mike carey

This is something I hadn't thought of, but agree with the assessment. It's a useful corrective to the nervous perception that we are one of the targets of this policy. For my part, I'm rarely going to a city to hire, rather, I'm going there and hiring while I'm there. I tend to choose a hotel based on what works for me rather than think specifically about how an overnight would go there. I have never worried about keycard access. I wait for my guest in the foyer and go with them to my room. In part, this reflects the fact that what I'm doing is legal here, but I haven't really thought about changing tack in the US. I'm sure part of it's also white privilege, I expect not to be noticed.

Rather than offer another comment on this aspect, I thought I'd post a link to this article from a few years ago. David is well known in the forum, many of us have been to pool parties at his home in Palm Springs. https://www.out.com/lifestyle/2016/2/09/price-intimacy-time-i-hired-sex-worker

As has been said in many different ways, it's a personal decision based on the particulars of the airline program and on what you as an individual get out of it. It's interesting that the experience of different people on upgrades is so varied. As @Benjamin_Nicholas said, if fewer people qualify for the highest status, by definition your chances of getting an upgrade are higher, but that doesn't mean you'll get one. I've only spoken at any length with one person about this. He seems to be upgraded on most of his flights (with AA, he's exec platinum), but I know he checks the number of open premium seats on flights he is about to book. From the airline's perspective they're always going to try to monetise spare premium seats before giving them to frequent flyers. Unlike your FF points, upgrade credits aren't contingent liabilities in their accounts, they lapse if you don't or can't use them. My calculations are different, QF doesn't give upgrade credits, most of the benefit of status is access to their lounges, Qantas Club for Gold, and domestic business and international first class lounges for Platinum. They also give you hgher priority for upgrades, but those are points upgrades. Their calculation uses status credits based on fare class, flexibility and distance rather than specifically on dollars and/or miles. One thing about mileage runs with QF is that status requalification is discounted, so that extra flight to qualify this year will reduce the cost of next year's status. I wouldn't take a long haul flight just to qualify, but I would choose the date I travelled to move it from one qualification year to another. Having just gone through all that, I paused and thought of that old line that if you have to ask the price of something you can't afford it. Fretting over what to do and whether to do it in order to qualify for this 'status' thing is a bit like that, but guilty as charged!

... And in Australia, and has been for as long as I can remember. Turns out from the Oxford Dictionary it's a 1980s term, and it's not listed as being regional.

I agree, @Max but I'm not sure what point you were making. If it was that for all the issues with the B787 ten years ago, everything is fine now, then yes. If it was just about the B737, I suspect you are correct again. But that doesn't mean that the B737 Max will be the aircraft that carries the brand forward. The MAX may emerge from the current unpleasantness, but equally Boeing may back off and develop a different 'new' version of the B737.

Yup, the latest RM review calls him Jake Cook.

I've done it before, here I go again, posting tangentially related things, although in this case it's a) in keeping with the 'Will it ever fly' subject of the thread and b) featuring the aircraft type that the thread started on. So, to QF7879 JFK-SYD that flew over the weekend. https://thepointsguy.com/news/qantas-project-sunrise-sydney/

Good grief, he has enough trouble with English. I guess he'll shorten it to Trump NZ.

The new normal. Claiming that actual normality is pathological. Doing so ironically serves only better to illustrate the absurdity of it all! [MEDIA=twitter]1185207873199960065[/MEDIA]

@Realalist I wasn't going to comment, but I can only echo what @Epigonos said. You are entitled not to tell a potential hire anything about yourself, but if you don't you'll be on tenterhooks wondering if they'll turn you away. Many will say any age, race or body shape, but unless you've told them about yourself, you'll still harbour thoughts that it might have just been their advertising pitch. I now make a point of telling guys I want to hire how old I am, and also that I live in a small town so if I'm going to meet it won't be 'now' but when I'm in their city. Most responses are positive on both counts. I realise it's easy for me to say this and harder for you to accept it, and I had similar reservations. But in my trips to the US I have hired some incredible men whom I would have thought would turn their noses up at me. They didn't.

I have a total of 7 siblings and first cousins, only one other, my sister, is gay. No other relatives are gay, as far as I know. My sister came out 30 years ago when I was still in denial, has been partnered most of the time and is getting married in a couple of weeks to her current partner of 15 years..

