Walker88

I'm a perennial bear, but I did not expect a Recession in the near term, and now the figures back it up. There was so much pent up demand due to Covid that many people are throwing caution to the wind and doing what they were prevented from doing for 2 years. Travel is booming, even to Thailand. People continue to buy cars in the US. Interest rates have hit house prices, but even that is regional. Some areas continue to grow. Unemployment in the US is 3.5%, down sharply from the 6.8% Biden inherited from 45. Inflation is dropping rapidly. Natural gas prices are lower than when russia invaded Ukraine. That impacts fertilizer prices,in a good way, which in turn helps with the cost of food. The winter has been warmer than expected in much of the EU, and despite the every fortnight cold snap in the US, overall weather hasn't been as severe as normal. Now the bad news is that a lot of this spending is debt based, and with interest rates climbing people who fail to pay off credit card balances are looking at 30%+ rates on unpaid balances. I do think we have a good chance of a Recession starting later in 2023, as consumers reach their credit limit, but until then, we'll make hay while the sun shines.

You're not well versed in biology and biochemistry, I think. Some foods cause people to exude unpleasant aromas in their sweat. This can be a function of one's individual metabolism, just as individual metabolism might make one person allergic to a food that is no problem to another person. Examples of such foods that can cause odor in sweat are peanuts, garlic and red onions (foods high in sulfur can lead to hydrogen sulfide emissions). Do you think 'fresh sweat' is just water? Lots of different molecules in sweat besides H2O. Now bacteria does react with the H2O in sweat and can produce some nasty smells, particularly in obese people. Excess adipose tissue often has folds, called perniculi. Bacteria gets trapped in the folds and can absolutely reek. Those with 'spare tires' or bellies that hang over the belt are prone. That is why obese people often smell, even if they've recently bathed. The bacteria grows quickly in the folds of fat, especially in hot and humid weather. The obese become inured to their own odor, so don't notice, but other people do notice. Yet another reason to get fit.

If you come to Bangkok, try Massimo Dutti. There's one in Siam Paragon and one in EmQuartier. Very reasonably priced (relative to, say, NY) They have lots of casual cotton shirts, some cotton and linen blends, cotton or linen shorts, and cotton boxer shorts. You simply cannot beat cotton boxers for Thai weather. Many of the tailors in BKK have a range of fabrics, cotton and linen. Tailor-on-Ten (actually on Sukh Soi 8) is a good shop if you want cotton or linen shorts made, or dress casual cotton shirts. Personally I do not like the feel of man-made material, so always wear cotton or linen or tropical weight wool. Even the 'wife beaters' I wear to the gym are cotton (definitely not easy to find in Thailand)

45 lost the popular vote by several million in 2016, but because of the anachronism known as the Electoral College, he 'won' the election. Had Beau Biden not died of cancer, it's likely 45 would still be a Game Show host and would never have disgraced the White House. Biden would have run and won in 2016. Sadly, HRC felt 'entitled', despite all of her negatives. Then russia intervened, both by funding treehugger jill stein's campaign, and then after manafort gave internal polling data to GRU asset kilimnik, who gave it to the Internet Research Agency (a GRU entity) in St Pete, who then microtargeted voters in swing States with disinformation about HRC. stein had more votes in several swing States than the margin 45 had over HRC. One can safely assume all of those would otherwise have gone to HRC, as stein was left of HRC. Sadly, 45 won and gave the green light to racism, violence and all manner of craziness. ("Good people on both sides", where one side was chanting "Jews will not replace us".) So we have terms like 'groomers', which the far right uses to censor reality and create a straw man where "dems are trying to turn your children gay/trans/etc." We have sitting repubs in Congress who think the insurrection was something between 'typical tourists' and 'legitimate 1st Amendment protest', when the 1st hardly said trying to overthrow the govt or hang the VP was okay.

