Gecko123

Buddy up to the test proctor. He/she is most likely aware that some of the questions in the English version test are worded confusingly. Circle them and try to get the proctor to give you the correct answers.

I don't consider it to be "homophobic" or "transphobic" to have reservations about electing someone to the second most powerful position in the US government if there are suggestions that he might still be wrestling with his sexual orientation. Ordinarily, I would consider the nuances of someone's sexual orientation and psychological sense of self to be none of my business, but in the context of a vice presidental election, I think these are legitimate questions. The eyeliner, the hyper fastidious facial hair grooming, some of his misogynist comments, his repeated name changes, his relationship with gay venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and above all else his willingness to do a 180 change of positions on whether Trump poses a threat to democracy and LGBTQ issues raises questions in my mind about whether: (a) he fully knows who he is and (b) whether he is taking positions on social issues in order to mask his own sexual orientation conflicts. It's perfectly understandable and part of life to work through psychological issues of this nature, I'm just not sure I would want someone still going through this process to be at the head of the government. This may sound like 1950's McCarthyism, but if he was a closet bisexual or homosexual, couldn't that potentially make him vulnerable to blackmail? For the record, I have sensed that the guy might have latent homosexual tendencies since he became the VP nominee, and I consider myself to be reasonably open-minded in regards to issues of human sexuality and sexual orientation.

I'll give you the best reason of all of why Trump won't step aside: the RNC grift and fund raising to pay his legal expenses would dry up

The assassination attempt, old age, the reality that he will lose sinking in, and the narcissistic injury of being rejected by the American electorate are all contributing to his obvious cognitive decline. Both in terms of the fast approaching election, and his age, time is not on his side. Viable campaign messaging strategies seem very few and far between. I foresee him more or less going into Mar-a-lago bunker mode for the duration, arguing that "everyone already knows who I am and what I stand for", leaving JD to struggle on his own out on the campaign trail, and ultimately blaming his loss on his VP, with a possible attempt on his part to plunge the country into civil war by baselessly challenging the legitimacy of the election yet again.

This is the type of comment I was talking about. Just so....yesterday. Don't you guys get it yet? The world is moving on from Trump. You can be part of it, or be relegated to the dust bin of history.

If you and @susanlea and @riclag and @stoner ,etc. think endless catty comments are gonna stop this freight train, I think you're gonna be sadly disappointed.

I've watched all of the preceding Harris-Walz rallies (Philadelphia, Eau Claire, Detroit) and the Arizona rally was unquestionably the best yet. Harris is becoming an ever more polished stump speech giver. After seeing the size and enthusiasm levels at the AZ rally I would say there's a VERY high likelihood that AZ is going to flip blue, hopefully influencing the down ballot races as well. Long suppressed emotions of hope, joy, unity, optimism are finally been untapped and I don't see the enthusiasm levels dying down anytime soon.

Trump is dis-kamala-bob-u-lated came up with that all on my own.

Anybody else notice Walz kinda has a Gene Hackman thing going on? This guy's "cool" factor keeps climbing.

Trump is trying to paint Harris-Walz as this communist threat at the same time he's all bromance with Putin, undermining NATO, and ready to sell out Ukraine faster than Chamberlain sold out the Czechs. He's a disgusting, hypocritical idiot.

Did I say he was gay? It was a reference to him wearing eye liner.

Tim Walz is going to mop the floor with "Boy George" Vance at the debate.

You can actually tell from his body language that this is not the case. The test of whether physical contact with children is appropriate is whether the contact by the adult is "giving" or "taking." In the clip he was signing a free school lunch program and I'm sure the kids were genuinely appreciative and he had reason to celebrate this because as a former teacher he knew how much it would help the kids. If you can't tell the difference between the wholesomeness of this interaction in the presence of numerous adults and someone "grooming" or taking lascivious pleasure from physical contact with children, I feel sorry for you.

Look at the guy's rapport with school children and his own children at the 41 second mark in this clip. If you don't have time to view the clip, just look at the below picture. You cannot get that kind of rapport with children without being a genuinely caring person. This type of humanism is exactly what is needed to begin healing the deep divisions within our country.

Thrilled to death. Absolutely winning ticket. Race will not remain tight for very much longer. Predicting a 60-40 blow out. Harris owes Hillary Clinton a huge debt of gratitude for having trail blazed and provided the American people the opportunity to imagine a female president.

The jobs report played a role, but it's looking to me like a lot of this sharp down draft has to do with the yen carry trade. In a nutshell, the unwinding of the yen carry trade is as follows. Foreigners borrowed money in yen because interest rates in Japan were so low. They used the borrowed "free" money to purchase stocks in the hopes of higher returns. Recently, the BOJ started raising interest rates which not only raised borrowing costs in Japanese yen, but has caused the yen to significantly appreciate. With the yen appreciating, the cost of repaying those loans in Japanese yen for foreign borrowers just got more expensive, and in a rush to close out those loans before the yen appreciates further, the assets which were purchased with this borrowed money are being liquidated, which is a big part of the reason why you are seeing these down drafts in the market just yet. Another indicator that the yen carry trade is what's behind the correction is that the US treasury market stabilized on Tuesday, with the short end of the yield curve actually rising. If fears of a recession were the primary driver behind the sell off, I believe you would have still been seeing bond yields dropping on Tuesday. A word to the Bitcoin fans: fasten your seatbelts. My suspicion is that a lot of that Yen carry trade speculative 'fast-money' investing had to have found its way into crypto-currencies, which is why you saw BTC plunge to around 50K yesterday, and I suspect it has further to go on the downside.

