DrewEckhardt

I had no problem fitting one rig, jumpsuit, helmet, and other accessories in a 50L Givi Maxima although a bit of prudence was needed to avoid accidental wheelies. Mounting it as a pannier would have worked better. A duffle back well-secured to the Pillion position via a cargo net is most comfortable when you run out of luggage space. I often rode 100 miles between Boulder and Brush with a rig or two when I lived in Colorado.

Although less than local minima taxes on "the rich" are much higher than they were 100 years ago. In 1913 the exemption for single people was $3000 ($69,782 in 2013 dollars) and $4000 ($93,042 in 2013 dollars) for married couples. The first $20,000 beyond the exemption ($465,212 in 2013 dollars) was taxed at 1%. Earnings over $500,000 a year ($11,630,303 in 2013 dollars) were taxed at the top rate of 7%. Compare and contrast with the $10K/$20K exemption for single people and married couples (standard deduction plus personal exemptions), 10% low tax bracket, 39.6% top bracket for earned income (not including both parts of medicare and the surcharge), and 23.8% capital gains rate for "the wealthy".

God forbid we become like all of Western Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Much better that we remain like Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Sudan. You give us all a refreshing clarity. We're more likely to end up like Jamaica which combines economic disparity with strict gun control. The firearms permit costs $3000 / year which is most of the median income so there are few legal guns. Mandatory life sentences, trials in closed court, and warrantless searches have done their job getting those with illegal guns off the street. The murder-rate in gun-free Jamaica is still 40/100,000 (down from the 60/100,000 it skyrocketed to after the 1974 handgun ban). Gun control laws have no positive effect on murders, cause other violent crime to increase, and have no place in America.

If her instructors haven't been watching her land out with low turns to down-wind landings on asphalt to avoid unseen obstacles they haven't seen enough to know she has the skills and appropriate psychological arousal level to perform well when it matters (as opposed to straight into the wind in a wide-open field) and suggest a more radical down-size than allowed by Brian Germain's writings. If they have seen that on an ongoing basis she has bad judgement and shouldn't be down sizing either. Choosing to follow advice from less experienced locals over industry recognized experts like Brian Germain is a bad idea unless those locals are advising a jumper to be more conservative than the standards for some reason (habit of landing on hanger roofs, can't walk fast on landing due to bad knees, etc.). Instructor ratings are neither high bars to clear nor guarantees of good judgement. I knew at least three instructors who killed themselves with bad judgement under canopy, one more that almost died from internal bleeding due to poor canopy skills, and stopped counting instructors' broken bones a long time ago. That said you don't need a smaller canopy to jump in winds. I never chose to jump my 105 in conditions I wasn't willing to jump my 245s. Forward speed is proportional to the square root of wing loading, so a 135 is at most 12% faster than a 170 (at the same wing loading the 135 looses more to drag - seam size is the same, the lines are shorter but just as fat, the pilot has a lower sectional density). Data is hard to come by, although Paraflite rates their Intruder 360 military canopy at 26 MPH forward speed with a 200 pound load and 34 MPH at 300 pounds. EIFF reports 22 MPH forward speed for its draggy classic accuracy canopies at the ideal .65 wing loading for that discipline). 3-4 MPH isn't much. Headed into the wind it can make a big difference in your progress across the ground (with a 22 MPH horizontal component to your forward airspeed and 20 MPH head wind, an extra 4 MPH does triple ground speed into the wind) although you're _much_ better off just getting out far enough up wind and floating in a minimum sink rate facing down wind if you end up really far out. Check the spot before you leap. If you're on a load with other groups that will make a fuss about you waiting in the door with the green light on let them go first.

