Baksteen

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Posts posted by Baksteen

  1. On 8/19/2021 at 7:08 AM, Westerly said:

    I spoke with a hold-out today. He was not strictly against getting vaccinated, but he said he has not done it because he feels that the vaccine was developed so much faster than so many other products that there is no way to know for sure what the long term risks are. Technically he is right, but realistically the risk is extremely small. I explained to him that the risk of harm from getting Covid is much higher than the risk of a defect in the vaccine. However, in all fairness that is a legitimate thing to question. It was developed fast with multiple phases combined. I think for a lot of people they just dont follow the 'Covid news' that much and they just genuinely arnt that worried about it. They see the fatality rates for their age group and they just dont feel like it's worth their concern over something that's not likely to kill them so it's not something they consider much either way and thats why they havent gotten the shot.

    The vaccine was developed faster because a lot of money was pumped into it short term rather than over the course of years, allowing companies to have a broader approach, testing several options in the lab instead of only the one which looks on paper the most promising. And, cynically, the regulating authorities had a vested interest in reviewing all documentation regarding COVID vaccines. It's quite the difference to your research process if the authorities come asking whether you have something for them yet, rather than you having to chase after them for months on end trying to cut through the red tape. 
     

  2. · Edited by Baksteen

    On 8/11/2021 at 2:24 PM, wolfriverjoe said:

    I have a very hard time finding sympathy for people who deliberately ignore science, reality and reason.

    If it only affected them, it would be much more of a 'it's your choice, do what you want but don't bitch about the consequences' thing.

    Smoking & diet, riding a motorcycle without a helmet or driving without a seatbelt, swooping, all of that. 
    Not the choice I would make (Disclaimer: I used to smoke and would sometimes ride bare-headed, but not anymore), but those choices don't put me at any significant extra risk.

    However, this is different.

    <snip>

    Well, it never really only affects "them" does it?
    A 50 jump wonder jumping a handkerchief as a main and a postage stamp as a reserve as a H&P on their own pass may only be endangering themselves - but a lot of innocent bystanders are likely to be affected if (when) they bounce.

    A smoker is getting the lion's share of the unhealthy substances in the cigarette, but second-hand smoke is a health risk, especially for their children.

    An anti-vaxer is not endangering just themselves, but also their innocent children - and indoctrinating said children into the same pseudoscience as well. Let alone the fully vaccinated people who for whatever reason have a weak response to the vaccine and end up in the ICU because some @$$hat is maintaining that they have "just a cold" and therefore do not need to quarantine.

  3. On 6/14/2021 at 8:02 PM, Cocowheats said:

    So a topic came up amongst some new jumpers that I didn't have a good answer for. One person mentioned getting some semi-cheap glasses with a camera in the temple to record their jumps up till they were at the USPA recommendation of 200+ jumps to mount a helmet camera of good quality.

    They were wondering since the glasses would not necessarily affect the helmets safety rating, like a mount can/will, and eliminates the USPA's worry about a snag or turbulence issue, that it may be permitted. This is obviously in part the decision of the DZ to allow or not...

    But it's an interesting thought because these jumpers are allowed to wear sunglasses under a helmet as A & B license holders. From what I saw, these camera glasses are slightly bulky glasses with mediocre camera quality. Just enough to see how the jump went.

    Obviously awareness, or lack of, is another concern addressed by the USPA, as they don't want the jumper sucked into getting "the shot".

    Thoughts on skirting the USPA camera recommendation via glasses cam under a helmet? I could see it being useful to jumper with good discipline perhaps on a B license with say 75+ jumps to help record and critique progress.

    After reading the entire thread I'll come back to the OP.

    Getting quality (e.g. useful) video during a skydive is a discipline, just like any other one (FS, FF, CReW, Swoop, instructing, tandem).

    You cannot expect any skydiver to be usefully competent in any discipline without investing some time in it first.

    I mean, I have enough jumps to wear a camera. I have enough jumps to make a freefly jump, if I were so inclined. 

    Would that make me a suitable person to get video from a two-way headdown?

  4. 18 hours ago, billeisele said:


    I've always said that one issue with COVID is the lack of consistent and quality info and guidance from the government and other "so called" experts.

