SethInMI

I think the 1400 came from me posting that last week I did a 1400 mile round trip in my Tesla. 700 miles each way, ~1.5 hrs charging spread out over 13.5 hrs of travel. Brent acts like this is the end-of-the-world but really it isn't. edit: even though my wife was annoyed at all the charging we had to do on our trip "we have to stop AGAIN?" she was not pushing us to drive the gas car, and actually has decided to get rid of it and make her next car electric.

No. 5 stops, 1.5 hrs total time. You act like sitting in your car is completely wasted time, but I would disagree. Giving yourself a break every few hours is nice. We watch Netflix on the car screen. But I can't win the "we can get there faster so you suck" argument...although like I said, I likely spend less time fueling per year than you do, so if your time is very valuable, maybe an electric car should be on your list.

I got a laugh out of this line so thanks for that. I got a 480 HP AWD "sewing machine" that is very fun to drive. More fun than my 300 HP Subaru STi was. And I just got back from a 1400 mi round trip to visit my sis in NC. No waiting for charging. Was I in and out in 5 min? No, but 15-20 min really isn't that long. Stretch your legs, get some lunch or dinner. And I can couple that with the fact I don't have to wait that 5 min any other time of year, the standing outside my car freezing in the winter or sweating in summer while it fuels is long past for me.

from the article you linked, I am not sure it won't. Sweden is 90% union-labor, and the Tesla maint personnel have walked out in a labor dispute, so the rest of the country's workers are refusing to support Tesla. So sounds like Tesla will have to make a deal to get anywhere in Sweden anytime soon... Unions seem to be making a comeback these days, at least generating a lot of news. So I don't follow the connection to the Luddites.

I don't want any updates sent to me ; ) In case anyone was wondering how I made this, I wrote a small program that automatically finds and downloads all the individual dropzone web pages on dropzone.com, finds the name and geolocation of each one on the page, and saves them all to a single kmz file. It takes about an hour to do that (I put a few sec delay in between each download), and as long as dz.com doesn't change the format of their website, I can re-run the process at any time. If there is data that is out of date, I think it would be best to update dz.com itself, and the re-run the program to create new kmz file Another alternative would be to add some data to @platypii 's website and work on keeping that up to date. They could provide a kmz download button if you wanted a google earth view.

alright, I think I got it to work, scraping is brittle and a bit tedious. The attached kmz has about a 1000 dropzones. Some DZs didn't have coordinates or I couldn't parse them and they ended up at 0,0. I grouped them by country as they were in DZ.com. There is no additional metadata other than the name of each DZ, I might add a url back to its DZ.com page but I probably won't. As someone pointed out, this data is probably from 10-15 years ago. google earth can be found at https://earth.google.com/ dropzones-full.kmz

I didn't realize the Map version of the dropzone directory was not a feature of this site anymore. It looks the like the data (LAT and LON of each DZ) is still there. I might take a crack at scraping it into a KML file, I have wanted to play around with scraping a bit this would be a good excuse.

fb throws weird shit at me all the time. normally it is mildly annoying, but occasionally it comes up with some good stuff though. I thought this was dark but quite funny.

In most states, EVs already get charged additional registration fees. I pay an extra $150 a year, which is about the amount of sales tax the state would get on $2500 worth of gas sales.

I was hoping for some old school shenanigans, but not much there for that, but the face full of drogue was fun.

yes, this link doesn't work

That has been the overwhelming story of "factory work" in the USA and in other developed countries in recent decades. Not job elimination through automation, but through movement to lower cost countries, like Brazil as you mention, but also China, Vietnam and plenty of others. Will these new robotics affect that trend, or start a new one? I doubt it will be much noticed in this country, as a lot of factory jobs remaining are difficult to automate, the maintaining and re-configuring of existing robots, etc. Sure automation may come for those too, but it will be a slow process that society can absorb. As Brent points out, we as a society have seen massive reductions in factory work over the last centuries and largely it has been a good thing. When the robots come for the jobs in Bangladesh, that will be a milestone. Ethier robots have managed to get really cheap, or the Bangladesh economy has finally "made it".

