SirBillybob

Somewhat paradoxically, Quebec may be lifting measures earlier than other provinces in spite of the highest infection prevalence. One argument underpinning the relaxation is that the majority of cases are elderly in long term care facilities. It is key to assess rates of new infection based on gradually re-opening the economy. Federal relaxation of travel bans and quarantine requirements at any point prior to an advanced level of re-opening the economy will confound the data. The histogram graph of daily new cases has not nearly shown a drop yet, compared to other nations including some hard-hit in Europe. It is uncertain whether the 2-week quarantine rules for most foreign nationals will apply when foreign nationals are green-lit for entry. Will the border open without quarantine requirements by July 1? Hard to say. A lot has happened over 8 weeks that is out of control. And 8 weeks going forward seems like a short time to figure out all the details.

This was previously discussed in another thread. I am not saying the ad is well-crafted. Much of the content is superfluous. The only slightly logical reason for suggesting Montreal is not the best location is that it is illegal in Canada to purchase services and it is illegal for a platform to advertise the seller’s services. The provider is immune from prosecution. The ad platform has no plausible deniability. It is the client that needs plausible deniability but the provider cannot cover that contingency in an ad. He can allude to your liability without writing that it is illegal for you to pay for him. The $500 is highway robbery. Yet you are also the indictable one in that regard. On overthinking I can surpass you. LOL

I have to admit that I did not read Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend quadrilogy in order but that did not matter.

Oh! I might sound like I have lost my head, but hope you have read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies prior to the latest.

Mantel is methodical and meticulous, and suffers from endometriosis that sets back her schedule, hence the delay.

At first glance the topic I myself wondered if it might be Floridan Chad Johnson from early porn, eg ‘Perfect 10’, but he must be older than early forties.

The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel’s final instalment in the Wolf Hall trilogy. The first two won Man Booker. We are 3 months away from this year’s long list.

Quebec is planning to re-open schools this month. A lot of parents and teacher worries about it. I am isolated in place with brief weekly grocery outings. A young woman on my small loft building level was taken by ambulance yesterday, presumably CoV. As for commercial, to sum up for what might be relevant here, the first phase in May is stores with a separate entrance that do not require walking thru an indoor mall. They can be in a shopping center as long as they can be accessed directly from a street or parking lot. These small steps will be assessed in terms of new infection trends. A bar/entertainment venue would be something much further down the line, as even restaurants will likely require physical distancing if and when they are added to the trials. Grocery stores and pharmacies had remained open. Personally, I think the logarithmic base10 incidence trajectory should be horizontal prior to much re-opening. Not a clairvoyant, but at least I have the option to lay low. I have previously gone months at a time without a visit to nearby stripper bars. The typical home-town take-for-granted syndrome.

I just joined Twitter after years of resisting, cannot keep up with Instagram and Facebook as it is. I did not know there was so much explicit content on Twitter. An endless sinkhole of brief porn. In addition, often teaser clips linked to OnlyFans accounts that happen to have low content. It is more fun to find Twitter photos and clips worth curating for a JO session than take the plunge into a modestly priced paid membership.

Blow job? Something from a time capsule?

LOL, just got the Texas airport reference. I had indicated the account based in Caribbean. In this case, LRD is La Republica Dominicana. I have been in the United States a total of less than 30 days this century. I realize, as well, there are far more important things going on.

