DrewEckhardt

Some people can drive with one knee leaving both hands free for other things.

Shiro's is awesome they get great uni (try the uni ika shomen). Shiki is one of the few places in America which can serve Fugu - call ahead in-season and they can serve you a tasting menu. I really like the variety of salmon - that's almost a Portlandia episode "Your King salmon Fred grew up on the West bank of the Copper River" Yeah it's horrible. I spent FOUR HOURS one day driving the 90 miles from Shelton to Seattle. My wife spent about as long making it the few miles across Lake Washington. OTOH, if you're not enroute to a startup liquidity event it's probably better to pay income tax and have roads that aren't ludicrously undersized.

Obama is a _very_ smart man who has a fine understanding of economics. I doubt he missed anything. Like most big budget items in American politics you'd do best to forget about all the "liberal" and "conservative" hype politicians use to distract us from what's going on and follow the money. ACA means that PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) will have millions of new customers buying their products using government mandated and subsidized health insurance. They bought a seat at the negotiating table with some drug discounts, got things they didn't like removed such as the re-import provision, and once satisfied spun up a pair of 501(c)(4) organizations to run a $150M advertising campaign supporting ACA which was coordinated with the White House. Obama and his Democrats are corporatists in bed with those guys just like Bush 43 and his Republicans which controlled both houses of Congress when Medicare Part D was passed funneling $1T over 10 years to PhRMA member companies. PhRMA liked that one so much they thanked Billy Tauzin(R) for his help passing the bill with a seven figure job as their president. [QUOTE]Rant over - as you were. Here's more food for thought: ACA has minimum medical loss ratios of 80 (large groups) - 85% (individuals and small groups) which is to say for a given $1 in premiums they must spend at least 80 cents on health care, or that they're allowed a 25% mark-up. Before ACA they could profit more by negotiating lower costs with providers. Now the only way to make more will be to spend more to collect a bigger sales commission. In a free market they might have to compete on price so that wouldn't happen although we do not have a free market. The McCarran-Ferguson act exempts insurance companies from federal anti-trust laws including those on price fixing. In theory they're limited by state anti-trust laws although in practice their contracts often have arbitration clauses which those courts have historically recognized.

Lesee: A Chevy Cruze is 33mpg (from fuelly.com) car with a $17,000 price tag. Swapping in an electric drive train and calling it a Volt eliminates the gas but ups the price to $40,000. Paying $23,000 more for a cheap car seems stupid before you run the arithmetic - in California that'll buy enough gas at $4.50 a gallon to cover 168,663 miles. OTOH, the $70,000 Tesla Model S is out selling gas powered cars with comparable quality and price tags. First quarter sales were 4750 units versus 3077 Mercedes S-class cars, 2338 BMW 7 series, and 1462 Audi A8s. I think Chevy's problems are more about trying to charge a lot for a cheap Chevy than moving electric vehicles.

That will have interesting control issues. I hope it's stable. As far as FAA is concerned they are all "Unmanned Aircraft Systems" regardless of size, even down to insect size. Drone is not legally defined. You say they "were" building it. Is it finished? I think so. Sometime in the last month or so they vanished from the shop after pretty much living there turning out machined parts and have a face book page (that wasn't hard to find - not too many San Jose State students make such things) which looks more like a photo and less like a rendering but there's no test flight footage https://www.facebook.com/IncredibleHLQ http://www.industrytap.com/heavy-lifting-quadcopter-lifts-50-pound-loads-its-a-gas-powered-hulk-hlq/2182

Four mechanical engineering students who share my communal machine shop were building a heavy-lift (50 pound payload, 112 pound vehicle) twin engine quadracopter with an estimated one hour loiter time for their senior project. _That_ is a drone.

California only has a surplus because of insanely high taxes and a state legislature which has yet to increase spending to match the revenue returned by the tax increases and recovery from the recession. 1. Brown's 30% increase on the highest marginal state income tax rate in the country raised it to 13.3%. Even people poor enough to qualify for government moderate income housing assistance are paying 9.3% plus the separate 1.0% State Disability Insurance surcharge for a 10.3% total. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax 2. California has the highest minimum state sales tax in the country of 7.5% (6.5% + the 1% uniform local tax, with some cities and counties adding another 2.5% for a 10% total). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_and_use_taxes_in_California 3. California has extremely high property values (6 of the top 10 most expensive cities in the country are in SIlicon Valley) which means at the base 1% rate a modest 1500 square foot 3/2 ranch built in 1950 can land a $15,000 annual tax bill for people whose tax basis hasn't been limited by Proposition 13. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/02/the-most-expensive-cities_n_2220188.html#slide=1825107 4. California has high corporate taxes. One-man S-corps (like skydiving instructors) pay 2.5% with an $800/year minimum . C-corps pay at least 8.84%. https://www.ftb.ca.gov/businesses/faq/717.shtml https://www.ftb.ca.gov/businesses/faq/704.shtml

You mean because some one changed that while we weren't looking to read "The right of the people to keep and bear muskets shall not be infringed?"

