to swing yourself out of the twists you made in your risers.

I have no problem showing it, but I'm skeptical of the power PSAs have to actually change behavior. I made a PSA earlier this year that just about everyone I know has watched and I still come back into the team room after a jump halfway through the day to find four people eating in-n-out and an empty bag on the table. Back on topic... I don't text or talk without a handsfree while driving. I avoid browsing for music on my ipod/phone as well because that's a similar distraction to texting. That's why I like Genius Playlists and Pandora so much, set it up when getting ready to go and you don't have to touch it. I rarely use the phone at all while driving because I'm told it's impossible to carry on a conversation with me. I guess driving is too distracting. "What was that again? Sorry, I was changing lanes and wasn't paying attention to you." "What were you saying? Sorry, someone was tailgating the guy next to me and I was trying to make room so he wouldn't cut me off."

What we ought to do is find the two people that had their fingers cut off and make a big deal out of the sacrifice they made to vote. Sell them as heros. Villainy against the masses is a behavior the Taliban can't afford, and it's one that needs to be advertised.

Was there live air-to-ground from the freefall groups? I thought the jumbo-tron just had video from the landing areas, stabilized shots of the formations and jets from the ground, and the CReW air-to-ground.

I touched on this in the parallel thread, but Bank Robbery Shooting is not automatically premeditated. However, the death resulting from an unintentional shooting (and subsequent death) during a premeditated bank robbery could be taken as intentional (felony-murder). Correct; I tried to make it as test-like as possible. c) is the "slightly tricky answer" to get rid of whereas b) is the one you'd eliminate immediately (on account of it being the Worst. Analogy. Ever.) /edited to add... alright, alight... I'll lose the attitude. Sometimes even when I don't disagree with someone I'll give them flak about presenting an idea in a wholly unconvincing manner. MY point was that neither abortion nor the death penalty are unintentional. Also, neither group of passengers is well represented by the elaboration in the analogy regarding due process. And finally, at the core of the analogy, we have the axiomatic statements of "abortion = killing babies" and "capital punishment given due process is perfectly fine" which are both moot.

Only if you refuse to accept that abortion is the premature end of a human life-otherwise, it makes perfect sense. No, no... irrespective of my stance on abortion. But I am laughing now (yes, out loud) because the fact that the analogy in question has the power to derail a thread about terrorism into one of abortion is but one of the things that make it the Worst. Analogy. Ever. Unintentional : Premeditated :: a) Automobile Fatalities : Beltway Sniper Attacks b) Abortion : Death Penalty c) Pancreatic Cancer : Bank Robbery Shootings d) Iran Air 655 : Pan Am 103 e) Both a) and d)

murder is murder. (was lockerbie really a surprise after this iranian airliner had been shot down) No No No..... Unintentional versus premeditated. That's like saying abortion and the death sentence are the same. Killing innocent babies versus a process of adjudication from a jury of peers for a crime against society are different. If you can't grasp that, then it's okay...... I just want to know. Worst. Analogy. Ever.

All the captains and organizers did a great job, and from my point of view it went pretty smoothly. Moscone field was pretty big and, aside from getting tossed around quite a bit by turbulence, not too tricky. In any event, it's hard to beat doing a 20 way over downtown San Francisco with jets flying smoke in formation over the Golden Gate Bridge.