mike carey

@handiacefailure I'm an android guy not apple (I started to write 'I'm an android not an apple guy') and I don't remember any trouble using Google Pay in the US in April, although that might have been pure luck with the places I tried (I had a card I used half the time that wasn't loaded in my wallet). In some places they still wanted a signature as well rather than a PIN ffs. I suspect that the point of sale terminal technology needed for chip and pin is also needed for mobile wallets and some big firms haven't seen the need to invest in it yet. And I can use Google Pay to tap on and off public transport in Sydney (not, or not yet, in some other Australian cities). I believe that also works in NYC but I knew I needed a physical Metro Card for the JFK air train so I didn't try.

Bon anniversaire!

Good grief! I'm gob-smacked! PINs have been the only thing here for about 10 years (apart from contactless for below [usually] $100). The financial authorities decided that signatures were insufficient for security so they made chip and PIN the standard. Signatures aren't accepted as proof if a transaction is disputed.

The rule was that everyone gave way to the right, and through traffic had right of way over traffic turning across them. So there was a rule to prescribe which vehicle has right of way whenever two vehicles met at an intersection. Not many of those intersections these days, usually one cross-street is given precedence and the other will have give way or stop signs. I can't quite get my head around US four way stop signs because stop signs here mean stop and give way to other traffic (who's there first makes no difference). Once you get your head around it, it's no more complicated than our no-stop-signs intersections. Yes, it is when your brain is set the other way as well.

Moderator's reminder to stay on topic and avoid political tangents. This thread asks about flow on effects from the current public discussion about trans issues on attitudes towards the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. It is not about trans issues themselves.

Agree, and that lounge is a pleasant place to do it!

The risk to people not used to the way traffic runs is more front of mind in the UK with all those Europeans, here less so. You see them here occasionally, most often if the traffic will come from an unexpected direction, one way roads, divided roads with a wide central reservation. There's enough of the signs on the road that it's not a surprise to see them here.

Sheesh, politics!

Why would anyone want to do that?

I don't have experience in continental Europe but elsewhere I have had no issues with ATMs, but take some Euros (don't buy them at the airport) and your CCs, and some green in your wallet. Remember that the Euro is the currency in many countries and the ATM experience will vary between them. There may be places that don't take CCs but in some countries cash isn't taken (or rarely so) such as Sweden (not eurozone), and in most countries plastic (or your mobile wallet) will work.

Must be southern hemisphere.

Yeah it does. Are you suggesting it doesn't in some rich developed countries? Or one? Government and civil society combine to address, if not always immediately to solve things as they arise. Surely that is just the way things are?

I TOLD YOU TO GET OFF MY LAWN! I'll show you, I won't mow it.

The way there is likely to be evidence that it is not happening is if the authorities had considered it and rejected it. If it's just a rumour that 'someone heard' and passed on there won't be contrary evidence. The burden of proof is on those claiming that something is happening.

Heaven forfend! Then again, given the detail in which we've canvassed the culinary advantages of Queens, perhaps that isn't a fate worse than death. But what would I know?!

I wonder which of these gentlemen is Mr E. I mean everyone has heard of Sweet Mr E of Life, so it would be nice to see what he looked like.

Wasn't there a novella about that?

You paint an idyllic picture of a weekend there (or second prize, a week). Why would anyone take a weekend trip to, say the Caribbean, when Fire Island is on offer?

The human body does adapt to higher altitudes, athletes train at altitude for a reason. The greater the altitude change the longer it takes, but I understand it takes days rather than weeks or months. Santa Fe is at over 2100m so that could take a couple of weeks or so to adjust fully from sea level. I remember feeling the effects distinctly in Quito (2850m) for a few days, then a little at higher altitude at Cusco (3400m). I still had to take it easy for the rest of the few days I was in the Andes but felt fine. I lived at about 350m before the trip but I'd been travelling for a month or so at lower altitudes. I was younger (ahem) and had no underlying conditions, and had been exercising more than usual in that previous month, so those would have been factors.

The Economist is the only one that I take in print form, but I do subscribe to the digital versions of the Australian Financial Review, the NYT, the Washington Post and Bloomberg, and the Saturday Paper here. I also take the Australian as one of the benefits of a credit card (and that comes with the digital WSJ). And from left field, Haaretz. I'm looking at what to cut back on! Every time I look at a Grauniad article they guilt trip me to pay up, or at least they try.

I have no idea who's confused, but I am certainly not. To be clear, I was not commenting on what people had written here about the royal couple, I was responding to a comment about this paragraph, and addressing the argument that it had made.

I wasn't referencing anyone. I was clarifying a point that an earlier post had made, that anyone writing 'Stop writing about this' is doing exactly what they say should not be done, and there is illogicality, or at least a contradiction in doing so. The 'writer' was anyone who wrote such a thing, not a specific person in here.

If this obsession were unique to this forum your point would be well made, but the obsession the public (or some elements of it) have with shouting its disdain for their alleged pursuit of ever greater publicity is pervasive. The observation, that continuing to write about something that the writer claims to want not to see written or spoken about is illogical, is exactly on point. This forum's obscurity is beside the point, the critique of this forum's discussion of the issue is both particular to it, and at the same time a critique of it as a wider phenomenon. Dismissing the particular implies dismissal of that wider phenomenon.

As others have said, if $400 is too much for you don't pay it, but to say that $400 is a price that is beyond the Pale is to bay at the moon. You can no more command the price of an escort go down than you can command that of the price of petrol, all you can do is shop around. As @Simon Suraci and @BenjaminNicholas have said far more eloquently than I ever could, escorts are running a business. They set their prices and they live and die on whether they can attract customers at those prices. Some set prices below $400 and that works for them, others charge $400 or more and still succeed. That's life.

Fair question, Simon. I'd say it's a discussion about the merits of a $400 rate and not one about issues about hiring, so better placed here in the Lounge. The consensus of mods may see it moved.