impulse

Be careful what you wish for. They'll all be moving to Thailand.

Are you claiming you never had a job? Where did you get your startup funds to invest? The nanny state provided a safely regulated market for those investments. I'd bet a month's salary that you couldn't survive Thailand for a month leaving the house with 50 baht a day of discretionary money. I couldn't. So I don't pass judgment on Thai people who can, nor the choices they make in doing so. I'd behave a lot differently if I had to even try.

Yeah, you definitely need to learn the culture. Here's a good start to understanding "the culture". Walk out of your house with 50 baht in your pocket each morning for a month. No plastic and no quickpay. Just 50 baht. Because that's all the discretionary money you'd have if you made a Thai salary, especially with a wife and kids at home. You'll quickly figure out a lot of the idiosyncrasies you see every day. Then thank your lucky stars you have that nanny state nugget you made before you moved to Thailand.

Yes. That's exactly what I mean. They offer multi-year loans for a $2000 scooter. If you can barely afford that, a good helmet may be out of reach. And a 500 baht plastic beanie is useless. Probably worse than useless. Except for getting through police checkpoints. You keep looking at Thai life and the locals through your nanny glasses.

Easy to come to Thailand with the nugget you made working back home, then pass judgement on how the silly brown people spend their meager wages. I had 2 scooter helmets. One skullcap cost me 2 weeks' salary if I was making 300 baht a day. The full face helmet cost me a months' salary at 300 baht a day. And they weren't top of the line. Just minimally functional. Most Thai people are caught in the middle where there's a need to get around, matched up with wages too low for everyone to afford 4 wheels and a ton of steel. So they haul their kids around on scooters... It's not lack of love. It's economic reality.

And if they did, would you have to spend another 2 weeks' salary in a few months when they outgrow it? 2 weeks' salary, assuming you want a minimally functional real helmet, and not a useless plastic beanie.

Tough crowd here. Boat ramp fails are a favorite on YouTube. Thousands and thousands of videos of people doing much worse. It's funny until it happens to your truck. And even that turns into a funny story at the next beer party.

Drink a tall glass of water. Wouldn't want you to get dehydrated.

The election results were skewed by the $1.5 billion the Dems dumped into it, and all the celebrities (many paid...) who sided with Harris. In a head up election, they would have been trounced even worse.

Looks like the same nightmare I have all the time. Only, I usually show up at the office nekked in mine.

Probably not... https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-delay-deny-depose-insurance-online-criticism-2d9c9a1a2a551876e72a11a93fc7624c https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-ceo-manhattan-shooting-death-dee5ad726a345a8209ecc0df7e44756e https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-delay-deny-depose-insurance-online-criticism-2d9c9a1a2a551876e72a11a93fc7624c https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooter-b6a0bcc8f517604bb612511acea164b9

Missed opportunities...

That's how it's supposed to work, but in the OP, a German helicopter got too close to a Russkie warship and the Russkies fired warning shots to back them off. You and I won't know what really happened (or where) because they'll prosecute any whistleblower who releases the classified information that shows who was where and did what. That is way too much risk of a misjudgment that could "accidentally" turn into a hot war. It'll look like "defense", but it's really poking the bear to elicit the response that will make the warmongers and their companies richer. Edit: TBH, I'm thankful we got through the 2024 election without someone triggering Armageddon to get the votes to stay in power.

Were those kids and/or their Mom drunk?

You're hanging out in the wrong places. My favorite resort in Jomtien catered to Russkie, Uke, East German and other Eastern European family groups. They were delightful. Very cordial to me, an American. I just avoided the monger parts of town where the drunks of all persuasions congregated.

I'm glad to see Thailand run (generally) for the benefit of the Thai people. Otherwise, we'd all be squeezed out. It's amusing that the same posters that hate the Russkies and the Indians and the Chinese are the ones who would love to see Thailand allow foreigners to buy up land and homes and 100% of condo projects. Throw the projects wide ass open... And do away with those pesky reporting and visa requirements. Even if it's just 1 rai of land and one condo per foreigner, imagine what would happen if billions of foreigners bought a rai of land under their brothers' or their neighbors' passport... We'd have Russkie towns pooling their passports and buying up entire islands. Besides, I can't imagine the massive energy sink that comes with hating on so many people around me. But I guess some people thrive on it. Or they think they do.

Stay hydrated. You don't want a UTI.

Apart from Thais working in the tourism sector, does anyone actually want Russians here? The Ukrainians they're not shooting at are pleased. Same guy who's mortified that some Thai people can't afford scooter helmets that would actually protect them in a crash. Trying to bring the nanny state to LOS.

They'll use the ol' amnesia trick. "I don't recall..."

But they are not for profits, as are many of the best hospitals in the US. One problem with "not for profits" is that's where the illegals and the off-the-grid-indigent go for their free care. Which has to be recouped by overcharging the rest of us. Another problem is the delta between the top line margins and the bottom line. Too many straws and layers of parasites sucking their blood. Like "charity" CEOs taking home $$10s of millions in salaries. I got charged $1500 for 5 minutes with a physicians assistant when I had a toothache and just needed some pain pills to tide me over until the dentist opened the next morning. At a non-profit ER. The icing on that cake is that they wouldn't allow me to take the pain pill at home so I could drive safely. She insisted that I take it right there and risk a car wreck driving home under the influence. I declined. They did give me a script for 3 of them. So I had to wait for the pharmacies to open the next morning. $1500 for nothing. How's that for non-profit?

So whoever's taking over the reins for Diddy will hold a 2 week shindig. Congress will be a ghost town.

I don't buy shirts in Asia online for that very reason. I can go to one kiosk in BoBae market in Bangkok and an XL fits fine and the next one, it'll be 2XL, and the next it will be L that fits. Theres' no consistency in shirt sizes. (Edit: And no consistency in fabric quality) And I'm not a serial returner like a lot of people, so I'm stuck with what I ordered online. My bad. I rarely go out specifically clothes shopping in BKK because it's so hard to go anywhere and not find a bunch of clothes for sale. I just buy what I find when I'm out doing other stuff. The one exception is Songkran shirts out of season. I love 'em, and I'll make a special trip to the BoBae area just to buy them out of season.

Half the foreign guys in Thailand are passport bros. Some of the rest are going to take a hard look at the ball and chain they're traveling with and become passport bros. The rest of us are here for the temples and the culture.

The man was Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who was called before Cummings' committee in February 2016. After hiking the price of an old drug for parasitic infections to $750 a pill from $13.50, Shkreli became the poster boy for pharmaceutical greed that helped define the past decade. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/31/792617538/a-decade-marked-by-outrage-over-drug-prices

I don't recall ever meeting an American without a "health insurance screwed me" story. I certainly have mine. Lots of them, though none of catastrophic magnitude. But that's a tough way to live- doing everything right and still being afraid of going bankrupt. Edit: So, in that respect, it is a great unifier. You can have lefties, righties, Blacks, whites and Asians all around the same dinner table, and that topic will have them all agreeing. It does go off the rails when solutions come up for discussion...