DrewEckhardt

I worry more about people who drive cars which produce over 30,000 fatalities a year versus 38 (over the last five years) for spree killers. I also worry about beer drinkers who also own cars. Mass murderers are evil but often not stupid. The Happy Land night club killer took out 87 with a can of gasoline and Timothy McVeigh got 168 with some racing fuel and fertilizer without giving their victims a chance to fight back each time they paused to aim or stopped to reload. That's not going to get you anywhere unless you're planning on stealing it or just want to avoid inviting someone to dinner that might yell at you for being ignorant about guns. Pennsylvania police noted that "assault weapons" made up just 1.4% of guns submitted to forensics examiners in homicides. For the first decade California's Attorney General was required to report the sorts of firearms used in crimes he found a low of 0% (0 of 173) and high of 6% (8 of 147). If your neighbor murders you with a gun it's unlikely to be an "assault weapon." Finding out which of your neighbors have concealed carry permits and only inviting them to your soirees would make you safer. The Texans looked and crime statistics after instituting their shall-issue concealed carry permits and learned that non-permit holding Texan males over 21 were 7.7 times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime and females 7.5 with only 26% those cases adjudicated with accused permit holders resulting in convictions.

While horrible and upsetting, being killed in a mass shooting (36 per year since 2007) is as rare as being struck by lightning and not something to worry about. People who can't get over their fears of inanimate objects and look at root causes that could be responsible may be culpable. Those of us who logically conclude that additional restrictions on guns which won't help aren't.

You know what I mean the high cal Military weapons In the vernacular an "assault rifle" is something scary looking which most people have only seen on TV. The most popular American, Belgian, and German designs are usually black although I've seen photos of pink ones made for girls. The most popular American designed "assault rifles" aren't legal for deer hunting in some states and are frowned upon elsewhere because they lack the power to make a clean kill sufficiently likely at ranges of interest. The most popular eastern block "assault rifles" fire a .30 caliber bullet but use a small cartridge and powder charge with about half the power of American big game rifles chambered in the most popular caliber (.30-06, as in the 1906 year of introduction). "Sport-utility rifle" is a better description.

In theory. Mass shootings like this are horrible but only news worthy because they're _exceedingly_ uncommon. Children under 19 are 80 times more likely to die in a traffic accident, 13 times more likely to drown, and 12 times more likely to be fatally poisoned than they are to be killed in a school shooting. I don't worry about being a victim in one the same way I don't worry about other rare events like being killed by a mountain lion or piece of blue ice falling from a plane's toilet. Most murders aren't mass murders and those aren't an issue for me as some one with an exceedingly low chance of being impoverished in a city with great economic disparity and none at all for risk factors like participation in youth gangs and the illegal drug market. Sub-populations without lots of poor people and economic disparity don't kill each other and aren't at higher risk than other places with stricter gun laws. In such places poor people kill each other which leads to bad averages. This shows up in government statistics of murder rates according to race in areas where that correlates with low incomes compared to the population at large. People like to cite _Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicides: A Tale of Two Cities_ (Sloan at el) as an example showing how American access to guns makes us less safe than Canadians where similar cities (size, geography, etc) are compared. Although Seattle and Vancouver are similar cities on opposite sides of the border they have radically different demographics. At the time of the study white people on both sides of the border had similar economic circumstances and were safer in Seattle with 6.2 murders per 100,000 versus 6.4 per 100,000 in Vancouver. In Vancouver the minorities were more affluent than average and their murder rates were not out of line with those of the white population. In Seattle the black and Hispanic per-capita incomes from the 2000 census were about half the white population's ( $18,328 and $17,216 respectively vs $35,641) and murder rates consequently many times higher at 36.6 and 26.9 per 100,000. If people want to reduce those murder rates (as opposed to making themselves feel good or having a policy which retains peoples' confidence in their politicians that are "doing something") they need to address the underlying cause of economic disparity which is educational attainment. Schools with local control and funding where the adults are under educated don't seem to be very successful getting kids there. Just passing gun laws doesn't help. Jamaica tried a handgun ban in 1974 with warrant-less searches, special gun courts with secret trials, and mandatory life sentences and had their murder rate skyrocket past 60 per 100,000 inhabitants. Murderers using guns kill one person at a time as opposed to those with gasoline cans that have killed 87 with one act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire), guys with trucks filled with fuel-oil bombs and 168 dead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing), and terrorists flying jets into buildings at 2977 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11#Casualties). While armed school employees might not stop the first killing, they should be able to keep a shooter from reloading several times.