Washington State can't afford such things because they don't have an income tax.

That doesn't make things last longer, it just cuts labor and crushes unions. 80 hours making a complex part on a Bridgeport is a fun hobby today but doesn't compete economically with bolting it to a rotary table on a CNC mill, pushing "start", and getting a cup of coffee.

Would that be the same right that spends 5X as much on our military compared to the second place country, 10X versus the second place NATO country, and 30X against the nearest first world country with similar land mass and border length? The same right that passed the trillion dollar per ten year tax funnel to the pharmaceutical industry (aka Medicare Part D) which PhRMA liked so much they made Billy Tauzin their president with a seven figure salary? The same right behind the Earned Income Credit (created by Ford, expanded by Reagan) and Child Credit (doubled by Bush 43)? The same right behind Bush 43's record breaking non-defense discretionary spending increases? By comparison Clinton was a fiscal conservative. The Republicans have some things going for them but support for a small inexpensive government is not one of them.

and (3) special corporatist laws that prohibit discharge of student loans in bankruptcy which allow private lenders to profit from loans that otherwise don't make sense. Instead of "$100K of our money towards a $200K photography degree? Forget it - you'll never make a living, will tire of working two jobs living at home with your parents, will declare bankruptcy, and we won't get our money back!" it's "Sure we'll spot you the six figure loan!" where "You'll live with your parents until you're fifty, drive the same car you have now, and work as many jobs as it takes until we get our money back plus healthy profits" goes unsaid. They need to get rid of that and score education borrowers like they do home buyers.

Under Obamacare you may have been more likely to get the better treatment if it was more expensive. Obamacare mandates (as in insurance companies have to refund the excess premiums) minimum medical loss ratios of 80 (individuals and small groups) and 85% which roughly means that insurance companies must spend that fraction of the total premiums collected on actual health care and they can't increase profits by denying claims and spending less. With Obamacare earning more will require more spending on which they can make their 25% markup. The caveat is that the companies which own insurance companies have been buying up hospitals which aren't subject to such limits on profits and an insurance company may insist you have the old high-margin procedure performed at their "in network" hospital for a small profit to them and big profit to the facility owned by the same share holders.

Not-for-profit socialist insurance (and sometimes socialist health care) for everyone works in most of the developed world, paying for everyone's insurance for less money than America spends covering the 25% of our population which wouldn't be profitable for private insurers. You've got your "isms" confused. Socialism had nothing to do with the ACA bill passed by Congress and signed by Obama beyond marketing for (lots of Democrats would love Socialist health care) and against (lots of Republicans despise the concept) the bill. It was about corporatism. With capitalist health care when you have a minor problem you go to the nurse's office and pay him $15-$25 cash for fifteen minutes of his time as you do trades people like your mechanic or professionals like your accountant with moderate investment in training. You might get a recommendation for drugs which you fill yourself from the shelves of the local superstore at $8 for 25 pills or $15 for 250 if it is a recurring problem and you opt for the generic. In the unlikely event something is really wrong he refers you to a specialist medical doctor who charges you $150-$200 for a half hour of her time like lawyers and other professionals do after spending years training following their under graduate program. That doesn't happen because we don't have capitalist health care - the American Medical Association has arranged things so that there aren't low cost alternatives to their members' services via medical licenses requiring a MD and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) trade group prefers a world where you just see the $10 co-pay on a prescription and aren't worrying about medication's true cost. With socialist health care you take your government insurance card to a government owned health care facility and are seen by doctors and nurses employed by the government. That doesn't happen because we don't have socialist health care except for veterans (with the VA). We also provide socialist health insurance for old people (Medicare) who wouldn't be profitable to insure and poor people (Medicaid) that couldn't afford to buy free market insurance with much of that spending ultimately becoming profit for private companies. Obviously we don't have capitalist health care and most of us don't have socialist health care. Instead we have corporatist health care where the health and insurance industries get laws passed on their behalf maximizing profits at the peoples' expense. Sometimes that comes in the form of redirected tax dollars, like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Obamacare subsidies. In terms of purchasing power parity the United States government spends more per capita on health care than ALL of the other OECD countries. That includes the Netherlands, France, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, New Zealand, the United Kingdom. Spain, Sweden, Japan, Norway, Italy, Iceland, Ireland, Australia, Slovenia, the Slovak Republic, Finland, Chile, Luxembourg, Isreal, Hungary, the Czech Republica, Korea, Poland, Estonia, Mexico, and Turkey. Sometimes it's just protection - only MDs can practice medicine, and the insurance industry is exempt from Federal anti-trust laws. Somewhere between is the special tax treatment for employer provided group plans which allow them to collect up to twice as much from people for the same difference in after tax income. PhRMA bought a seat at the negotiating table with drug discounts and massaged ACA into a more palatable form (they got rid of things like the part allowing their drugs to be re-imported from lower cost markets). With that done they spun up a pair of 501(c)(4) groups and coordinated their $150 million advertising campaign with the White House to land millions of new consumers (many with tax subsidies) who'll see a substantial portion of their premiums go to buying products from PhRMA members. PhRMA is also the organization which rewarded Representative Billy Tauzin with a seven figure salary as their president after he helped pass the Medicare Part D $1 trillion per ten year tax funnel to their industry. For the Republicans who've read this far he's a Republican, speaker Dennis Hastert (R) sponsored the bill, it passed the Republican controlled House and Senate, and Republican George W. Bush signed it into law. This is because we have a corporatist government with corporatism at the core of both Democratic and Republican parties.

