mike carey

Haha, I know I can't afford you, but I also know you're a sweet guy who's happy to chat. That's a win.

Here in my part of Canberra very few people are wearing masks at the shopping centre (the only 'crowded' place I've been recently), even the staff in the branch of a national supermarket chain that 'encourages' its staff and customers to do so. Understandable, in a territory that has had zero cases in over two months. I haven't noticed a pattern in the age of those wearing them. I wear one, but now carry it on the 300m walk to the shops. Today, I forgot to put it on until I was inside. Metro Melbourne is the only place in the country where there is a mandate, a[though they are encouraged on public transport in Sydney and on flights everywhere. On a tangential issue, when I went to pay cash for a mask I bought a few weeks ago at the chemist shop, their reaction was an almost panicky 'what do we do with that', followed by what seemed to be profound relief when I told them I could pay with a card. I haven't used cash since this started, but from what I've seen, no other merchant seems to have been concerned when others did (public transport doesn't accept cash, you have to use a transit card).

Um, no (I know I'm not the first) single and double quotation marks are both valid, and which you chose is a question of style. (Organisations and institutions can have a style guide that mandates on over the other, the Australian DOD specified single quotes.) The exception to this is if there is a quotation within a quotation you use the single marks for one and double for the other. And where punctuation marks go depends on the meaning, and in this case the question mark relates to the whole sentence not the work 'wreak'. Basically, if the punctuation mark is part of the quotation it's inside the inverted commas, and it's outside if it's not. (Generally you only have one punctuation mark, but if a quotation ends with an exclamation mark inside the inverted comma, you could have a question mark outside it if you were using the quotation in a question that you were posing.) Well, I would say they were flat wrong!! But you were the one writing the paper and arguing with them, not me. *Rant over.*

There's a very good chance that it will, if a huge experiment that's been conducted in the southern hemisphere over the last six months is any guide. You're welcome! I had commented in the past about a huge reduction in respiratory disease in general and in the incidence of influenza in particular in Australia this winter. Covid-19 precautionary measures seem to have reduced other diseases as well. I've had colds every year of my life, until this year. The Economist crunched WHO data from the six southern hemisphere countries for which it was available (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand), and in the article it published it noted: Data from Australia tell a remarkable tale. From May to mid-August of 2015-19, an average of 86,000 Australians tested positive for the flu each year, and around 130 died of it. This winter the government has registered only 627 influenza infections and just a single death. Tests were only down 20%. It's the second of three items in this podcast. https://play.acast.com/s/theintelligencepodcast/homework-thefutureoftheoffice There is even a chance that there will be a minimal flu season in the northern hemisphere because it has to come from somewhere, and the south is far less a source this year than usual, and travel, by which much of its spread occurs is minimal. That is not to say that influenza won't be an issue this northern winter, so it's no reason not to have the shot.

Reading all the plans and bookings people have made is great, and I hope I will be able to be there. At the moment, though, I don't know if I'll be able to leave the country, and even if I can, whether I'd be happy to travel to the US. God, I hope I can.

Oh dear, Unicorn's been on the cooking sherry again. Seeing links that aren't there and unable to see those that are.

There are people who link unrelated things to claim proof of things that are not so.

And there are courts that convict you for engaging in sex for money, doesn't make that right. Today, dating someone and misleading them to have sex can be rape, if you know you have HIV. Consent is conditional.

This is a false equivalence of comic absurdity. There is nothing about fixing a car that can in any context be criminal, although doing it negligently could be criminal negligence. There are laws about consent in sexual intercourse and failing to obtain it or honour the conditions of consent is a criminal offence. A criminal trial determines whether the act in question was an offence proven beyond reasonable doubt to be one of which the defendant was guilty. The 'logocal conclusion' you sought to draw is completely bereft of logic. You can, and the court did. Whether you like that is not the question. And as an aside, it could not be fraud, that is obtaining money under false pretences, nobody did that.

