champu

Oh, it'd definitely be a huge pain in the ass. But why would obtaining a personally tailored assessment of risk of a tangential negative interaction when receiving a service be anything but a huge pain in the ass? Accomplishing what people say they want is usually possible but is often difficult and requires distributed effort. Usually there's an easier centralized way that does anywhere from slightly worse to a completely ineffective job at accomplishing the stated goal. I think the decision to support such a centralized measure hangs much more prominently on the level of sacrifice required by the proponent (zero recurring effort is pretty attractive) than it does on the effectiveness or shortcomings of the measure.

I think that's par for the course at most large operations, which is why I said "a couple phone calls." If you called a dropzone back after checking on their staff and said, "Hey, I want to do a tandem, but only if I receieve assurance my instructor won't be Gropey McGee because he's a registered sex offender" then either they will work with you or if they don't then you (as someone who checks on people in this way) wouldn't want to jump there anyway. If that's the decision that we're talking about before someone goes on a tandem with someone else, and we all agree the information in the registry isn't a perfect way to make that decision, then I don't follow why anyone would choose to deligate that decision to a licensing organization.

As a data point, I have a BASE canopy called a "Rock Dragon" and it does not encourage me to land in jagged boulder fields nor biff into cliff faces.

You don't have to be sorry for anything. I don't think anyone here is opposed to your overall stated goal of keeping rapists from being tandem instructors. I am curious as to why you ignored my suggestion of letting the tandem student do their own research though. The registry as it exists today and a couple phone calls to the dropzone give prospective tandem students the tools they need to take on as much or as little risk with respect to a tandem instructor's presence on the national registry, and for what, as each individual tandem student desires. In fact, people can do this for as many interactions in their life as they so choose. Success or failure at navigating life without having to interact with sex offenders is on them. When you demand that these decisions get moved to the DZO, or to a T/E, or to a gear manufacturer, or to the USPA, or to the FAA, what you're demanding is that someone else make a crappy sweeping decision based on flawed information so that you don't have to, either as an ego defense mechanism or just laziness.

I think you want to have your cake and eat it too. You've demonstrated through your own series of comments the problem with the registry. Everyone who "shouldn't" be on it but is (according to some loose consensus on dropzone.com) should have just "gotten a better lawyer" and yet you still don't trust people on the list for minor offenses because they may have "gotten a better [lawyer]." If this is all about lawyers (which I agree, it largely is) rather than about what people have done, why would you want to push decisions based on this flawed data set further up a chain of authority (DZO -> T/E -> USPA -> etc.) where a wrong decision does more damage? Why don't you just let tandem students do their own research and decide for themselves? If it's a woman who was a victim of sexual assault and she doesn't want to take any chances she can look up the whole dropzone and, hey, if she refuses to jump there if the part time janitorial woman who cleans the bathrooms once a week flashed her breasts at Marti Gras two decades ago, that's her call.

That game was ridiculous, I'm pretty disappointed about the play on which it ended. Congrats to Kings fans, you get to watch four more games on your way to the cup. Blackhawks will be back for it next year.

I agree that the questionnaire is pretty simplistic/forward even as online personality tests go. That said, the undue negative connotation around being any degree of "psychopathic" outweighs the misunderstanding the authors may have regarding why skydivers skydive.

There's a danger in using an entity you don't like, or at the very least don't identify with, as a case study for what any entity should or shouldn't be allowed to do. I'm not sure what your "yes, in some cases" choice even means in response to the question "should x be allowed to sue y?"

How could that possibly be? You just started the thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EY7lYRneHc

Interesting, though not surprising, to see it using APAS rather than CBM.

The justice system may not always get things right, and punishment should never be about revenge, but prison rape is still fitting, right folks? /added another link /and removed one... the post of Andy's I had linked to couldn't really be construed as supporting it

Does the location determine the skills of the surgeon? Do his patients fare less if he operates in Los Angles. I never realized the success of surgery was determined by what city it was performed in. Not so much the city in general, but Rush Medical Center is where I'd go for joint surgery. My sister is an orthopedic PA and has been putting knees and feet back together again there for about ten years.

No, negligence in any form cannot be raised to a criminal offense with the right attorney. Only state, federal, or county appointed prosecutors can instigate criminal charges. You are not a lawyer, and you have no idea what you are talking about. You are flat out wrong. Give it up. I had read his original comment as, "Negligence in any form can be raised to criminal with the right [district] attorney." and so thought you were being kinda harsh, but given his follow up post I may have been giving him too much credit.