It's unlikely to be the kind of pornography you have in mind. Also, who decides 'age appropriate'? What many of these books do is discuss the reality of things like slavery. There is a segment of the population, known as republicans, who insist everything always has been perfect in the US and it's the greatest country in the history of the world now and forever and ever, Amen. There needs to be a middle ground between the absurdity of the far right and the wokiness of the far left. The far right is maybe 35% of the US, while the far left is maybe 3% of the US. Both extremes are too loud.

Does the female have to pay child support when you give birth?

If cops are stopping cars to check for Criminal Vapers, they might also go to all the street stalls in Bangkok selling e-cig equipment. Surely they'd meet their quota of catching Criminal Vapers that way. I never understood the random stopping of taxis. It isn't as if they test the driver for booze. It's always the passengers who are checked. I've been stopped many times riding in a taxi at night. I have to get out produce my passport and empty my pockets. I haven't been shaken down for money in BKK, but the whole thing just seems odd. I've been stopped at a massive checkpoint on the highway before, where cops just went up to every vehicle and said simply "Two hundred baht". That was a shake down, a kind of dunamic toll booth for the Police Welfare Fund. One time my taxi was stopped riding between Maesai and Chiangrai, a cop came and sat next to me in the back seat, put his face right into mine, and told me he was going to go through all my possessions. I told him to have at it and stared back at him. He smiled, and then climbed back out. I sort of understand that check, given the region of the country, but the other random stops are just odd.

Last January I thought I was a starry-eyed optimist thinking maybe 5 million. Adjusting for the usual TAT fudge factor, I still think my estimate was crushed. I took one flight out of Suvarnabhumi in December and I had never seen the airport as crowded, even during the 40 million year of 2019 (?). Every seat in the departure hall before Immigration/Customs was filled, people were sitting on the floor against walls, and it was a scrum navigating the floor to get to my check-in counter. It might not yet be close to what it was, and hopefully the rush wasn't just pent up demand that will slow in 2023, but one has to be pleased that rank and file Thai people may well be gainfully employed again. I'm sure some expats will miss the quiet of the Covid Era, but since around 18% of the Thai economy is tourism related, and much of that foreign tourism, it's a good thing in the grander scheme.

That's Standard American Diet, abbreviated as SAD. And sad it is, as currently 43% of Americans classify as obese.

Puzzling why they didn't do things right, as it looks as if they spent a good deal of money on the place. The additional cost of establishing a company, paying off bringing in a Thai partner, getting a proper visa, getting a work permit, registering for VAT, and hiring 4 Thais for each foreigner with a work permit---all added up---would be much less than they spent on the facility. Granted the process is a bit cumbersome, but it sure beats getting one's business closed and then getting blacklisted. That gives a new meaning to the term 'sunk costs'. Of course now some local has a turnkey restaurant all ready to go and likely regular clientele. Good deal.

Cheddar on an Italian pizza? Ah.....NO. That might work well in the US or UK, but not in Italy. Mozzarella, Bufala mozz, Burrata, Asiago, Parmesan, Telaggio, Provolone....okay. Also, unless it's Quattro Formaggi, moderation in cheese is better. I knew I'd found a good one in Bangkok when, while waiting for my pizza, I heard lots of Italian language spoken around me.

Though I'm from the US, I prefer Napoli-style pizza, not NY and definitely not Chicago. I tried just about everywhere in Bangkok, and I think there are two places I can say are tops: Pizza Massillia and Vesuvio. I think both make a single grudging concession to local taste (Thai women almost exclusively choose "Hawaiian' that has pineapple), but everything else comes from Italy. Vesuvio has a cold case in front of the kitchen that shows many of the meats and cheeses they use, and all are Italian imports. They also have a really great wine list, better than many hi-so restaurants. Massillia's menu is larger than Vesuvio if some of one's companions don't want just pizza.

I have no superstitions, which is to say I do not subscribe to any Stone or Bronze Age myths. If these things give others comfort, they can knock themselves silly. I do have one rule, however, that I think should be part of the First Amendment's 'freedom of religion' in the US Constitution: Your god or gods must be omnipotent, which means if the gods have any problem with what anyone is doing, they alone will take care of it, if it is their 'will'. They do not need any proxy on Earth to do their wet work. Those humans unwilling to accept that instantly lose tax free status for their places of 'worship' and are dumped into the highest tax bracket and highest property tax bracket.