While very horrible school shootings are extremely uncommon and not high on the list of things you need to worry about. According to the Secret Service and US Department of Education the odds are about 1 in 1 million. http://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/preventingattacksreport.pdf As of 2007 a child under 19's chances of dying in an auto accident were about 80 in 1M, drowning 13 in 1M, and being poisoned 12 in 1M.

how are you going to get the guns out of criminals hands, all you will do is disarm law abiding people. Jamaica tried a handgun ban in 1974 with warrant-less searches, special gun courts with secret trials, and mandatory life sentences. Their murder rate skyrocketed past 60 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Not true. Gun laws have become laxer and laxer. Hardly. I can't have guns delivered by mail to my house from the Sears catalog, can't import "non-sporting" guns, can't buy a new machine gun, and am subject to much stricter state regulations.

Right. That seems to be the case in states with shall-issue concealed carry permits. Seems reasonable to me. I can't do anything about the dead children and know from past experience that idiots will use every sordid incident as an excuse for depriving me of my rights. The government should deal with the biggest dangers first. Where children are concerned that'd be cleaning supplies and swimming pools. These sorts of things will occur periodically until we arm school employees like they did in Israel.

Nope. Back then we didn't have the structural issues which face us now. Back then we had a national economy without lots of 5-10X+ differences in pay for the same work (the railroads fixed that) based on geography and costs of living to go with that. American companies were American. Now we live in a big global economy where a young engineer in the SF bay area (41% of venture capital in 2011 went to Silicon Valley; it's where the jobs are) can afford a 1-2 bedroom apartment and 1/5 his wages buys one in India a villa with hired help although the two are potentially fungible (They don't yet have the same institutional learning that we have here where good people have worked with good experienced people and passed on that knowledge, although that will change as people pick that up here and go back home, some with both US wages and radically lower costs of living). As of this year IBM has just 1/4 of its employees here and has more people in India than America. Back then we were much of the first world, the second world of communist bloc countries did its own thing, and the third world consisting of everyone else was an undeveloped back water that might make trinkets but otherwise didn't have much effect on us. We had a trade surplus. The Soviet Union collapsed trying to keep up with our defense spending and its constituent countries now complete with us. China realized they'd do better fighting us in the market place. Tsinghua University graduates are as competent as Americans. The third world countries are now emerging markets which often have reasonable education systems and decent technological infrastructure that allow them to build most of what we need and want (for much less money). China and India together have 2 billion people competing against us. We have a big trade deficit. Perhaps more significantly back then pretty much everyone could do something economically worth while. Affordable automation means that's no longer the case. Manufacturing jobs are on their way out - even Foxconn plans to have a million robots deployed by 2014. I get shop time for under $100/month including CNC router, 4 axis vertical mill with tool changer, laser cutter, and water jet use (you provide your own cutting tools and pay for water jet abrasive). A couple entrepreneurs didn't need any employees when they used one of these community shops for a little home business cranking out six figures worth of smart phone car mounts. University of Washington students 3D printed themselves a boat to enter in a recycled milk jug regatta. Farming is on its way out - advances in machine vision are allowing automated crop picking and weeding that will be price competitive with migrant workers. Even many "intellectual" jobs can be taken over by machines. Expert systems can outperform civil engineers and doctors in some situations and are getting better. There's an X prize to make a tricorder. Regulations will initially limit human replacement, although political forces make change likely (the insurance and pharmaceutical industries have more to spend on lobbyists than the AMA). We're approaching a time when only intellectual property creation has value at a large scale and there won't be enough of a market for things like bespoke hand made luxury yacht interiors to support a sizeable work force. We should have a few local maxima left although any "recovery" cannot last without radical societal changes to accommodate the new reality.

Corporatist governments acting on behalf of powerful economic interests (profitable industries, professsional organizations, corporations, unions) instead of the people. That has a lot to do with our first-past-the-post voting systems which result in two parties that are about the same and makes replacement of the status quo an all-or-nothing affair that's rarely possible. Fat people aren't acting to make negative real interest rates which punish savers and retired people living on fixed incomes, they're not closing school libraries instead of letting parent volunteers staff them to extort more money from the tax payers, they're not quadrupling the incarceration rate and prison count since their union came to power, they're not acting to make real-estate more expensive, they're not using "health care" as an excuse to funnel trillions of dollars (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) to private industry instead of working to reduce costs, they're not using "defense" (once you're spending 4X the second place country, 11X the next NATO country, and 30X the nearest country with the same land mass and border length it's not about defense) to funnel trillions of tax dollars to private companies...

