mike carey

I think it's possible to have a lot of fun with Mike with his clothes on. Whether the other party has their clothes on or not. I'm sure some bottoms could learn to do other things with appropriate encouragement!

Delighted to see you make a cheeky comment, PK.

You're quite right. Even though there isn't an approved antibody test yet, that may happen and may be a requirement. Back to the days of yellow vaccination books. I'm certainly not confident that travel from Australia will be possible this year, or that other countries or sub-national jurisdictions won't have severe restrictions. I would hope that they end up being more like the current yellow fever rules than complete travel bans, but we will see. Just now, I'm not confident in booking anything in Palm Springs before next April.

Welcome to the forum, [uSER=19448]@Joshua Mann[/uSER], or to be more precise welcome back to posting in this time of corona. As you've no doubt worked out it can be fun, but you don't need to take everything too seriously (although occasionally most of us do). No doubt it's concerning to have to freeze your RM account, but such are the times we are in.

Indeed they are not, and the situation of others is not to be minimised. But this thread is about sex workers. Many of their challenges are shared by others who are marginalised, but many others are not. Their work can't be used in a resume for other jobs, unemployment payments in the US, unlike many other countries, are contingent on having been in recognised work. Even the best prepared workers, and not just sex workers, can easily be knocked over by force majeure like a pandemic, so 'they made their choices', while correct doesn't capture the nature of the difficulty they may be in. When we're talking about one set of people on any subject, the fact that other separate groups may also be affected is a separate issue. The groups are not in competition for sympathy or anything else.

Interesting development in Australia. I rarely spend over $100 so it won't affect me (and I always use tap and go). [MEDIA=twitter]1245949000651608064[/MEDIA]

My local Aldi had plenty of ricotta when I was there two days ago. Big plastic sieve-like containers, about a kilo by the look of them. Not much use to you though.

+1 We've just had a royal commission into financial sector malpractice, and it's resulted in financial institution executives left and right having to fall on their swords. One of the things that came out was the sharp practices of, and high fees that bank and other for profit financial institution operated retirement savings funds charged. This was in stark contrast to 'industry funds' that are run as not-for-profits by various industry sector employers and unions in collaboration. They have lower fees and of the top 10 retirement funds, nine were industry funds. Since the RC, the for-profit funds have been haemorrhaging investment funds to the industry ones.

Sure t-shirts may be breathable, but wearing masks in public is designed to protect the public from any pathogens you may breathe out, not to stop you from breathing them in. They stop you from broadcasting droplets and contaminating surfaces. The risk from inhaling aerosols is less than that from touching contaminated surfaces and subsequently touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Any sort of mask is likely to stop you touching your nose or mouth, even the ones that anti-globalisation protester wore. If you want to have a mask that reduces your chances of inhaling airborne viruses, you need an N95 mask or better. The plain surgical masks that clinicians used routinely in non-pandemic times are not much more effective than a cloth mask would be.

Well, it's now 2.05am in eastern Australia for the second time this morning. For the next 25 minutes, Adelaide and the rest of South Australia will be 30 minutes ahead of us.

I went to the bottle shop this evening. There they have a counter with two registers on it (usually only one in use) not checkout lanes. They had installed a clear perspex screen in front of each register (with a cut-out to one side so you could hand the register person your purchases). They also had a spot marked on the floor with 'please stand here' on it so you were squarely facing the screen.

Well, he cancelled and then the world was cancelled, otherwise we all might have been able to see him in Palm Springs in 10 days, but sadly that was not to be. It's Eric's birthday on 5 April (which is today here). So happy birthday @Eric Hassan, in your lock down in New York, and happy international poppers day too.

An interesting tangent to this discussion, there are hardship provisions in our superannuation system that allow you to withdraw funds if you have to. Leave aside the fact that if you don't absolutely have to, when there is a drop in the value of the funds is not a good time to make a withdrawal, but the government has specifically allowed people to withdraw $10K this financial year (up to 30 June) and 10K next during the crisis. Some real estate agents have written to tenants telling them they will not even consider asking landlords for rent reductions unless the tenant had investigated withdrawing retirement savings to cover costs they couldn't otherwise meet. The corporate regulator almost immediately put out a statement that real estate agents could face a $1m fine for doing that as it constituted illegal financial advice. You have to be a licensed financial advisor to give such advice.