I would look to see if the 70 year old man stole that special lucky amulet from another story about the Fitness First branch, because something shined upon him and made his day.

First, I enjoy Thailand and don't have any plans to leave it anytime soon. I'll get that statement out of the way. I do see many expats in country who are bitter and far from 'living the dream', but there are reasons for that. One reason is that they are the type of people who would be unhappy anywhere. They have to fix themselves, as nobody else can do it for them. The second is that people did not plan properly. The best thing anyone could learn at a young age is to accept that life is finite and all are mortal. If one truly understands that, one begins planning early. ---Get health insurance when one is young and healthy. Yes, it might impact the budget when in one's 20s, but the payoff in peace of mind is huge later in life. ---Begin saving when young. Live life, to be sure, but don't go overboard. Build up a nest egg. ---Look at all the alternatives...what does each locale offer, how likely are the good things to continue, etc. ---Take as long of a vacation as one can to visit places one might choose to live, so surprises are minimized ---Know yourself. How adaptable are you? What lifestyle to you really want? Are you being realistic (e.g., do you think 20 year old women will lust after your body when you're 60+)? Does the locale offer sufficient challenges to keep you from getting bored? If you decide to open or buy a business, can you as a foreigner do it? Plan well and know your strengths and limitations, and Thailand can be an ideal place to live. It's safe, food is delightful (and in a city like Bangkok every cuisine is available), it has varied topography and lifestyle options, infrastructure is adequate all over and excellent in BKK, its airport is a hub to anywhere, people are at least outwardly friendly, foreigners can buy or open businesses, and if a US person, you can own 100% (Treaty of Amity). I rarely tire of Thailand. I have homes in a few countries, so can go and chill out if need be, until the quietness of a rural area makes me miss the cacophony of BKK (vibrancy might be a better term). I need both the quietness of nature and the bustle of my fellow human beings. The business I bought can be run from abroad owing to the ease of communication and the incredible technology that exists in the world today. I've had health insurance since I was 22. I chose to not have kids, so that burden (I know, others will argue it's joy) will never be with me. I'm lucky enough to have all the funds I'll ever need in this lifetime. I write that because I suspect some members here are still young....30s or maybe even 20s. To those folks, look at the responses in this thread. Note who is bitter and why. Note who is happy and why. Learn from it, so that you need not live it. Begin your planning now, because the years move like a coin you've spun on a table top....as the coin falls its percussion rate increases and increases and increases....until it stops. That is how the years pass. Plan well, and the 'dream' falls into place.

Yes, because the US probably has more superstitious people, aka religious, than most of Europe, so people would expect you to thank some figment of your imagination. Tough to escape it, and a non-believer is likely the last "demographic" who could ever be elected POTUS. I prefer Greek Gods if I had to choose, but the US settled on some sort on monotheistic thing. Boring.

To some extent he's correct. In many areas, what arises in the US spreads internationally, since no country is producing any culture nowadays. There's no more Beethoven, Tolstoy, Joyce, Shakespeare, etc. Culture should be dynamic and not just rely on the long dead past, but nobody is adding to it now. The vacuum gets filled, like it or not. Thus, the world gets stuck with rap and R&B (some of which I do enjoy), Hollywood, plus denims and track shoes and inner city fashion from New York or South Central Los Angeles. Old people dress like old people, but the youth of the world emulates US inner city. Starved for culture worldwide might be the reason. I've stopped being surprised seeing young people in Thailand, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Japan, the UK, Germany, etc. look like they're Straight outta Compton, complete with the hand gestures and 'attitude'. Even cutesy 'boy bands' came from the US, with New Kids on the Block and other abominations eventually yielding K-Poppers like BTS.

