SivaGanesha

What about laid off--tomorrow is my last day at work? "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Not only is it fattening, but double cheeseburgers for Passover is just about as non-kosher as you can get.

Your health insurance provider, though, is no doubt part of a nationwide network and cannot unilaterally change the basic parameters of its service without approval from entities in other states. Much of this legislation strikes me as a pretty clear cut case of trying to regulate an industry which has grown nationwide--which seems a pretty clear cut case of interstate commerce legitimately subject to federal jurisdiction. I think the parts of this legislation that deal with regulating the health insurance industry will pass muster in the courts. Other aspects of the legislation--for example REQUIRING Americans to purchase health insurance--do seem to go beyond the traditional constitutional role of the federal government and will, I think, be struck down by the courts. To Obama/Congress' credit I think they knew there were controversial aspects to this legislation and set the main implementation date--2014--far enough in the future to give both the electorate and the courts a chance to weigh in before all of this gets too deeply entrenched in the federal bureaucracy. I think that was a gutsy call for which they deserve credit. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

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At the risk of sounding sexist--I've noticed that women tend to become significantly more religious as they age. They don't, however, necessarily go back to the same religion they were raised in--but religion of one form or another seems to become increasingly important to a lot of women from their 40's onward. Men have their own pattern which I also consider rather dysfunctional--but it is a different pattern. With men it is more that they often become passionate holy roller religious types at a very young age (their 20's)--and they tend to stick with it although they do mellow out a bit as they age. Of course it varies a great deal from individual to individual as well--but I've noticed the above patterns with women and men frequently enough to call them patterns. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Because, IMHO, a lot of these people are just going to end up as glorified employees. It's a 2-year visa. $250K sounds suspiciously like the approximate amount it would cost to hire someone for 2 years (remembering that there are other costs besides salary involved in hiring someone). "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

What do people think of: http://www.startupvisa.com/ The basic idea is that if a non-American entrepreneur can attract $250k in venture/angel funding, of which $100k must come from US sources, they can get a visa to come to the USA to start their company. It sounds like the proponents of this idea are making a great sound bite of it--saying that how can we refuse these immigrants--they are going to create jobs, just what we need right now, yada, yada, yada. However, although I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship, I have serious reservations about this program. For one thing, $250k doesn't exactly create a lot of jobs. I could easily see the 'entrepreneurs' who actually benefit from this just being glorified employees of the VCs or of some existing company that is already funded--and the new company really would exist only on paper. Something also doesn't feel right about how apparently so many Silicon Valley VC's are apparently excited about this idea. American entrepreneurs have been starved for support from the VC/angel community for awhile now--and now the VC's/angels want to bypass the Americans to give money to foreigners who will be easier to control. I'm sure many of these foreign entrepreneurs are genuinely gifted people with a lot of good ideas--but something doesn't smell right about the whole thing to me. Comments? "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

I agree with you that there may have been fraud. However, I don't think that State opened a special investigation in this case. My suspicion--of course there is no proof--is that the father lied and the daughter told the truth. The daughter--when she applied for her first adult passport--simply answered some questions truthfully, not realizing that the answers--now provided truthfully for the first time--would result in the routine denial of her passport application. State didn't have to open a special investigation or audit--they simply made a routine decision to deny based on very basic info provided by the daughter. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

A better analogy--because it involves a similarly long time frame--might be to compare this woman's status to that of the illegal immigrants granted amnesty in the general amnesty of 1986 which legalized about 3 million formerly illegal immigrants. Now some of the amnesty claims were, if truth be told, somewhat fraudulent. Not everyone who got amnesty in 1986 really qualified for it. However, no one--not even the fiercest opponents of illegal immigration--these days would recommend that we go back and reopen those old cases. Maybe some people got green cards and (ultimately) citizenship on shaky grounds, but it happened and virtually everyone feels that, after more than 20 years, it is pretty much a fait accompli. Your question posed a 10 year scenario but I would say that after 20 or 30 years the situation is qualitatively different. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Such rules exist to prevent endless chains of "US citizens" living abroad and claiming citizenship based on a single American ancestor. The father's status as a citizen is absolute on his own account but his ability to pass that status on to his children born outside the USA has some restrictions on it. It's hard to evaluate such cases when we in the public don't know all the facts. However, I think the government should be subject to similar rules as apply in denaturalization cases. That is, if more than two years elapse since a claim to US citizenship is first established, only a judge (and not a faceless bureaucrat) should have the authority to correct an erroneous claim to US citizenship. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Pool is not for everyone. Those who aren't cut out for pool should take up bowling where the object is to knock over the white pins with the black ball.

