JackGats

Alas, in order to arrest some youth smoking a joint down an alley, police will not wonder at having first to step over a pregnant tramp drinking wine from the bottle.

The real issue is not discussed, ie whether police in any country should get paid to go after cannabis (by smell or otherwise).

The gap between what kind of woman I can get for short time and what kind of woman I could get as a 24/7 companion is so huge that I have no other alternative than to live in Thailand where short time is available. By the very sexual emphasis of my life in Thailand, I am trapped where the night-life is. It would have been different had I lived in Thailand in the good old days where any hottie was keen to share the farang's life anywhere in Thailand in exchange for modest amounts of cash.

What I resent in ChatGPT is that if you ask ChatGPT to read the Thai, what you get is Thai read with a noticeable US accent. At present I wouldn't recommend using ChatGPT to practise listening and speaking Thai.

Auto-generated subtitles are not much use for learning a language because they contain many mistakes. They have even become a nuisance as Youtube seems to have the feature on by default everytime you open Youtube.

Well, there is at least one Australian restaurant I know of. In Jomtien, called Tinnies. Good restaurant. There may be others.

Protectionism. Thailand protects its own agriculture and food industry by imposing punitive custom duties on imports.

Oh sorry then. I thought you did suggest something about tranferring a stock portfolio.

All those women who tripped over themselves to repeatedly attend the guy's parties now decide that after all they were "raped". And the women who'd have given an eye and a leg back then to attend but were spurned are joining in the chorus. The staggering hypocrisy of it all (and of all of them)!

<deleted>! You don't transfer a stock portfolio by bank transfer. You have never owned a stock portfolio obviously.

Do you own 600k USD in shares? How do you bring that to Thailand?

Indeed this "only some aspects" is what enables some countries to proudly claim "prostitution is legal" while in fact it isn't. In Belgium and Portugal prostitution has officially been legal for decades but local authorities are free to withhold permits for prostitution venues as well as for privately operating escorts, and local authorities do so more often than not. In France or Sweden women are free to prostitute but men are not allowed to pay for a prostitute: what kind of fool does one need to be to consider this as meaning prostitution is legal? And so on and so forth. Meanwhile in some countries like Uganda, Madagascar, Kenya ... prostitution has always been illegal but it is all over the place. P.S. My initial point was that "1st World" countries should not (or no longer) be hailed as libertarian countries in matters of prostitution (nor of hetero sex for that matter).

Lists are all very well but they don't mean much. France is on the list with its Nordic model. You can google "nordic model" if you don't know what it entails. What is the US doing on the list? Yes I know, prostitution is legal in Nevada and Puerto Rico. Big deal. Thailand being on the list in spite of prostitution being officially illegal in Thailand shows what an inconsistent hodgepodge such "lists" are. This is somewhat reminiscent of the lists of "10 best countries to retire in", with 8 of of 10 countries being ones where they tax your world-wide income at an extortionate rate.

What 1st World are you talking about? The US where banning prostitution is state of the union mission statement number one? Scandinavia and the EU where the "Nordic model" (ie the most repressive regime ever) is being adopted by one country after another? You are right if only insofar as legalization means "rendering it inaccessible". Accessible and affordable prostitution is now a feature of 3rd World or emerging countries, not of 1st World countries.

Better criminalised but largely tolerated than legalised but heavily regulated. This is especially true of course if legalisation means criminalising one side of the transaction ("Nordic model").

I suppose you use it with your own crypto wallet? My feeling is that BC exchanges can be as devious as banks when it comes to freezing your account.

Except in Thailand you can still walk into the bank and have your problem taken care of. Which is more than you can say for many banks in other countries. Even non-direct banks, ie banks that have high-street branches, will not do much if you have a technical problem. And if you want cash they will refer you to the nearest ATM, too bad if your ATM card doesn't work.

Ok, so US as bad as the EU. Western countries are now screwing their own citizens. From what I see around me Russians have it easier with settling wherever they want and accessing their money. We are now in an inverted Cold War World. Our beloved "democracies" are restricting our freedom. Soon they will start refusing to issue us with passports.

Count yourself lucky not to be from the EU. At least as a US citizen you can still open a US bank account while living in Thailand. Once EU expats lose their EU accounts, there's nothing for it but to bank only in Asia (how do you transfer an EU stock portfolio to Thailand?), or go back and live in the EU for one fiscal year in order to open <deleted>load of new accounts before becoming moving out again. Yes, setting up call-centers manned with employees who know little and can do little is the new way for bank to cut costs these days. The day crypto takes over and all banks vanish will be a victory for mankind. I'm not even a crypto investor, I missed that band-wagon, but I now understand why long term there's no alternative to crypto.

I have the impression that Google Translate works better on my Galaxy since I opened Live Transcribed in the background (rather than leave it buried within the Accessibility Settings). Could Live Transcribed be an enabler for audio-to-text applications?

I'll give it a try, thanks. P.S. Strange, when I tried to download Live Transcribe, it turned out it was already on my phone. Were other apps using it in the background? However, I can only access it through Google Play Store. The app is invisible in my settings. OK, now I get it. It was tucked away under "Accessibility" in my Android settings! I managed to get it to produce an icon on my home screen.

Google Translator has a major flaw: when used to translate speech to text, it often doesn't start translating after you launch the microphone. It stalls and registers nothing, Arrrgh! If used to practice listening on the headlines in Thai, I'd say it will leave you high and dry in one spoken sentence out of three. Here's a speech-to-text app that seems to do a much better job:

I don't wish for the baht to become too weak. A strong baht keeps the cheap hordes away.

Quote: "A 10% increase in the baht’s exchange rate combined with a 10% decrease in the dollar will raise production costs by 20%." Poor English. "Production costs" should read "export price of domestically manufactured goods".

In life you cheat if you can afford to do so. Otherwise you don't.