I'm 3.7% Neanderthal. Lucky I still have hair, because that long sloped forehead thing is unsightly. No Denisovan, but a touch of African. Then, being American, I've got a pinch of this, a pinch of that, a sprinkle of something else....100% mongrel. But no damn baseball cap, forward or backward! And unlike 43% of Americans who qualify as obese, no fat. (No fat is my disguise)

This might amuse/surprise/shock non-Americans... When I go visit the US, I always go to a famous Gun Show. It would make the suks of Quetta in Pakistan look safe in comparison. Thousands of guns for sale on tables in a venue the size of a Boeing factory.....semi-auto handguns, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, sniper rifles (some .50 caliber, which at 2000 meters still has more stopping power than a .44 magnum fired point blank), AR-15s, AK-47s...and for those with the right license, fully automatic machine guns. All it takes to go home with a hundred guns and tens of thousands of rounds of ammo is a two minute FBI check online. Cash and carry. There are even bins full of 30-100 rd mags for AR-15s, in case the usual 30 rd magazine is insufficient for one's needs. Guys bring in dollies and wheel out boxes and boxes of ammo. There's all kinds of knives as well as vendors selling every 'prepper' good imaginable. The conversations I overhear are filled with boasts about what some goober is going to do "when the civil war starts". The crowd is around 95% right wing, the rest being people looking for home protection or who enjoy target shooting. Photos of 45 sit atop many tables, and one can buy t-shirts saying things like "HIllary for Prison 2016" or "Let's Go Brandon" (representing an epithet aimed at Biden...that sprung from a NASCAR race and an announcer who misunderstood what the crowd was chanting), or "I'd Rather Be Russian than Democrat", etc. For the women, there's crochet kits where she can sew in the words to the Second Amendment (the one that grants citizens the right to bear, but not all, arms). Oh, and Confederate flags, Nazi memorabilia, and similar stuff. What stands out even more than the guns is that the average show goer is morbidly obese. I doubt most could run up a flight of stairs. I sometimes count people I think are 300+ lbs (134kg), both men and women, and I stop counting after 100. Ready for battle they are not. I stand out because I'm quite fit, I tend to dress neatly, and I guess I appear as if my IQ might be above room temperature. The whole show is very much one side of America, and one I absolutely do not miss. I'm just a bit of a moth to a flame, and I like to scout out the opposition.

I was responding to another poster. All threads drift a bit, but since one 'tell' of being American is a guy in a red hat with a silly slogan on it, it's appropriate. And yes, I have nothing but contempt for 45. He epitomizes all of the worst qualities in the US: loud, entitled, obese, corrupt, self-absorbed, willfully ignorant...all of the things the OP's post elicited from non-Americans.

Easy to make with a straight face. Yes, I'm well aware of the vices of some of the Founders, though not all were slave owners. They set the country on a path, with wording that is flexible. Jefferson and Madison wrote most of the founding docs, and only one was a slaveowner. One can get the impression Jefferson knew a day would come when slavery would be not only frowned upon, but outlawed. Madison, perhaps, insisted that the wording be neutral enough in the founding documents that the new nation would be a work in progress toward "all [men] are created equal". We often suffer from Presentism, where we project current values on to the past. We like to think we would have been better had we lived 'back then', which is delusion. Most all of us would have assumed the beliefs of the era, just as we do today. Again, I fall back on the neutral wording (save for the [men] I noted), and the idea that the nation was to be an eternal work in progress. The Founders seemed to know they were fighting human nature, which is at its core tribal and racist. The key point was that the Founders could have just piggybacked off the Magna Carta, where all are equal except the monarch, but they specifically left that out and took the view that power/greatness/respect/authority merely by birth was an anachronism or just nonsense. A slogan of that time---despite most Founders being atheist---was "We bow to no Earthly King". That phrase was geared toward winning over citizens who happened to hold religious beliefs, but get them on board the "no monarchs' thing.

Who did that?

