Basejumper.com - archive

After some speaking arround i found out that this guy have bourght a BASErig(brand new) from one of our major gear manufactors,no questions were asked no ref . were showed, no peopled were asked to back up this dude..
This guy just went to the online store and ordered a complete set of gear..no problems what so ever..

Now i do rember getting call´s mails pm´s etc etc if people near me(who was not known to BASE) were trying to buy gear or a FJC(or others in this country known for BASEjumping)

Today i found out that a person bourgt his BASErig after aprox 40 skydives, no one wants to take him,but trust me i will send the pic of this guy if he dies,gets hurt or otherway harming the BASElife arround here,stright to the manufactor..

Why is BASEjumping turning into a f¤cking dz full of skydivers,in a world controled by mony instead of adventures..

Hope some people has a bad taste in their mouth..

Not to dizz skydivers,bu we all know how cormercial dz´s work do we want BASE to be the same.. if yes we´re on the right track..

Yes i cant spell for sh!t never could,no need to cover that side of this tread..

lol 53 weivs no comments.. well done

Ok, Stefan. kick the kid in the nuts, take his baserig and tell him to come back when he has more than enough experience to start.
As the great Sarah P. would say, "How's all that hopey changey stuff workin' for yah?".

guess you are right bro... that's what you see when a sport becomes populair... bad news but true..
From the other side.. how do you want to see it regulated??? that's the other ' bad news'..
The only thing " WE" can do is giving the right info.. the right lead and be a good and smart thinking coach/ mentor.. The first time jumper has to need the brains too to understand this.. but ofcourse... stupidity will always be there..

When it comes to manufacturers of basegear.. my humble opinion is that they have a small responsibility.. although i know that a lot of jumpers disagree with me.. they are the ones who can ' regulated' on a very small scale and i think they should make the choise to do a small background check.. it also is bad for there business when somebody hurts or kills himself.. bad for the sport.. bad for the business.. but ofcourse.. that's MY opinion.

The only option for me.. be a good mentor and give the right information..

ps.. just watched your site.. jalous at your job! whiiiihaaa!

Ok...I'll bite...

(begin rant)

First of all, manufacturers have the right to make money. They are perfectly free to sell gear to whomever they choose. It is completely unfair to put the onus on the manufacturers to act as the policemen and/or gatekeepers of base. First, it's completely impractical and 2 it's completely unfair. Why should they be charged with conducting a background check on potential customers? They have lives too and shouldn't have to make sure that every customer has the base community's "seal of approval" before they sell them gear.

Besides that, any idiot who decides that they WILL base jump, is not going to listen to a manufacturer tell them not to, they will go find someone else to sell them gear. The other option is that they use their skydiving gear. Either way, they're jumping.

This sport will continue to have injuries, fatalities and arrests, its the nature of the beast. Most of us have considered the potential ramifications of our actions come to terms it. The flip side is that there will always be the kid that jumps off his high rise with a bed sheet thinking he can fly because he just saw JT on 60 minutes. Completely unpreventable. Yeah the kid with the bed sheet is an extreme but that is equally true for skydivers (or wannabees) with more balls than brains who decide they are going to base.

The point is that base is about our individual decisions and the results thereof. To hold manufacturers accountable for selling gear to someone they haven't fully vetted is ridiculous.

(end rant)

Jack

true.
still, does screening help lessen liability? or increase it? eventually, someone will get sued.

Lesson NOT learned?

I asked by PM but got no response....

So which company did this?

Truthfully? If manufacturers begin the process of screening their prospective customers and fail to do so diligently EVERY TIME, liability increases. To the extent that I'm aware, once a person/company takes notice of a dangerous situation/product and begin taking measures to correct it, they are required to continue correcting the condition and to the extent that someone gets hurt at some point afterward, that person/manufacturer is liable. This being the case, if manufacturers being taking steps to screen their potential customers and fail to do so on the one occasion that inexperienced jumper gets hurt/dies, they could be found liable.

With regard to "someone getting sued", you and I both know that anyone can sue anyone else, filing a lawsuit doesn't require a legitimate basis.

So, if I were manufacturing base gear, I wouldn't make it a point to screen my customers strictly as a CYA issue. But hey, what do I know?

Manufacturers tell us, and the gear does very clearly state that performing base jumps could result in serious injury or death. That's what i call an implicit statement of waiver.

So do guns and power tools. yet the manufacturers of those products still get sued...

Burnin' yourself at McDonalds with some hot coffee will get you a quick One point five.



Million!!!

Good point. And do we expect the drive through workers to determine who is entitled to a delicious cup of coffee with their egg mcmuffin? Ludicrous I say!

I went off as people saw it as a look but not respon tread ;)

Im not telling which compagny it is,they usaly is trust worthy and i dont want to give them miscredit as of 1 mistake.

