mike carey

I suspect that the booking sites aren't optimised for multiple city itineraries. For one thing, the best deals on the different sectors are likely to be with different airlines, so there is less chance of low overall prices for the itinerary. A travel agent might be the best way of doing it. Alternatively use your preferred airline's web site (or check separately on several of them). I've done the travel agent thing (a trip to South America with a whole bunch of flights in the continent, but also tours and hotels) but other than that, the closest I've come to that sort of trip is one into one US city, an internal flight and home from the second US city, and I booked that on the QF web page. The fare was the same as a return trip to the first city would have been (it was the further one from Sydney).

Meh, we don't do thanksgiving, but some of us have heard of it.

Of course you can go cold turkey with food. Think the week after thanksgiving.

@escortrod, not haggis? Seriously some good things there. Lancs hotpot is one I love but hadn't thought of for years.

Oh, I know that's how it would happen in the anti-socialist states of Murika. It doesn't come out of people's pay here. Workers agree on their pay, employers have to pay the 9.5% into superannuation on top of that. Next time we have a Labor Party government they will increase the percentage above 9.5.

Superannuation is compulsory, employers have to pay 9.5% of your salary into the fund (and you can pay in your own money). It is tax-privileged (all income in the fund is taxed at 15%), but it's not a government entity like SS, it's in privately operated funds or the industry ones I mentioned, or you can set up a fund of your own much like a personal trust, but the employee owns the funds in their account. There are rules about taking it out (you have to be 60). Breaches of the rules can result in very high tax rates applying to the funds. However you manage it you have to keep firewalls between your regular funds and your superannuation fund accounts, and transactions between them can result in tax liabilities. In the end though, most payouts when you are retired are tax free if you take them as gradual payments (rather than just withdrawing all the money).

You mean you? Yes, posts. Next thing we know, someone will be hoist by their own trumpet.

The Ontario Teachers' pension fund has invested in toll roads in Australia. There are listed companies here that own toll roads (here and in Canada), and Sydney Airport is a listed company. If you're a teacher in Ontario, or you have a retirement investment structure that can buy infrastructure shares, you can invest in them. We have compulsory superannuation here, and the pool of funds is about AUD2.3tr at the moment. Some of the fund managers are 'industry funds' run cooperatively by businesses and unions, and they make direct investments in things like infrastructure, and anyone can open an account with those funds. You can't pick the individual investments where your savings are placed, but you can invest indirectly in those sorts of assets. Ours is a small investment space compared to the US, so I can't imagine that there is not a similar opportunity there.

David, I'm in awe, this is all so inspiring. I can see why this guy from NY who I met last year loves you.

I know I've commented on this before, but you virtually never hear the word 'suicide' used in reports in this country, it's always 'no suspicious circumstances'. The exception is in domestic violence when a man and his partner and children are found dead, there it might be mentioned, often obliquely. Anything that even hints at it is always followed by reference to Lifeline and Beyond Blue, two support services, and their crisis phone numbers and/or internet addresses.

Sounds like a personal portfolio management arrangement where the manager isn't the company that manages the individual mutual funds. This sounds similar to an arrangement my broker is pitching to me. For a fee of that sort of level, they would manage the shares and mutual fund investments I have in a single structured account and provide consolidated cash flow statements, portfolio valuations and annual income statements for tax returns, and on-line access to all the account details. They actually pitched it to me for my superannuation (retirement savings) which have to be kept in an investment product that has stricter rules than regular savings and investments. (There are mutual fund style investment products that meet the legal requirements for superannuation but the rules for moving between them are more complex than for normal assets. The structure they propose is its own superannuation account so it can hold any sort of assets, like shares, cash and regular mutual funds.) There are regulatory reasons that mean I need to have a compliant structure for superannuation funds, but despite the management cost I am considering one for my regular investments as well. I could just retain separate share investments and do all the administrative work myself, but paying someone to do that seems like an attractive idea, and the fee is tax-deductible. Apart from the administrative work they do, I would manage the funds within the structure as if they were separate investments, making all the buy and sell decisions. If that is the way @Unicorn does it and doesn't authorise the advisor to make investment decisions $5 sounds (from this distance) like a good deal for each trade, and would remove the risk of churning the portfolio.

Pedantic point (stated above also), Romanian is a nation state and also an ethnic/language group, the two definitions form a Venn diagram. According to Google, the Romanian word for 'Romanian' is 'Română' which is uncomfortably close to Roma/Romani, which as you note is a completely different ethnic group (some of whom also happen to be Romanian [nationality]). From my observation, Americans tend to classify people into about five large racial categories and only look at race and racism through that prism. IIRC the Australian census asks about ancestry not race, and lists origins that are not necessarily race-based: some overlap groups that may be seen as being different, and some distinguish between origins that to most people are not distinct racially (Chinese and HK, English/British/Scottish/Irish). To me, racism is a view that one's own group is superior to another, with prejudicial treatment of the other as a result, and I see race and ethnic origin both as being valid sources of racial prejudice. Whether I would describe a particular instance as being racist or prejudiced can be a difficult decision. Finally, I've seen the argument that all whites are racist because systemic racism. I think it's nonsense. To be racist is an individual decision, systemic racism is about how society has evolved over time, and to me only becomes individualised or the responsibility of one group today when some aspect of systemic (often unconscious) racial advantage is legislated to formalise the discrimination.

I'm sure it's common elsewhere, but the once coin-only parking meters in Canberra now take credit/debit cards (some street ones don't), I'm obsessed (not really, but you get the drift) with frequent flyer points, so I use cards whenever I can (triple points at Maccas on my Amex, it's a restaurant apparently), public transport uses smart cards that are far cheaper than using cash, and more convenient, toll roads don't have cash booths, you need an electronic tag in your car (accounts recharged from a credit card). I carry cash but rarely use it, have a cheque book but rarely use it either.

