Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: Neither Deep nor Wide, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I loved Jordan ... Aqaba, Wadi rum, Petra, Madaba and Jerash were all amazing enough that I could get past some of the other stuff. We accepted that my role was to be "the man" and I could fake that role as needed.
Probably the only really depressing bit of moving from a heterosexual marriage to a non-heterosexual one, for me, was going through the list of Places We Should Probably Put Off Visiting For A While (inc.: most of the Middle East.) It's not that I wouldn't love to go there, it's that there's still a whole lot of places in the world we haven't traveled that involve so much less stress about our personal safety/comfort, yanno?
And as for handing the bill to the man - well we go out to dinner fairly often and my partner has a much better palate for detecting off flavours in wine so she routinely orders the wine that we choose together. Yet about three-quarters of NZ waitstaff will a) hand the wine list to me and b) offer a taste of the wine to me regardless of who actually made the order. So that kind of mindless sexism is alive and thriving in NZ too.
My favourite story of this type is when a friend's mother took several of us - teenage uni students at the time - to a nice-ish restaurant for lunch (in Christchurch, for context). Five people at the table, one nicely-dressed middle-aged woman, four teenagers in jeans and t-shirts, and who does the bill get handed to? The only male. No reading of social cues whatsoever except for gender. Watching him panic for a second at the thought of having to pay the bill was pretty funny, though.
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Hard News: We need to talk about Len, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I suspect the IRD cares a lot about who gets the free travel ….. but that’s another issue
We're in the US, where the IRS has decided that loyalty points don't count as income. Don't know what the situation is in NZ, but I somehow doubt anyone's paying tax on FlyBuys....remember, you'd have to keep track of which were used before expiry to count the actual benefit (or tax people on points they might or might not use.) No sensible tax department is going to want anything to do with that sort of minefield for relatively small gains.
It’s not “nothing to see here” territory though. There is a boundary where too many gifts become a form of corruption.
Absolutely, but three free nights a year, when you're paying for another twenty-odd, probably isn't it.
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Hard News: We need to talk about Len, in reply to jb,
I should have said “ many major companies”, but the same principle applies: if the company’s paying, the benefits revert to the company (and shareholders) unless – as in your wife’s case – it’s deemed as part of the package.
Mmm, maybe I should be clearer. It's not a formal part of the package. It's that no-one seems to think there is any question that the benefits (loyalty points) *would* revert to the company - it's a consultancy, so the travel is paid for out of each contract the travel is for, rather than by the company per se. Still having a hard time seeing it as a big ethical deal, though, in the "reverting to the shareholders" sense. The shareholders aren't exactly going to be using the points.
It borders, for sure. But it’s not automatic. There is perfectly sound financial reasons that have nothing more sinister in them than influencing the Mayor’s next choice of a hotel to stay in. He’s obviously a guy who spends a lot of time in hotels, so you chuck him free stuff.
More specifically, upgrades usually don't cost hotels anything, or very little directly, because they're just putting someone in a room that was otherwise empty. They usually amount to extra space and maybe nicer furnishings - from the customer's perspective there's not any actual financial benefit to having it, it just makes you feel better-inclined towards the hotel. It's not really the stuff corruption is made of.
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Hard News: We need to talk about Len, in reply to jb,
The key issue is whether these were gained in a private capacity or in his capacity as mayor.
If the former, it’s none of anyone’s business.
If his spend with the hotel group was paid from public funds, then the accrued benefits should revert to those funds. Most major companies have ethical guidelines that require this.Really? One of the few things that has made my wife's extensive work travel over the last year bearable is the approximately thirty bajillion hotel points she's gotten (which translate to free nights, and, yes, free upgrades for our personal travel.) Her company (and industry) definitely seems to consider that a way to partially compensate people for having to do that much travel, there's never been any question of the points reverting to the company - and in fact they couldn't, since they're associated with a loyalty account under her name. I suppose it might be different in a situation where the person gaining the points also had the final say on whether and where they traveled, but where the travel is mandated I have a difficult time seeing it as an ethical question.
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Hard News: Mandela, in reply to Hilary Stace,
He came to Wellington in the mid 1990s
My college choir, the Wellington East Girls' College Small Choir, got to sing for him, I think in the Town Hall. Nearly two decades later, when I was going to WEGC, the head of music still had us sing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika every so often during school assembly, and had a photo of him meeting the choir in the music department. It meant something more to her than I ever really understood; by the time I was old enough to know who he was, he'd stepped down as president.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I do not see those quotes as being contradictory.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooookay.
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Hard News: How do you sleep?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Why, I do believe the National Government may be
using the same technique to ‘lullaby’ the nation…The difference being I know the genre I'm working with is fantasy.
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Hard News: How do you sleep?, in reply to Kracklite,
All the meditation apps seem to take too long, but revisiting isolated bits of simple stories one liked seems to work rather better. I’m actually not being facetious – if you can’t shut down thinking, it narrows one’s attention without provoking more complex associations.
Weirdly, the only way I go to sleep any night, unless I'm absolutely knackered, is to tell myself stories. They distract my mind from my body long enough for sleep to kick in. While I generally sleep well once I am asleep, if I can't think of a good story hook, it can take me an hour or so to get there. Trying to keep my mind blank is the best guarantee of insomnia I can think of.
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Hard News: How do you sleep?, in reply to Danielle,
I sleep well and heavily, which I know is quite obnoxious and I'm very sorry. I could quite easily sleep through someone coming into my house and removing all my furniture (don't get any ideas, you guys). These child-raising years have so far been a series of literal rude awakenings. Damn baby monitors, ruining my hibernation time.
This is normally true for me (which is good, because I'm a mess if I get anything under seven hours straight), but for eighteen months my partner was away from home four nights a week, and after the first two or three months of that, for the first time in my life I couldn't sleep when she was away. Any tiny noise woke me up in irrational panic. The only things that reliably kept me under were alcohol (problematic for obvious reasons) or diphenhydramine, which is sold as an OTC sleep med in the US - for most people it's pretty benign but it does become less effective the longer you use it.
Fortunately, she's not going to be away again on that scale any time soon, but it was really depressing to be reliant on another person just to get a good night's sleep. The *really* stupid bit was that I could sleep just fine when *I* was away from home, even if I was by myself; I even slept perfectly well through seven days of major storms at sea, even if I wasn't feeling too flash when awake. It was all psychological. Bloody psychology.
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Hard News: The Crazy Gang Nation, in reply to Sacha,
I'm impressed by how forthright and impolite the coverage has become - seems like a tipping point for at least some US journos. Let's add Esquire to the mix:
I wouldn't call it a tipping point in that case - Charlie Pierce has been in fine and apoplectic form about the Republicans in general and the Tea Party in particular since, oh, well before the Presidential elections last year.