Well it aint that loong ago since i were asked if it were ok to take people to fjc and sell them gear,if i didnt knew the person i could find out who he or she is and if there were a mentor that could tell if it were ok.
Also non compagnies like Tom A. does background cheks.

I know in US this aint a big deale as theres tons of stuff to jump off,and 1 bust or injury wont go out nationaly but in a small country like DK BASElife is hot in the whole country after a bust or injury(we are only 5.5mill people here). if jack asses are allowed to set our way of living wrong all efforts of legal events daylight objects etc etc will die..

Stefan,
I think that may be a key point as far as community size. When a sport is small everyone has an identity and has some accountability as far as others will know of things. The more participants base gets the more there will be who don't care for ANY good practices/rules/standards and will degrade the whole situation for the rest (who are trying to keep things positive) by lowering the incentive for the others to maintain discipline and self-regulation of behavior. More people in sport --> more jumpers with no consideration of others and no care for established procedures "F*$k it, I don't give a shit about anybody else or their objects but myself" it's clear on this board already. And this applies to everything, so it's just common sense that would guide you to not associate with those type of people in any activity, not just base.
PS: you're welcome to visit again here anytime, I remember your last visit

7 years I have been saying it now.

hopeless...

well it is getting wors.. missing the urban, 2-3 pers groups look out for each other stuff like that

In three words...

YOU

FUCKING

TUBE!!!

I'm not by any means advocating that everyone and their brother should go out and base jump, but I do think that a lot of us out there tend to feel a little too entitled and tend to think that it's up to us to give permission to others to jump. After all who the hell are we to decide what someone can and can't do with their own life/ personal safety. I just hope that there will not be knowlege and resources held back from people because we don't think they should be doing it. If anything that adds to the risk. Personally I taught myself to base jump via scouring this website, blincmagazine, and watching some packing videos. By the grace of God I'm not dead, and now I have reliable trustworthy buddies to share my passion with and help keep me safe. Just because I didn't go through a first jump course or ask permission first didn't make me any more of a daredevil than the rest of the community. I just didn't feel the need to spend thousands of dollars and ask for approval. Anyways I'm not even sure where I'm going with this because I'm rambling and not making any sense or saying worth reading... but I guess over all I'd say that the Base manufacturers have a right to sell their shit to two year olds if they want to and there isn't a damn thing that any of us can or should say about it. Its not up to us, and in my opinion it shouldn't be. And P.S. i'm not some super experienced guy with all the answers, just the average douche bag that jumps off of shit at night for fun.

you should atleast have to sign your real name to bad advice like that.

man, as Calvin said "hopeless"

Would you give a drunk keys to his car? How about a gun to some one that asked for one to kill themselves?

Base manufacturers are busy, but come on, they aren't selling thousands of rigs... Couple hundred a year, at most. If they don't take the time to check out who they are selling equipment to, it seems like it's just laziness or greed.

Who Knows? Maybe they have a good reason for not doing it, I'd like to hear what it is.

That seems like a very unfair comparison to me. Selling to someone whom you do not have full knowledge of is not the same as giving something to someone you know to be wreck less or suicidal. If you ran a gun shop would you order a full psych analysis on everyone you sold a gun to? If you didn't and someone turned out to be suicidal or homicidal, I guess that would be the fault of the gun shop for not screening more vigilantly?

rarely has a thread summarized how hopeless this "sport" really is.




like we said, You can't give everyone a full psych eval, but you can't give a drunk keys to a car.

BASE Ethics worked great when there were only one or two hundred throughout the US, the world barely a thousand. but now, man. Now, It's hopeless.

We all are muppets.

We all are muppets.

Nah, some of us still give a shit more
about our friends than looking cool or
making 10 bucks, and you know this.

Unless, you referring to the fact that
there is a fat man's hand up your ass,
you're singing & dancing with a frog...
well then you are correct.

 

my point was most of us did and are doing things the way we should, asking permission, not day blazing, etc, etc. but there will always be the few who don't care, who don't know, and that number is growing. there is nothing you me or anyone can do to stop it. I have been in BASE for 6 years now and when I started, there were but a few of us here in Co. now I can name off easily 50. and I know there are 50 more than that.

hopeless.

these are the same debates that were going on 10 years ago.

i have very mixed feelings on this issue.

you tube an d over internet videos, or internet easy acces to purchasing them etc , definately has contributed greatly to people gaining access to get sum sort of insid acceess to BASE/fixed object jumping like never before. at least before to see videos of BASE you'd have to go out of your way to a DZ and purchase videos from the pro shop, chute shak, etc. to view them. or know someone on the DZ and video s would be passed around , or a skydivin film festival,

but now, just google BASe video's etc. instant access. and i must admit i recently went on utube and posted a video for a joke on at Blinc at the expense of somebody else. i took it off,it was an illeagle jump and not cool to post, but up until then had never had an account on there and never wanted to post but I WAS REALY DRUNK AND TYPING! NUF SAID.

