DrewEckhardt

The United States doesn't have a gun problem. We do have an educational gap which leads to economic disparity and subsequently high murder and other crime rates. If our murder rate had anything to do with the availability of guns, blood would have run red in the streets of small rural towns where boys kept rifles and shotguns in their vehicles so they could hunt on the way to and from school. It did not. If our murder rate had anything to do with the availability of guns, it would have been higher before the Gun Control Act of 1968 than after when it became illegal to sell guns through the mail. It was not. If our murder rates had anything to do with the availability of guns, they'd be higher where adults without criminal records can carry concealed than in places where handguns are effectively illegal. They are not. Our murder rates are/were not higher in those situations because they don't go up with more ready access to guns. They're high among some subpopulations due to economic and social issues that are unpopular to admit and a lot more difficult to fix compared to passing another gun-control law. 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 this is incorrect. 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. People's income generally comes from their educational attainment and there's a huge gap there. Part of the education gap is due to how we run our schools. Public schools are paid for (through property taxes) and controlled (as in the curriculum) by the local populations. Students generally attend local schools. Black children are more likely to live in statistically poor neighborhoods. White children are more likely to live in statistically affluent neighborhoods where professional parents insist the schools provide college level courses so their kids can get into name-brand universities. Black children are therefore less likely to have the same educational opportunities as white ones. Part of it is social. Children tend to follow in their father's footsteps when it comes to education and earnings. Poor people living among the relatively wealthy will continue to kill each other until we deal with this.

FIrst point of contact.

Better still just make Canada the 51st State. The problem there being they'd have to WANT to be the 51st state. I seriously doubt they'd want it. We spend about as much on our military as the rest of the world put together and there's not much sense in that sort of thing if you're not going to build an empire. With military spending at 1/30th of our level Canada looks like a pretty easy target. Maybe we could just roll across the border, annex Canada, and appropriate their oil by force.

Yeah! We suck! How dare we own homes!? That's not the problem. The issues are that the middle class's homes represent a disproportionate fraction of their assets because they don't save enough and spend too much on housing. I define "enough" long term savings as what it will take to maintain the same standard of living in retirement even if the government decides to means-test Social Security. As a rule of thumb you need 25X your final salary to get there. With the median household earning $51,914 in 2010 the average family needs about $1.3 million by retirement age. Nationwide median home price was $166,100 in May of 2010 suggesting that the median family's house should be about 13% of their assets by the time they reach their 60s. Enough cash is 6-12 months of take home pay. The median new house built in 2010 had grown 40% from 1525 square feet in 1973 to 2,169 square feet. 1500 square feet is plenty; and with only 1200 square feet my wife and I talk about sending our house guests to the north wing where they have their own bathroom and aren't underfoot. When the price to rent ratio suggests that. I became a renter for four years to wait out the bubble's inevitable collapse. Otherwise we should buy smaller homes so we can save + invest more in a diverse portfolio (no more than 5% of your wealth in a single asset is one rule of thumb). We should also accumulate less depreciating and disposable crap.

They're a British Commonwealth country where the British Bill of Rights of 1689 should apply. It states You don't want commoners poaching the King's deer or uppity Catholics getting out of line, although otherwise people should have arms to defend themselves.

I'm a fan of your first paragraph. As for the second? well, those parents will do a poor job (by my subjective standards - see list of negative adjectives of your choice) and the kid will either turn out or not depending on their own merits, no thanks to mom or dad. If someone takes a personal interest to help out, that's great, but the government forcing my viewpoint on that family? Seems reasonable to me. Crime comes from economic disparity. Economic disparity comes from lower paying jobs and unemployment Unemployment and lower paying jobs come from less educational attainment. Educational attainment comes from how your father did before you. We need to do something to break that cycle .