The OP posted a benign article that merely suggests certain tells. Responses drifted---as one might expect---into criticisms and malign generalizations, often based on an N of 1. The confidence interval on an N of 1 in a universe of 330,000,000 is.......low. Do Americans behave in an entitled manner? Some probably do. Some Germans and Brits and Aussies and others probably do, too., especially in a country where the foreigner feels some sort of superiority, as many foreigners do in Thailand. Are Americans loud? Some probably are. Some Germans and Brits and Aussies and Japanese Yakuza probably are, too. Americans have no monopoly on entitlement, loudness, obesity, cultural ignorance, etc. Some folks like to project, so they will ascribe to Americans what they know full well are present in themselves or their own countrymen. Other people might be reacting to the ubiquitous nature of American 'culture'. While much of American culture doesn't make me swell with pride, I can see much of it has been exported and absorbed, largely because no other nation or culture is creating any culture that resonates across borders, except maybe South Korea. Baseball caps, rap, R&B, KFC/Macs & fast food, 7-11, Hollywood movies...these things have travel, say what you might. (Personally I hate superhero movies, most sci-fi after Star War #1, and most of what Hollywood produces nowadays.) It isn't unusual to see a Thai band donned in NYC or South Central LA fashion, spewing out rap. Many Thai women cannot be kept out of 7-11, where they purchase really bad food, or sharing a bucket of spicy wings from KFC with their sisters. Thai women are not lining up for a 'proper English breakfast' or blood pudding. Those things appeal to one nationality only. We happen to live in an Era when America is dominant, good or bad. It's economy is still around 30% of World GDP, and its military power is unrivaled. The US continues to secure the majority of Nobel Prizes, and its technology is adopted everywhere. This won't be forever, though most people over the age of forty will be pushing daisies by the time America slips from its top spot. Certainly the US is doing its damn-dest to fall, with clowns like 45 embracing and trying to export fascism rather than democracy, as well as practicing willful ignorance, but the next few decades still look to be US-centered. I'm a professional expatriate who has largely lost touch with his home nation, but there are some things about America that give me pride. While men like Jefferson and Madison borrowed from Locke and Rousseau, and many of the US' founders were faulty by today's standards, the idea of human equality is something the US promoted more than any nation ever. The US specifically rebelled against monarchies and those granted respect and authority merely by birth, having achieved nothing but been whelped. Every human everywhere has benefited from that belief in equality. Though far from perfect, the US does try to promote human rights for all, no matter the circumstances of birth. Admittedly, the US remains a work in progress, but the goal is noble. Hopefully a day will come when a born royal is given nothing more than a female born in rural Bangladesh, as one is not inherently better than the other. If there is a bottom line to this thread, it should be that each and every person should be judged on his or her individual merits, and not thrown into some category simply by virtue of the passport they carry.

Amazing graphic. I never would have guessed the percent in 1989. I think the "Ugly American" meme began in the 1960s, so it can likely be blamed on a true handful of people. I've been living outside of the US almost exclusively since university. When I am in a hotel in SEAsia in particular, or South Asia, the hotel staff 'shares' with me nationalities they don't like. They know me, but not necessarily my nationality. Sometimes they beef about guests, then say something like, "You've not German, are you?" There seems to be a fairly consistent "Do Not Like" list. I prefer not to name them, but American doesn't make the top 5. Perhaps in the 1960s it could have, but not now. Best others look in the mirror.

A bit surprised that the OP has not yet drawn the Claude Rains/Capt Renault "shocked, shocked" line from Casablanca. As another poster noted, there are a few hundred thousand non-Pattaya square kms where an expat could settle, thereby avoiding the nastiness of Walking Street and FL-ridden Beach Road. The OP spoke of Patts having all the things one needs to live comfortably, which I assume means grocery stories, dept stores and good communications. Perhaps he is unaware, but the reason those services are so easy to find in Patts is BECAUSE of what Walking Street, Beach Road, Soi Buakhow, Soi 6, LK Metro, etc. offer. Absent that in Pattaya's past, Pattaya would likely be a sleepy fishing village lacking a Terminal 21, Central Festival, multiple Big Cs, etc. "If my demons leave me, I'm sure my angels will soon follow"