On Oct 16, 9:40*am, wrote:
On Oct 16, 8:41*am, BB wrote:

Now that the government is taking John's advice and recapitalizing the
banks rather than buying their bad loans, maybe we should revisit his
soaring advice too.

Just to set the record straight, this is a little joke from Andy.
Don't blame me for this mess of a hideous bailout and goverment
takeover of the banking system! (As if anyone ever listened to my
advice in the first place.) Ok, it's not as disastrous as having the
government buy out every bad mortgage in the country, but not by a
whole lot.

John

;-)

In a feeble attempt to make this more glider-related:

I'd like to see the bailout architects *actually* have to bail out.
If they survive, we consider letting them stay in office... But I
can't decide if we give them a parachute or not. ;-)

Also, I believe that commercial glider operations need to lobby
congress. Many are failing or have gone into bankruptcy, and they
need the government's help to stay afloat. We keep hearing that
consumer spending is the lynchpin of our economy, and glider rides and
rentals are certainly an excellent avenue for consumers to spend their
money! Furthermore, once launched the glider is a zero-emissions
vehicle - and we are all conscious of environmental impacts and the
cost of energy/fuel these days; so supporting glider operations is
truly an important issue. It is also a wonderful subject for future
government study. Can you imagine how much fuel we could save if we
could develop a glider-based transportation network? To heck with
those noisy and fuel-burning VLJs, why not launch small 3 - 8 person
gliders to 30,000' and then glide to destinations up to 170 miles away
(hey, 200 miles if the towplane climbs at an angle away from the
airport)? That only requires a 30:1 glide-ratio, which is quite
doable with today's technology! All we need is some money from the
government...

--Noel
(who has now used his XCSoar PDA simulator to "fly" a couple of TATs
and understands them much better)