Some high school students in Idaho brought new meaning to the phrase "happiness is a warm gun" in the form of their welding class project: a BBQ grill modeled after a S&W 500 Magnum revolver with smoke coming out the barrel. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/bbq-grill-modeled-smoking-500-magnum-revolver-171050053.html

As much as I feel the governments have grown out-of-control and dislike taxes I think it's a bad idea since it shifts more of the tax burden from businesses (which are paying property tax (perhaps indirectly as part of their rent ) regardless of how profitable they are on paper) to the citizens (who will eventually make up any short fall with higher income or sales tax rates). A better option is passing a law like Colorado's Taxpayers Bill Of Rights which prohibits tax collections increasing faster than the product of inflation and population growth where any excess must be refunded to the tax payers and spending is cut back to sustainable levels whenever there's a recession unless the people choose to pay more tax to support issues they support like local schools. Apart from the voter approved tax increases, under such a law people who stay in the same home see their property taxes drop over time in real dollars as their building depreciates and new more valuable properties are built. People are free to move without impacting their tax situation and new arrivals don't pay disproportionately high taxes for similar properties as under California's Proposition 13 which also protects the citizens from onerous growing property tax bills.

Much more dangerous. Assuming you start young there's a 1 in 50 chance you'll be killed skydiving over the next 20 years (not including plane crashes which are counted separately). It's worse than riding motorcycles. [QUOTE] Also, what are your thoughts on the objections of relatives, does it matter that a parent [/QUOTE] No unless they're still supporting you financially. [QUOTE] or wife, husband [/QUOTE] Yes. Marriage for most people leads to children which need to be provided for financially, emotionally, and otherwise for a few decades. Financial arrangements are often made based on the skydiving partner(s) being around for quite a while (career compromises, mortgages that can't be paid comfortably with one salary, etc.) At the very least you need to take that into account and provide sufficient life and disability insurance. [QUOTE] etc is worried about you? [/QUOTE] No.

You probably asked for Global Express Guaranteed (as in guaranteed day of delivery) which does charge dimensional weight. Express Mail® International to Norway for 5 pounds Max. length 60", max. length plus girth combined 108" 3 - 5 business days $59.30 (at post office) $54.56 (online) plus insurance. Country information : http://pe.usps.com/text/imm/mo_029.htm

300 More tapered/elliptical planforms are more sensitive to control input whether intended or not. Plenty of people die after accidentally pointing them at the ground trying to turn into the wind at a relatively low altitude. Here's a guy who killed himself under a Stiletto 150 with a 1.2 wing loading and 480 jumps http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3709212 Control sensitivity also makes spinning malfunctions more likely, although that's less likely to kill you. Many are also trimmed steeper than less aggressive canopies which helps them stay in a speed building dive longer.

Quote So when families’ median wealth plunged from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010, we've got to examine the numbers a bit more. If you've got 99 people with wealth of $10k (combined wealth of $990k) and add the hundredth person with a wealth of $100 million, you've got a wealth of $100,990,000. (Average wealth of $1,009,900 per person). [/QUOTE] No. The median is the point at which half the values are higher and half lower. The average is the mean. The median of 100K, 200K, 300K, 1M, and 10M is 300K and the mean is $2,320,000. If the millionaires fortunes drop to $300K or over like 100K, 200K, 300K, 301K, 302K the median is still 300K although the mean has dropped to $240,600.

Income and wealth are largely separate issues. Paying $100,000 for your house, it having a potential sale price of 150,000 nominal dollars by 2000 due to inflation, hitting 350,000 nominal dollars in 2006, and dropping back to $190,000 in current dollars has little to do with you being able to make ends meet. You should actually be better off now than you were at the peak. Since you had equity in your home you should have been able to refinance at interest rates which the government has manipulated to be 1/3 lower than at the peak which were already at historically low levels. With real estate taxes most places based on a property's current value you're probably doing better on that front too. Of course, you will be hurting if you were using your house as an ATM to live a more extravagant lifestyle than your paycheck supports although that's your own fault for expecting to live off free money.

It's very disingenuous to compare our situation to the top of a real-estate bubble which eclipsed the last two by 75% and nearly doubled long-term inflation adjusted house prices (for the same home - newer construction has tended to be larger and therefore more expensive) which have otherwise remained essentially flat since 1950. Especially in a country where most people aren't savers and the majority of their "wealth" is in their home. Prices were bound to revert to the mean who ever became president, especially since real wages are flat or declining and many other costs like education and medical care have been going up far faster than inflation leaving less to buy homes.

The recipient usually does not have to pay customs brokerage fees with USPS, just the usual country imposed charges for duty, GST, etc. Some of their international options also don't/didn't use dimensional weight (where a fluffy or well-packed 5 pound object costs as much to ship as a dense 20 pound package).