Sadly I was on a load and missed the halftime show . But this seems to be a bit of an ageist thread! Maybe someone needs to found OFROPS (Old Fart Rockers Over Phorty Society). Remember, "you don't quit doing the Super Bowl halftime show because you get old--you get old because you quit doing the Super Bowl halftime show!" "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

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Then you misunderstand. I'm referring to the following page: http://www.irs.gov/compliance/enforcement/article/0,,id=175752,00.html which states: If CI determines the investigation should be criminally prosecuted, a prosecution recommendation is forwarded to: 1. The Department of Justice, Tax Division, (if it is a tax investigation) In other words the IRS does not prosecute criminal tax cases directly. They must rely on the Department of Justice, Tax Division to do so. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

My understanding is that the IRS has no direct legal role in enforcing criminal law, even tax law. If the IRS wants to proceed with criminal charges against a taxpayer, they need to go through the FBI to do so. It is therefore unclear to me why the IRS needs to be armed, although obviously the FBI would be. Actual criminal tax proceedings are, as a result, fairly rare--it is far more common for the IRS to use the threat of criminal prosecution to enforce civil compliance. Civil actions--seizure of property and assets, garnishment of wages, administrative penalties--are things the IRS can and very often does do on its own. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

There is no option for 'she is related to Obama, and therefore will be deported even while millions of other illegal immigrants are tacitly allowed to stay'. So I couldn't vote. Basically, by applying for and being denied asylum earlier in the 2000's, she may have been considered to be PRUCOL (permanently residing under color of law), which would have entitled her to some state benefits. Even the denial--if it is not enforced, and enforcement is rare--gives her some rights at the state level that someone wading across the Rio Grande does not immediately have. Immigration and related law can be very weird in the US. Essentially by applying for asylum, she got herself "into the system", giving herself some de facto rights unless USCIS actually chose to enforce the original order. Enforcement against a middle aged woman with no known criminal record would be unexpected, to say the last, unless she did something to draw attention to herself. However attention was indeed drawn to her because of the fact that her half-nephew is a public figure. This put some pressure on USCIS to enforce an order that otherwise might have been ignored. The only reason--IMHO--why the current proceedings are happening at all is because, due to the public attention, she is trying to reverse an order that might actually be at risk of being enforced at this point. The bottom line is that, if it weren't for who her half-nephew is, she would probably still be quietly living illegally in the USA, with a deportation order technically on the books but completely ignored, and continuing to draw whatever state benefits she is drawing. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

It seemed to work out well at SWOOP in (then) Grand Bend, Ontario in the 1980's--and as far as I can tell still does. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

I thought I read elsewhere (probably on here at some point) that he banged his head on exit creating a permanent ding in the aircraft. But my question is--how does one bang one's head on anything exiting from a Skyvan, esp on an AFF jump? I never did an AFF jump from a Skyvan, so maybe there is something about the exit procedure I'm not familiar with--but I'm just not clear what you'd bang yourself on even if you tried ? "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

I've made two jumps over this time period--one at Byron on Dec 20 and one at SkyDance on Jan 14. Unfortunately I find that the focus, when jumps become this infrequent, tends to shift simply to making a jump or two to stay legal and current, rather than actually trying to learn anything new. I'm hoping we get some solid good weather soon so I can get back to learning. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

When one of the most active tandem instructors at one of the largest DZ's in NorCal only gets in 8 jumps in a month, that tells you right there just how bad the weather has been "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Finally got my first skydive of 2010 in today...from a PAC 750 (not necessarily the PAC 750) at SkyDance. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Good points--I guess I hadn't realized until now how foggy it gets this time of year just east of the mountains. I've lived in the SF Bay Area for quite a number of years but this is the first year I'm trying to skydive regularly. The last jump I made the fog had burned off right at Byron but from altitude you could see a low layer of fog still covered a great deal of the surrounding area. I can imagine that sort of thing is indeed very hard to predict. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

I've been a little disappointed lately with the weather forecasts online at www.usairnet.com. Poor information from this site has, unfortunately, caused me to make several bad decisions regarding planning my weekends re skydiving and other activities in recent weeks. I know that no one can predict the weather with absolute certainty, but I seem to recall (when I used to fly Cessnas) that aviation forecasts were pretty accurate within 12 hr or so. The quality of these forecasts these days, unfortunately, seems to be far worse that I remember, even over the very short term of a few hours. For example, the current time is about 4pm Thursday. The forecast for the ceilings at Livermore, CA at the current time is >12k. The actual ceiling is, according to the AWOS, just 200 feet. That's about as far off as it is possible to be--to the point where the information from www.usairnet.com is inaccurate to the point of being useless. Am I using this information incorrectly or is there somewhere else that is better to go for such forecasts? How do pilots use information that is so inaccurate to safely plan flights? "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

I was at a private party at the American Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan. I do remember driving home via the west side highway so as to avoid any tolls on the way out of Manhattan--not specifically to avoid paying tolls but because I didn't want my way home to depend on computers. "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014

Have fun...I'm a little too far north for this! I'm just curious about this tradition though--I'm not Jewish but recently joined the local Jewish Community Center since they have state-of-the-art workout facilities and I feel I need to be hitting the gym regularly if I'm going to skydive. As such I just found out about the Jewish tradition of Chinese food for Christmas. But my question was--are Jews "celebrating" Christmas in this way one day early this year--12/24--because 12/25 after sunset would conflict with Shabbat this year? "It's hard to have fun at 4-way unless your whole team gets down to the ground safely to do it again!"--Northern California Skydiving League re USPA Safety Day, March 8, 2014