Done. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323158/How-Mail-On-Sunday-printed-plastic-gun-UK--took-board-Eurostar-stopped-security-scandal.html#ixzz2TAN1XkSb They didn't fire it and prove it worked without injury.

WTF? $ echo '#' | od -h 0000000 0a23 0000002 You mean 0x23. Without -n echo appends a 0x0a newline character and that second byte was interpreted as the most significant bits since you're using a little endian box. echo -n \# | od -t x1 0000000 23 0000001

Crunch.

Abraham's (as in the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) first wife Sarai was having problems conceiving and offered her handmaiden Hagar up as a second wife with that union producing Ishmael. Usually such a first born would inherit everything. Sarai subsequently bore Abraham a second son Isaac. Wanting the best for her son she had Abraham cast out and disinherit Ishmael. Ishmael is Muhammad's forefather and recognized by Muslims as Abraham's legitimate first born. Judaism maintains that Isaac is Abraham's true heir. Israel (given to Abraham and his descendants by God) is the inheritance in question.

Note however that "unemployed" is a term of art which only includes people actively looking for work and not those that have given up because they can't find a job. The share of adults with jobs was 63.3 in 2007, but has hovered between 58.2 and 58.7 percent for the last three years.

Democracy. It doesn't mean what you think it does. Google tells me "Democracy" means exactly what I think it does First-past-the-post electoral systems like ours are by definition not democratic because failures to gain pluralities within districts (which are often Gerrymandered to preserve the existing power structure - after the 2000 Census required new boundaries the Democrats and Republicans in California conspired to create new districts where in the 2004 election no seats changed parties and only 5/85 state assembly districts had a majority of less than 55%) result in ZERO representation so less than "the whole population" or "all the eligible members of a state" like registered voters are governing. Influence on Congress creatures in other districts via campaign contributions is the only way significant (35% of households own guns, although given our treatment you have to worry about how the 12.6% of Americans who are black fare) geographically dispersed minorities have a voice in this "democracy." Our non-democratic political system is also why we can't have "common sense" legislation. I'd happily accept mandatory background checks on transfers which then proceed like those under the 03 C&R Federal Firearms License I held until realizing I was most interested in designs newer (but not necessarily more lethal - a Colt 1895 as in year of manufacture machine gun isn't even a firearm under US Code Title 18) than what that allowed me to acquire directly by mail across state lines. Instead we get package deals including enough for all the significant corporatist interests like the National Alliance of Stocking Gun Dealers who want a cut of every transfer that happens (those guys are the reason behind the mail order ban in the Gun Control Act of 1968). Given a choice I can choose between opposing all background checks and requiring all transfers to go through those stocking gun dealers which can charge as much as they want (like in California, where some dealers' fees have crossed $100 for guns worth less) and refuse when it might cut into their profit margins (like in California, where they're required by law to complete private transfers although some refuse outright and some just add hours of delay until people go elsewhere) because used guns transfered between private parties mean less money for them than consignment and new sales. After having a gun held hostage by a dealer who decided after receiving a shipment he wanted 10% of my invoice price not $20-$40 and looked at statistics where law abiding citizens in high-crime areas are as safe as they are in Europe (Milwaukee/Belgium) I prefer no background check over that mess. I prefer it enough to pay politicians to preserve the status quo (all sales from licensed dealers whether at their store or a gun show take a transfer, although private transfers within a state don't take a background check) at a national level in case I ever return to living in a less totalitarian state. Of course all this ignores the country being a constitutional republic.