Both experiences occur in the general area that is south of the dividing point between Canada/USA and Mexico, Caribbean, Central America, South America. Hence, written up here. —— Here is an UNRELATED more concrete (I hope) example to illustrate the theme: You connect privately on a message board with somebody that describes himself as a partner in a prestigious law firm, but of course the profile is anonymous on the message board, like we are on this board. The person broadcasts his credentials on the board but they are not the focus on the board. Basically the same credentials come up in your private communication with him, but again, the agenda is mostly about fun gay and sex related stuff. The online “friendship” is purely platonic. Career details can be boring compared to other topics and joking around. Who really needs to deviate from interesting commentary and gossip about hot Latin guys? He gradually asserts added embellishment about his qualifications and career, for example is also a high-status law professor, has many specialties, travels and consults internationally, all impressive but credible. However, you are educated and not completely naïve, and eventually you reach a tipping point where it is uncomfortable to confront him (he has been otherwise sweet and kind) but you have enough information to explore the reality. YOU HOLD BACK. You want to give the benefit of the doubt. It is not usually illegal to fabricate one’s background, and people have their reasons ... ranging on a spectrum from wanting to harmlessly upgrade their persona, to sociopathy at the more extreme end. Yet if you have standards for authenticity in a friendship that has evolved to connecting in person ... well, it gets more complicated, even if socio-economic status is irrelevant. You meet for the first time, following months of text friendship, taking a meal together in a mutual travel destination, with a view to going out on the town. Locals in the foreign (Latin language) venues ask about your backgrounds, a natural aspect of social introductions, and are naturally impressed. However, he slips up a little by adding an piece inconsistent with the “CV” he put forward in social media and in discussions with you, just enough to prompt you to later go clickety-clack on your keyboard. You discover with a bit of digging that the person is not the things he says he is, that he may be a paralegal, perhaps even no more than a senior legal secretary. You don’t need to hire a private investigator these days to trace footprints on social media. There has not been any direct confrontation or accounting, and your previous regular communication has dried up following the dinner. Let’s say you knit your brow at one point during a discussion about an academic thesis he described writing. He comments: “Why are you scrunching up your face, BB?” Perhaps he now knows that you know, etc. It turns out he is “busy” now. What would be the point of a confrontation if you sense he knows you have discovered the fraudulent aspects of his professional profile? Besides, the friendship seems tainted and dishonest at this point. —— So, this is not about commercial sex workers to whom we tend give a free pass about their mendacity. Of course, some of us distort our profiles with the trade we hire as well. That agenda is, by definition, implicitly performative. The essentialist part of the exchange is a mutually beneficial arrangement. We gossip and share at times about providers, and there seem to be minimal restrictions about checking, “cyberstalking”, what have you, in relation to our activities. I have NOT “outed” this person but I have debriefed with a few folks outside the situation. People that neither, to the best of my knowledge, directly know the person or the person’s name, nor have a similar DM history with the person. People with whom there is an implicit trust that they would not publicly “out” the person in a way that could make the person feel unsettled. ——- Assuming a dividing line between clients and providers, was I being “douche-y” in looking up the person with whom I had been friendly for a long time? Is this different than investigating a provider if you think something is off? Should I have simply drawn on my spidey sense about the impersonating? And then distanced myself based on feeling confident about the judgement without corroborating “evidence”? What are the standards of propriety in a situation like this?

A truth stranger than fiction, because only fiction is obliged to stay within possibilities .... Some four decades ago I travelled on a fantastic Caribbean cruise (non-gay, small liner), joined by someone with whom there were friends in common back home. He had an arts degree and was not in school. Much to my surprise and consternation he decided that he would pose as a medical student in our nautical microcosm. He did not warn me or ask me to collude in this charade. I did not back up the fiction and I stayed out of it. He also posed as heterosexual but the socio-political climate made that more justifiable. Most on board got sucked in concerning his academic status, but a very select few shot knowing glances to my poker face. There were a lot of activities to override a focus on his backdrop and he did not offer informal medical advice that everybody knew would not be the province of an undergraduate anyway. The dude was princely to me and everyone else while perhaps basking in the additional social capital his misrepresentation conferred. I did not reveal the experience to anybody at home known to him, and it never came up between us. The event and his related meta communication eroded my desire to maintain a close association. I know for a fact he has never done any concrete harm through impersonation. ——— Fast forward to an experience with a recent friend that had already overtly described and convinced me and countless others of credentials far exceeding reality. Following months of digital communication, the new normal for degrees of bonding these days, this person proposed a social meet-up at a travel destination we had in scheduling common. We also jointly know a few people. In this case, I am a retired, not particularly outstanding, clinician maintaining faculty status at a university, yet have had associations with young high-performance multiply decorated academics within many disciplines (the current person’s practice and discipline is not the point). Eventually, close to the juncture of our meeting, I had very mild suspicions as the person’s narrative expanded into a range where the average listener would become somewhat incredulous. This evolved into a realization that the situation was thematically very similar to years ago, this new person also presenting the same charade within a small group social gathering on our meeting day. This was uncomfortable. At the same time, this person alluded to skills that would sound ominous to anybody that might be on to them. This prompted me to look things up based on the information I had, verifying for myself that the person was impersonating, presumably for social capital purposes. Perhaps others are aware of men and women inclined to grossly exaggerate themselves. It was certainly not necessary, for my sake, to cultivate friendship based on falsely elevated status. I will engage with somebody friendly and charming irrespective of walk of life. There would be nothing to gain by directly confronting or “outing” this stage show. I do not wish to embarrass anybody, while feeling sheepish about my own naïveté. However, I have described the experience to a few people I am certain are not contained with the person’s circle, without identifying information. —— What do you think would be a reasonable threshold for digging a little into the public domain to unearth somebody’s reality? What constitutes a related boundary violation? What about the things a person tells you, distorts, or omits, outside of their primary identity (given that confidentiality about that component is generally an ethical imperative even if not explicitly requested), is one’s business? How and it what arenas(s) might you debrief the type of experience I described?

