DrewEckhardt

Objectively speaking sex between most people looks bad too although most of us find it plenty enjoyable and overlook that.

Genetic imperative. Most people can't get past that and acknowledge their interests this century differ from what nature decided was right millions of years ago. Some people are naively optimistic. Some choose ignorance to live in more pleasant dream worlds. Some are too stupid to see the progressing collision between first and developing worlds, technology advancing past the point where not everyone has abilities which produce more value than it costs to employ them, and governments acting on behalf of corporatist interests to reduce how far the resulting pay or unemployment gets people. Some are just incredibly selfish and cruel choosing to bring new people into that world. Marriage has legal implications you may wish to avail yourself of. As a professional who gets health insurance you might want to take advantage of spousal benefits with a subsidy from an employer and ability to pay your share with pre-tax dollars that may go twice as far compared to when the governments grab slices first. As some one who saves for retirement you care that your assets pass to your partner tax free - after 40 years of 3% inflation the savings you'll accumulate to replace the median household income for college graduates will be $5.5M which will likely qualify you as "rich" and incur the death tax. As some who do does not you'll want survivors benefits only available to married people. As a sleaze or person worried about wrongful prosecution you might like that spouses can't be compelled to testify against each other. Etc. With the right person marriage is great. I decided against spawning. It's better that way. Two came with my wife and while I love them seeing the situation they're facing in their odyssey years confirms the wisdom of that choice.

(Or any other automatic or semi-automatic weapon or a magazine that can hold more than a handful of rounds...) Thoughts? People need guns like AR15s because the police are under no legal obligation to protect individual citizens, like when the LA police withdrew during the Rodney King riots. Some business owners were spared only because they had guns and the mobs didn't want to risk death. People need guns like AR15s because bullets aren't magic and in real life guns don't work like they do in the movies. In the infamous 1986 FBI Miami shootout one bank robber was mortally wounded by the FBI's first bullet which stopped an inch from his heart and collapsed one lung. After that he killed two agents and wounded three more, not stopping until after he'd been shot a total of twelve times with a bruised spinal cord from the twelfth hit taking him out of the fight. For the sake of argument we could hypothesize that no one needs an AR15. They also do not need more than a bunk in a dormitory room, food better than Nutraloaf, and cars which can travel faster than any speed limit. Thankfully we live in a country where we're allowed private homes, gourmet meals, and powerful cars if we like them. You could think of AR15s in the same way except they're safer than cars. According to Dianne Feinstein who is politically motivated not to understate related casualties assault weapons are used to murder about 50 people a year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approximately 4000 pedestrians and 500 cyclists are killed each year by car drivers.

Right, this is simple arithmetic. Exiting at 2000 feet you're about 16 seconds from impact with a high speed malfunction, not all usable. At terminal velocity it takes 2700 feet to have the same 16 seconds. Reality is a bit more complicated with accommodations for what you'll be doing both when everything goes right and when everything goes wrong. If you're content flying a pattern starting at 300 feet and ending some place on the grassy DZ you need less starting altitude than when your last turn starts at a specific three dimensional coordinate 600 feet off the ground. If you have wingsuit parts to unzip and stow out of the way you need to open higher to allow time for that. A high performance canopy which looses 100 feet/second in a spinning malfunction calls for more altitude than something big and square. That said it's still arithmetic. Some combinations of factors sum to a 2000' pack opening or below being relatively sensible, some add to 4000' or above. If you accept that USPA's 1800 foot cutaway decision altitude is reasonable and have a modern canopy that "takes 800 feet to open" 1800 + 800 = 2600 which is above 2500' before you add other factors.

Outrageous! Illustrative of how the common man gets the shaft compared to the 1%! Enron's collapse caused capital costs to increase 0.5% per year or $4 billion annually which is a _lot_ more than one $400M lump sum. In spite of that Jeffrey Skilling is only serving 14 years. A proportional punishment would be less than a year. One out of 320 million isn't a lot.

I do. It's perfect for seven cell accuracy canopies loaded around the .7 pound per square foot optimum with a spot over the top. When things go well you'll be open within several seconds and 50 feet of altitude. If things don't low speed malfunctions happen slowly. 300 feet of altitude is plenty to fly a pattern with down-wind, base, and final legs. I wouldn't jump one of my small ellipticals in that situation because it takes a while to open, you have more housekeeping to do with collapsible sliders/chest straps/etc, getting back to the DZ with 300 feet of altitude wouldn't leave room for a normal speed inducing turn to say nothing of a pattern.

Willard is my cat. He's very good at being lazy.

It happens. I had a horrible sleeping accident where I put my foot through a particle board shelf, broke a glass candle holder, and got blood on the vaulted ceiling. Hurt too much to wear shoes for days to say nothing of jumping.

Legally that would be theft just like when Farmer McNasty decides to keep a cutaway canopy. As a law abiding citizen you should turn it into the police and be done with it.