Oh, sorry. Let me try again. If you go to a post office, or a FedEx Office, or a UPS Store (or the many other retail shipping locations out there), a HUMAN working behind the counter will look at your package and its destination, put it on a scale, and tell you how much it will cost to ship it using a variety of shipping methodologies. Better? Although 1. Any place not owned by the shipping company (FedEx / Kinko's is OK; Mail Boxes, Etc. is not) will charge a (sometimes substantial) markup for that. 2. Each country has its own paperwork requirements. You'll have an easier time making duplicate invoices or whatever if you look that up at home.

Sure, although they'll have a much harder time smoking enough to cause problems than we did with our student smoking lounges and permission to take smoke breaks between classes.

Yes. One rig (135 main/150 reserve size), helmet, and jumpsuit fits perfectly in a Givi 50L top case which locks so you don't need to haul your rig around with you when you head inside for a soda or whatever. A second can fit in an airline carry-on sized bag under a bungee net on the passenger seat plus a wingsuit, etc. That leaves room in your panniers for shoes, rain suit, tent, sleeping bag, clean clothes, and a six pack of beer.

No. You are thinking like a capitalist which is incorrect because this isn't a free market. The purpose of government is to transfer money to the people (natural, corporate, and otherwise) paying to get them elected from the rest of us. Being a Senator pays $174,000 a year. Being a Senator costs nearly 10 times that with the average successful campaign running $10M for a 6 year term which is $1,666,666.666 666 per annum - campaign fund of the beast. The arithmetic works because people (both natural and not) make campaign contributions. They make campaign contributions because it pays big dividends. The specific ideas here are to: 1. Make real interest rates negative so that we can pay people to buy houses (some ARMs have negative interest rates) as a little quid pro to the National Association of Realtors(TM) PAC which made more contributions to candidates than any other PAC in the 2010 election cycle, even heavy hitters like AT&T. 2. Maximize profits in the banking industry where the executive bonus packages have been suffering. With savers unable to make money on short term treasury securities the banks can get away paying 0.05% on deposits where they used to pay 5%. This makes for much larger profits when they lend the money to credit card users at 9% and beyond. Obviously people who have healthy cash stock piles to weather things like unemployment and to buy their adult children educations that might let them join the middle class on their own suffer as a side effect; although without the money to buy Congress Critters they don't matter.

Nope. They also charge you federal income tax on the interest, so in the 28% bracket you have a 1.18% after tax return and are loosing 1.8% over 10 years.

My wife and I upgraded to deep pile carpet which I measured at an inch deep. It's awesome, like walking on a sandy beach or Tempurpedic bed. I've slept on beds that were less comfortable. Our dilemma now is taking care of it. The back side of the sample is marked "use suction only" implying that we shouldn't be using a vacuum which relies on a brush, although the carpet store won't tell us what sort of vacuum sucks enough (or whether the suction only is just a way for them to weasel out of the warranty). Does any one have relevant first-hand experience with such a carpet and vacuum recommendation to go with it? Our cat is black, our carpet is light, and we need to figure something out before the carpet becomes cat-colored.

Is this a generational thing? Although I'd have to try hard to be more casual (I usually wear shorts and T-shirt with Teva sandals and socks) leaving my shirt untucked still seems wrong even without a collar.

And party like it's nineteen ninety nine!

Macgyver Knight Rider The A-Team Battlestar Galactica Miami Vice Moonlighting V Hill Street Blues Saturday Night Live with Dennis Miller, Mike Meyers, and Dana Carvey I tried to re-watch Macgyver (goofy), Moonlighting (slow), and V (too cheesy), and Miami Vice via Netflix. Only Miami Vice withstood the evolved tastes that went with adulthood. After 25 years later Crockett and Tubbs are still cool.

1. Statistically. You note that 5% (or whatever) of the packages you send out are lost or claimed to be non-deliveries by your customers and price your goods accordingly. This is the same way the big box stores deal with leakage. 2. By only shipping things without a tracking number when the loss won't irritate you too much. For something using valuable closet or drawer space that sells for $25 (not too interesting) + $12 in international shipping (without a tracking number and much more with) I'll just risk it because in effect I'm only out lunch money (shipping) if something happens and still gain more storage space. Otherwise you don't. Pay up and consider it a life lesson.