nathaniel

That is a delicious way of stating the problem, because it completely fails to account for the other reasons that people might do a jump or a maneuver in the first place. Some people find thrills in risks. It's precisely that safety is desirable only to a degree, and that there are always tradeoffs involved. It's positively delightful that you are able to elucidate your preferences, but it is dreadful that you would recklessly attempt to impose your preferences on others. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I'm unfamiliar with this kind of device. What's to stop a bellows or an oversized turkey baster from defeating it? nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

diamonds? wtf It's real easy to do a train or a flower with 4 people in the skyvan. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Coal causes pollution too, duh. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Pretty much the laws of physics I mean, if an asteroid were to strike the Earth that would change everything, right? Propping up a currency, esp a foreign currency, is a fairly difficult thing to do. It will get to the point where it becomes so expensive that it's no longer worthwhile. It's a hot issue right now, because it seems China is approaching that point. Dropping the whole thing on the floor would yield to enormous shocks to the world economy, and worst of all inside China. It would likely destabilize the entire country. edit to add: much more likely they will back off gradually, and the US will experience some devaluation while the yuan soars. US exports will pick up, China exports will dip, and the US gov't will have to relearn fiscal discipline. Decidedly ho-hum. Rarely in macroeconomics do bold things like that ever happen all at once, and when they do they tend to be diastrous for all parties involved. Now, China has shown no indication of wanting to commit economic suicide since at least the 1970's. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That's an argument against free trade, but not against globalization. And IMO it's mostly spot on. As long as there are substantive regulatory & subsidy differences between countries there could be justification for tariffs. That's what the WTO was intended to work out, in order to facilitate globalization. The US has its own set of subsidies, agriculture, defense, &c. On the other hand China's the worse off for having much of Europe, the Middle East and Asia upwind. Their pollution lands in China. In a global economists wet dream India & the like would have to subsidize China for all the ill effects of that pollution. It's not likely to ever happen, at least not in our lifetimes. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Ha! Don't even get me started nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

You are only considering half the equation. The US is more valuable to China than vice-versa. They only make up 20% or so of our trade, we make up a much greater proportion of theirs (their economy is yet much smaller for the same trade). There is no credible threat. We support only ourselves by buying the best-priced goods on the market. To suggest otherwise should be immediately false. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

No country is self-sufficient, or ever has been. The Rooskies were the last to play that game, and see where it got them. Your accounting is way off base. People who lose their jobs to outsourcing don't all remain unemployed for the rest of their lives. Some of them get jobs doing more productive things, or in industries that are more competitive onshore or which can't be offshored as economically. ^^^ edit to add: these three ideas are more or less equivalent. This devolves into a nationalist argument. Why should consumers be forced to support someone else's standard of living when it costs them their own? Would it upset you if workers in China could live at the same standards of living as Americans? That's what's going to happen, and most of it is going to come from China's standard of living increasing. No competent economists are forecasting depression. Why are you bringing it up? nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

++ What people always seem to assume is that globalization is a zero sum game. "Job gained overseas == job lost in USA", or "factory opened overseas == factory closed in USA". They miss the forest for all the trees. Fortunately for us and for them it's a positive sum game. As the economies of foreign places rise, so does their need for cheap crap, cars, airplanes, computers, services & practically everything else. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

What he said. Also, I've found that being tall & skinny (my BMI is stuck around 18) gives flexibility when freeflying. You'll be able to go slower than the average jumper when in a sitfly (think hybrid jumps 8). If you straighten up a little bit, into a crouch and almost into a stand you'll be able to keep up with ordinary folk. And in a full stand or headdown your wind profile will end up being quite small so you'll have plenty of speed should you so desire it. Just make sure you have tight-fitting clothes