It's great. If a proposed law isn't sensible enough to land a strong super majority of votes it should not pass. Republicans and Democrats are the two sides of the same counterfeit coin. They both want a powerful, big, and expensive central government which funnels money into private companies. The biggest differences between the two are in how they market themselves to voters, with generally minor differences when they vote for legislation which will pass the other house and president's desk. Real patriots would recall the Founding Fathers' comments on standing armies, notice that we're spending over 5X number 2, 10X the second place NATO country, and 30X the nearest first world country sharing our land mass and border length on ours, and cut that real fat instead of trivialities that barely constitute 3% of the budget (like the $350,000 spent to provide White House tours).

I find it laughable that neither Democrats nor Republicans mind welfare when it goes to companies. American soldiers aren't so incompetent that they need 5X the resources of the second place country, 10X the second place in NATO, or 30X the nearest first world country with the same landmass and border length to defend us. OTOH, maybe companies like Lockheed-Martin are so incompetent that they do need the public assistance to survive in what would otherwise be closer to a capitalist country.

I'd be happier if they stuck to what's allowed by the plain English of the US Constitution, although even that is far too permissive for the proper role of government. The founding fathers' likely intent is closer to right although that would be more readily perverted by the courts. The blanket ability to regulate interstate commerce is too much even without the excesses began with Wickard v. Filburn since a literal interpretation of "regulate" allows rules which disproportionally favor some parties over others. A literal interpretation of "To coin money, regulate the value thereof" suffers from the same problem. It's not unconstitutional for them to decide my money is going to loose 30% of its value over the next decade which disproportionally benefits those wealthy enough that they don't need a significant fraction of their assets in cash for liquidity in case of emergencies like medical problems or job loss. "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years" doesn't preclude repeating that appropriation each year or spending more than the rest of the world put together on the military with most of that money sent to private for-profit companies. Of what is in the Constitution I am especially fond of the 10th amendment I'm a pragmatist though. I realize we're never going to have a Federal government limited to what's allowed by the Constitution to say nothing of a leaner beast. Since we're stuck with governments playing improper roles I'm voting/lobbying/pontificating for a government which plays a more livable combination of those roles.

I'm a libertarian and find government food, housing, etc. assistance for the poor and unemployed very reasonable. The governments are acting on behalf of corporatist interests to artificially increase the price of essentials like housing, food, health care, and education. With an electoral system (first past the post, private campaign funding that costs $1.7M/year to land $174K/year offices) that prevents changing that (the two viable parties which result from such a system are very close together, and you're not going to outspend enough of the corporatist interests backing those parties) the best the governments can do is mitigate the damage caused by actions taken on behalf of their corporatist interests. Local governments limit housing density and building rates on behalf of existing land owners to create supply/demand imbalances that drive prices up. The real estate PAC ranked first in contributions to candidates for every election cycle since 1998 (and presumably before - that's as far back as the opensecrets.org data goes) influences the Federal government's actions. Forgiven debt being tax free to the rentier class allows land lords to spend more at low risk and drive up values. The president appoints and senate confirms Federal Reserve governors and chairmen who manipulate interest rates with one goal being to prop up property values. The Government Sponsored Enterprises act to prop up property values through buying, guaranteeing, or under-writing privately issued mortgages that private industry wouldn't touch. The USDA keeps prices high by paying farmers not to grow food. The insurance industry is exempt from Federal anti-trust legislation. Since WWII "employer provided" health insurance has been tax-exempt while private insurance is not which has the side effect of getting a majority of insured individuals into more expensive plans than they'd otherwise choose. In high-tax states like California employers would need to spend twice as much on compensation to allow people earning below the Social Security cap to spend the same amount of insurance in private markets, and even if they were willing to do that the vast majority of insured getting their product through work or the government means that private rates are even higher. This makes people who can get employer provided health-insurance a captive market which caters to the least common denominator of employees who just look at the deductible and not the cost/benefit trade-off. Federal law precluding discharge of student loan debt in bankruptcy allows private lenders to profit from loans students can't really afford based on the jobs they'll qualify for. The feds also don't discriminate on ability to repay. The net result of all that money available for education is college costs increasing at 4X the inflation rate for decades. That corporatist crap increasing costs far beyond what they'd be in a capitalist free market makes it much harder to fend for yourself and save for periods of under/unemployment since your job has wages like they would be in a capitalist country - limited by the economic value you can provide. Although we can't fix that corporatism, the governments lessing its impact is less unfair than them only assisting their corporatist masters.