    This guy is obviously passionate about what he believes. Some of it is correct, some of it is not. If there was full disclosure and more clarity from "our leaders" it would help to manage COVID, and it would lessen the believability of these type folks. There are plenty of folks that are confused by the differing opinions and will easily point to this type passionate speech as accurate.

    One specific point is disclosure of the data on side effects from the vaccine. Lack of easy access to that data can lead some to believe it's being purposefully hidden. It would also be helpful to have easy access to the list of pre-existing conditions that could make taking the vaccine risky. People are scared of COVID and some are scared of the vaccine. The lack of a quality consistent message, and easy access to data doesn't help that. 

    It's a sad fact of life that conspiracy ..people are much better at providing catchy, easily digested "information" than science/governments.

    This is of course partially due to the fact that science is slowed down by well, the need to backup their claims with actual science, basically.

    As to "our leaders" (as in the government), they are politicians, not medical experts. This means that in case of COVID-information they are at best well-informed and well meaning amateurs, not experts. 

    • Like 1

  5. 4 hours ago, metalslug said:

    Using that spin; food charities can feed three squares daily, over 30 days, to 100 people, and claim to have fed 9000 people.  

    In an innocuous mistake and, yes, Trump has done worse, but this wasn't merely 'misread' twice; The leader of the free world doesn't seem to be aware of the population of his own country. For what it's worth; I'm not entirely anti-Dem; I have huge respect for both Clinton and Obama, but this man's health status is becoming more obvious.

    I think the US have lost their "leader of the free world"-status for quite some time now. At least in all countries which are not actually the US themselves.

    You guys merely have the most soldiers; that is not the same.

  8. On 7/24/2021 at 2:00 PM, pchapman said:

    A lot of people are more likely to follow what they are told when they understand the reasons behind what they are told. There are plenty of dumb, incorrect, and arbitrary things that people are told in life, so backing an instruction up with some reasoning can be helpful.

    Be that as it may, JoeWeber's comment is still funny as hell. :-)

     

    To the OP, in my opinion a "standup landing" is the most overrated type of landing there is.
    Personally, I have been making PLFs for most of a year when recovering from a knee injury (which I sustained while participating in a ballroom dancing contest, if you believe it).
    I reasoned that while my knee was finally good enough to jump safely, I was not going to jeopardise it with "having to" land on my feet as experienced jumpers are "expected to". I reasoned that I was jumping out of an airplane - no need to try and look cool. :-)

     

    • Like 2

  9. On 7/17/2021 at 8:33 AM, Westerly said:

     

     

    Great. Sounds like people are getting with the program. At this point people have made their choice. 99% of all new infections are among those who are unvaccinated. Get the shot or take your chances. The unvaccinated need to stop bringing down those of us who have made the smarter choice. Time to cut the dead weight and let them take the risks they so desperately want to take. They want to be on their own and do their own thing, so let them. Drop the masks and precautions and let nature sort things out. Everyone had a chance to protect themselves. They made their choice.

    As you yourself correctly remarked above, the virus may mutate in people who are not vaccinated.
    You were talking about entire nations, but the same holds true within nations in which not enough people are vaccinated.
    That might mean that a mutation arises for which the vaccines becomes less effective.

     

    Also, if you are vaccinated, you can still get it - and spread it.

    You just have a way lower chance of becoming hospitalised or dying.

    • Like 1

  10. The key is not to get discouraged too easily. If the instructors told you you cannot jump right now they might  not necessarily consider you a lost cause, but merely someone who needs some extra training. There is no shame in that. 

    Every jumper will hit a bottleneck sooner or later in their jumping career. This can be anything from the exercise they cannot master, to getting back into the air after taking some time off due to personal reasons, after witnessing their first incident up close, all of the above, or something else entirely. 

  11. 4 hours ago, Westerly said:

    The vaccines are sold by private firms who are welcome to sell their product to anyone they want. The government cannot legally restrict them from selling their product to other countries, nor would it.

    That is technically true.
    I meant indirectly, with rich countries buying up all the supply at high price before the poor countries have a chance.

