dorbie

It is a ponzi scheme but even ponzi schemes can work while there's a growing supply of new investors. Unfortunately in this case there isn't. The past and current recipients a.k.a. the greatest generation (the ones our elected representatives are eternally terrified of pissing off), have been living off the backs of their children and grandchildren years. For years we've known of the problem of the retirement of the baby boomers(their children), this is when the supply of investors in the ponzi scheme dries up and the liabilities start to pile up. Even if the supply of investors were stable it makes no sense, you could never get more out of the scheme than you put in without it investing to get some sort of growth or without it accumulating debt. Of course no portion of any SS contribution is ever invested and it's way too late for investment to avert the looming catastrophe.

BEER!

Dude if you bend down and whisper anywhere near my ass while I'm taking a dump we're going to come to blows.

Yup you get a lot of that. The grizzled act, some can't resist it, others can. It's a measure of character IMHO. When someone brings shit like that up to make a point, unless it's some kind of genuine personal catharsis or has some valid reason (training, safety etc.), it says a lot about their character. I just move on. I have no desire to see anyone go in and I have no desire to be like the blowhard who can't resist bringing it up. Everyone experiences shit in their lifetime. Hoping you're "in on" a bad experience has got to be bad for your karma and is a sign of a troubled mind.

Nobody can exceed the 401k federal limits set at $14k this year (+ catchup for anyone >50 yrs old). Employer matching contribs don't count towards this total. You're getting tax deferred on those contributions, they're not going to let you contribute whatever you like :-) The % limit is plan to plan but I've been in plans with flexible % limits month to month but with an annual cap of 10%, upping your % would only reduce your employer matching payments capped on a monthly or quarterly basis.

The advice on biplane is different from side by side. Your comments on a dominant canopy suggests you're confusing the two scenarios. Read the relevant section in the SIM, (it's about one page) & talk to your instructors.

Especially when their arm is increasing in weight under the same Gs.

Dude, that's fucked up right there. Be careful what you wish for.

/\/\/\/, ditto.

My first hop n' pop was from 3500 ft (at my request)soon after AFF. My first two attempts to pull I rolled. 3rd attempt I was probably touch & go with my student cypres. It did look low but in stuffing up my signoff I realized you have a lot of time especially in that first 1k. That doesn't mean I'm going to use up most of my contingency before I get out the plane on any casual jump. That altitude is not for when things go right. Anything wrong with the aircraft and the rules change for me. I'm getting out if I think I have time to pull silver. That's an intellectual decision not a visceral one but so was my AFF Level 1.

There are multiple ancillary issues that make this particularly worrying. If this was New Zeland or some such place then frankly I wouldn't lose sleep, but alas it ain't NZ it's NK. Maybe we can cut a package deal with China, let them take Taiwan if they promise to invade NK.

You're right that I decided not to exit that plane because of my training, tempered with what little experience I have. It's difficult to see where anyone would be with alternative training and no minimums, but at some point you know what your canopy does and you've been at 1k or 1.5k over the DZ and you think holy shit I'd hate to chop here and you adjust your numbers accordingly. A high speed mal with 5 seconds to live and a compromised notion of hard deck is not a situation I want to get myself in if I can help it. I pretty much agree with everything you've written in your post, although I wouldn't have exited without another few hundred feet (just me).

Sparkey, Old Chinese saying; "When the finger points at the moon the fool points at the finger."

Wrong, you read exactly what you wanted into my post to arrive at an unsupportable conclusion. If I'd gotten out of the plane through peer pressure then I'd have been a sheep. My decision not to exit was based on the fact that it's frigging insane to exit below or near what my preconceived notion of where my hard deck is based on my comfort level w.r.t. executing EPs under non ideal circumstances, add to that my occasionally snivelly canopy (especially on hop & pops) and I didn't want my first cutaway decision to be made as I snivelled through 1000. Where's my hard deck? Should I change my contingencies just because I exited lower, that's nuts. Jumping out & pulling silver would equally dumb but virtually guaranteed for any reasonable hard deck (that I'm comfortable with) and my canopy even with the forward motion of the plane. Jumping ain't about paring away your margin of error until you have none left (at least for me YMMV). Your post is absolutly typical of the BSR irrationality that's out there. Any sign that a regulation that's routinely flouted, unenforcable and never enforced had any impact despite evidence and testimony to the contrary is seized upon as a success story. Facts BAD, BSR GOOD, ugh. But yea all those smart jumpers riding the load down are just slaves to the BSRs. Afterall nobody's ever died for the want of altitude executing their EPs, only a fool would entertain the thought that you might need the extra altitude, mains are so reliable afterall.