How many young lives would be wasted if drugs were NOT restricted? - Fud Fewer. Hard drug use went down after Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Overdoses are less likely when product strength is known. When legal ways to get high are available there isn't much point to sniffing paint or trying whatever the chemists concocted this week to work around legal restrictions.

Loveland. The snow is relatively good and no slope side accommodations or surrounding city means it's almost entirely day skiers from the urban Front Range so it won't be crowded. There are a few affordable hotels in Georgetown if you don't want to drive up every day. That'd be my first choice after living in Colorado for 15 years; a few with Ski the Summit (Arapahoe Basin, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, and Keystone) season passes; a few years with Copper passes; a few years with Loveland passes; and enough time every place else in the Front Range (apart from Silver Creek which I never got around to visiting). The other ski areas aren't that much lower.

No. There haven't been "many mass shootings" In 2012 18 out of about 240,000,000 adults committed one, which is 1 in 13 million or 0.0000075%. They killed 88 out of 315,000,000 people is 0.000028%. Those numbers are orders of magnitude less severe than other things we don't consider to be problems. It's a non-issue not worth addressing.

No. They illegally import or make weapons because they're criminals. Guns are effectively illegal in Jamaica (in theory licenses are available, although the annual $3000 fee is most of the average annual income). The 1974 handgun ban came with mandatory life sentences for illegal possession, warrantless searches, and secret trials. The murder rate skyrocketed to 60/100,000 at the time of the ban although it's since returned to the pre-ban 40/100,000 rate, 75% involving guns. How about a 3500 pound car? Car drivers kill 5000 pedestrians every year with their suburban assault vehicles which is ONE HUNDRED TIMES the body count of "assault rifles" according to Dianne Feinstein. You going to ban those? They're MUCH more likely to kill you as long as you're not a criminal (most murders are criminals killing each other) or perhaps under educated putting you on the down-side of economic disparity. I don't worry much about American gun violence. It's nearly all criminals and the under-educated without viable legal career paths killing each other and I'm part of neither demographic. The raw data behind the anti-gun paper _Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicides: A Tale of Two Cities_ showed that a white person in Seattle where any law abiding adult can have a gun was less likely to be murdered than in Vancouver. As other countries have discovered gun bans don't change that. With economic disparity the losers turning to crime find some way to get the tools needed to ply their trade. OTOH, gun bans do lead to increases in other violent criminal attacks on innocent people (where criminals suspect citizens are armed they opt for safer crimes like burglarizing unoccupied homes) and that would bother me (violent crime is 4X worse in the UK than the US). I'm actually happy that criminals get $75 .25 ACP pistols as leakage from legal markets. I feel safer with that situation than having a country in which all guns are subject to strict controls and importing such a pistol would be about as hard as a fully automatic AK47 and making one would be more difficult than manufacturing an open-bolt submachine gun. Perhaps. Get rid of the education gap caused in part by local control and funding of schools and run a marketing campaign to make education cool the same way smoking has been turned into a social scourge. People with economic situations close enough to the median don't kill each other regardless of what guns they own. There are 240,000 machine guns legally owned by private citizens in America. Since 1934 only _TWO_ have been used in crimes, the most recent in 1989 by a corrupt Ohio police officer who used his to murder an informant. No gun regulation is going to cause an appreciable reduction in gun crime, although it will piss off gun-owners causing us to lay in life-time supplies and turn against the Democrats responsible for most of the silliness.

