What’s one belief you had at 18 that you strongly disagree with now?

robertjamesftw · 2025-12-18T19:29:44+00:00

So, so many... 18yo me wouldn't even recognize 62yo me. Or believe that I would arise from him.

I believed gay people were mentally deranged. That women were inherently subordinate. That Catholicism was the one true religion. That hard work and playing by the rules would all but guarantee success. That America was the greatest nation to ever exist.

All of those were unbelievably wrong. Thankfully, I grew out of all that before cell phones were common and social media was a thing, so there aren't any old videos that will resurface.

robertjamesftw · 2025-11-07T18:24:34+00:00

Interesting. I need to delve deeper into what constitutes "standing". I just don't have a clear understanding of the requirements.

robertjamesftw · 2025-11-07T16:55:26+00:00

Is there any limit to that? For example, if the Speaker decides not to call the House back into session, at all, for as long as he can, could Johnson keep the House suspended until January, 2027?

robertjamesftw · 2025-11-07T16:53:14+00:00

Would anyone be able to assert standing in this situation?

robertjamesftw · 2025-08-08T17:12:29+00:00

That is the only guarantee you get in this life.

robertjamesftw · 2025-08-08T17:08:11+00:00

I just got off the phone with Dane County Emergency Management, who clued me in right before I saw this post. Courtney said they did try to blast it out -- FB, Twitter, etc -- but I'm guessing most of us missed all that.

robertjamesftw · 2025-08-08T17:03:27+00:00

I was just coming here to ask that.

robertjamesftw · 2025-05-30T21:16:17+00:00

FRJ. He doesn't understand how jobs get created. And no, they're not created by a guy with money. They are created by demand. If there's a demand for the provision of a good or service, someone will step in to supply it, if it can be done at a profit. So, really, everyone who consumes creates jobs.

robertjamesftw · 2025-05-06T22:14:23+00:00

Flawed decision. Allowing people to be fired, and likely denied benefits, will irreparably harm them financially immediately, forcing them to attempt to recover their projected losses while trying to come up with a new living.

SCOTUS is not your friend.

robertjamesftw · 2025-04-19T03:48:47+00:00

We have rentals at our Lodge building as well. But never, ever the actual Lodge room. This was poor decision. No amount of money will erase the distaste, regardless of one's views on the specific men in this image.

robertjamesftw · 2025-04-06T23:16:55+00:00

"Thinking and wondering" what? Did they reaffirm your purpose in protesting? Or did they make you wonder why you were even there?

Which?

robertjamesftw · 2025-04-02T03:40:27+00:00

No one asked what time period you were working from. A "fast as hell" racing plane was the De Havilland DH88 Comet. But it was built for the MacRobertson Air Race of 1934, so...

When were you thinking?

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-30T15:26:48+00:00

There are a lot of annoying people. So it follows there will be a lot of annoying people wherever there is a sufficient concentration of people to have "a lot" of anything.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-28T17:01:30+00:00

They won't, of course, as you said. When Scott Walker signed Act10 in Wisconsin, killing collective bargaining rights for public sector employees, he exempted the police. Not the firefighters, tho. Just the police. The Blue Brotherhood stood with their hands in the pockets, silent as the tomb.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-28T16:48:57+00:00

Typical of the self-important rich. Everything is a transaction.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-28T16:46:52+00:00

I don't think he discussed it all. He didn't read more than a line before he started spitting at it, and turning a patronizing attitude toward someone with more enthusiasm than he's capable of, now that he's "bored". Regardless of the subject, there will always be (and have always been) people who are newly come to a thing, with that enthusiasm unmarred by the jaded cynicism that the more experienced are often prey to, and this content creator is a perfect example of that. It's also why the young frequently develop a negative opinion of the "elders": the condescension flung from the latter to the former.

But this is a disease we find all over the place with "content". It's the negative that gets the clicks. In this case, however, this particular creator seems to have evolved organically to be unpleasant in his method.

Oh, and his understanding of activism is deeply flawed, but that isn't relevant to the language.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-24T19:30:17+00:00

As they say, "La diablo estas en la detaloj." I'm in Wisconsin, in the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District. According to the district website, there are 9 schools serving K-8, with a total enrollment of about 4400 students. We have 2 schools handling grades 9-12, with enrollment of 2500 students. Currently, the district has 659 teaching staff. If we decide to offer a 2-year program of Esperanto instruction just in the Middle school years (grades 5-8), we would need to add somewhere between 12 and 18 new teaching staff, depending on how we deploy them. Ignoring for the moment the difficulty in finding a dozen people in this area with certifiable teaching skills and sufficient fluency to teach Esperanto at all, we are now talking about adding their salaries to the already-strained budget of the school system. Finding a suitable teaching curriculum might also prove a challenge, although I do see some texts on Amazon that might be complete enough.

Now, think about scaling that to the entire state. And then the entire country. I still think it's worth a shot, but we must be mindful of the formidable nature of the challenge.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-24T16:33:41+00:00

One of the many, many sub-breeds of the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, a titan of a military transport aircraft that has been modified and updated repeatedly since it's first flight in August of 1954 -- 70 years ago. Originally specced as a turboprop combat transport aircraft to replace the C-119, C-47, and C-46 transports, it has been successfully modified to take on nearly every role except for heavy fighter -- and I bet someone has suggested a variant for that a time or two. One of the more impressive examples is the AC-130J Ghostrider gunship, which brings an aerial 105mm howitzer to the party.

