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If you’re asking for drop zone financing advice here, you’re not ready to buy a drop zone. IMHO Do you have a good DZO friend that has been around a while that can mentor you through the process? There are about 101 things to review before purchasing, or starting a DZ from scratch. A nicely run DZ in a good location can be very lucrative. Signed, recovering dzo

Two recommendations is all the more compelling. Looks like I'll be changing my flight.

IANA DZO, but I'd bet you could find a lot of information at the USPA DZO Conference - connections, where/how to secure a loan, maybe sample/template business plans.

Wonderful, wonderful, post. Worth every second of reading it. Wendy P.

I would argue that this is not entirely true. They took some elements of what they saw in the established system and emphasized them and developed them further (even turned things into "principles" and "truths" that were not obviously so, which you can see if you look at others who strongly disagreed with them at the time) and so they set directions for the system to evolve. I have to admit, I am too lazy to look for quotes from philosophers who preceded them (mostly because the main work on the history of Philosophy I recently read is from Richard David Precht and he writes in German) but Keynes and Smith were preceded by other philosophers who developed some of the basis of their thinking: David Hume-John Locke-Robert Boyle-Isaac Newton (and others had very different ideas: Immanuel Kant for example) So, maybe we can say that as far as humans go there is always a feedback loop between development of thought (sometimes pure thought without much regard to its practicability) and action in the physical realm. So again, it is very worthwhile to THINK about alternatives, even if at the time you do not know how to IMPLEMENT them. Yes, but there are a number of points here: 1. This sounds a little bit like the idea based on "social darwinism" (correct me if I misinterpret you there) and the way I read that, this is really something that has been disproven pretty thoroughly by now. Even Darwin thought that competition was only one minor part of the evolutionary drive and gave much more importance to cooperation. It is easy to see that, if you just look at nature. Many of the most successful species are ones that display a tremendous amount of cooperation (alongside some competition) This actually is another sign to me how our system grew out of a specific philosophy of the time of Smith (and before) when there was a conflict between the ideas of the (mostly British) empiricists and the (mostly German) idealists. As far as economic systems are concerned, the Brits won out. 2. The main issue is not "profit" or resource maximization. The systemic issues I see are threefold: a. The incentives in the system are skewed to rewarding individual profit without regard to profit for the whole. If you study a bit of game theory you will see that systems that are set up this way (simple example would be the prisoner's dilemma) will always result in solutions that are sub-optimal. The outcome this system can produce is always worse than the best possible outcome within the system--and even that best possible outcome is worse than the best possible outcome in a system that is set up to reward profit for individuals that also maximizes profit for the whole.--see EDIT BELOW! (I know, the idea of social darwinism is that there is no "natural" system that can maximize profit for the individual and the whole. "win-win-win" scenarios are idealistic ideas of hippies that have no practical value. I disagree, and many system-thinkers do so as well.) b. While money was originally designed as a medium of exchange representing real value (things, services, etc) it has been so decoupled from that value (financial sector, derivatives, derivatives of derivatives) that the smallest amount of interactions in the world are still representing any of that real value. If you want to make REAL money, you will not focus on activities that provide real value in the physical world. The incentives are to focus on activities that trade various abstract representations (currencies, stocks, derivatives, futures, even real estate but used only as an abstract symbol that does not maximize the utility of said real estate in the real world). c. With an abstract medium to measure value (money) you run into the problem that it only measures a certain KIND of value and leaves many other kinds of value (resources!) out. We looked at this before but: The tree that provides tremendous value for the forest, the animals around it, the humans that breathe the oxygen it produces, etc, etc. has NO money-value as long as it stands in the forest (as this cannot be measured easily) but has very specific value once it is cut down and turned into lumber. Now it has value for ONE person only, but that value can easily be quantified in Dollars. (What's important to me here is that the person who cuts down the tree is not a "bad" or "immoral" person. He is a person that acts in accordance to the incentives of the system. If he wasn't doing that he would be a looser in the system, which also means he would have less and less resources and power within the system, making his "morality" and "goodness" irrelevant--because it has no power to change anything.) All this together provides certain incentives for action. People who listen to these incentives will be successful in the system. Those who don't will fail. The problem is that many systems thinkers, when they project this out, come to the conclusion that a system with these parameters will eventually self-terminate. Cancer is an often used example: When a cell stops to be connected to other cells (in its function and purpose) and starts working only for its own reproduction and benefit it becomes a cancer cell. Initially it benefits and reproduces its genetic code exponentially, outcompeting all the other cells around it. So it "wins" temporarily. However, eventually it kills the entire organism that it depends upon for its survival and self-terminates. So in the end it looses. One can argue that it is in the nature of the cell to only look out for its own benefit--but that isn't true for healthy cells. They look out for their own benefit, but in a way that also benefits the whole. And in the end this is the more successful strategy...and it is also the more natural one, I'd argue. So these are arguments, why it would be useful to think about systems that are not self-terminating and yet have a relationship to our "nature" (keeping in mind that our "nature" is as much influenced by the system we grow up in, as it influences that system) Now: You may be right that we have no idea how to IMPLEMENT such a system, if we ever came up with it, given that we already know that "planned economy" does not work. But to me that is no reason not to think about the implications of systems (and especially the implication of self-termination). Fortunately the people, whose thoughts around this I like, are very clear on the fact that implementation can never be a "planned/forced" process (for many reasons) and are also generally clear on the fact that such a system can actually not be "designed" in the sense that it can be written down as a set of unchanging rules that are THE BEST rules. They are clear that it will have to emerge naturally, but there will be some features that may have to be "artificially" implemented (the step from legs to wheels, because there is no natural intermediate step) and some features can only be striven towards (in the sense of steering into a direction) and others again, will have to surprisingly emerge on their own. EDIT: The important thing to know about these game theory examples is that the preferred outcome of such games is not just sub-optimal for the WHOLE but is also sub-optimal for the INDIVIDUALS in the game, even though they each strive to maximize their own benefit. They each loose out, compared to what they could have gotten.

