JoeWeber

Bingo.

Indeed, I've had a hell of a good run, opened in 1988. Crazy. I'm lucky to have fantastic staff and awesome jumpers who know I want to be gone a lot but must have the same or better safety etc. so it's easy to keep it going. Also, I really thought we'd be part 135 a decade ago and set up for the possibility, although the op's manual is probably too out of date. I can tell you with certainty that some big operators are going to have a lot of engines to overhaul and a lot of SB's and SIL's to accomplish if we go 135. They might also have some 'splainin' to do about how many hours since flight school their pilots have.

Then instead of locking up the shooters in asylums, which don’t help, let’s instead lock them up in gun stores.

Yes. Everyone. Me first, certainly but DZO’s aren’t the only DZ workers affected by higher costs everywhere. The problem has been, and still is, an inability to raise prices.

Agreed. It sounds onerous but enforcing maintenance and pilot training standards isn't so awful. Also, the end of pop up tandem operations will be a good thing and those operators positioned to survive will gain market share and pricing strength. That's a great thing that will mean better pay for industry employees.

Jeez, who could have seen this coming?

I agree. But of course it's not just Q, or any other variant. I'm being repetitive, again, but I think it starts at the level of how our brains are wired. In a way, Grimmie's family nutter is a perfect example of one way it happens. His nutter is successful, probably thinks his intuition is a leg up on people with so called smarts, feels validated as being superior as a consequence of his good fortune, and this is my last guess, won a few times when others said he would lose. Hence, being a contrarian and seeing truth where others cannot see it became natural. So it's not just some kind of something in the water in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania: it apparently can happen to many seemingly smart people anywhere. Of course, how the simple minded get there requires no explanation.

I don't want to pick around the edges of this with you. We've not engaged personally but from what you post I respect where you come from. Hopefully we can all get to where mutual respect wins the day and knee jerk bigotry dies. Have a great and boozy evening.

Mis-gendering is a serious thing for some people. If you think not just go into any Apple store and check out the name tags. Myths are references to the past, would be's reference the future. I was positing should not's. I prefer to include Facebook in any discussion of societies ill's if you don't I respect your position. In the meantime which serious studies on the matter from a century ago should I review and where would you place nature/nurture in the conversation? Absolutely we are talking small numbers of gender affirming surgeries but it is also true that the idea of it seems to be growing in acceptance hence the developing desire to discuss the reasons. Sort of it's the same as needing to discuss, in philosophical terms, skydiving safety issues which sort of has us all in the same bucket already. There is a real use to it.

Surely this much is easily agreed to by most, I think. Of course, we should all be civilized enough to not intentionally, and out of sheer stubbornness, hurt the feelings of our fellows who are struggling with gender identity issues. But mistakes should not be stigmatized socially or penalized legally. The bottom line is that we are way too early in our understanding of the problem of gender dysphoria to have even a solid guess at how much of the condition is owing to nurture or to nature or to Facebook. As we take the time to learn I think the best path is to broadly disagree with the idea of gender reassignment surgery for minors but otherwise just live and let live.

It's good for tomatoes?

Step away from the trough and see that there is a much bigger menu on offer than what you are being fed. For a quick start recognize that human history and world history are bigger things than American history. We propagate in the futile pretense that doing so increases and expands our time but it does not. America will cease to be and with it American jingoism as it has for every society that has preceded us and is now gone. Just the way it is.

Several decades? That's tomorrow not forever. But as ever, the conservative viewpoint as exemplified by thought leader Brent is: as long as I get mine now all is right in the world. Thinking back a bit I now see why you teach your kids to build tree branch shelters in the forest. Like a good dad, you want the best for them when it all goes to hell.

I think he was home schooled by Ayn Rand. He'll recall from back when he had a manifest job at now the closed Skydive Happy Valley that I pointed out that his employers business, because it was in rented space on a Federally funded airport, was subsidized by the US taxpayer. Oh no!, I was told in no uncertain I have an MBA terms: those are "sunk costs".