You're missing a key point. Gov't will subsidize either all, or part of the premium pending certain circumstances. Hence, you get free health care and free money. You're missing another key point. Dumping more money into markets causes prices to increase. Federal student loans and laws exempting private loan debt from bankruptcy have allowed education price increases to quadruple inflation since 1980. The federal government and investors assuming liability for loans people could not afford doubled home prices in real money. More money for health insurance means prices will go up. Even with the subsidies you're probably going to loose. Lets say you're a young single person making $40,000 a year which is about the median income for single-earner households. Before Obamacare showed up assuming you didn't work for the 51% of firms offering group plans you might have spent $80/month, $960/year, and 2.4% of your income on insurance. Under the new plan you're required to spend 9.5% of your income or $3800 a year and $316 a month on health insurance before the subsidy kicks in. I was paying $80/month for my adult son's health insurance before that mess. Now I'm paying $150/month. I expect that to increase even more because the only way insurance companies can make more money under the new law (due to a medical loss ratio minimum of 80% which allows them to retain at most 20% of premiums for overhead and profits) is to spend more. $100/month on a patented single chiral form of a drug is $300 a year in potential profits while $10/month on the generic form with both polarities is just $30/year. You can bet they'll take the option which allows $1500 in premiums over the $150 in premium option. Obamacare only helps private citizens when they are not eligible for employer coverage, are too well off for Medicaid, are too young for Medicare plus hhavead pre-existing conditions, are old (but not old enough for Medicare which would make them unprofitable for private industry), and/or poor (but not poor enough for Medicaid where they could not afford insurance). It really helps the health insurers (who get customers who'd choose not to buy their product or could not afford it, and must charge young healthy people at least 1/3 old people), health care providers getting that money, and drug companies (you do know that PhRMA spent $150M to pass the bill?). People in this country get their isms confused. While Corporatism also ends in "ism" like Socialism it's about dividing the country into groups with common economic interests and passing laws on their behalf, not the people socially owning or controlling the means of production to their own benefit. Socialist countries insure all their populations for less than the per-capita price (based on our entire population) to cover the 25% who are too old or poor to be profitable.

PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) did NOT spend $150M spinning up a pair of 501(c)(4) organizations to run an advertising campaign supporting Obamacare and make profit-cutting compromises like drug discounts to earn a seat at the negotiating table to nuke onerous provisions like the re-import clause to have people skip the subsidies and not send money their way or to see profits otherwise drop. Health insurers did not allow the bill to pass in a form which would cut their profits. Obama is just a pawn like the Republicans (speaker Hastert who sponsored the bill, House and Senate who passed it, and president Bush who signed it) responsible for Medicare Part D which is the other $100B/year tax funnel into the health insurance, health care, and pharmaceutical industries. PhRMA liked Republican representative Billy Tauzin's help passing that one so much they rewarded him with a seven figure job as their president. Astute observers might notice the two "parties" aren't too different except when it comes to what people do with their crotch, guns, and whether it's better to pay for an even bigger government through higher taxes or printing money where some of those differences are more about marketing than what they do once elected. With corporatist interests deciding who ends up on the ballot (spending $10.5M for the average successful Senate campaign or $1.7M for each of six years where the job pays just $174K) for both parties that should not surprise anyone.

Now it's Goldman Sachs. Third world governments (like Zimbabwe with their trillion dollar bill) print money to cover their expenses. The US government does not (that's what the Fed is for). The Fed printing money and giving it directly to the government would still smell too much like the third world situation, so companies like Goldman Sachs make straw purchases of Treasury Bills which the Fed then prints money to buy. I'm being facetious although the situation is completely ludicrous. This explains the situation best http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k. I laughed it so hard I cried.

Nope. It's the Fed standing in the way of growth. They could stimulate it through buying debt directly from consumers instead of mortgage backed securities from banks and treasury bills from Lehman Brothers. For the same sort of money they've been manufacturing for those purposes ($80B/month) they could buy $695 per month of debt ($8340 per year) from each of the 115M households in the US. IOW, every month the fed would send each household a check for $695 like the credit card companies do where cashing the check incurs an obligation to pay back the money. The differences from the credit card company checks would be in the term (we'd get 20-30 years to pay back the money), interest rate (just 2-3%), and that the fed was making the money handed out to us. It's time we got a populist Fed that took care of the people, not the Mortgage Bankers of America, Home Builders of America, and National Association of Realtors PACs. Maybe we could ease into it, giving $348 per month to each family instead of $40B per month to the real estate industries for their mortgage backed securities.

That doesn't mean anything. I did jury duty and got myself elected foreman. The other jurors didn't come from professions where they were trained to think logically (at least one of the lawyers used up their peremptory challenges disqualifying doctors, engineers, and lawyers - I got empaneled after that with an MD as an alternate) and the initial votes were understandably based on emotion and incomplete understanding of the laws in question. On one count I persuaded all 11 to change their minds from guilty to not guilty because the defendant did not violate the law as written. Something similar happening in the Zimmerman trial seems quite reasonable.

