Enzian

There might be a shortage of really beautiful girls as implied in the last sentence of the OP. (If Webfact can be what the woke would call racist, then I can be piggy sexist.) Or as others have said, the stunners have moved to other formats.

I'm not Thai and I know what you are saying. But the younger urban generations are changing and like I say, it could work in some cases. I'm just brainstorming, but you might agree with me that Thais all need to think outside the box more.

My impression is that their outreach is targeting the elderly themselves. What about telling the younger generations to lay down the law to their elders, tell them to just take the shot and don't take no for an answer? (This comes from my experience with my own father; he would never take any advice from me till the beginning stages of his decline, then I just had to be firm and stand my ground and he would shut up and do it, what ever it was.) It might work in a certain percentage of cases.

To reiterate, there's the question of the tipping point. At what time will this come to bite the country in the behind, and what will that be like? Unless someone has a crystal ball, it seems we won't know till it happens.

Couple days ago had a discussion with the farang monk who originally introduced me to Thailand. We agreed that the one positive in the situation is that, no matter how low on the social ladder, it's almost impossible to starve to death in Thailand. But just having to say that kind of tells you where we're at.

And even with the government not doing anything commonsensical to bring tourists in and give some hope for the future, construction projects in Bangkok are still going great guns. Of course it's possible that those in government just don't care about the suffering and debt, or just like it this way for some reason (racial purity? fire sales anyone?). But then there's this cognitive dissonance between what the government is doing and the hope that some apparently have that those projects will have some purpose when finished. Or there's just more money that has to be laundered than we can even imagine. (Or there's just an unreal amount of simple liquidity, but that seems more of a Western problem.)

I have nothing but sympathy for someone whose name is a familiar American English acronym for "pain in the a#s".

For those on here who still don't appreciate how far back goes the influence of the Chinese in Thailand, I will again recommend The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation, by Wasana Wongsurawat, published in 2019 by Silkworm Books.

History. I hate to think what Thailand would be like now without the past 200 years of Chinese economic imperialism and influence. One out of every 6 Thais have a significant if not majority element of Chinese background. American culture will continue to be important, but this is Chinese country in some ways, maybe just not as much as Singapore for example.

Almost like she knows she's not qualified; that awareness would be a first in this country! (But I admit to having had a bromance soft spot for Abhisit despite his obvious limitations.)

Walking around Sukhumvit I used to see a break in the traffic and think I can make it! I can make it! now I think do I want to risk my life to save 30 seconds? Which makes me wonder if pedestrian deaths have gone down at all.

This whole democracy idea around the world is a fallacy and red herring. The only thing that has a chance over time is some sort of republicanism with a small "r". Most so-called democracies are de facto republics in the way they operate. SPQR. The USA is not a democracy, de facto or de jure, and yet it keeps supposedly promoting this garbage idea of mob rule.

My bank Krungsri is not on the list so OK. My gf jokes that she and her sister can be happy because they never have enough money in any bank to be able to worry.

The whole economy is organized to skim from the poor and from the urban middle class and move the proceeds up the ladder. They will just stumble along for a couple of more generations until something drastic happens to force some kind of reform. In the meantime the question is, Where is the tipping point when this becomes some kind of crisis? We never know till it happens, like in the US when people kept saying we should be having inflation but we're not, and then all of a sudden it took off, with Murphy's Law adding accelerators.

This is a shame because there are so many, products of the Thai educational system, who will vote strictly for the name without knowing or understanding anything else. And they have the numbers.

I'm happy to "invest" here in things unmentionable, but not nearly as unmentionable as the quality of the ideas that TAT comes up with.

Otto von Bismarck famously said "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." In Thailand we can definitely reverse this and have it be equally relevant.

A lot of bad taste humor could be drawn out of speculation about what will happen to the many--probably most--who default.

But it's a FASCINATING dump. But seriously one of my fantasies is the government solves whatever unemployment there is by paying people to clean up the environment. You have to wonder if the elite even has their eyes open when they go out of their posh neighborhoods.

I like Bangkok Barry's long explanation just above. My simplification of his #7 is that Thai drivers seem to have no concept of leaving "a margin for error". Just watch them. There is no apparent awareness that driving like they do, if anything goes wrong they and/or someone else is screwed.

Off topic I admit, but really... This is a big issue. They logically should want the tourists out there spending but they haven't acted like it. Maybe they are trying to follow what they see as public opinion. Maybe the fact is that half the money the tourists spend go to country persons they care nothing about, who only exist to be exploited. Maybe they want to go back 200 years. I'm too western to understand.

Pirated means fake or stolen?

Any scheme to defraud or mislead involves, at least at the beginning, some sort of rational plan involving multiple players who all understand and cooperate to keep it secret and are on the same page. This is the problem with most conspiracy theories. So I agree with you. All this is beyond these people over more than a short run.

But won't one's airline of choice require some kind of test result in order to get a boarding pass? And won't airlines differ in this regard depending on where one is coming from and where one is going? And which airline.

I notice that in central Sukhumvit around Nana station the cars and bikes seem a little more considerate now, and the pedestrians seem a LOT more careful, looking all ways like they might see a nuke sailing down the street. I have no doubt that the famous accident is the cause and I wonder if data about pedestrians hit would show a decline. It's not impossible that over time things will improve.