I wouldn't get my hopes up. Labor is getting too expensive even in China/Taiwan and machines are getting cheaper. For this reason Foxconn is already starting to replace people with plans to buy a million robots between 2011 and 2014: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801 Robots cost the same whether they live overseas or at home in the US and don't take many people to run. That may be the reason for the few jobs created in the US by the new Lenovo production line mentioned in the original article: It also ignores that such jobs don't necessarily pay well even when the positions call for skilled labor like CNC operators: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the-bills.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0&buffer_share=2278b&utm_source=buffer

The one which will both measure you for a suit and build it. They'll get it right. If they don't they'll fix it quickly without you waiting on shipping in both directions. Without a popular brand name they won't do high volume and will be more likely to make things good (sew stripes in instead of doing them as apliques so you don't have a seam on your shoulder where your rig sits) instead of fast. They'll charge you less and deliver sooner too.

That simple arithmetic ignores the time value of money. $1 paid in tax today is the same as $7.60 paid in tax 30 years from now (assuming a 7% real rate of return as on the S&P 500 from 1950 through 2009). A 30% reduction in what you put in with tax free growth is the same as tax free contributions with 30% out of the total when you make withdrawals and 30% is twice 15%. The big Roth advantages are 1. Higher effective contribution limits. If you're going to be taxed at 20% (state and federal) on withdrawals, your contribution limit to a Roth 401k is like $21,250 into a traditional 401k not $17,000 although at a 32% state and federal tax rate today that's $25K less in net pay (I picked numbers in the ball park for middle class people that make nice round numbers when you do the arithmetic). You can put even more in by converting existing 401k and IRAs into Roths. 2. Roth withdrawals are not income which can make 85% of your Social Security benefits taxable or eliminate tax credits or deductions for things like paying a dependent relative's college tuition. 3. The same estate tax exemption applies regardless of how assets will be taxed after your death, although for a given asset value your heirs pocket more from a Roth IRA than a conventional IRA. A Roth effectively gives you a bigger estate tax exemption by reducing the size of your estate for a given value received by your heirs.

Just ponder this for a little while. Every single American in this country with a retirement acct will eventually be paying capital gains tax someday. Hardly any Americans in this country will pay capital gains due to their retirement accounts. 401K withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income. Defined benefit plan payments are taxed as ordinary income. Traditional IRA withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income except for the basis from non-deductible contributions wihch is not taxed again. Roth and Roth 401K withdrawals are not taxed. Capital gains aren't going to be an issue for you unless 1) You sell your home for $500,000 (assuming you're married) or $250,000 (single or widowed) above your basis (purchase price and improvements). 2) You've been investing outside tax advantaged accounts. 3) You start a business or join one early in its life cycle and make up for the reduced salary and/or increased work with a liquidity event. The third one is the significant one since most people getting "wealthy" from business do so after years of hard work culminating in an overnight liquidity event. I put "wealthy" in quotes since in a long retirement you can only withdraw 4% of the principal each year and I can't consider middle class people retaining their income in retirement "wealthy." A married couple drawing retirement payments matching the $72,743 2008 median income among married couples can only do so indefinitely (Half my grand parents made it past 90, and with improvements in medical care somewhere past 100 is likely) when that's under 4% of their assets which implies non-housing assets must total $1.8M or more in case Social Security becomes more (people who saved already have their benefits taxed) means tested than it is today.

Or - Buy a used complete system, with a 190 that's safe for you to jump now. Most containers with the closing loop on the wall separating the main/reserve compartment will have sufficient closing loop tension two sizes smaller which would let you use the rig down to a 150. If you desire and are ready, sell the used 190 and get a used 170. Repeat if you want with a 150. If you do a good job shopping you should spend about $1 a jump on depreciation. If you want to down size farther then you might consider a new rig that you'll be jumping indefinitely (135, 120, 105 conventional canopies; then smaller cross-braced designs that pack bigger) so the depreciation doesn't matter. No. You'll look better on video with matching gear in your colors but will pay a few thousand dollars for the privilege. Yes. Containers also appreciate about $1/jump. Do a reasonable job shopping and you'll be spending the same $2/jump on the combination regardless of how many times you sell and buy. Do a good job and you'll spend less or maybe make a little money. Yes. If you down-size you'll be competing with people selling canopies that fly as well but pack easier for $500+ less than you would with the street price - $1/jump formula. You'll take longer to sell or cut your price hundreds of dollars .