They're also a problem where farmers use flood irrigation.

You'd have spent less buying a used (perhaps with a new harness) container and higher mileage main AND would have safe sized gear. The last used rig I bought was $800 for container and reserve. I sold one airworthy ZP main for $400 and bought two for $600 each. If you're not an odd size/shape selling and trying again may be a fine idea.

I was hoping for a show about the Rolls Royce V12 engine as used in the Spitfire and P-51 (B through D models, the later with Merlin in licensed Packard branded form) Mustang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Merlin

It sucks less for people ineligible for group plans where one or more of the following applies: 1. They have pre-existing conditions 2. They're poor but not poor enough for Medicaid 3. They're old but not old enough for Medicare It might suck less for the low wage job workers moving into the job openings which result when employers replace 3 40 hour/week positions with 4 30 hour/week positions. It sucks more for 1. 40 hour per week employees whose hours are cut below 30 so their employer doesn't need to pay a $2000 penalty. 2. Young people who must be charged at least 1/3 of what old people pay. 3. People who'd otherwise opt for low cost plans with routine maintenance paid out of pocket 4. People who will pay more where the insurance companies (who are exempt from Federal anti-trust laws and have contractually neutered state laws on that matter) must increase expenditures to increase profits (they're allowed at most a 25% markup). The other OECD governments all spend less on heath care than ours does although usually that implies universal insurance for everybody not just the 25% of the population which is too poor or old to be profitable for private industry.

Everything goes better with bacon.

I have no lawn just decks and gardens (eight). The closest I get is the blue rug juniper covering my front yard mixed with various conifers (including a couple of Acaia cognata common name "Cousin Itt" ) and a nice Japanese maple in the middle.

More precisely each 1000 feet of density altitude yields about a 2% speed increase which is like a 4% decrease in canopy size. Density altitude is the altitude at which standard temperature and humidity would produce a matching air density; where standard temperature decreasing with elevation implies density altitudes significantly higher on summer days at mountainous DZs than their field elevation suggests. The change in effective size also means more altitude lost in speed inducing landing maneuvers. At Mile Hi Skydiving (5052 feet field elevation with summer density altitudes breaking 8000 feet) in Longmont, CO a few visiting jumpers got ambulance rides when they decided to ignore that.

Don't opt for a single setup that's usually acceptable for a lot of situations but ideal for none. You want 2-3 rigs and 3 canopies (one big rig with a classic accuracy or BASE canopy; one regular sized rig with a semi-elliptical for general purpose use where your tastes will tend more towards one than others, and some other smaller canopy for CRW). Not caring about the equipment being in your colors and some patience shopping on the used market can keep that affordable. A big F111 seven cell loaded around .7 pounds per square foot is usually the right tool for that. While consistently hitting a 2cm dead center may take a lot of currency, getting within within a foot or two of where you want does not. You setup for final approach with a glide ratio around 1:1 in 2/3 brakes and make adjustments (full flight is about 2:1, and full sink is straight down) to end where you want (enough flare is left at around 3/4 brakes for a pleasant stand-up landing on hard ground). That is rather different from modern sport canopies that flatten out with a little brakes and maintain a similar glide until just short of their stall point. Bite the bullet and buy a big used rig to hold such a canopy - I spent about $800 for my Javelin J7 with a Raven III reserve around 2005. While I wouldn't want to freefly with a reserve lacking span-wise reinforcement tapes where a premature deployment or AAD fire could break the parachute (I saw one reserve "landing" after it separated into 2 and 5 cell chunks held together by the single reinforcing tape across the tail following an over-speed deployment) the Raven III will be fine when used within its design envelope. That's another special case. You want something with wing loading and glide that match local CRW jumpers canopies along with dacron lines that won't slice people up. That might share a rig with your fun canopy. I have a couple Reflex R335 rigs built for 135 mains. My 105 Samurai still packs up firm enough to work well, I use a Monarch 135 for wingsuit jumps (and a little skysurfing back when that was fashionable), and I've fit a 143 Lightning in there apart from the CRW riser parts which usually hang out. There isn't one.

Yes - I won't buy a car with an automatic. I opted for an Audi A4 Quattro with a manual over a less expensive Passat 4 Motion which only came with an automatic. If Audi wasn't offering a manual I'd be driving a Subaru.

Learn to spot. It'll do a _much_ better job getting you back than a higher wing loading (in an ideal world the speed increase would be proportional to the square root of wingloading which means downsizing from a 170 to a 150 would net just 7% more air speed, although your frontal area doesn't change and the lines get shorter but not thinner so in practice you don't do that well). If some one wants to complain about you not getting out down-wind let them go first and walk back. There are very few situations where I'd be willing to jump my 105 swoop canopy but not my 245 accuracy setup and none where I'd jump the 105 but not a modern 9 cell at a pound per square foot.

Is that the same one that causes drivers in the next lane to speed up so you can't change lanes?