No. 1. Malpractice insurance constitutes less than 2% of health care spending. 2. Physician's salaries which ultimately pay for doctors' university training are only 5-10% of medical spending. Nope. Advertising only works because the returns are a lot greater than the spending. For instance drug companies need to convince consumers to pester their doctors for new drugs which are still covered by patent and expensive instead of old generic ones that are less profitable due to competition. My favorite is the Prilosec story. Prilosec had $5.6B in annual sales in 2001 which was the last full year it was covered by patent. The poor drug company expected to loose 85% of the market to generics. They got rid of the significantly less bioactive chiral form of the active ingredient, patented the single chiral form, called it Nexium, and ran a great marketing campaign. Prilosec + Nexium annual sales combined went from $6.1B in 2001 to $6.6B in 2002. Much of the increase comes from improved technology; although the improvements (single chiral forms of old drugs) can be better for profits than patients and there's a lot of over treatment going on. Health care is expensive in America because it's corporatist not capitalist (where it's reasonable for consumers to choose less expensive alternatives) or socialist (where no profit motive keeps costs down).

Maybe for trades, but not for the professions. For some professions too. I've never noticed a correlation between where software engineers went to school and on the job performance amongst those who pass a hiring bar which doesn't take into account candidates' educational credentials. A larger fraction of some schools' graduates fail to pass that bar; although I don't hold that against others who can or get my hopes up for candidates from "better" schools because too many still fail. The groups I've worked for (including some at Amazon, Microsoft, and Qualcomm) have done the same for people with experience in industry. In one case that was most likely attributable to the computer science department's grab for more tuition dollars. The professor teaching a core sophomore class failed a lot of people (allegedly 1/3) because most of the students' grade came from how well their projects performed against automated test suites generated by teaching assistants (not too different than in industry). She was replaced by some one who didn't do that and allowed more people to remain in the department for their junior year and beyond. Few (if any) of the graduates we interviewed before the change were turned down because they lacked programming aptitude; perhaps half were after. Schools could theoretically help differentiate between new graduates whose resumes stop at "BS CS degree" although there are enough differentiated (via personal projects, internships, and even project classes) new graduates with experience to suggest they'll do better than others in industry it's not an issue.

Let it hang. Just make sure your leg straps are tight enough nothing can slip under them. Don't land out and don't botch the landing.

No. People should not be deprived of their civil rights without due process in which they received timely notice to prepare a defense, were allowed legal representation, and their case was properly adjudicated. Under current law where people pose a threat to themselves or others they can already be involuntarily committed and loose their firearms rights via that process under federal law. "Mental illness" includes things like feeling down in the winter because you have low vitamin D levels in your blood stream. Such minor maladies make up the majority of the 26.2% of the general population which the National Institute for Mental Health estimate suffer from a mental disorder each year. Even anti-psychotics aren't necessarily a big deal - some are used to control epileptic seizures. Finally with a blanket "mental disorder" disqualification you're likely to have even more problems because people will have another reason to avoid treatment. It depends on how you define "weird." If they're displaying a firearm in the presence of another person in a rude/angry/threating manner they've committed a crime which merits reporting. Otherwise the answer is generally "no" like when they're cleaning their gun in the kitchen (I wouldn't want powder residue, gun oil, or cleaning solvents on my nice carpet). The mentally disturbed aren't a big problem. Most murders are done by criminals, with 75% of murders having adult criminal records. 12.5% com from juveniles who by definition can't have adult criminal records and assuming the same criminal past we'd get to 84% of murders committed by people who were already criminals. 4.3% of murderers do have a history of mental illness although that's not necessarily causal where federal studies of prisoners and the general population show an 11% rate of mental disorders in the later. FWIW, like other rational people I spend more time thinking about how I'm going to spend my lottery millions (18X more likely than being killed by a crazy who shoots multiple people) or killed by a car when I'm walking or riding a bike (57X).

