mike carey

Ouch, sorry to to hear that Woolfer! Hope it all clears up, hopfully before then!

Less funny than a sad characterisation of 'oh, so I've accidentally outed myself'.

JD is such a sweetie, Marylander! I've also chatted with Killian outside the public view over the last couple of days, and although he does not fit into this thread, he is indeed a nice guy.

Brian, you're a lovely guy, I hope we can meet when I'm in the US.

Diver, I'm sure I could manage some sort of ice cream event with Brian!

Uber is about to start operating in Canberra at the end of October, and unlike NSW where Uber drivers are having their vehicle registrations cancelled, the Australian Capital Territory government has announced regulations under which Uber will be allowed to operate. Uber drivers will have to undertake police and health checks and vehicles will have to be inspected. At the same time the ACT Government has announced reductions in the annual fees for taxi plates (from $20k to $5k over the next two years). One critical restriction will be that Uber is banned from using surge pricing during emergencies. During the terrorist siege in Sydney in December last year Uber's automatic surge pricing kicked in when, in fear that there were bombs elsewhere in the CBD, people were trying to get the hell out of there. Uber had significant damage control to do that day, and as I recall they made the rides free. Uber trips will have to be booked via the app (taxis can park in taxi ranks and can be hailed on the street) and cannot be paid in cash. Regular taxis will also be allowed to use the Uber app to book rides. Suddenly, now that Uber will be legal in the ACT, the insurance industry has come out and said they will launch insurance products for Uber drivers!

Sync, that doesn't mean it can't be an enjoyable movie if you suspend belief and just watch it for what it is. I really didn't read the reviews with that in mind, everyone seems to have focussed on historical accuracy rather than whether it was a good story.

Having read a number of reviews but not seen the film, an observation. Mr Emmerich seems to have made a fundamental error in making an historical movie, and that is you can't change the basic story of what happened. The way he characterised the white boy from Kansas or Indiana (depending which review at the top or the thread you believe, and that is an indictment of one of the reviewers, but that's a separate discussion) does just that, it didn't happen that way and there are plenty of people still around who know that it didn't happen. There are two ways you can inject fiction into an historical film that will work. One is what Peter Weir did in The Year of Living Dangerously where a fictional story was wrapped around a depiction of the Soeharto coup in 1965. The other is the way Costa-Gavras made Z and State of Siege that respectively told the stories of the colonels' coup in Greece in 1967 and the kidnapping of a US Embassy officer by the Tupamaros in Uruguay in the 1970s. He didn't misprepresent what happened, rather he told a story that fitted into a realistic protrayal of what had happened. Emmerich could have set his story against the background of what really happened but instead chose to change the history. I wish he hadn't.

Following up from Frequent Flier's comments, some observations based on my reading about and using Sydney taxis, which seem to have some similarities with NYC (although certainly not on scale), and no, I haven't used Uber either. 1. I agree that Uber would not be well served publicising net earnings. 2. Once the reality of what net earnings are sets in, the take-up of Uber by drivers is likely to level out and won't put all the regular taxis out of business. 3. Taxis have the 'hail from the kerb' market to themelves in inner Sydney, and I doubt that Uber has the potential to take much if any of that. I suspect NYC is the same. Maybe not in some other cities. 4. Potentially, Uber's surge pricing will act as a safety valve in busy times, drawing in extra drivers. The tendency for taxis not to turn up in busy times (they get a better fare etc) is a source of profound passenger annoyance. Extra Uber drivers in such times could paradoxically reduce this taxi PR fail. 5. Sydney has a 3 o'clock driver change over (am and pm). No amount of complaints has convinced them to change that (hey passengers, you have no choice, suck it up). See #4, plus, 'Hey we do have a choice, fuck off', may just kick in. 6. While yes, it's unfair to owners of NYC medallions and Sydney taxi licence plates, my sympathy is limited. Most drivers here aren't owners and often get a raw deal from owners. Based on #2 and #3, Uber is not likely to devalue the owners' investments but only to reduce the rate at which it appreciates. Even if it goes down some, welcome to the free market. 7. Yes, Uber needs to be suitably regulated, but that doesn't mean that the existing taxi regulations are the right ones for either taxis or Uber. Instead of asking governments to save them by regulation, taxis should look at why people use Uber (and it ain't just price) and work out what they can do to compete. 8. I follow a cabbie in Guelph ON on twitter. He's a vegan and straight but pretty hot anyway. He tweets what he really thinks about Uber, but also on things his taxi company is doing to make riding easier, like rolling out an app. 9. Taxi companies, it's not all about Uber, it's about you too!

