mike carey

I can't say if it's a spoiler or not as I haven't seen the fillum, but Rialto is a suburb of Dublin. That cold be the link, it may be where it's set. Rialo is on the Irish Grand Canal, and there is a Rialto bridge that crosses the canal.

The reason some people are considering high priced merchandise is that their tolerance for paying $n is related to how much money they have as well as their understanding of what is a 'market' rate. I'm more guided by that market rate but I'm not everyone. If my income were $10m pa I wouldn't blink at $1k per hour if I liked the look of the guy. I earn somewhat less than that (several orders of magnitude as it happens), so I think hard before hiring at rather lower rates, but that's me. And not necessarily in a bad way, many reflect the view that his price is simply outside their range. The 'who does he think he is' crowd, and the 'I wouldn't pay that much for him' ones not so much. Turning your unwillingness or inability to pay someone's rate into a comment on the provider does exactly what you suggest, Benjamin.

Sometimes things miss you by 'that much'. https://twitter.com/signalborder/status/1352769488119324673?s=20

And then there's: "And how did you find your steak sir?" "Oh quite by accident. I lifted up the potato and there it was."

Spoken by another man who happily sets his own rules of engagement in the business.

This subject came up in the weekly Sunday morning sports discussion program on the ABC, and although they were talking about vaccination for Australian Olympic athletes, it could reasonably be applied more broadly. The Australian Olympic Committee went public this week saying that the team would not be jumping the queue for vaccination. The panelists noted that the number of people in the whole team is vanishingly small in proportion to the Australian population and vaccinating them would have a negligible (but not zero) effect on the availability of vaccine for higher priority recipients so most Australians would not begrudge them being vaccinated for the games. Although the US is less sport obsessed than Australia, the same might largely be true there. On the issue of equity, is should not be too much to ask for the wealthy IOC to fund vaccination for athletes from poor countries, or for the rich countries to do so, with the aim both of helping to ensure the safe running of the games and of preventing athletes from potentially bringing the virus home.

I'm not sure someone into wethers is that much of an attraction.

No arguments from me on that score. He seems more closely aligned to the political milieu he operates in than his successor or any of the state or territory senior health/medical officers.

He's a public servant not a politician. The secretaries of government departments in Australia are in effect their CEOs, the politician in charge is the minister. I think the Canadian equivalent is deputy minister.

Probably the same spelling test as for the sub-bation hall of fame.

I think I've hit the jackpot with this thread:

There's some astonishing J-class fares being offered, I can only hope that when travel here opens up again some of the airlines offer deals half as good. These AA fares have been discussed in the One Mile at a Time forum to some cynicism, and some contempt for anyone who is travelling to South America in the pandemic, or even talking about it. While they are tempting, I'm too much of a glass-half-empty guy in this situation: possibility of cancellation, difficulty of getting soon to be mandatory tests and so on, but good luck and have fun anyone who's going to take the plunge.

Yes it is, or any other, but the question was asked after Unicorn posted a pic of his vaccination record that used two different nomenclatures for the Pfizer vaccine. I was aiming to remove any idea that he had received different vaccines.

As far as I can tell, you can't edit who follows you (that's up to them), only who you follow. (For those, hover the cursor over their avatar or name and select 'Unfollow' in the dialogue box.)

And the twitter thread it comes from for your amusement.

Excellent! Something to read while I think about cuddles.

BioNTech/Pfizer is the full attribution of the two companies involved, Pfizer is a short form of the name, so Unicorn's two jabs were the same vaccine (if that was the source of any confusion).

Bon Anniversaire!

The question posed in this thread was about the morality of hiring, not the morality of hirers or escorts. Don't confuse the morality of the particular examples you cite with the morality of hiring per se. There are banking and finance practices that are immoral, but that does not make banking and finance immoral industries (although there are perhaps some people who would differ with me on that score).

Well, if it were accidental, how could I possibly hold that against you. Still, I think it would be unlikely. When would you like to have an experiment so I can confirm that sort of thing doesn't happen?

His ad says, 'Muscle guy from FROM LONDON'.

The origins and the current status are probably related, but is a way the link is no longer relevant. In most societies that are influenced by religions, more particularly the Abrahamic ones, the morality of sex work is tied up with the morality of sex more broadly. Sex has a particular status of being a uniquely special interaction between two people, and anything that seems at odds with that special status is seen as immoral. The Church view that sex is must be within wedlock and must have the purpose of procreation makes anything other than that immoral in the view of the Church, and it's not a view unknown outside the Church. On that morality scale, anything outside married procreative sex is immoral and should be equally so, there should be no tiers of immorality but there are. A lot of it comes down to, 'Things I don't like are immoral', which is not the basis for a system of government. (Keen observers will see what I did there.) There's a lot of muddled thinking and hypocrisy around the issue. If you accept that recreational sex or sex out of wedlock are not immoral it's a bit of a stretch to think that paid sex is. Still it's a relatively cost free way for some people to excuse some of their own behaviours and set themselves up as being moral by condemning something they don't do as immoral. Also it's easy to be captured by an institutional view of a hierarchy of morality and to feel guilt if you transgress it. If you question the idea of sex as a moral minefield, consider the famous 'I did not have sex with that woman'. That is premised on the view that there are times when sex is immoral, and therefore more effort goes into proving that what you did was not sex rather than address the idea that if there was anything immoral it was the whole situation rather than the specifics of which tab went into which slot. (To be clear, I see marital fidelity as part of the contract, and negotiable during the term of the contract, not part of the definition of the arrangement or an issue of morality.) So no, I don't think hiring is immoral, either for the hirer or the provider. The arguments about trafficking are just so much nonsense. Restaurants can and do exploit workers and arrange to have people trafficked for that work. That doesn't make them immoral. Even on the premise that sex work may not be moral, the possibility that some workers might be trafficked would not make it more so. The only truly immoral thing in any way linked to sex work is the army of campaigners against it who buy its services.

A prehensile appendage perhaps?

Maybe I should to. Amongst other things ...

And I wouldn't for a moment suggest that this was not part of the reason 2020 may not seem so bad for them. Still, they had a reasonably strict lock-down for some weeks.