English is such a wonderful language, nicht wahr? Things are going swimmingly in the sub-editing department of this newspaper. [MEDIA=twitter]1184352898592804864[/MEDIA]

I think that's what I was saying, but making it a general case rather than just about Scott. I'm not sure whether is is privilege or just a lack of consideration to think, 'You have to disclose this, but I don't'. As gay men we should be aware how tedious it is to have to correct other people's assumptions when they haven't bothered to consider the possibility that they were wrong.

You're right. A lot of things are 'the norm', and people can be forgiven for assuming that someone they 'meet' will conform to the norm until it's demonstrated otherwise. (In our societies the 'norm' is generally white, male, cis, married (or partnered), believer, Christian, even though people who don't conform to each of those are common, and in some cases (male) in fact the minority.) Being surprised by someone not conforming to any of those characteristics is perfectly understandable, putting the onus on them to tell you (apart from a momentary, 'I wish they had told me') is the issue here. We need to be able to check ourselves and reflect on whether it's our own assumptions that are the problem rather than the other person's disclosure or otherwise.

Well, that does rule out travel to one country.

Holy fuck, @loremipsum you are fast becoming my favourite poster here. I'll soon want to meet you.

An interesting question, and one that is most likely never to be able to be answered by someone who didn't have an abusive parent. We can never know whether the instinct to love a parent regardless could be negated by their disdain or abuse, and how much it would take, and whether the response would be anger or an effort to dismiss them from our lives. Our entire lives shape who we are, and we cannot escape our pasts, be that an unhappy childhood or an unsuccessful relationship. They can be in the past but they cannot be completely escaped any less than they can be forgotten, and perhaps because they cannot be forgotten. This is what is at the centre of the lifetime of trauma children who suffered sexual abuse can endure. On this theme, in response to a discussion on the radio about whether a divorce 'ends' a marriage someone texted in that it was only when their ex had died that they finally were 'free'. Maybe, as the radio host remarked, it's only in their death that a child can be free of a parent who mistreated them.

Two hours!

(As an aside, both are examples of prescriptive grammarians insisting that things must not be done in English because they are not possible in Latin. Rejecting these ideas is something to not put up with. [Note: Sentence ending in two consecutive prepositions.])

To boldy go where no man's gone before. And also to allow people to use prepositions to end sentences with!

Oh, so you did, I had thought the subjunctive mood was prohibited in the US by federal law.

It's a well to remember that the article in the OP refers to population-wide statistics for syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. As interesting as this conversation has been, and as important as raising the factors that have been discussed is, what MSM do or don't do is going to play a minimal role in these statistics. I suspect that was what @Kurtis Wolfe was alluding to in his terse comment about maths. I noticed that one of the examples used in the article was the huge increase in congenital syphilis, that is an infected mother passing it on to a new-born child. I only read through the article once but there was no reference to STIs other than the three on which the article was based.

It was 'staged', as he was running he was following a car that was projecting the target position of where he needed to be to stay on a two-hour pace. He also had several teams of multiple pace-makers running with him. They weren't co-competitors but rather they were there purely to assist him..

Exactly, it has demonstrated that the idea that it couldn't be done in under two hours was wrong, not that two hours had any special significance. Interestingly (to me) when this was discussed in the Sunday morning sport panel here, one of the panelists noted that at the Athens Olympics in 1896 the race was won in 2 h 58' 50" and that was over 40km (25 miles). The current distance is that of the 1908 games, where it was the distance from Windsor Castle to the spot on the track in front of the Royal Box at White City Stadium. The distance wasn't standardised until 1921.

There was an interesting segment on the news last night (and it was on the public broadcaster so there's almost certainly no commercial spin to the coverage). 5G is just starting to roll out here and so far it's only in a small proportion of the major metropolitan areas. If you're looking to upgrade your device you need to consider when the service will be available, not only where you live but also to places you might visit regularly. I'm sure the device would be able to maintain a connection on a legacy network, but there is less reason to upgrade if half the time it'll be using 4G. One point the segment raised that I had never considered was the example of Korea. There, they found that data rates on 4G improved significantly when 5G became available because all the heavy users upgraded leaving more capacity for the rest. It becomes a question of whether you actually need the higher speeds or if it's just a sort of cyber dick measuring contest.