A little older than that, at least the sentiment is. 'No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.' Samuel Johnson

While the short term loss is alarming, it might add some perspective if you look at what it was worth in April 2019 rather than just at what it was worth two months ago.

Here, the government has authorised a wide range of telemedicine consultations, and as I understand it they apply equally to telephone and video. I don't know if they are the same as an in-person consultation. Since payment is from the public health system, not an insurance company, the approval of the use of technology came with the approval of the payment and the amount paid. For a lot of things, providers can set their own fee and Medicare pays the 'scheduled fee' either to them or as a refund to the patient but these services apparently have to be 'bulk billed', that is the provider receives the scheduled fee direct from Medicare.

There are two factors, one as you suggest is that the number of cases recorded probably understates the actual case load. But the second, that should not be ignored is that the case load is counted two to three weeks ahead of when the resultant number of deaths can be.

There's no hint here of any restriction on bringing your own bags to the shops, and in Canberra single use plastic bags have been banned since 2011. Most people bring their own, buy heavier duty plastic bags (15 cents each) or load their groceries back into the trolley and unpack it into their cars. The most common reusable bags there are woven plastic with a rough finish that's unlikely to have virus persist on it, or cloth which is also lower risk. I generally use the self-checkout so I don't know whether checkout staff pack your own bags for you or make you to it yourself (or shop at Aldi where they don't pack any bags, it's all down to you). [Trolleys in this town require you to put a gold coin ($1 or $2) in a slot to unlock them from the row of trolleys, and once you've taken your groceries to your car you get it back when you return the trolley and secure it in trolley bay in the car park. Oh, and translation, trolley = cart.]

Well it's suddenly down to +17C here in Canberra and cloudy. Daylight saving ends tonight. On the positive side it's allegedly going to in the low 20s at the end of the week. I need to get out and start walking. You're putting me to shame, @Epigonos.

With most of our grocery shops being national chains, prices are mostly stable. There have been large increases in some produce but that was foreshadowed several months ago because of the drought and then the fires. I just heard a news item that said processors (canneries and frozen food producers) are adjusting their product mixes (more canned tomatoes and less tomato paste for example), and the decline in produce required for the restaurant trade has resulted in more produce available for retail, be that direct sale or through processors.

Thanks for sharing this, @purplekow. It is both inspiring and terrifying to read. Kia Kaha (stay strong).

I tend not to believe the use by or best by dates on things like mayo or mustard. On @Gar1eth's point on curry in mayonnaise, there is a commercial line here of peri peri mayonnaise, which I think is great.

Thanks for this @Epigonos. For those interested, Bloomberg has pages, one with world-wide figures and another for the US. They are updated several times a day. I realise that the site is paywalled, but they have an introductory offer of I think, $3.99 per month if you wanted to check those pages for a while (I think they offer a limited number of free articles if you only want to look once). https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-coronavirus-cases-world-map/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=covid_tracker&utm_content=bofu&sref=ExvOhfnN A car analogy occurred to me as I read this. We all know that drunk drivers kill people, but there was a time when we only knew about one of them if they had a crash or if they were pulled over for erratic driving. About 30 years ago, random breath tests were introduced here. Roadblocks were set up, people were pulled over at random just for a breath test (happened to me on a country road a couple of days ago), and anyone stopped for anything else was tested while they were there. The analogy, we increased testing and we had a far better understanding of how much drunk driving was going on, and as a result people stopped doing it. Well, not everyone, but most people did, and it became socially unacceptable. And fairly quickly the number of deaths on the road fell sharply. Not precise because drinking and driving is a conscious (well usually) choice, not an invisible pathogen.

Welcome back!

Thanks, thought so. In fairness Pensant was talking about post-COVID travel when presumably at least some of the restrictions will be lifted.