Wall Street billionaire Steve Schwarzman got apoplectic when someone suggested that we close his favorite tax loophole (carried interest which allows him to pay a much lower tax rate than the rest of us).
The first place he suggested we meet was closed, not unsurprisingly, given that it was a pub and it's 10.30 on a Wednesday morning.
However, making reference to Britain's 'far more restrictive' student visa policies – when compared with the country's competitors from around the world – he added: "The bizarre inclusion of international students, in our drive to lower net migration numbers, has sent out a terrible message to the brightest and most ambitious students globally, suggesting we're closed for business.
So I'm not suggesting that we close the doors on Shell's Arctic drilling forever.
In an era of social media intimacies and reality TV revelations, it could be suggested we're getting closer to each other.
Waymo's self-driving car ride won't be my last, and it certainly wasn't my first – but it was the first that suggested we might be closer than many think to Level 4 autonomous vehicles operating on public roads for a public customer base.
Scenes of violence this week on the Greek-Macedonian border, where refugees breached a border fence with a homemade battering ram, and in Calais, where police fired teargas at people protesting against the demolition of their shelters, suggest we are close to a line that we absolutely must not cross.
"The pace of deterioration seems to have leveled off a bit, which is a good sign and might suggest we are close to a sort of low point in [terms of negative] growth, but it is not the same as saying we are close to a low point in activity," said Dominic Bryant, an economist with BNP Paribas.
While the execution of Fan Jinghui, the deaths of three Chinese executives in the siege in Mali, and the increasing number of Uighurs travelling to help ISIS would seem to suggest we are close to reaching a tipping point in which China will take serious action against ISIS, to assume such action is imminent would be premature.
The characters we played were so close I suggested we marry, so as my senility took control, he would have legal authority to take care of me.