Call me a bit uninformed, but despite my experience in this particular area, I'm having a hard time figuring out to what, exactly, you are referring; could you help me out a bit and fill me in? Links to references would also be tremendously helpful. This is not actually true, Bill Clinton entered into a aid agreement where the US supplied NK with aid in exchange for ceasing all enrichment and warhead development. Years later the NK government pretty much announced to the Bush administration (initially only through diplomatic channels) that they'd been working on nukes all along and had a couple or were about to have enough material for a couple of nukes (the story varied). This was their insane attempt at brinkmanship to try to get the US to give more aid. It prompted Bush's hard stance on multilateral talks NK who insisted on billateral talks with the USA (deep pockets) presumably because it worked for them the last time, unfortunately for them it proved spectacularly unsuccessful for the U.S. given that they went ahead and developed their nukes anyway. So here we are today, trying to get NK's good neighbours to force them to play nice. The right wing nuts claim Clinton was duped/hoodwinked, but that's a bit unkind, although Kerry's professed willingness to jump back into a billateral deal does tarnish the left on this, but it's more a case of anything that defined a position different from Bush. IMHO bending over on NK nuke billateral diplomacy for Pyongyang in the TV debate was the worst think Kerry did. From what I've read there was some apparent cross administration complicity in the state department trying to give NK the benefit of the doubt for years even when non proliferation inspectors were turning up violations. Probably trying to keep the deal alive at all costs with a solid helping of wishful thinking. This bubble finally burst big time when NK flat out admitted they'd been cheating. What happens next is anyone's guess. I predict a bad outcome.

Bill, once again you turn logic on it's head. The guy is a CO, not a soldier, and you posted it as a counterpoint to the initial post because it presents the conduct of our troops in Iraq in a highly negative light. Despite your protests it is one sided and focuses entirely on a negative presentation of isolated incidents if we are even to believe a CO who stood by and did nothing about the illegal conduct he witnessed. As for supporting only the troops that support my position, that's the pot calling the kettle black, it's a rare occasion when you manage to find a soldier to support, l and it's utterly ludicrous to suggest I'm selective in my support because I don't support a CO concocting about as one sided and negative an account as is possible. What a joke.

Carefull Bill, you'll be calling them child killers and spitting on them next. All that skepticism you normally exhibit goes right out the window when you like the story, and when the story is bashing U.S. troops you love it. Support for the war and our troops does not equate for support for outrageous conduct by ill disciplined units that should be prosecuted. But it's no kind of support when you jump on any negative opportunity. I don't have blind faith in a guy who got caught on the hop, shipped to Iraq and for all I know may have made up crap to swing a CO discharge. This guy claims to have witnessed a lot of illegal conduct and done absolutely squat about it except leave then blab to the press. The real issue here is focus. There are lots of stories from Iraq and we incessantly accentuate the negative. Every campaign has illegal conduct, putting troops in charge of anything for very long can degenerate into a bad situation without discipline. It's happened with UK troops and they've been aggressively court-marshalled where there's evidence. The thing that pisses me off most about some of these stories is that if it's true these squaddies are sowing the seeds for the death of more troops and their own prolonged involvement. Most of them are a lot smarter than that, and that's why I'm confident these are one sided versions of isolated incidents. It's kinda like the reports that a US soldier had shot a surrendering, unarmed, wounded Iraqi. That's one side of the story that left a lot of important details out like the guy seemed to be feigning death and their unit being attacked by similar insurgents playing possum and then attacking with IEDs. That's before you even consider the guy was an illegal combatant with no legal rights who in past conflicts would have been hanged from the nearest lamp post by U.S. troops wounded or not, as would most of the guys in the prison for fighting using guerilla tactics after a regime has fallen. How far we've progressed.

