mike carey

The only plausible explanation for this is that he made that appearance between taking the test and receiving the result, and local regulations didn't require you to isolate for that period. Here you have to do that if you are having the test because you suspect yon might have the virus, although not if it's a test to clear you for travel. In his case there would seem to be no reason to have a clearance test, as absent vaccination a negative test wouldn't let him into Australia. The only conceivable reason for having a test was the hope that having a recent infection would exempt him from needing to be vaccinated. On the basis of all that, his appearance with those children shows nothing but a wilful disregard for their safely.

He was Bahamian, (which was British at the time) and apparently his accent from there was an obstacle at the start of his career.

So name the forum 'Wendys'?

And as has been noted in another thread, he has reactivated his RM ad. He has posted travel to Tejas in mid January and OC in mid February.

Go into it with your eyes open. Assume that he wants to engage you in another appointment and plan on that basis. If that's ok, do it (if you're happy with that). You could ask him what the ground rules are. If he just wants to meet, whether that involves sex or not, that's sort of a bonus. Don't assume he just wants a meeting off the clock.

Tourist attractions are, almost by definition, places with a wide general appeal. Archaeological sites are a specialist interest. Persepolis is most likely, for Westerners not just Americans, an unknown rather than underrated site. Given the US government's hostility to travel to Iran, it is likely to remain largely unknown to that audience. If I were to go there I would lose my access to visa waiver travel to the US, not something I am willing to forego just yet. I can remember Persepolis being one of the locations the Shah used for his celebrations of 2500 years of the Persian Empire. When I googled it I discovered that it was when I was still in high school (1971). Old I am!

Haha, now I remember him, or at least the context in which he came out. A very political move to do so for the Sochi Olympics in the face of Russian LGBTI policies. But now, back to the subject of the thread.

I get the joke, less so perhaps than if I'd known who BSR was talking about. And yes, a joke is a joke. I didn't say it wasn't funny, I simply said that there was a serious point there as well. As I said above, the serious point might have been one best not commented on. And yeah, at a party I'm boring AF, a complete Debbie Downer, as a number of people on the forum can attest!

I don't know him, so that is an explanation, but there is an inherent joke in asking if yo can reveal something that is already revealed. But even if it's a joke it still poses a serious question. Perhaps a question I didn't need to answer.

That depends on what you characterise 'the whole world' knowing to actually mean. Mostly, the whole world doesn't know (it's not the whole world anyway, it's the developed Anglosphere and some others), it usually just suspects. More broadly, I'd say you can come out regardless of how widely your sexuality is or is suspected to be. If you choose to come out you have a target audience you are thinking about, no matter how large or small that audience may be. I've heard it said that you have to come out again every time you meet someone.

Bon anniversaire!

Absolutely! He won't care one jot what the Serbian president says or thinks. In every issue bar this one, the Serbian president would neither know nor care what an Australian PM thought or did. Nil-all draw. This all depends on the Federal Court now, although you can never rule out a sudden technicality that prompts a reassessment (if the public mood shifts).

Agree on both counts, although I'm due to do an anal test, but bowel cancer screening (which is free here). Earlier in the pandemic I recall seeing vision of PCR test stations where both were swabbed.

On the issue of nose or throat/cheek swabs, I had posted somewhere in the forum that a medical expert here had commented that Omicron is more strongly present in the throat and far less prevalent in the nasal passage than earlier variants. That appears to be becoming the accepted medical opinion. The instructions with the kits are likely to take some time to catch up with this, so it makes sense to swab both. (I wouldn't advocate adding an arse swab, but maybe that's just me.) A comment on the wider discussion of the efficacy of RATs. There are two separate questions, how effective they are at detecting the disease accurately, and whether the testing being done with them is necessary or even useful. The former is purely one of the statistics for how well they work, the latter is one of whether you need to find out if a particular person has the disease. Opinions differ on which people you need to know that about. If the aim of the testing is to exclude people known to be positive then the value is clearer than if the aim it so determine that people don't have the disease. We know that a negative test is only good for the five minutes after it is taken (hyperbolic exaggeration), so their benefit is in winnowing out some of the positive cases not in identifying those who are not. Public health officials know this so they will likely only mandate them as a gate-keeper test (as opposed to other reasons) when they see a benefit in excluding the proportion of population that return a positive test. One of the unstated reasons for testing more widely than is necessary is to reassure the wider community. The merits of this are at best debatable. Case in point is South Australia that as it was opening up the the eastern states required a RAT for the couple of weeks when their case load was negligible but scrapped it when their numbers started to rise and they had had time to explain to the SA public why they weren't needed. (I mean to explain why the tests were not needed, not to explain why the SA public was not needed. I make no comment on the latter.) In Australia, not requiring a test is not a free-for-all. People who test positive must isolate for usually seven days so they are taken out of circulation once they are known to have the disease. Testing is only required in limited specific circumstances. Surveillance testing is now a thing of the past. Public health policy has moved from aggressively looking for as many cases as can be found, to isolating known cases. Mandatory testing of all the household contacts of a known case is a completely different thing to testing everyone that was in a shopping centre the hour after a known case visited it.

He appealed to the Federal Court, and they adjourned the case until Monday, so effectively he can't be deported while the case is pending. That court can't be relied on to do what the government wants, so I'm not sure why the adjournment was until Monday rather than tomorrow (it's 2200 on Thursday now). Perhaps they want to give the parties enough time to resolve it themselves. As you said, the drama continues!

Perhaps he should have known, but the Immigration Department official who issued the visa should have known better that it was the wrong visa and either not issued it or issued the correct one. I see red tape as being unnecessarily complex rules, this is a case of apparently clear rules being incompetently administered.