they had Fjc's back when i got started , i really couldn't justify it at the time and had already met a cool fixed object jumper before actually wanting to do a Fixed jumpe so that was my in. "mY Utube" at the time was just: him just talking about his fixed jummps n' stuff. and then i wanted to.
he had three rigs and sold one of his to me and taught me all the simple stuff and made me pay for trip to the Potatoe.

unfortunately-- almost as soon he taught me basic Span jumping and some "A" actio he got his girlfriend pregnant and he quit. i got his vertex rig really cheap it was very new at the time! but back to the unfortunately part!!

now i was left on my own. all his original buddies he jumped with were well out of state and i was on my own not knowing anybody around who did BASE.his wife discouraged him from talking me (and also he quit skydiving as well) and eventually i just gave up on him, real sad!!! i wasn't on the internet at the time didn't really want to be. so i never was on Blinc or here , etc. so i had no acces to meet other jumpers in the area at the time. nobody at our little DZ BASEed , id have to go to the bigger one, but didn't hav e to the time/extra money to go. so having talked to my exMentor about all the objects we were to jump in our future weere out there and found others. and i jumped them . alone and/or with non jumpin friends. and i did some really stupid unethical things at the time i didn't think that waht i did was wrong, not at all. i was ignorant of how bad of things i was doin, doing to the objeccts, and almost doin to myself.

i assumed that if i didn't know anybody who jumped in the area, that i was the only one as well. so when it did finally dawn on me that some of the things iwas doing might not be cool i figured,well i'm maybe only hurting myself. i never really knew the severity of Callling the locals, or trying to.,trying really hard to. But in my case i didn't have anyone to call to see if the object was hot, the rules of the object,etc. and at the time not all that long ago , Almost 8 years i didn't ever have a Cell Phone when traveling!

well come to find out alll the stuff i was jumping was being jumped by other', a lot more than i thought.. i didn't know this for a long time , until i started to frequent the bigger DZ's. i came to find out a while later. that what i'd don'e espeacially in one case was really, really, very fucked up!!!! the object is still there and still going strong BUT. waht i did definately let the owners of it that somebody was wanting/gaining access to it. and a parachutist for sure!.

that's what happens when your on your own. whith no guidence no real understandin. etc.

i don't quite know what i'm saying here but, just understanding the need to want to jump, and understanding the POWER OF YOUTUBE/internet i guess. there are so many unwritten rules, so many unwritten rulles to follow. us, the manufactures, newbies,mentors, But how many of us just blow off the curious newbie, wuffoo, etc. only to leave them dicouraged and determined now fueled with feeling of IM gonna do this, no matter what!!

it's as the other guy said an old argument etc....and 10 years from now when a lot of quys posting on this very thread have: Gone in, retired, been crippled,got some gal pregnant, went to prison, or just moved on from BASE/fixed jumping you'll see guys likke: "Sangi" or "debaucherordrgz" saying this same old thing, in the end only Technology changes, everything else just goes in some sort of cycle , the years just depend on the complexy of the situation.


the internet has fucked up alot things beyond bASE,, alot of business' has been cheapned by the net! Hackers,indentity theft, free music,movies, software, etc (all theft) or just been put out of bussiness, and weird access to things very unspeakable that young boys and Girls see that are very disburbing, "yeah, yeah you say"... but what if you saw on your cute daughters laptop video of a ?????.........,,, you see, and "yeah , yeah i know", just think of all the BASE shortcuts experienced jumpers have now because of the internet as well!!! all the research and shit the internet provideed me since in went on line, less than a few years ago blows me away, anyway this is getting long and im'm not really taking a side..

UN FORTUnately the internet.Genie is out the bottle and there is nothing we can do about that! Thers a whole world bigger than bASE being fucked by the internet!!! just get used to it! easy access to EVERYTHHING! :\

some good stuff there.

one of the purposes of this site IS to make it easy for a googler to find information. hopefully they find, and read, information like ethics, contacting locals, etc.

it's not really that hard to search. the site technically welcomes all, although I do welcome "discouragement" to the apparently clueless.

I suspect the cluesless will try to dominate BASE, just like they do at so many dz's... I think only Darwin can slow that trend.

nice post.

i think this fits...

you don't know what you don't know, especially when first starting out in BASE!

couldn't agree more - i think i went about things pretty responsibly - and i remember having all kinds of dillusions of grandeur leaving my FJC. Fortunately i hooked up with a few people who were willing to spend some time dragging an out-of-shape fatso up and down some real nice A's. I realized how much i didnt know / wasn't told / hadn't thought of, on the mile-long hike to my first A. after that, i just shut my mouth, listened, and tried to absorb as much as possible.

I did not think we were debating... just calling all calling it the way we see it.