Robert Fisk is a radical left wing journalist working for the Daily Mirror (or he did), which in itself is just a little bit more left and anti-American than the Soviet era Pravda. On the political spectrum he's as biased, left wing and anti-American as it is possible to find. Claiming this guy is reputable used the word "reputable" very loosely. At least Fisk is consistent though, his radical anti-Americanism isn't a new thing for him, he was radically anti-American during the Afghan campaign and absolutely opposed any American imperialist brutality aimed directly at the mass murderers and conspirators who had struck America. He was so anti-American that when he was almost lynched by a mob of Afghan refugees [while he was trying to uncover a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan that never materialized for him (between complaints about the the dangers posed by US food drops)] he blamed the USA saying he totally understood why they wanted to lynch him, and he'd have lynched himself too if he were in their boots, given what America had done to them. His repute goes way back. When Saddam was subsidizing the families of child suicide bombers in Palestine to blow up children in Israel where was Fisk with the photographs? We should have posted pictures of the child victims of Dresden on the front pages of our nationals in the UK and US during the second world war. Better to surrender to Hitler and let him expand his progrom worldwide than kill another child. Better to leave generations of Iraqi children for years to come under the dictates of Saddam than risk injury to a single child today. Better to let the Mid-East fester indefinitely until the chickens come home to roost on all our children.

Not hard to guage what altitude someone deploys at. Watch enough deployments and you'll get good at it. Is it your opinion that the BSR's should be done away with? It's not hard to guage when they exit below their minimum either. I've been on hop n' pop runs where almost the entire load got out at 1900ft and had a great laugh about it watching the video when they got down. One guy even did a half a dozen barrel rolls on exit. Maybe he had an E license. I rode the plane down with one or two other jumpers (none of us because of a regulation). No points for guessing how many of those guys pulled above their regulation minimums let alone had a working canopy above them by their personal hard decks. Tell me again who's going to enforce pull altitude. Regulation needs to match the culture and guys making a high 'base' jump from a plane with a parachute rig aren't even thinking about that reg. Now we can wait for the old timers and base jumpers to chime in about what a pussy I am for riding those loads down and we'll all have a clear picture of the value of regulations that don't match the culture. Some regulations are used capriciously when it's convenient to reign someone in. This is even advocated and planned by people proposing new regulations "don't worry it won't apply to you we'll only use it when we need to control a guy who does xyz, you'll be free to flout this one most weekends" If you can't live by the rules then don't pass them, or better yet pick a rule most can live by. If jumpers flout BRSs without any waiver then what's the point of them, it's meaningless window dressing. In this context your question w.r.t. BSRs being abolished is only barely rhetorical.

That's one of the reasons I saw this as being exclusively for intentional cutaway jumps under experimental canopies. I just see this as an option for test pilots flying experimental canopies. Definitely not something anyone would attempt to land or even get low with.

In an earlier thread I suggested a cutaway system for intentional cutaway jumps only, not something you'd want to land or get low with. The proposal was to route the cutaway cables down and around one foot. If routed correctly the jumper would have to actively maintain flexion in the leg to prevent cutaway. Actively straightening the leg or G-loc would result in the leg straightening and cutting away anyway, although the intent is that under high G loading it would be easy to straighten the leg before loss of consciousness. The advantage is you're not relying on some delicate ballance of forces of a weight vs velcro (or more sophisticated equivalent). You rely on active application of force to prevent cutaway and have total control unless you cannot hold your leg in a flex in which case you would automatically chop, particularly in a high G situation. A modification would be to be able to disconnect the foot routed cable while above the hard deck, but I'm not really advocating that, this was purely an idea for experimental tertiary rig jumps.

I recently got out on a 2-way and noticed the other guy's chin strap had slipped up under his nose, so I grabbed the strap and tried to get it under his chin. This was a lot more difficult than I expected, so I had to use my thumb as leverage against his chin. Anyway after a few seconds of trying I managed to get it past his mouth and under his chin and we proceeded as planned. We got down and I mentioned it to the other jumper, he had no idea his chin strap had slipped under his nose, saying "I thought you were taking some wierd grip on me or something" . No shit!

The guy is wearing a jump suit with large colored quarters. Just because some reporter says the guy dressed like a jester and aimed for a tree some of you are ready to criticize the jumper and the DZ. What really happened? The guy had a high speed mal successfully used his EPs (I guess the DZ must have trained him reasonably well for that). Unable to make it back he had to land in trees, we don't even know if he had other options. Well done on his beer reserve ride.

And I thought this was a thread about Blockbuster Video.

So now it's come down to channeling kallend