The issue being discussed here is whether people agree or not, but the issue in the case is what the law is. This case was decided under ACT law which is not the same as Victorian law. I haven't researched the specifics of what the differences are but ACT law tends to be more progressive in some areas of law that have a social dimension such as what constitutes consent. NSW law, by contrast, at least until recently offered an absolute defence of having a belief that consent had been given. In general, laws on the subject are moving towards consent needing to be explicit and able to be withdrawn at any time. It can also be conditional, so for example in a male-female encounter consent to penetrative intercourse cannot assume both vaginal and anal intercourse had been consented to. In the case in question, there is no debate that initial consent was granted, and it was for a legal sex work transaction, but as the judge ruled the consent was clearly conditional on payment. The escort did not retrospectively withdraw consent, it was ruled never to have existed. If the judge has erred in law, then no doubt the defendant's lawyers will take the case to an appeal. (There is also an issue on the initiation of the case, it wasn't one of the escort being allowed to sue the client, it was one of the police launching a criminal charge on the basis of the facts of the matter.) I find the view that rape is horrific and this was not horrific so shouldn't be called rape to he somewhat disturbing. They remind me of the arguments that unless women fight and scratch and resist an attempted rape, then it's not really rape. It also seems to be part of a parallel argument that by putting up a shingle, a sex worker has consented to anything and everything so shouldn't complain.

Old Soviet joke: A woman goes into a butcher's shop and asks, 'You don't have any fish?' The butcher replies, 'No, we don't have any meat, the shop across the street doesn't have any fish'.

It's alphabetical in that numbers are of a pattern that means the letters used repeat for successive numbers. So the letters in say 'seven' will repeat ad infinitum. It's only when you add numbers like 'thousand' and 'million' that you add new letters into the mix. I was half asleep when the question was posed on the wireless this morning and although I thought I had worked it out, I didn't text my answer in.

Even if it should be it isn't always.

A maths question, well not actually, it's a random question. If you start at zero and spell every number as you count upwards, what is the last letter of the alphabet that you will use?

I saw a snippet of this video a couple of weeks ago, and today someone posted something on twitter to which, 'And we all preferred the world we found to the one we'd left behind' was the perfect comment, about our condition now.

I'm not about to enter into a conversation about whether the image I use is of me, or whether other users chose to use their own image. There is no forum requirement for folk to use an image of themselves, or their own name, or to disclose whether they do so. The fact that some other forum members may already know the answer to that question about me is immaterial.

I don't usually do this. I usually post on one of the other days. Saw this on twitter: Apology Dad joke: I would like to confess to a murder and apologise to the entire school. I mixed up the crows' food with the fish food.

I've never seen reports here about there being problems with flat (actually slightly sloping) roofs. From the discussion so far, it's not clear what normal roofing materials in the US are, and that would make a difference. Here, they are invariably sheet metal, usually corrugated galvanised iron or some other sort of moulded metal sheeting, with a metal gutter on the lower side leading to a metal downpipe to take the water away. (Sloped roofs would commonly be concrete or terra cotta tiles.) Roofing metal is durable and you would expect it to last for 40 or more years. The house my mother built in 1968 (with a sloping roof) is showing signs of rust now so I'll probably need to replace the roofing iron shortly.

Today in the ACT Supreme Court a sex work client was convicted of rape after he flew two escorts to Canberra for separate overnights then after the session refused to pay them. He flew them here, provided chauffeurs and hotel rooms. It later emerged that he had paid using stolen credit card details. The judge ruled that their consent to having sex was negated because it had been obtained through fraudulent misrepresentation. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-24/former-canberra-actor-jailed-for-raping-male-escorts/12589284

TOTALLY understandable!

A strong cold front went through these parts over the last couple of days, hence the third photo in this tweet. Portland is about 250km north of here, and 150km west of Sydney, at about 1000m elevation. [MEDIA=twitter]1297162710115737600[/MEDIA]

Isn't that what cheer-leaders are for?

Most of you probably know that the words root and rooted have a particular meaning in Australian vernacular. Suffice to say that no one here would for a moment consider calling a church anything like this. (Although there is a chain of tool shops that rejoice in the name Total Tools.) In case you were wondering, I googled and there is a church of that name in Florida. [MEDIA=twitter]1297150038783623168[/MEDIA]

@whipped guy, yes 'number plate' is what they're called. To clarify, he's free to cross the border but would face 14 days' quarantine on return. The state's tourism slogan is 'Beautiful one day, perfect the next'.