Of course life, and life forms, used to be a lot less complicated. Unless you believe we were created and are devolving, that is. At an earlier time on these pages I referenced a speech by Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, Earth in it's final Century?. He said: "There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise. But any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria." Surely, unless you believe we were created by a God in our present form, you think that must be true. So we are destined to change in the most significant ways but, like the rest of evolution, it will happen slowly and according to unpredictable patterns. Maybe in 5 Billion years we won't be bound to our corporeal selves or maybe we will have evolved into beings that don't need an opposite sex to reproduce or can simply change sex as needed; that's far from unknown in nature, of course. So how does that work? How would it start with humans? Perhaps there will be some sort of genetic confusion in the womb and at birth. Perhaps there would be some form of social gender bending as the need develops or as nature tests a new idea? That's how evolution has always worked, right? The point being that no one can ever know in advance what is right or natural for a species because we are always changing to survive until we go extinct. Our species is alway testing new ideas and the test bed is us. Consequently, we will always fail in our understanding and knowledge if we don't test our held views against artificial time frames; like what we believe today as opposed to what might be tomorrow for example. Grasping that idea alone should be enough to stop any of the prejudicial, bigoted, or negative projections that anyone has about how any of your fellow humans perceive themselves as they live the one life they have under rules that are not written on stone tablets. The times they are a-changin' and, like it or not, so are we.

Sure, sure but the idea is the same, both are four legged mammals belonging to the group animalis nonprotectedus. Same thing only different.

As self evident and unobvious as when someone writes group and not protected group or Air Force Group or any of the other groups of groups? You have a gift for self embarrassment.

Useless? Hardly, it's excellent training for debating the Torah with Rabbi's.

The Supreme Court gave religious bigots a get out of jail free card. Now anything that offends one's religious sensibilities can trigger a legitimate denial of services. Anything. Now, in the dystopian future the gun loonies pray for I don't doubt the idea of forced AR-15 ownership will be a fervent yearning. Nor do I doubt that our current Supreme Court could find a way to see reasonability in the proposition and rule in favor of it before the steam stops rising off their last turd, stare decisis be damned. And, as we now know, they'd be thrilled to do so even if the case was simply made up for the purpose. I think you're right that student loan forgiveness was a vote grabbing scheme. I also think I might have posted so here along with my happy support of the plan; unlike some of my fellow liberals I am usually in favor of dirty fighting if that's what is needed to advance the cause. No matter, whether or not the justifications and legal basis for the scheme were thin, the Supreme Court made up standing where none existed just to make the ruling and that should bother everyone. Harvard are assholes. $53 Billion in the kitty with more flooding in daily in exchange for indulgences, they ought to have already come out stating they were only pretending to have fair admissions, now see the error in their ways, and were intending to support every kind of diversity as a core goal and for the betterment of the world we live in, hurt feelings be damned. But I'll guess you'd disagree.

That's the problem. Not your point, which is spot on, but the sad fact that our correspondents seem unable to grasp the actual problem. No matter if you believe we are too or too little left or right if you cannot see that the USSC is acting like kids with the cookie jar while their parents are away you are not being honest.

Yes, and you should be compelled to turn in your AR-15's for smelting because they offend my religious sensibilities. What, you say? You've caused me no harm so I have no standing? Um, check recent USSC rulings. I must accommodate your AR-15's because you love them like family just like the women who stroll their yappy dogs in covered strollers do? So sorry Charlie, now first comes religion and second comes your supposed individual rights. Welcome to the world you yearned for.

Sort of, defiling a butcher shop with non-halal meat and offal might cause an actual transfer of material that cannot be absolutely avoided. Of course, it's still absolute bullshit but like not grinding peanut flour in a grist mill for allergy reasons there is a point to be made. The question is simply at what stage does society stop accommodating bullshit religious reasons for denying service to individuals simply because they belong to a group. Here we have a service offered to the public at large being denied to a group that has created no harm to society unless you believe that better restaurant service and better delicatessens are a harm. Also, let's not forget that they paid in equal measure for the infrastructure that made the website designers business possible including, but not limited to, creating the internet. And you have the undiluted gall to say Bill is being obtuse.

Every last bit of this could have ended 200 years ago if those enslaved people would have just grabbed their bootstraps and told those plantation owners that they didn't want to be slaves anymore. They could have but they obviously didn't so it's on them, plain and simple.

Well stated.

Should wheel chair users be forced to build their own ramps? That shouldn't take too much gumption and ingenuity and just think how proud they'd be of their accomplishments. Why it might even inspire kids to learn on their own; we'd save even more tax dollars from being wasted and, with fewer schools, there'd be fewer school shootings, too. It's a big mistake to believe we need to apply ointment to any festering and suppurating sore for it to heal when all we need to do is demand personal responsibility and wave the wand of Reaganomics over the problem.