This is absolutely extraordinary, and has been an evolving story since his flight landed in Melbourne at 1130 pm last night (0730 US EST). His visa has just been cancelled, although his lawyers are appealing the decision. I really don't know how this will play out in the court of public opinion. He will no longer be the focus of all the discussion, but rather the various decision processes are likely to be. It will variously be seen as 'the government' not being able to make up its mind (not differentiating between the state and federal governments), one or other of the governments being seen as grandstanding or playing political games with the other, or just more generalised bureaucratic failure. Whatever else, it is likely to see Djokovic pass the 'villain' hat to someone else. There will also be a sense that they made up their minds and couldn't stick with a decision. People may not have liked the original decision, but will have moved on. They may still have booed him on the court more as a pantomime villain, but this decision will likely confer a level of sympathy on him. The two governments concerned have some rusted on supporters and detractors, and some of the response will be coloured by those opinions, but most people here won't look at the issue through a political lens.

On the evening news panel program last night I learned that in addition to Dryuary, this month is also Veganuary. The 'also' is my characterisation, not one that its proponents made. I can assure engaged forum members that I will be giving this initiative the same excited and enthusiastic consideration as I am giving Dryuary.

One reason for the recent slowing of results for PCR tests being cited here is that in the past they would batch test four samples together and only test them individually if a batch returned a positive result, and few did. Now, almost every batch would contain at least one positive sample so they have to test every sample separately at the outset.

Further to my previous post, just now I saw this on twitter https://twitter.com/MattWalshMedia/status/1478321873477771264?s=20

The degree of cynicism here on this issue, on Twitter and in the general conversation, is off the scale. The public communications about the wider Covid / Omicron issue is confused and confusing. Rules then exceptions,, mandates then changes to them. Australians in general have a low tolerance for special dispensations, but there was surprisingly little resistance to exceptions being made for sports people to enter and leave the country when they wouldn't have been able to as private citizens In those cases, however, the rules that were waived were about who was allowed to enter and exit, not the conditions when they did so. They still had to undertake the same quarantine periods, although teams were allowed to organise their own quarantine facilities if they met the same standards of supervision and the like as state-operated facilities. This exemption doesn't pass what is called here 'the pub test', medical reasons my arse.

Whether there are events in those or other places is a separate discussion. The DC event and the Palm Springs weekend are what could be called 'destination' event for the participants, not gatherings aimed at the community where they are held, although they are certainly convenient for those locals. They depend for their success on people travelling from around the country and beyond (Exhibit A for the latter right here), and indeed for this event this year an organiser who lives on the west coast. Staging another similar event elsewhere would work best at a location that is a drawcard (for whatever reason) in its own right, so a destination city or an airline hub. There have been events attempted in places like New York and Chicago but none has been enduring, so perhaps the key to success is a city that is not too much of a destination: if people really want to go there (or have to) they would do it anyway, and the event wouldn't prompt them to make a special trip, whereas for an event at a place people sort of want to go could be the trigger for them to make the trip. I can't talk to Philly's status as a drawcard, although I am aware of its historical significance as the first seat of Congress, amongst other things, so I don't know where it fits into the scale of likely host cities. Princeton and I suspect Philly are candidates for locals to organise a meeting, and perhaps advertise it for wider attendance from forum members but I doubt either will become the next, or another 'forum regular' gathering. Don't die wondering, try to organise something local, but history suggests that something more even that a few initially enthusiastic locals is needed for an enduing event. Good luck!

From the commentary here among usually reliable suspects, I mean sources, RATs are useful, less expensive but less reliable than PCRs. They are useful for targeted testing of cohorts of people who are likely or known to be contacts and for surveillance testing in vulnerable groups or groups of people who would pose a particular risk if they were unknowingly infectious. They are not all that much use to test someone at a single point in time but are useful to chart the emergence of disease in a cohort by testing them frequently. So, for example a single positive or a single negative doesn't say much (although depending who it was it may be advisable for a single positive result to be referred for a PCR test). Two negative tests followed by a third that is positive is a more reliable indicator of an actual positive case. One thing that's come out here in the last couple of days is that there are indications that Omicron is more concentrated in the throat, so using just a swab of the nose for the RAT sample is likely to be far less reliable, and both the nose and the back of the throat should be swabbed. There are certainly times when a negative RAT delivers false reassurance to the person and those they plan to meet. Perhaps if you are told you need an RAT to attend a social function deciding not to attend might be the wisest course of action. You may not have Covid, but you cannot be reasonably sure that some random who tested negative and goes doesn't have it anyway. This concern too will pass as people become more confident of their triple (or more?) vaccinations, but there's a way to go.

My access this time was courtesy of my airline status (rolled over successively since the start of the pandemic). I only needed one flight in my last membership year to retain status and I think with this flight, or perhaps one or two more, I'll be good for yet another year's extension. Unlike the US, here lounge access is the main benefit of status. So, getting any ticket on Qantas is the easiest way for me to achieve my 'lounge' ambition for the year.You also receive access if you're travelling in Business on a revenue ticket, an award flight or a points upgrade. None of those would have been much use to someone like you who didn't get to fly at all. I'm not sure where QF is with paid memberships now, but for some time they just stopped the clock on expiry rather than extend memberships for a year. They have enough lounges open for them to have ended that pause. (They sell memberships for a year from the date you buy it not by the calendar year. I still have a short period of paid membership waiting for when, or if, my status runs out.) Oh, and the flight ended up being delayed two and a half hours. I didn't take advantage of the complimentary wine they served on the flight.

Some people can just read the room straight away!