Arghh ... Yet a free reign to be maliciously rude and accusatory to any individual caught in the crossfire of a bad day, and to do the heavy lifting on behalf of one’s symbolic figurehead.

I am prepared to make generalizations about cross-national rates of rudeness and alpha fails, but it would not be particularly useful.

Got me ... the research papers related to gratitude expressivity customs in Brazil and elsewhere do not exist, and I have never peer-review published on help-seeking dynamics.

Right you are, also applies to ‘eunuch’. You would think I am new at this.

I was not making a generalization about Brazil, nor were observational questionnaire researchers doing so particularly, and I have no need to defend what I took from the bit of reading I did. I was interested in digging a little into modes of expressing gratitude. It appears that Asian customs may be unique compared to Brazil and North America, the latter two patterns more similar. Be my guest to do a search on, say, cross-cultural expressions of gratitude, and lead a seminar on the topic. Or simpler, if a young Brazilian male does not show appreciation according to expectations, explore it with him. Personally, I am more caught up in my altruistic magnanimity, and buffing my nails on my lapel, on rare donation occasions than I am seeking overt recognition from the recipient.

Teehee, “finishing” education for young garotos in Brazil. Hard pass ... not much for me to contribute.

Ha, You choose a handle that suggests incapacity to elevate a topic and then you do not elevate a topic.

I should also point out that the research is not observational but is based on self-reports of Brazilian youth regarding rates of preferred modes of expressing gratitude for having a wish met. One limitation of this is the possible disconnect between what they deem to best fit the situation and what they might do in actuality based on perception of what comportment dictates.

“Not trying to be mean or ... troll”. Sounds much more humble than other forum contributors bent on critical appraisal that blames, shames, maims with memes.

Good points, to be sure. I am in fact drawing from an academic research review and summarizing, briefly, multiple cross-cultural studies not just one isolated project, rather than pasting links to the relevant studies. It is not my own research. I am not a sociologist or anthropologist. But I simply wish to blend the scholastic along with some of the experiential here. I have been in Brasil often and lived in long-stay low-cost family-integration room rentals of up to $20USD per night, (not upscale digs) enough to know that, yes, you will see a great deal of the usual expected polite social interactions among locals of all ages. And of course, many various verbal and meta-communicative forms. I am not clumping all young men together. But I have decades of cross-cultural service experience and I have also observed different or non-existent incidents of ‘’the simple thank you”, whatever version might be seen as an expression of gratitude, according to gender, ethnicity, or intersection of those, obviously along with additional circumstances ... recognizing that my own relatively privileged gender and ethnicity play a role. The continuum has ranged from gifts out of whack with the situation to formal complaints about my being useless in relation to meeting a need. I cannot second-guess all the dynamics in the OP’s reported cases, but I hoped that digging a little into the research on modes of expressed gratitude would broaden interpretation with multifactorial information and soften the negative stereotype about commercial sex workers, as I think is the intention of many contributors to the thread.

What gets me is some apparently more recent accounts that are $25 (Canadian currency) but the profile lists only a handful of photos and vids have been posted to date. You would think that these providers would at least enter a greater number of nonXrated photos to the inventory to make it look like it may be worth it to explore the account. I have dabbled a month at a time here and there but have not really been drawn to check for new posts very regularly. Only as a last resort after checking IG or Twitter faves. And also discovered the lower cost profiles that upcharge for new clips.

I think some of this is cultural. If a young macho guy there is offered a favour (eg cigarette, share of a pizza slice) from a friend I would not be surprised not witnessing a verbal expression of gratitude. The gratitude may be connective, the acknowledgement of a bond that exempts the formality, and the implicit intention of the receiver to wish the giver well. Similarly, a boomerang request for a second-helping of assistance may be an artefact of this dynamic, whatever the degree of authenticity of connectivity in the context of an existing transactional history. I would not take it personally, and it may be as likely the guy is signalling (or feigning, if you are inclined to be, well, jaded) closeness as much as it is likely he may be guilty of a rude oversight. In some cultures, in fact, expressed verbal gratitude for a wish granted can be considered an insult. In Brazil, among youth, some research suggests that verbal gratitude is favoured by the wish receiver at about 50%, and connective gratitude (reciprocating by interpersonal closeness where possible) is quite prominent. There are variations according to whether the wish is hedonistic as opposed to based on a fundamental need, and differences related to whether where the person fits in a continuum of social autonomy-heteronomy. A third form of gratitude, reciprocating a concrete favour in kind at some point, is obviously impossible given resources and distance. I wonder if that would also cause the young recipient to lean towards implied connectivity over ‘obrigado’, that connectivity having also been satisfied in cases of honouring you with an erotic image accompanying a request.