My classmate owned one (again, some cessnoid) but sold it. It reportedly has the side effect that you can sometimes spend your ordinary flight in the cockpit instead of in the cattlebox, as the pilots are likely to know you from the small airports where they fly for fun.
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That is some good lateral thinking! I’m never going to fly a plane myself (I know my limits), but I sure would like to be friends with more people that do.
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I have some two flight hours on cessnoids, and it is not That Difficult. (The takeoffs and especially the landings can be, the flight itself is easy peasy. You have a lot of time for everything, and if you have anybody within a few miles, the ground control tells you. Cf. car driving which is SCARY.)
Edit: and, back to the topic, the cessnoids are also pretty cybersecure. Next to no digital avionics, no wireless access to it as well, and the thing is likely to survive even a direct EMP hit given its overall lack of advanced electronics.
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I have an irrational fear of 5000 ft. Not 2000, not 30,000, but 5000. I learned this brutally on a hot air balloon. It’s the Looking Up and seeing things that caused me to freak out 
Related note, I always try to do things that I know will be uncomfortable. Sometimes I like them (ice blocking, its awesome), sometimes I discover a new fear (spelunking, fuck that noise).
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Flight testing at low altitude is pretty fun. I remember doing some testing over the gulf of Mexico, hadn’t been looking out of the window much, glanced out when we were running a test at 1000ft and we were buzzing oil rigs and fishing boats at 1000ft in a 747…
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Three or four million in a lump sum, post-tax. That’s enough, for me in my 40s, to provide reasonably for the rest of my life and to allow for the purchase of a property somewhere in which to reside, as well as to reinvest.
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I wasn’t afraid of heights above something like 500 feet until I was strapped to a larger man and then flipped out of an airplane like a baby in his lap.
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For me it was the balloon with a Vietnam pilot. He was absolutely fearless, and fucked with us the entire time. He used to take balloons up tens of thousands of feet with an oxygen mask and ride the jetstream.
I just don’t trust wicker baskets.
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Was he younger or older?
The younger fearless ones are suspicious.
The older fearless ones, with a lot of hours clocked in, seem to me as a better bet.
There are no old bold pilots, as the saying goes, so those ones are more likely to know well enough where the edge of the envelope is.
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Yep. I’ve known my share of old flight test pilots, and they definitely know where the limits are. Further out than you’d think, mostly 
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Oh, he was older. At least late sixties, perhaps seventies. As part of the flight package there was a bottle of champagne waiting for us on landing, and after my wife duly sabered it he was visibily impressed.
Didn’t get the distance I had hoped, one bottle cork hit at least 100 meters previously.
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Oh, I do recall a wannabe wolf of Wall Street claiming that he was the hardest working and that if he was forced to flip burgers he would naturally become the boss because he works so hard, yadda yadda yadda.
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“Dick… I’m terrified of my laptop…”
“Bob… I’m terrified of your laptop too… but at least I don’t have to touch it…”
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“Hmmm… so, that’s what “felching” is, Dick…?”
“Yup… I dare you to work it in to your next presentation, Bob…”
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Dick, this plane is so new, they haven’t removed the Saran Wrap from the Windows.
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The problem is that the top .01 percent just don’t have that big a share of the so-far-untaxed income.
If you want to really ramp up the amount of money available for politicians to spend, you have to either
(1) significantly raise taxes on the top 15% (here you’re getting into the ‘fire lieutenant married to an OR nurse’ category), or
(2) you have to go after accumulated wealth, not income. Do that, and I expect the number of California and New York fundraisers for progressive causes and candidates to take a nosedive.
Do you know that what you say has a tendency to be exactly backwards from the truth? You make these little Fox pronouncements that are so laughably wrong they’re not even worth refuting, a couple posts each week, and then you fade back into the woodwork. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in trolling, or convincing, or debating. Why?
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What about taxing financial operations, and taxing the unproductive speculative money at quite higher rate than real work?
Low taxes on wages and work, high ones on speculations. Could throttle down the financializing of the economy, bring back at least some jobs.
Cutting down on wars would also be beneficial. Mucho dinero could be saved there.
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I sometimes wonder how much money wars generate though? I suspect they cost more than they earn, but the Korean war incented south Korea to buy $7 billion worth of arms from us just this year (source: nytimes). And they have been buying for decades. Same with Iraq. We sold them almost $7 billion this year alone, and likely will for decades.
Are wars akin to a CD or bond to the US of sorts?
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Depends on whether you’re in the arms trade or not.
Certainly, some people make quite a living out of making weapons, and it’s easier to justify that if you’re involved in more wars.
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