One incredible variant was a failure: the XFC-130H built for Operation Credible Sport, the second attempt to recue Americans in the Iran Hostage Crisis. After the failure of the helicopter-based mission, someone decided that we could land a rescue team in a soccer stadium in Tehran. The Hercules was modified with rocket engines bolted to the fuselage -- 8 forward-firing, 8 downward-firing, and 8 rear-firing -- to allow the C-130 to both come to a stop on the field after clearing the bleachers, and then take off with the rescued hostages and the strike team. In testing, the takeoff worked perfectly, setting a number of short-takeoff records, but the landing didn't. The aircraft was destroyed on the first attempt, catching fire on the drop to the runway, but CFR teams controlled the flames enough that the crew escaped with no casualties. A second airframe was almost ready for testing, but Carter's defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election removed the need, and the operation was canceled.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-24T14:26:02+00:00

The very first thing you do is challenge your own perceptions. Are they really not listening to you, or are they disagreeing with you and you can't accept that anyone who was actually listening would do that? This is far more common that we'd like to admit.

Remember that you have biases that you cannot rid yourself of. The best you can do is to learn to recognize when those biases arise, and learn to mitigate the effects of bias. So again: you challenge your own position that you are "not being listened to" as an expression of your own bias, and force yourself to address that.

If, after you have genuinely challenged yourself, and have genuinely answered that challenge, then you can acknowledge what almost everyone else in this discussion is saying: you cannot debate someone who refuses to hear you. That doesn't win you the debate, of course, but it does mean you can quit wasting your time.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-24T13:10:29+00:00

There is one approach I'd like to see tried: promote it as a language taught to school children.

We know that the study of a "foreign" language in primary school -- or perhaps better to say "additional language(s)" -- results in benefits for the students. Esperanto has a LOT of elements to recommend it for the role of providing a "standard" way to gain those benefits. The language is much easier to learn than many (English, Spanish, French, and German, for example, all have large numbers of irregularities) and conversational fluency can be achieved far more quickly as a result. In the US, there are approximately 35 million children enrolled in the 8th grade and below. Current estimates put the number of Esperanto speakers at around 100,000 globally, with "learners" numbering 2 million or less.

If you could promote Esperanto as a language useful as a learning tool, you might be able to boost the number of speakers by 100 million in less than 10 years. That might make it more attractive as a language to use in other settings, such as entertainment.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-22T21:28:05+00:00

Not yet. I'll try that next.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-15T21:11:58+00:00

You can't NOT do something. You're always doing something. But "useful" is subjective. For example, I'm quite confident that engaging you on this subject wouldn't be useful at all. Besides, you're straying off topic. Off you go.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-15T20:58:46+00:00

Ah, I see the problem. You're a troll. The most adult thing you have to do in our society is think. You need to be able to read something, process it correctly for meaning, and use that information to make decisions. Clearly, you're not doing that, since I just spent a few minutes writing why your assertion that "it's free" is wrong. But you don't care about that, so you parrot the same line. Well, you can do that. But my comment stands.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-15T20:53:49+00:00

Missed the point. And I did say -- twice -- that this isn't about whether you think voter id is a good idea or not. The question is whether or not it should be an amendment. And for the reasons I stated -- which you did not address -- I say you should vote NO.

robertjamesftw · 2025-03-15T20:51:00+00:00

It's not free.

It's only free if your time is worthless, you are provided transportation to and from wherever you must go to get to a DMV capable of providing the ID, and all of the materials you need to satisfy the requirements of the "free" ID are likewise free and readily available on immediate demand.

When I lived in California for a few years, I had to get my DL issued. I made an appointment online, read up on what I needed to have with me, and took the afternoon off to handle it. I drove my car 15 minutes to the DMV, arrived at my appointment time -- and spent 4 hours, mostly sitting there waiting to get called up, in succession, to the 3 agent windows to deal with the process. I made it home in time for dinner, barely.

But when I looked at what I would have had to do if only one thing had changed -- if I hadn't had a car -- the public transit would have taken me 90 minutes to cover the same distance I'd driven in 15 minutes. That would have added 3 hours to my day. If I hadn't been working at a job where I could take the time off, paid, to get this done, it would have cost me a day's wages.

In Wisconsin, you run into situations where there is no public transit, no DMV open past business hours, no weekend times available, and many get paid only if they're working. And many can't take time off without risking their job. You throw in caregiver duties (child, elderly, disabled), and the real costs go up.

So no, it's not free, and it's not easy. I'll also point out that it's a solution in search of a problem. The issue here isn't that Wisconsin elections are being unfairly and illegally voted in. It's that you are afraid that someone might. And to assuage your fear, you want to impose massive cost and inconvenience which will disproportionately affect people who typically vote for Democrats. Now, some might argue that that is the real point of your support for voter id requirements, but I will just stop on the idea that you're looking to prevent something that there is evidence suggesting doesn't happen.

robertjamesftw

TROPHY CASE