mike carey

Your advantage is you could abuse them back, and they won't realise it or better, think you were being complimentary.

At least. Nothing to do with monks, an apparently spurious derivation of the name, although your experience may be monastic.

I seem to carry quite a lot, but it hasn't caused anything like that.

If I'm not mistaken, it's not always the escort's choice about which photos are 'premium', RM can classify them as such. I don't know whether escorts are told if RM does that.

I hadn't noticed before, there's a small orange blob on the 49th parallel in southern Alberta or Saskatchewan and a dot to its north east. Those are Kerguelen Islands and Heard Island respectively, sub-antarctic islands, in the case of Heard Island known more recently as the home of penguins and not much else apart from glaciers and a 2,745m active volcano. And the subject of some recent notoriety. And please no comments about the weather sounding just like the prairie provinces or Montana.

... And on its other big day, the fish markets are apparently jumping ... https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/apr/03/packed-to-the-gills-shoppers-embrace-new-sydney-fish-market-during-good-friday-rush (Ed: Sheesh, errant apostrophe removed!]

I think this is an interesting perspective. Australia isn't on the opposite side of the world from the US but it's close. Apart from that direct comparison, the map illustrates that the centre of Australia's continental mass is closer to the equator than that of the US.

Not just you, he has contacted others too. The best approach is to put him on 'ignore'. He will still be able to see things you've posted but you won't see his content (unless someone else quotes him in a comment they make). He also won't be able to PM you. Here's the link: https://www.companyofmen.org/ignore/ Edited to add. Yes, that's the account name. The sheer effrontery of it.

Really? I always assumed it was about Dallas! Why would I not? What else could 'Big D' mean, after all?

Such students, at least some of them, may enjoy taking the measurements. They might usefully include in their study additional data points tracking the relationship between claimed and measured data. Anonymised, of course.

So, now there will be inflation in bank notes?

I can imagine Sam carrying a clutch.

Would it be too harsh to suggest that there's a causative link? Whatever the case, I suspect the inverse is not true.

Here is the BOM's tracking map.

Gasp! Say it ain't so!

Isn't it normal for the Treasury Secretary of the day to sign banknotes? I can imagine some audiences taking exception to it, but not the audience here.

I always thought you were the calculating type.

I'm not chasing the highest term deposit rates, or savings accounts that offer a few basis points more than my main bank, and clearly my experience has no relevance for North American investors. That said, my bank's savings account has been offering a variable interest rate paid monthly 65 basis points above the Reserve Bank cash rate, so 4.75% with the current cash rate 0f 4.1%. It's been tracking at the same premium to the cash rate for a couple of years now. In general its term rates are lower than that, but at present they are offering 5% for 6 or 9 months and 5.1% for 12 months paid at maturity. The rates are 4.95, 4.92 and 4.98 respectively if paid monthly. I'm only half tempted to lock in one of those as current expectations are that the RBA will raise rates by 25 basis points in May or June, and then the savings rate would go to 5%. (All interest earnings are subject to income tax.)

Perhaps neither underrated nor overrated, more likely not really 'rated' at all, but both the old and new Sydney Fish Markets could/can be vibrant places to visit, for the commercial auctions, retail precinct and their culinary scenes. The market regularly stays open continuously for retail and commercial sales for the 36 hours leading up to Christmas. Time magazine, it appears, has noticed. https://time.com/collection/worlds-greatest-places/2026/sydney-fish-market/

Says one provincial colonist to another!

Whatever the precise calculation, it's still a lot, but I drive so little it won't break the bank. I also usually have a supermarket voucher that takes 4 cents/litre off (big deal I know!) so that softens the blow. My calculation was for the 95 octane, $2.659 (not standard unleaded at $2.50). The spot exchange rate when I worked it out was about $AU1=$US0.6966 (it's dropped since then), so that was $US1.8523, multiplied by 3.78L for a price per gallon is $US7.0015.

I hadn't bought petrol for a while as I haven't travelled away from Canberra much, and I don't go past servos often to note the day-to-day prices. Today was refuel day and regular UPL was $2.50/litre, and the 95 octane for my car was $2.659. Last time I bought it was under $2. As prices have gone up over the past few months, the Aussie dollar has also appreciated against the USD, and the two price movements both increase the USD equivalent of our prices. The $2.659/litre today works out at $US7 per US gallon. (Diesel was just over $3/litre today.)

Oh, it's believable, but the headline statement is not what's believable there, because in a prosperous city like New York, it doesn't pass what in Australia we call 'the pub test'. What is believable is that a poll would make such a 'finding'. When you commission a poll, you write the question, you are able to 'adjust' the sample surveyed and weight the data. Curiously, I didn't see a reference in the article to the name of the polling agency, or a link to a full report of the results. I'm sure that there are people in the city, some frequent posters here may have views as to which borough they live in, who do indeed have to make the sort of decisions, but a majority? Yeah nah.

When old threads are resurrected, or when we merge a new one into an older one, some people will comment as if nothing went before, but others, perhaps many, will read the old content, either anew having read it in the past, or for a first time. I know that I regularly (but not frequently) receive emojis on posts I have written months or years earlier, often from active forum members. So yes, there is an element of dead horse beating, but that's fine. It only becomes tiresome if a new thread starts to do it every Tuesday. Not every revived thread needs to be sent to a knackery.