Guessing it'll be Walz. His 'Uncle Wally' likability and plain-spokenness may be just what the country needs to start healing America's political divisions. His rust belt appeal is also attractive. Pelosi, whose political instincts are beyond reproach after she helped coax Biden to step down, has endorsed him and this is probably carrying enormous weight as well.

excellent example of why a non-native speaker can claim with confidence that comprehension difficulties on the part of the listener do not always deserve to be attributed to poor pronunciation on the part of the speaker.

Lucie Castets who is a proposed candidate for Prime Minister of the French National Assembly has some of the most remarkable and captivating facial features I have seen in a long, long time. I am hoping she can become Prime Minister just so I can look at her more often.

You may find this hard to believe but I would be willing to bet that if Stuart Jay Raj started jabbering away in Thai to a total stranger that he could easily experience the same 'brain freeze' reaction that the OP and others have reported experiencing. As I said earlier, if your proficiency was anything approaching advanced level, you would have experienced this for yourself and know how common it is, and wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this frustrating experience as a lack of proficiency on the part of the non-native speaker.

All of the posters who are clinging to the hypothesis that the root of the problem is that the non-native speaker's proficiency must not be that good still can't explain why the majority of his communication with Thais generally goes smoothly. It doesn't make sense to say someone who is generally able to communicate effectively, but occasionally encounters someone who struggles to understand them, must have a proficiency problem. I remember a situation where a foreign guy's wife made a snide comment about having trouble understanding my Thai. I pointed out that just the day before I had had an hour long conversation with her parents and her sister, and I hadn't detected any comprehension problems. How do you explain that?

You've reminded of a variety of other reasons why assessments of speaking ability made by Thais can be biased and not necessarily reliable: (1) A Thai person who has an inflated opinion of their own ability to speak English and who feels competitive with everyone else in terms of foreign language proficiency can unfairly judge a foreigner's proficiency; (2) a Thai person who wants to practice their English and denigrates or willfully frustrates communication in Thai in order to steer the conversation to English; (3) a Thai person who has established themself as the designated 'English-speaker' in front of their peers, (even though their proficiency may actually be quite low) and who view attempts at speaking Thai with them as a humiliation in front of their peer group; (4) a Thai spouse who has learned from experience that their non-Thai speaking spouse gets moody and jealous if another foreigner speaks Thai with them, and for this reason, in order to soothe the insecurities of the spouse, they downplay how well the foreigner speaks Thai, or refuses to conversationally engage in Thai with the foreigner at all.

Asking someone if someone speaks Thai is a perfectly legitimate question. Someone can look Thai, perhaps even be Thai, and not speak the language. Also, asking them if they speak Thai, if they in fact do speak Thai, serves to jolt them into realizing that they understood the question you just asked them in Thai. Asking someone in a condescending or annoyed tone if they speak Thai can be discourteous, but politely asking in a friendly tone if they speak Thai is perfectly acceptable, nothing conceited or arrogant about it at all. My point in my earlier post is that there are some foreigners who have a very low level of proficiency in Thai who are very judgmental about other foreigners ability with the language, and who often make snap judgements about someone's ability based on "whether they 'sound like' a native speaker or whether the native speaker understands them. The point I was making is that just because a native speaker fails to understand you or another non-native speaker does not automatically reflect poorly on their proficiency level, and anyone - including you - had they achieved a high degree of proficiency would have experienced this phenomena, and the fact that they - and you and jay boy - don't realize this tells me that it highly likely that your proficiency in the language isn't that high.

It is my strong suspicion that if you yourself enjoyed any degree of fluency in Thai you would have long ago disabused yourself of that notion. The experience of being very easily understood by most Thai speakers and then encountering the occasional Thai speaker who has brain freeze when a non-native speaker speaks Thai is something that I am extremely confident even the most highly proficient non-native speakers experience on occasion.

These Trump supporters jumping on the inflation bandwagon crack me up. Let's look at how Trump is proposing to solve this problem, shall we? Increasing fossil fuel production? By pulling out of climate change accords? By putting the brakes on green energy initiatives? You don't think climate change is having an impact on inflation and standards of living? (insurance rates, food production costs, construction costs, condo special assessments, uninsured flood losses, etc.) LOL. By cutting taxes (like Trump did back in 2017)? This was fiscally irresponsible and resulted in the deficit ballooning and because spending wasn't cut to offset the reduced revenue, this contributed to inflationary pressures. By cutting immigration? You don't think immigrant labor has a dampening effect on wage growth, which contributes to inflation? By slashing entitlement programs like SS and Medicare? Deficit spending is probably the biggest contributor to inflation as it pumps borrowed money into the economy, increasing demand for goods and services. Slashing entitlement programs would undoubtably cure the inflation problem, but at whose expense? Let me give you a hint. Anyone who is heavily reliant on these programs for maintaining their standard of living, i.e., the typical ASEANNOW forum member, that's who. LOL.