With low humidity and gloves jumping is pleasant with ground temperatures down to 40 degrees. In a decade of skydiving in Colorado I never went a full month between jumps except after herniating a disc in a sneezing accident. December/January might have had a few 3 week delays. Texas is farther south and warmer.

Because one or more of the following apply : 1. Politicians believe attempting to ban them wins more votes and campaign contributions than it looses. This probably holds in urban areas for candidates with low NRA-ILA rankings. 2. Politicians are elite pigs (while all animals are equal, some are more equal than others) who want to limit firearms availability to people outside the ruling class. 3. It makes ignorant people feel good.

That's Republican marketing spin which isn't the whole truth. Obamacare as passed by Congress will maximize insurance company profits partially through the transfer of federal tax dollars. Government job creation resulting from this is merely a side effect. The Republicans don't want the whole truth known because they're also corporatists which operate the same way as Democrats. For example in 2003 the Republican House, Republican Senate, and Republican President passed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act which created Medicare Part D as a trillion-dollar-per-decade tax funnel to private corporations.

http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Miami-Dade-Police-Officers-Caught-on-Camera-Allegedly-Ignoring-Emergency-Calls-189754261.html That's individual officers and it can get much worse. During the 1992 riots the LA Police Department was pulled back for their own safety. The police have no legal obligation to protect any single person - just society as a whole.

This is _far_ _far_ far_ from the beginning. Drone strikes are just a matter of degree. 1. Civil asset forfeiture with its lesser standards of guilt (preponderance of evidence versus beyond a reasonable doubt) and entitlement to representation (not there because it's not a criminal matter) has been used with excuses of organized crime and the war on some drugs for decades. 2. US citizens arrested on US soil have already been held as enemy combatants and tortured following 9/11/2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29

No more than 1.0 + .1/100 jumps per Brian Germain's Wingloading Never Exceed formula. It's easy to set an upper bound. Landing parachutes straight into the wind in large flat grassy open spaces is not hard. It doesn't get difficult until you have to correct problems like making a low 90 degree turn to avoid power lines for a down-wind landing on an asphalt road on the sunset load after cute chicks flashed the pilot for extra altitude, some one in the group got hypoxic and caught their foot on a seatbelt for a long climb out and long spot, and with the low light the power lines went unnoticed until the last second. When the jumper in question hasn't been making lots of out landings with low turns to avoid obstacles we don't know how they'll do and they shouldn't be jumping a smaller canopy. When they've consistently been doing that it shows bad judgement and they shouldn't be jumping a smaller parachute. Following Brian's formula and the down-sizing skill pre-requisites from him and Bill von Novak (land down-wind, cross-wind, with 180 degree flat turns from 100 feet, with post-planeout carving turns, with induced speed, arrest a dive, etc.) gets jumpers to the point that they have the necessary survival skills, are likely to have the muscle memory to avoid over-controlling the canopy, and are likely to be performing at a psychological arousal level where things going wrong doesn't have them panic.

It'll save me the same way wearing a seatbelt does in a car or plane - some of the time.

My wife is already busy cooking for the big day. The ham meat balls, shrimp pate atop bruschetta with cocktail sauce, and beef roast samples (apparently destined for some sort of meat salad) were very good. I can't wait for the pulled pork sliders which will follow tomorrow. There are also a couple pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream (Cherry Garcia and Late Night snack) and la petit ecolier dark chocolate topped butter cookies. Beer will be our standard refrigerator staples of Stone IPA (crisp and tasty) and Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA (a nice live IPA like Bridgeport would make if they weren't so afraid of hops, but not as yummy as Russian River Blind Pig).

Because one or more of the following apply : 1. Politicians believe attempting to ban them wins more votes and campaign contributions than it looses. This probably holds in urban areas for candidates with low NRA-ILA rankings. 2. Politicians are elite pigs (while all animals are equal, some are more equal than others) who want to limit firearms availability to people outside the ruling class. 3. It makes ignorant people feel good.