Lol, I totally get where you're coming from. Being Australian, my mentality is more like your American friends. I live in a small town (Tumut) and spend some of my time in Canberra. It's a two hour drive between them and I don't really plan trips between the two, I just jump in my car and go. Tumut to Sydney is about four hours and Canberra to Sydney three, and I travel between the three with little consideration. I confess to being amused when you said the Ardennes were too far. I belong to a gay camping group and have often driven six hours for a weekend camping trip.

@Wolfer, I can't claim the expertise of others who have commented here, I can only make uninformed comments that you are entitled to ignore. I would say find other things to do. Jump on your bicycle and spend a weekend in Flanders or the Ardennes. It's not all about sex. Find non-sexual things to do. I joined a gay camping group, it was fun and the only sex was between people who came to the group as couples (well, I think that was all there was!). Of course don't ignore serious mental health advice, those suggestions are important. I don't know your circumstances, but I was closeted for years, from the world and from myself, I came out only slowly. I had uninspiring sex, and I met my first escort a few years ago. I've met some wonderful guys through this site (in various ways, I'm not talking about face-to-face meetings) but it's not the only place to meet them. I've found the vicarious engagement here important, I'm not chasing sex every minute of the day. Scale back, do what you want to do, don't rush because you think you should. As others have said, seek a therapist if things seem to be getting out of control.

In Australia and I suspect in Canada, especially francophone Canada, the word `Christian` used as a name isn`t weaponised the way it can be in the US. I've read a bit about Christian and seen some of his videos, no indication of nominative determinism.

What would be really odd would be if someone called in Petrograd. For me, one of the transformational moments was when Russia reverted the name of Leningrad to St Petersburg and the Russian navy commissioned a ship called Пётр Великий (Peter the Great).

I still have cheque books for a small number of bank accounts, suffice to say they have 19... printed at the end of the date field, and two of them are for banks that no longer exist (the old banks have been bought out and the accounts migrated to the new bank, but the old cheques still work). Last time I called an electrician, I made sure I had cash to pay him. Interestingly, when I had my car serviced last month ($1600 - some major work needed, new brake pads for example, it was the 250,000 km service) they gave me the bill and asked my to pay it by bank transfer on-line, they were sick of the credit card costs (note, here companies are allowed to charge you what it costs them to use CCs but they didn`t do that). I may offer to pay by cheque next time (although I suspect that having me do it on-line works better for them). Also, when I had a furniture removal a couple of months ago they were happy for me to pay by bank transfer.

Oh, yes, the Romans were paragons of virtue in their kindness and respect for human life. They were justified in stopping evil druidic practices. Do you actually listen to and think about things that you are saying?

There are two separate concepts that are widely confused and conflated, often deliberately to enable people to deny any sort of responsibility. One is collective guilt, the other is some sort of collective or historical responsibility. I agree that there is no place for collective guilt, at least not after the immediate time has passed. Even then the concept of collective guilt is often misused to condemn a whole group when only certain parts of the group were responsible. To use your example, white people today are not guilty of things that some white people did to other racial groups in the past, nor are they collectively responsible for them. What they do have a responsibility to do is recognise the inherent disadvantage that POC suffer because of past discrimination, and the inherent advantage they have because of they way that discrimination caused society to be structured. Yes, individuals have responsibility, but it's delusional to think that there is now a level playing field. Certainly there is individual disadvantage that occurs within ethnic groups, but there is also systemic disadvantage that is structural. It's not as simple as telling the people who face this disadvantage that overcoming it is all down to them. Our forbears created the society that this happens in because it suited us, to refuse to acknowledge that is an act of historical blindness. (This acceptance is a separate issue from anything that might be done to redress it.)

Human sacrifice is uncivilised, burning witches is civilised. Gotcha.

There is pushback here on the idea that Cook 'discovered' Australia. He hadn't of course, with the partial exception of being the first European to chart the east coast. Terra Australis had long existed in the imagination of Europeans. Torres had charted the straits between Australia and New Guinea, the Dutch (Hartog) and the English (Dampier) had landed on the west coast, Abel Tasman had charted Van Diemen's land (now Tasmania) and New Zealand, all before Cook's first voyage. Makassans had been frequent visitors to the north of the continent. In geographic terms, 'European discovery' is still a valid term, as were the discoveries of Antarctica and some oceanic islands, although in the Pacific Polynesians had discovered most, even incredibly remote ones like Rapa Nui. Beyond geography, 'discovery' in its unqualified sense can be applied to scientific and biological discoveries. The word is often used carelessly or in a general sense to describe the arrival of a dominant group in an area, but it can and is used deliberately to deny or minimise previous inhabitants in settler countries. There is no harm in celebrating the voyages of Columbus or Cook, but that should not be used to underplay 65,000 or 14,000 years of previous continuous human history. Aka 'theft'. And yes, it was brief and largely forgotten (and extensively denied by southern European settler communities in the Americas). There are speculative early accounts of other Europeans reaching North America before them, but given the documented extent of Viking settlements across the North Atlantic (they discovered Iceland and settled Greenland), the accounts of Vinland are hardly implausible. Finally, don't forget that in the US imagination, native Americans are the plains 'Indians', but they are not the only previous inhabitants of North America. Mexico is also part of North America, and there was a flourishing civilisation there when the Spanish arrived (as there were, and previously had been further south in both continents).

Of course Columbus didn't discover America. People had known it was there for at least 14,000 years.

Quite so, I have never met a dog or a giraffe that uses an Oxford comma.

No, I can't! In any case, WA is another country.