mike carey

The British use of 'fag' for a cigarette is unrelated to its American use for a homosexual man. (In fact, the British usage is older than the American one.) So calling a cigarette a fag doesn't carry any allusion to homosexuality, it is in no way homophobic. On the broader question of the use of the word faggot, I see nothing wrong with the gay community appropriating it. I can understand some gay men being uncomfortable with its use because of its history as a term of abuse, but I'm not one of them.

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/innovation/waronwaste/SizeDoesntMatter.mp4 Not what you expect from the title, or from the opening scenes, this is an ad from (or maybe a trailer for) an ABCTV series about waste. 40% of bananas on Australian farms are typically shredded and dumped because they don't meet the supermarkets' standards. http://www.abc.net.au/ourfocus/waronwaste/

Hi Logan, welcome to the forum. I hope you find it useful, many do. If you have an ad, you may find it useful to include a link in your signature here. Don't take things here too seriously!

Lol, Oliver, I doubt it too. Is there a 'He's just too big, I would die' size that might make someone play down their size?

Turns out that the gentleman concerned opposes Qantas' strong public support for marriage equality, and wanted to demonstrate to its CEO (Alan Joyce) that there are 'consequences' from the 'mainstream community' for this support. Now that the motive has become clear, Joyce will be pressing charges.

In the great Franco-Belgian tradition of entartement the CEO of Qantas had a lemon meringue pie shoved in his face at a business breakfast in Perth a couple of days ago. In this case the reason for it remains unclear, but this may be an appropriate response to some of his US counterparts, for example United Airlines CEO 'dragging a screaming customer off a flight is a good idea' Muñoz. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-09/qantas-chief-alan-joyce-cops-cream-pie-in-face-in-perth/8510156

That to me is a 'could happen to anyone' moment. Careless on the part of United, shouldn't have happened, but it did, and to my mind once the mistake had been realised the airline did the right thing. As to not notifying her, illustration if ever it were needed that you should check the departure board at the airport, especially if you checked in on line hours earlier. Announcements? In my recent recollection, foreign airlines in Australia and the US make announcements in English and their own language (Cathay in Cantonese not Mandarin - screw you Beijing) but local ones do so only in English. Most likely untrue, but funny, I recall a story of an Air New Zealand flight to Los Angeles being announced as having 'continued service to Auckland'. One passenger allegedly heard this as 'to Oakland' and stayed on board. Then, two hours into the flight ....

Also sounds like it is an automated response and if so, ill-advised but not desperate.

This used to be a nice area, before they let the trumpets in. https://twitter.com/virtuallydead/status/850853459171704833

I very much doubt it, such a straight laced hetero town!

There is a distinction that is being lost here. Nothing that has been said seeks to excuse Hernandez' actions, either murder or suicide. What it does, is seek to explain what he did. LGBTI people are more likely than the rest of the community to take their own lives. The only way that society at large, or our community can reduce its prevalence is to understand what drives people to seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem and try to ameliorate those drivers.

So I've been told, funguy!

No problems, I suspected that might have been what happened. I was talking about profits in the context of government services that are tendered out to private companies or the entities providing them are privatised.

@bigjoey my comment that you quoted was about things like medicare, health care and public transport. If governments are providing or managing these as essential services, they have a responsibility to ensure that an appropriate level of service is provided, whether by regulation or subsidy, and to prevent providers from trimming service levels. I had made a distinction between them and purely commercial services like airlines. I have no argument with you that airlines trim services (and inclusions) to boost profits. In the US, paying extra for baggage, meals etc has become the new normal, with some of them now creating new cabins to enable you to rent a seat with enough room for your legs. Thankfully, they use the yield management algorithms on those seats as well, so you can sometimes find them at a lower price than you would pay for a late notice cattle class seat.

You highlight an important issue, for what things is the outcome that society expects 'making profits' rather than 'delivering the service'? Arguably for air transport, profit may be an acceptable outcome in which society may set limits about what is acceptable in delivering the service that generates the profits. Think safety regulations, customer rights (not just those illustrated in this instance, but also something like the Australian law that mandates 'total price' advertising - they aren't allowed to say 'plus taxes and fees' or the like). For some other things, like Medicare, health care, and I would argue public transit, the outcome should be a reasonable service at an affordable cost (to the user or to society/government). Companies should not have the social licence, much less the legal authority, to use their algorithms to avoid providing services that affect their profits. Obviously they need to cover costs, but I don't see 'for profit' as the optimum basis for delivering the services. Nothing wrong with for-profits running them, but they need to be subject to tight regulation. Trimming the level of service to increase profit should not be an option.

I wasn't thinking of that, but it's possible, I was thinking more of people who thought nobody would care what an airline had done but have now seen that they are interested.

More likely folk will be emboldened to go public with their horror stories, no matter which airline it was with.

To Do List: 1. Buy 4 Pigs 2. Paint numbers 1, 2, 3 & 5 on their backs 3. Release them at the mall 4. Sit back & watch Security search for No. 4. Source

To Do List: 1. Buy 4 Pigs 2. Paint numbers 1, 2, 3 & 5 on their backs 3. Release them at the mall 4. Sit back & watch Security search for No. 4. Source

And sitting between a couple who were having a domestic dispute and wouldn't sit together!! Bumped because of a 'higher priority passenger' FFS. If I recall correctly he was a mutual fund manager, so not some pleb.

With a bit of luck the airlines (not just United, but all of them) will have come to the conclusion that the time for involuntary denial of passage ends when the customer steps onto the aeroplane. By all means deny boarding before then, but thereafter it should only be voluntary, however much that costs them. If they haven't worked out that they need the seats before the pax board, too bad.

I think I read that it was based in part on the fare paid and the passengers' frequent flyer status.

Exactly. The RTW ticket is the sort of thing that is seen here as a major offer, other types of offers might have more resonance in the US. Tickets and travel vouchers effectively cost the airline nothing (unless they happen to be used on a flight that was full). United have to be brain-dead (or at least tone-deaf) not to realise that flying home on the last flight on a Sunday night passengers are less likely to volunteer to give up their seats than on almost any other flight you can think of. By way of contrast, if I were offered money to be offloaded on a midday Qantas flight from Sydney to Melbourne when I knew there was another flight in 15 or 30 minutes (which there would be on that route) it would take me under a nanosecond to accept.

This was discussed on the ABC late afternoon news-panel show today, and there was universal agreement that 'Offer more' was the answer. As one of them said, there would have been at least one person who would say, 'Yeah, I'll take the round-the-world ticket'.