    Though I also vaguely remember one of the vaccines being in short supply because it was manufactured in the US and because the US would not release it until it's own demand was satisfied.

  12. On 7/12/2021 at 12:25 AM, headoverheels said:

    If you want to see where the US may be heading with the delta variant, take a look at the UK, or (worse) the Netherlands.  Then number of new cases per day in the Netherlands has doubled in the past 2 days, quadrupled in 4 days, and octupled in 7 days.  Within the coming week, both the UK and the Netherlands will probably exceed their previous new daily case peaks.

    Fear not, America, your political leaders do not have the monopoly on stupidity.

    The Dutch government made a bid for the top of the list in the hall of Infamy with their latest bout of mind-boggling ignorance and stupidity.

    Not only had they let go some of the more unpopular covid-restrictions at breakneck speed (exactly as they did last year when the situation threatened to become stable and under control), they also naively declared that teenagers could attend night clubs and bars immediately after getting their vaccinations "as they would be fully protected".
    In bars and night clubs there would be no need for social distancing as long as people could prove they were either vaccinated or had tested negative for Covid in the past 40 hours. You could prove that you were eligible with an app. Unfortunately the developers (who were on government pay) forgot to make the system watertigfht, so people could just share the QR code the app provided them by sharing screenshots via Whatsapp and suchlike. That worked, if the venue in question even bothered to check in the first place.

     

    The prime minister and the minister of health and safety have made their apologies for this "lapse of judgement" in a separate press conference and have asked anyone who attended bars or night clubs past weekend to go into self-isolation and get tested.

    It's depressing to see that the people in charge have not learned a thing during the entire pandemic. I guess I'll be staying in a self imposed lockdownish for now.

  13. On 7/8/2021 at 2:19 AM, Westerly said:

    Even if every human in America was vaccinated, that wouldn’t change the fact that there are still some 120+ countries who have a 0% vaccination rate and the virus could very easily mutate there and then travel to the USA. Vaccinating just one country in a world of 240 countries means little to nothing in the grand scheme of stopping mutations. 

    Correct, actually.

    It's therefore in the rich countries best self-interest to stop hogging the vaccines and start making the vaccines available to second and third world countries.

     

    The Dutch approach, filtered trough my own cynical interpretation:
    Astra has been taken out of the Dutch vaccination program since the government has questions about the vaccine's reliability, what with the talk about side effects and all.

    The government have also announced to donate several hundreds of thousands of doses of Astra (aka crap we do not want) to other countries. 

  14. On 7/11/2021 at 7:51 AM, Westerly said:

    Great, so why are we only getting around this some 200 years after said document was written? Where were all the bleeding hearts when the flu was around? You know how many people have died from the flu? FAR more than COVID. Buy a factor of dozens. Yet, no one has given a crap about that for the last hundred or so years. This year had the lowest prevalence of flu deaths of any year in recorded history--largely because of all the COVID precautions of course. If we would have enacted these precautions for daily life a long time ago, millions of lives would have been saved from flu deaths. But we dident. No one cared. Even in an actual hospital, during peak flu season, no one wore masks. OR staff were the only ones that wore masks 100% of the time while at work. No other unit did-not even the ICU.

    I just find it convenient that all of a sudden we have a societal obligation to help people now, but it took a pandemic to figure that out. Prior to 2020 that wasent a thing and no one cared.

    Don't be a fool.

    Have you seen the general willingness of Joe Sixpack to compy with masking, social distancing and similar easily followed measures, even during the height of the aforementioned pandemic?

    Would you like to make such measures permanent?

  15. 21 hours ago, winsor said:

    Americans like it simple, but life isn't always like that.  If you are in Asia and treat Han Chinese, Koreans, Ainu, Annamese, Khmer and Thai as interchangeable, you are in for a rude awakening.  The same goes for losing track of the differences between Maori, Zulu, Yoruba, Ibo, Tutsi, Hutu and Mandingo, or between Sicilian, Finnish, Castilian, Norman, Scottish, Welsh, Czech and Albanian

    You know, I sometimes am embarrassed to be a white male in his forties. That is, embarassed on behalf of other white men.