I've circumambulated the Capitol building once or twice in the last year with a black suitcase in tow and I didn't get tackled. Not a clue. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Also key is where in the city you live. The police in university areas are keen to this sort of thing and must do some keeping track--when I was at school several of my friends who "forgot" to get il state plates found themselves with tickets on their parked vehicles. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Now that I read a bit from that online book, it turns out in one of the chapters they try to put a real price tag on immigration. In dollars, no less. They come up with slightly different figures depending on the type of study they use...to generalize it goes like this: negative effect at the state / local level greater positive effect at the federal level And they take efforts to point out that the problem is one where definitions play a crucial role. Like whether the effects of an immigrant's descendants should count towards the economic effect of immigration. "In the most restrictive definition, only immigrants themselves are counted. Here we find that immigrants pay about $32 billion more in taxes overall than they generate in costs. This positive balance reflects the age distribution of the immigrant population: There are relatively many working-age people and relatively few children and elderly. Immigrant households include nearly all immigrants, plus nearly all U.S.-born children of immigrants up to the age of 20 or so, because such children will co-reside with their immigrant parents. Expanding the definition to include immigrants plus their U.S.-born children under the age of 20, the estimated fiscal impact flips from $32 billion to -$13 billion. The biggest change is at the state and local levels, where the impact shifts from $4 billion to -$29 billion. Evidently it makes a decisive difference which of the two most common demographic formulations of the problem is used. Measured impacts are strongly positive for immigrants only and strongly negative overall for immigrant households. When we count all the relevant descendants of still-living immigrants we find a net positive fiscal impact of about $24 billion. There is a very large positive fiscal impact of $51 billion at the federal level, partially offset by a large negative fiscal impact of -$27 billion at the state and local levels. Looking separately at the federal, state, and local components, we find that at the state and local levels, the results including all descendants are little different from the immigrant household results: -$27 billion versus -$29 billion. The impacts of the two missing groups (adult children of immigrants and grandchildren of immigrants) offset each other. This is not true at the federal level, where the discrepancy is severe." nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

There wasn't much of a distinction before the 20th century... In my notes I have references to the work of economists Richard A Easterlin and "Taylor"... since Taylor is a common name I'd have to do a bit of rummaging... To be sure, immigration both contributes to and results from strong economy. I found this reference online, it seems to be quite good. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

What's always done the trick for me is that graphs of immigration rates look strikingly similar to graphs of GDP...in the US at least. /dons asbestos suit nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Believe it or not, this is a medical issue. A close relative of mine recently died from a degenerative dementia, and the same issue came up. Medical science has long established that some behaviour and reactions to certain types of stimuli are not governed by the part of the brain responsible for cognition. It's particularly tempting for family members, esp family members that are physically close to the patient and who observe the patient to infer way too much about the patient's mental capacities based on actions that are basically hardwired into the brain. It's an entirely understandable and even magnanimous reaction that lots of people have--it shows how tenaciously they cling to hope. But unfortunately it can lead caregivers to seek care that is inappropriate. For example, seeking physical therapy for someone who lacks the better part of her brain. I wish I could explain it better with examples, but this is not a field of expertise for me. What I know is that it's one area where, to be effective caregivers, we must put aside our instincts and rely on trained professionals for guidance. And in this case, as the court found, the professionals have spoken clearly. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

A brief amount of research into this morbid subject brings to light evidence to the contrary. "We were surprised that patients who chose this means to hasten death were, according to their nurses, more peaceful and suffered less in the last two weeks before death than patients who choose assisted suicide" http://www.nbc4.tv/health/2355264/detail.html "The general impression among hospice clinicians that starvation and dehydration do not contribute to suffering among the dying and might actually contribute to a comfortable passage from life." http://www.amsa.org/dd/prnh.cfm and lots more in medical literature. Not to mention it's beside the point when the parts of the brain that process pain don't exist anymore. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

But in this case, it's not the husband making the decision. He petitioned the court to make a decision, and the court decided. The court based its decision only in part on the husband's testimony. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Am I the only one embarrassed by the extrajudicial actions of our legislature? Why don't they just kidnap the poor lady and set her up for display in the rotunda. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I don't think that's a fair way of putting it. In Islam and in Christianity both there's strong subcultures of Reason. It's just that they start from premises that are widely divergent from each other, and again widely divergent from the rest of us. While not all Christians or Muslims are rational....neither are all of them irrational. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Sure you can...just not with a word processor. You'd have to use something like MS Paint, Photoshop &c. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Eeek. I just had this same problem trying to fill out the Birdman order form. There's no easy way to do it. I actually have Acrobat Writer at work and it's impossible to use. Instead I ended up using a program called pdf2ps to convert the documents from PDF to postscript format, and then I used the GIMP to edit the postscript documents, and finally I converted back to PDF using Adobe Distiller--I could also have used a program called ps2pdf but Distiller works a little better. You can get the GIMP for windows (its free), but I'm not sure about ps2pdf or pdf2ps. Anyone know if they're supported under Cygwin? Overall the process was enormously painful. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Here's software you could use. "Now witness the power of this fully operational battle station!" nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

For starters, don't consider your data secure if you use an insecure AP. It would be pretty straightforward for anyone else in your vicinity to observe your network traffic. So, if you were to visit dropzone.com it might be possible for someone to get your cookie & start using your account. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?