Cartwheeling out sounds fun, a lot easier to do from a Skyvan. I wanted to do a Bat Hang exit for one of my special jumps but the dzo wouldn't let me. I did my 100th naked. I vote for that. There are ways to retain your privacy if needed, like wear a fanny pack with a cover up and land away from everyone and put it on. Hitting the person after they land with whipped cream or shaving cream pies is a def thing for the 100th and 1000th jumps. People will often do special jumps with their friends on other major jump intervals (500th, 2000th, 3000th or others that feel important). and of course when you die and they cremate you, you can come along on one final traditional jump, the ash dive.

not really a swipe at religion, but I'll preserve the author's intent and drop this joke about language / slang in here:

According to the article I read, they did do plenty of planning, and they had planned to stop at a certain rest area with chargers. Several chargers there were offline, and the advance party tried to sit in an unused available spot to reserve it, which is not nice, and got the cops called on them. There is a reason Ford GM Volvo Mercedes Benz and a host of other manf. have decided to join Tesla and use their charging network. Tesla's network is huge and it is very reliable. Volkswagen, which owns Electrify America, one of the crappy charging networks, is in a tough spot. Do they throw in the towel and join Tesla, or do they stick it out?

Now I think about it, aren't speed fliers just really fast free-flyers? Following the general rule slower fallers before faster fallers, that would but the speed flier after the last free-fly group before the tandems and students.

So with this new KA what are your numbers Mike, if I may ask? Time to altitude and cycle time for a load wheels up to wheels down?

seems right to me. Getting out first and you risk the belly fliers opening over top of you, unless you are angling off jump run somehow, not sure what a speed flier does, I assume they just went straight down though.

I've never heard of FB / Meta charging for account recovery. Likely it is a scam, but try to do some more research. Try Reddit, maybe there is a sub-reddit on FB account recovery.

Excluding health coverage for source-of-injury like skydiving came up in a discussion. Googling around found this https://www.congress.gov/bill/108th-congress/senate-bill/423 amendment that I read was supposed to prevent group plans from excluding legal recreation activities (so skydiving but not trespassing BASE jumps). From what I can tell it never became law. Does anyone know if any employer offered group health plans exclude for source-of-injury in the USA? I kinda doubt it, but it would be interesting to know.

We still get our city Sunday paper, although it is thinner and smaller every year. One thing I like to do is read the obits, scanning to find ones that seem interesting to me. I like to see what the deceased family thought of him / her, what value they brought to the lives of others or what value they chose to create for themselves. There is also the interesting puzzle of reading between the lines, all families have some drama, divorces, blended families, difficult relationships often get alluded to obliquely and it is entertaining to read into names mentioned and omitted and descriptive word choices to try to assemble a more complete picture of a life lived. Most are like this person, "worked hard all their life, loved spending time with their family and friends and pursuing hobbies" but occasionally you get someone that really says to me "that was a life really well lived" or even "that was an obit well written" (not that a simple life isn't worth celebrating) Also, Wendy I was able to find the name of the person easily through google, but perhaps that wasn't your intent, It may have been just to prevent someone searching the name from finding this post on DZ.com.

I'm a bit late to this thread but my 0.02 is to echo Wendy and say buy used for first rig, and that all the major brands are fine. Javelin, Vector, Mirage, Infinity, Curv are popular, and there are others that I am skipping. Why used? Well you say you won't downside for a long time, but I don't believe you ; ). Sure you are a bit older, but ex-Airborne you will feel the need for a bit more speed. I am 50, I jump a 135 loaded at 1.6 and it isn't a rocket ship, but it gives me several nice features. The rig is smaller, I can fit it in a carry-on suitcase, the canopy is smaller and easier to pack, the rig is lighter and more comfortable to wear, and the increased airspeed makes me less sensitive to changing wind speeds. All these will enter your mind as you get more comfortable with flying a canopy and if you are like many (but not all) jumpers you will drop canopy sizes.

The quote about misleading range loss in cold weather does ring true for me. My brother lives about 150 miles from me, and my Tesla (with 300 mi range) uses about 55% of range to get to his house in the summer, which seems reasonable given my 80 mph highway speed. But when the temps drop below 20F it probably took 80% (iirc) or more. Some of that I chalk up to my winter tires being less efficient and my winter wheels also being less efficient, but although Telsa makes it clear that cold weather affects range it was surprising how much it changed.

I was too young to be into the Dead, but I am very glad my one trip to Red Rocks was July 2014. It was an Avett Brothers show, Bob Weir and RatDog opened, for one of their last shows. The Avetts joined in for Touch of Grey and I felt connected to a vast musical experience... Glad your daughter was able to gift that to you, that must have been a "gee I did something right" moment