People like him make me so angry I donate money to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (our lobbying organization) and smile knowing that it's not personal enough for people who don't like guns to put their money where their mouth is. Just think of how much better the NRA could protect our rights if we all gave $5 to the NRA-ILA and $5 to the NRA Political Victory Fund (our PAC) for each vitriolic news piece or editorial we saw. I'd passed on the PAC because the leadership were playing a loosing strategy of compromise where they supported anti-gun Republicans over pro-gun Democrats, although they seem to have gotten over that and I'll have to start rewarding their good behavior. Remember, even when you aren't personally wealthy enough to buy your own Congress Critter you can join together with millions of other middle class Americans and share some by way of PACs which are the last refuge of Democracy in this time of corporatism, Gerrymandering, and geographic districting which disenfranchises politicial minorities that don't all live in the same place.

You mean "salmon." http://img1.findthebest.com/sites/default/files/2307/media/images/Light_Salmon_Pink_430089.png Your manhood may feel less threatened if you use euphemisms for "girly" colors like mens shirt colors from the 1980s when more guys had enough testosterone to get away wearing such things. I'm assuming that was before your time - you might get some perspective from Miami Vice reruns. I have a mostly pink parachute in my wing suit rig. It works great, the price was right in part because it was pink, and if I ever cut it away (the rectangular shape makes that less likely) it'll be easy to find than my dark blue canopies.

I paid $800 for my last Javelin J7 with a 253 reserve and expect you could do the same. I never encountered weather conditions where I'd be unwilling to jump that rig with a 245 main for classic accuracy but still be good to go with my fun-sized rig with 105 main and 143 reserve although I'd stick my head out and check the spot if ground winds were significant. How much of your salary is not covered by disability insurance? What is your health insurance co-insurance share and out of pocket maximum? What is your health insurance deductible? Can you afford to do that a few years in a row when the first operation is not good enough? Injuries in the US are _very_ expensive even with "good" insurance. Without insurance they'll put you back together but you'll have a hard time getting access to good sports medicine people whose goal is to have you performing as well athletically as opposed to walking (not running) with a limp. The debt could also get in your way of doing things like buying a home.

Note two things 1. By default most policies cover the depreciated value, not the replacement cost. Hypothetically you could receive $2500 - your $500 deductible = $2000 to replace a 10 year old rig. Replacement value coverage is often available for an insignificant price increase. 2. Off-premise coverage can be a fraction of a total; IIRC my last policy was 10%. You might need extra total coverage (60,000 of contents coverage for $6,000 in gear not at home) to get there which doesn't cost too much.

If my senators had the spine to do what's right and oppose the bill they'd have my support and I'll probably send some money to those that did when they're facing reelection. While universal background checks might be good that'd be the cherry on top of the bill's crap sundae. The bill required all transfers to go through a dealer. While the National Alliance of Stocking Gun Dealers supports that move to boost profits (like the mail order ban in GCA 1968) I don't. I've had guns held hostage by transferring dealers that decided after receiving the shipment they wanted 10% of the invoice value. Here in California where all transfers must go through dealers although we require 1. All dealers to perform private party transfers 2. Dealers to perform the transfer for no more than $10 on top of what they collect for the state Dealer Record Of Sale process. some break the law and refuse to do such transfers because they don't like the price competition with their new and used gun inventories, some technically do but add hour long waits, and some on the wrong side of the NRA duck hunter/black rifle schism illegally refuse to transfer such guns and send customers down the road. Those problems aren't worth any impact such a law may have on criminals getting guns. As written the bill also made it illegal to shoot non-family member friends' guns on public land which is completely unacceptable. If congress people want universal background checks they should write a law which stops at requiring them and not add the problems which go with getting dealers in the middle of every transfer. Give non-licensees access to the same National Instant Check System that dealers have access to, require its use, and offer to escrow evidence of a legal transfer if people don't want to risk loosing paper records. Real compromise may help pass such legislation. com-pro-mise Noun. An agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions. That'd would be where each side gives up something and gains something; not where one side gives up less than the other party originally wanted like a mugger settling for half your money and mobile devices. A good compromise would be including a provision creating a shooter's Federal Firearms License with the same requirements for an 03 C&R that allows interstate transfers of firearms without the hassle of going through dealers with a prohibition on state laws that would interfere with that. I and a lot of other shooting enthusiasts would support such a bill.