From some of the recent comments it appears to me that one of the factors in whether Uber will succeed is the state of the existing taxi industry. If there is an undersupply or if the industry is dysfunctional, Uber will do well. If the existing industry is efficient, Uber's success will not be assured. Cafés in Australia offer a parallel. Starbucks swept the world opening coffee shops everywhere, and in most places they succeeded. In Australia we had cafés everywhere—I heard it said that every corner shop had an espresso machine and knew how to use it—and we still have them. Starbucks came in and tried to take up its market niche but failed dismally, we liked our cafés and continued to use them, and Starbucks' hundred some stores became fewer than 10. Incidentally, McDoanlds managed to build on our café culture and developed their McCafé concept here. The lesson for Uber is clear: unless they meet a demand that isn't already being met they will not do well.

And it's only funny because that's exactly what many of his critics sound like!

Whatever music you want to have playing, Mike! Not sure about the TV, Curious, Fox News in the background might not be ideal.

No, Gman, don't know why that is. As you said, there are some singers who don't slide into a North American accent, and others who don't do it in all their numbers. It's not limited to the ones you've listed, regional US accents tend to be 'normalised' too.

How many pronounce the ll in the way that Argentines do as zh?

Gman, there is virtually no accent difference in Australia. There are some differences in vocabulary, but they are minor. There are accent differences between Australia and New Zealand, but none between the east and west coasts of Australia.

Yes, when I was travelling in Europe in the 70s I spent some time with South Africans. They said that Dutch and Flemish speakers were reminded of their grandparents when they heard South Africans speak Afrikaans. That's amazing linguistically. It's as if American or Australian English had become separate languages from English: South African Dutch speakers weren't separated from the Dutch for all that much longer than we were from England, but Afrikaans became a separate language when our languages did not become separate. What is similar though is that our accents froze and preserved how English was spoken when we became separate communities from the UK. Researchers say that Australian English became set with its accent within 10 years of settlement here in the early 19th century.

I was surprised, I had learnt French and not Italian or Spanish, but travelling in South America I found I could read and understand Spanish and Italian newspapers reasonably well. I couldn't speak the languages but could understand the printed word. (More so Italian than Spanish.)

All the Anglosphere countries are less than enthusiastic at speaking second languages. There are exceptions such as the mandated French proficiency for government jobs in Canada, and the varying use of first nations' languages. Most white South Africans speak both English and Afrikaans. Australians are no different to that. Foreign language proficiency is usually limited to immigrants and their children, with notable exceptions like our previous prime minister. I learnt French for five years in high school but was never fluent, although I could get by in France when I was younger, now not so much. I also studied a couple of languages at uni, but was never fluent in them. I could ask really, really basic questions in Chinese - in writing but not orally in Hong Kong - and read things in Japan. For all that I'm functionally monolingual now. In Australia there is rarely either the need or the opportunity to speak foreign languages.

Indeed, someone has to do it!!

I have been a distant admirer of Alec and Ryan for a long time. I hope to become a much closer admirer, but only time will tell on that!

The Malaysian PM has just confirmed that the debris found at La Réunion was from MH370. So with that we can dispense with the conspiracy theories about the aircraft being flown to Diego Garcia or Central Asia.

The test of whether Uber is classy (as opposed to the driver in question) is how quickly they threw the driver out the door when they found out about it, which they apparently did. Cab drivers are more likely to be aware of the laws and be aware of the consequences of disregarding them, but you still hear stories of them turning assistance dogs away (and the follow up stories of drivers being prosecuted). I guess the poor driver no longer has to worry about scratches on his precious leather seats.

Go to your profile page and click on your number of points in the left hand column, and a box sill come up listing all the reward points you have. There is a link from that to a list of all the available points.

I don't know when first had a queer moment and recognised it as such, although in retrospect there were a few. I bought those body-building magazines but never for a moment associated what I saw with any form of sexual attraction, and generally managed the same dissociation between thinking about men's bodies and sexual attraction. I find it hard to believe myself now! I knew about poofters but thought of that as something about creepy old men (no, I hadn't met any) rather than something that might relate to 'normal people'. Something about growing up in a small town and being naïve: it's not that the place was homophobic, homosexuality just wasn't a thing to me. Realising that it actually was a thing and that it was part of me came slowly. Looking back I just didn't know what I was missing.

This is a serious concern. I'm waiting with bated breath for the Donald to blame President Obama for failing to stop these foreign birds from entering the United States and threatening American dinosaurs.