I think MARDs in general and the skyhook are good ideas and solid improvements on the standard RSL design. I'm not convinced, however, that the Collin's lanyard addresses anything other than gear maintenance / construction errors and I'm not comfortable with the added complexity and potential failure modes it creates. /edited: oops, phone typos.

Well, they didn't do nothing in his case. Evidently they saw some of his YouTube videos and called the police to go check on him... ...but failed to share the videos with the police. Police are not psychiatrists so unless they find newspaper clippings, strings, and pushpins all over the walls or he's having a schizophrenic episode when they get there it's not likely they were going to bring him in for being crazy. The ironic thing about a loner posting videos threatening violence on his or her YouTube channel is that they probably have very few if any subscribers so it's unlikely many people will see it and send it to authorities. Edited to add: I find the statement from the family that was given through their attorney shortly after the rampage that they are "staunchly against guns" to be in very poor taste.

I think this is likely where you'd open yourself up to liability. You can't have an official policy of what constitutes a "minor sex offense" and that's exactly what you'd be doing if you checked the registry and then only denied the application for a selection of specific crimes.

uh, the Guardian and the FBI aren't the same thing, and this citation doesn't show CA at 40th lowest for gun deaths (when the data clearly shows it should be 33rd) and says nothing about gun laws. It does show quite clearly that whatever you were posting from prior, it did include suicides because CA, per the Guardian, has a rate of 3.25/100k instead of 9. And instead of having a lower than average gun death rate, it has a worse than average (2.75), trailing 31 states. I remember in this thread there was an article posted where the author combined a bunch of rankings in a goofy way which is probably what happened in jclalor's original list as well. It's easier to correlate "permissive gun laws" with gun violence when one of the metrics you use to indicate gun violence is permissive gun laws.

So... ...you feel that in general minimum wage or near-minimum wage workers do not have jobs aligned to their value potential in the economy, and you'd propose using a minimum wage hike to equalize people's pay which will shake up the snow globe and people will land in jobs more suited to their capabilities?

Insanity is repeatedly voting for politicians who are more worried about getting more and more types of firearms classified as assault weapons and tracking how many rounds of ammunition people buy and expecting it to suddenly keep people from flipping out because they didn't seek mental help or get directed to mental help.

There is no right to carry in California. It's a "may issue" state which means that your county sheriff can and will tell you to piss off at his or her whim if you apply for a carry permit. So while there are some shortfalls that lead to this tragedy, suffice it to say I find it a stretch to blame right-to-carry advocates.

California legislators' approach to gun control laws make the TSA's approach to airline security look top notch. Both are reactionary and respond to anecdotal events, but at least when someone tries to blow up a plane with a bomb in their shoe, the TSA starts x-raying shoes. The California Senate would just ban boots and gloves.

If so, it's because he just bought a home here, which means he chose to take on this tax. Otherwise, it can only increase 2% per year, and it's 1-~1.2% of the purchase price of the home. This is substantially lower than many states, and with the guarantee of consistency. I've seen others as high as 4%. Of course, LA and California real estate is pricier, so mine comes close to 10k/year. But I know it will still be that way in 20 years. Indeed, there are many things that are much more expensive about California, including real estate, but residential property tax rates are generally pretty reasonable. My home (in L.A. County) was worth about the same as my dad's house when he sold it a year ago (in Cook County, IL) and he was paying over three times what I pay in property taxes. (and I bought in 2010 whereas he'd had that place since '89) The students / teacher ratio is about the same in classrooms and I have beaches, so I think I'm getting a better deal.

A little over ten years ago I was holding two job offers. One was in Ft Lauderdale and the other was in Southern California. There were a lot of factors to consider but the number of tech companies in general in California (and related to space in particular) in case I wanted to move was a pretty big one. I appreciate what Musk does for the space industry in bringing launch costs down, but from what I understand working for him is better for your resume than your bank account or your blood pressure. /eta: I will say this though, I was at King Harbor Brewing Co. with some coworkers for happy hour a couple weeks ago and a bus rolled up and out walked about two dozen SpaceX employees, half of them with their badges still on to have a round... so he's getting something right.

(a) Doctor, Doctor! it hurts when I do THIS! (b) __________________________________ . "Life ... in Oklahoma."