Am I the only one who wants to keep taxes about finances and not 'morale'? No, but you don't count because you're not a politician whose job is on the line based on public perception of how you're doing your job. That public

Welcome to the modern world. The American workforce has managed to price itself out of the market. Legislators and appointed regulators acted on behalf of corporatist interests to increase the costs of living (housing, health care, education) and wages followed. A young engineer in Silicon Valley (where the jobs are, with 41% of 2011 American high-tech venture capital spending here) needs and receives from large employers like Google $100K in annual compensation to cover a one-bedroom apartment after taxes and live a somewhat middle class lifestyle. The same engineer earning just $25K/year in India can have a villa with domestic help doing his cleaning. Eventually the global market will level the playing field and reduce the variation in salaries but not necessarily the costs of living. A government looking after its' citizens interests would work on policies so that the resulting pay nets a similar standard of living, like a flat or house not a cage apartment with ten people sharing one bathroom. Things like no special treatment in bankruptcy for student loans and not artificially increasing home prices with the GSEs would be steps in the right direction.

Community colleges still exist. As of this spring Front Range Community College in Colorado was charging in-state students $105 per credit hour or $3150 for full-time attendance. They still teach trades like welding and auto mechanics. Of course revenue from those sorts of charges to students and tax payer support doesn't cover marketing to the same degree as for profit institutions so potential students are less aware of them. Falling tax revenues from the recession have also reduced course offerings. It costs about $1.7M/year (successful senate campaigns averaged $10M before the last election and a Senator's term is 6 years) to land a Senate seat paying just $174K/year which is about 1/10th that. The arithmetic only works because powerful corporatist groups (like PACs - some associated with professional organizations like the National Association of Realtors; some for a single large corporation like AT&T; some for a union like United Auto Workers) cover those campaign costs and get something back for their efforts like special protection for student loans in bankruptcy which helps lenders profit from loans that students can't really afford to repay with the jobs their education qualifies them for which in turn allows education prices to increase (about 250% the rate of inflation since 1985) to match the available money. In theory we could spend a lot less with free on-line eduction with canned course work (ex - MIT OpenCoursWare), students getting support from each other and interested educators on-line when they run into problems, and have community colleges provide test proctoring and hands-on workshops for a fraction of what they charge now for a complete; although that would upset the profitable status quo.

As I noted that does not work and even if it did we could not afford the high prison costs (California hemorrhages $45,000 a year for each of our convicts) given stagnant wages and tax collections. Maybe we could try summary execution? When police find people with a probable illegal firearm they could confiscate the gun and use it to shoot the perpetrator in the head on the spot thus eliminating the problem without even requiring the tax payers to cover the bullet used. In theory Americans and others living under legal systems derived from British law (starting with the Magna Carta issued in 1215) cannot be punished without due process although fortunately we've evolved more permissive legal interpretations for the trying times we live in. Last century we decided that it was more convenient to allow asset forfeiture for certain egregious (racketeering then drug) crimes without a jury trial and counsel provided for defendants who could not afford to hire their own attorney. Last decade we decided that we could imprison people without a trial as long as we first accused them of terrorism. Perhaps in the 2010s we can take this one step further and award special status to gun criminals so we can execute them on the spot without the trouble and expense of a trial.

Only in your fantasies. After Jamaica banned handguns in 1974, used warrant-less searches, introduced special gun courts, held secret trials, and handed out mandatory life sentences their murder rate sextupled and still runs 60 per 100,000 people.

Perhaps if turn yourself into an unguided meat missile with a hard quick yank on a toggle or front riser like we did fifteen years ago although most of us learned that you get more speed with a slower turn that accelerates the canopy longer from a higher altitude. Slower higher turns are also readily adjusted to let you enjoy a nice accurate swoop when you arrive higher or lower than you planned. Get some canopy coaching. It'll make you both faster and safer.

No. It means that in 35 years the law hasn't been challenged by some one with legal standing, motivation, and legal services. That's unlikely to change in the next 35 years because few people would be insensitive and stupid enough to exercise their right to free speech in an offensive way there which got them thrown out plus have the motivation and financial resources to follow up legally.

Playing with my power tools, eating animal parts (dry aged steak, duck thighs, whole roast chicken, and whatever other cooked critter we get from local restaurants - I've got a craving for buttery beef tendon which I'll probably satisfy at my favorite neighborhood pho shop for lunch Tuesday), drinking ale, and watching fine discs plus Netflix.

Dianne Fine Swine and her ilk do not.

This is simple math. A company's assets (including receivables) should be worth more than its assets minus its obligations. Selling those assets and leaving a shell of a company can make sense where assets - revenue lost - obligations which transfer is sufficiently larger than assets - obligations. I worked for a company when it sold "substantially all of its assets" to another company and like my co-workers discovered that I no longer had a job when I showed up for work the next day. In our case we had specialized knowledge, were earning market wages, and the acquiring company made us job offers that weren't steps backwards. If we were making substantially above market wages or held positions that required less specialized training they wouldn't have needed to do that. Union contracts don't survive corporate liquidation.