Day: 18 October 2015

Dating couple awkwardly argues over who should pay bill

First dates argument

Remember First dates? and remember when I thought about going on Channel4 first dates?

Well I’ve always wondered when there was going to be bust up about who pays since I learned the whole dates are not paid for by Channel4.

Yes Crisitano this once again… after the ignite talk, radio debates, presentations, polls, etc, etc

Blame Tony who sent me the link to Mashable, where they cover the difficult exchange about payment for the meal and drinks.

Things seemed to be going okay until right at the very end of the date when the subject of paying for the meal came up — and everything suddenly got very awkward, very fast.

“Oh, we need to pay the bill,” said Elle, before moving the paper over to Mark’s side of the table.

Mark then asked if she was giving the bill to him, and Elle replied by saying: “Of course I’m giving it to you. I never pay on dates, why would I?

Finally I watched the whole episode myself and frankly I’m firmly shocked at her behaviour.  In my mind he did little wrong and frankly he went in with the right idea of splitting the bill or going dutch.

Now I’m fully aware TV has a massive habit of slicing and dicing  footage to make/add drama  or make somebody look a certain way. But in this case, it could be the drink talking but I would have cut the date short. Aka no shots of tequila and certainly no after party.

But I still reject the notion that money shows interest. Aka the idea that I would pay the bill if I wanted to see the person again.

But I will say there is no doubt this was a painful date and highlights the different way people think about how this should work. This is why I prefer to just take it off the table by both paying half.

Is it really wasted human effort?

Si Lumb once said something like

“We could be on Mars by now but instead we’re wasting effort stopping people stealing Coldplay records!”

Theres been a lot of focus on VR recently and I found Philip Rosedale’s Ted talk interesting in relation to si’s thoughts above, especially since Si is a fan of VR.

ROSEDALE: Why build a virtual world at all? For me, I know that when the Internet came around and I was doing computer programming and generally trying to run my own little company and figure out what to do with the Internet and with computers, I was just immediately struck by how the ultimate thing that you would really want to do with the Internet and with computers would be to use the Internet and connected computers to simulate a world to sort of recreate the laws of physics and how to make things, and do that inside a computer so that we could all get in there and make stuff.

The next frontier may not be space (no Mars or interstellar space trips yet sorry si) but instead the inner space of the virtual reality or rather a space we create and imagine for ourselves and others. Can be equally interesting?