    To me everyone is just people. Where someone is from or where their roots lie is not important to me, unless it's important enough to them that they elect to tell me.

    At the risk of undercutting my point:
    I do not have a problem with diversity programs, in fact I am very much in favour of them.  However, I am against the idea of a "diversity quotum" as it is or was sometimes called in the Netherlands, mainly because the person(s) in question will be put under a magnifying glass. Some people will wonder out loud if that person got hired merely to fill the quotum which means the person has to work twice as hard to prove themselves.

  17. 15 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

    Once again, John, you miss the larger point. We're supposed to be the greatest nation of innovators the world has yet seen, right? Well, then why are we still using other peoples viruses? Sure India has us beat on numbers but even the South Africans managed to develop their own virus. I say we hold tight and wait this out until we have a Texas strain or maybe one from West Virginia.

    I thought this whole thing was Bill Gates' fault?

  18. 2 hours ago, olofscience said:

    There have been a few crashes now attributed to pilots trying to make things more "exciting" for passengers, so here's the inevitable question that's already been brought up in the Electric Aircraft thread:

    Do you think zero-pilot ops for skydiving lifts is feasible? Meaning, remotely piloted from the ground or completely autonomous aircraft. There are a few things about skydiving ops that make it different:

    • all passengers can have parachutes
    • the aircraft only goes a few miles (a few dozen at most) from the takeoff/landing area so if it's radio controlled, there can be fewer issues with control signals
    • DZ operators might jump at the potential cost reduction
    • FAA/CAA will of course hold the legal stick, but they're mostly concerned with passengers going from point A to B rather than skydiving, and they're also pretty busy with UAVs and autonomous aircraft coming into the scene

    Completely autonomous flights have even been done by one of the most popular skydiving aircraft, the C208 Caravan: https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/08/25/xwing-debuts-worlds-first-fully-autonomous-air-cargo-flight-using-classic-planes/35548/

    Do you think zero-pilot ops for skydiving lifts (remotely piloted from the ground) would stop "pilots" trying to make things more "exciting" for passengers?

  19. · Edited by Baksteen

    8 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

    Fully agree. I usually don't get colds but I'm always irritated when people who are sick get in my space. Haven't had that experience in over a year now. I have also come to enjoy the masks. It's always big fun to go into banks wearing one and lovely to not need to smile at assholes. Same with shaking hands. You never know where the damn thing was or which orifice it was picking at before it's offered with a smile. Let's end that, too.

    Pre-2020 we politely sneezed in our hands.
    Then COVID happened and alternatives were sought.
    Sneezing in your elbow, for instance.

    Pre-2020 we shook hands.
    Then COVID happened and alternatives were sought.
    The elbow bump for instance.

    For the time being, I'll wave at you, thanks.

  20. 8 hours ago, Westerly said:

     people who cant get infected are not very likely to infect others. 

    I'm aware that you say "not very likely" as opposed to "impossible", but I would like to point out that the risk could still be significant.

    You can be fully immune for a disease like Polio, but still 'shed'  the virus into the environment (sewage). Subsequent improper treatment of this sewage can then lead to infection of non-vaccinated people.

    Not much of a risk in the Western world, maybe, but a very real one for developing countries.

     

    Now vaccine protection against Covid on the other hand is something completely new. I would advise caution in abandoning all safety measures based on having had the shot, or being in contact with someone who did.

  22. On 2/15/2021 at 6:36 PM, Cocowheats said:

    Truth, even for AFF.

    25 jumps minimum for an A license via AFF. Think I was at 34ish when I got mine. Seems most people repeat at least a few.

     

    OP, please post the results on here when available. I didn't want to give an email...

    With AFF there's at least "levels" you have to pass. I thought the OP was driving at that with the question.

  24. On 2/7/2021 at 2:49 AM, airdvr said:

    I would thinks someone who bitched a lot wouldn't be happy with an old rope.


    What is the assessed impact on the intended use, and is the intended use conform the manufacturer's guidelines?

    How much has the tensile strength of the old rope diminished compared to a new one of the same make and type?
    How much does the tensile strength vary between lot numbers?
    Is it still within specification?