Anyone can submit an incident report to USPA. These reports have always been voluntary until recently. There is a new requirement that a report be filed if an AAD fires on an AFF or tandem jump, whether it was the instructor's AAD, camera flier's AAD or the student's AAD. This is required of the instructor/camera flier on pain of disciplinary action for NOT reporting it within a few days. If one does report it on time, there will be no disciplinary action, even if something happened on that jump that in other cases might be a reason for disciplinary action. No clue what any disciplinary action might be since USPA doesn't release such information. There is no requirement for anyone to submit a report to USPA if any jumper (including students) is injured or killed, even if requested by a USPA director; only if an AAD fires on a student jump. Some jumpers/instructors/S&TAs/DZO's will never file a report because they don't trust USPA to keep the information 100% confidential. According to USPA these reports are destroyed with no copies retained by anyone. Release of some or all of the information on an incident report can definitely affect potential legal action. It has happened before when a board member kept a copy of an incident report then somehow the information on it got into the hands of ambulance chasing attorneys.

The Atom problem was not due to heat. Just shitty material. They tried to cover themselves with the heat and humidity excuses but it is simply not true

There's a reason you have 34 Green Merits with only 208 posts. Normally I wouldn't do this but if you are in the mood to deal I'll trade you 4 Warning Demerits for just 2 Merits. I can't keep the offer open ended obviously.

The original tweet, really isn't the big deal here I think. Yes, a President should know how much his word counts and what effect it may have on people if it scares them about something that isn't really an issue for them, so he should have made doubly sure that he got the right information before tweeting out states that could be affected. However, we already know that Trump doesn't do that, and considering that it was quickly corrected by NOAA, this really could have been a completely minor slip, not worthy of much attention. BUT: The entire circus of what he did afterwards, just to not have to admit that he made a mistake is absolutely grotesque: Using a black marker to draw something on an official map, is so unbelievably childish (and simply incomprehensible that he thought that would be a good idea--a 9 year old would know that this would be too obvious! I mean: He could have ordered someone to use Photoshop to alter the map...that would be scary too, but at least it would seem more adult!...or he could have shown the map that Coreece posted, if that was an official map that was available.) So the arguments about the original mistake (and how inaccurate it may or may not have been) are really irrelevant. I just can't fathom how anyone can see this and think there isn't something wrong with this person?!

How very interesting: To read through the salacious suggestions concerning a member of the “Cooper Community.” I know precisely who is behind this—her MO hasn’t changed a bit. My college-age daughter and I have nothing to do with “Anonymous in Vancouver” and have had nothing to do with her for the better part of several years. There is a reason for this. I will simply leave it at that. With that in mind, I am going to caution you to be extremely careful with respect to anything involving my immediate family. I have tolerated your vitriol regarding everything from CooperCon to my YouTube videos to my theories regarding the Western Flight Path. That said, I will not tolerate anything that drags my daughter, or the sick and distorted libel that her mother has spit out for many years, into this forum or any other forum. This is the one and only time I will address this subject. Do not try my patience. My family is off limits.