Walker88

I think we delude ourselves or try to make us and our time 'special' by thinking the end is near and it's never been this bad. Few periods in human history have been as relatively quiet as the last few decades. Yes, we had Covid, but the two bouts of Plague wiped out 25% of Europe the first time and upwards of 10% the second. Genghis Khan rolled across South Asia into Europe 8 centuries ago wiping out 20% of humanity. Even in the last hundred fifty years we've had two World Wars, the Holocaust, The Great Depression, The Armenian Massacre, Stalin's purges, Mao's killing of 60 million, Cambodia of the 1970s, three major Middle East wars, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s....... All things considered, the world is actually pretty quiet today. I can get on a plane and fly anywhere in the world today, save for over Ukraine and Israel. I'll find food and shelter wherever I go, and in most places decent medical care if I need it. We're a heck of a long way from Hobbes or Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy. Relax.

Yes, the guy who got UE back down from trump's disaster of 6.8%, got the economy out of the trump Recession, forged a bipartisan infrastructure Bill (rather than announce endless "Infrastructure Weeks" that never happened, as trump spent 300+ days and $170,000,000 of Taxpayer money playing golf), engineered the NATO effort to stand against russian aggression in Ukraine, negotiated a drop in prescription drug prices, cut $350 billion in FY2021from trump's last year deficit and $1.3 trillion in FY2022.....we should all be so geriatric. Bloated fatboy trump, the convicted sex offender, convicted charity fraudster, guilty business fraudster, twice impeached clown facing 91 felony counts for everything from trying to overthrow US democracy to stealing highly classified documents, to illegally paying off pornstars so she wouldn't announce his "not quite freakishly small, but well below average Johnson".....and now praising the support he gets from Hannibal Lecter (sic) and lambasting Forbes magazine because it removed him form its 400 list...is not exactly Mr Cognition. trump thought he was John von Neumann because he said "man woman camera TV person".

Even when I was 17 I had taste, so if I were 17 today, I know I would hate the banal cacophony and unimaginative drivel that is House, EDM, Techno and trance. "Awesome" it ain't. I do think it's "apropos" (just for you, GG) for the TikTok generation, as it is people without talent producing content for people without taste. I can enjoy classical, then enjoy the shift from that to Jazz by people like Louis Moreau Gottschalk to Ferdinand LaMothe, to Gershwin and Johnny Mercer, to the Swing Era, or Duke to Thelonius to Coltraine to Miles, even to Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, CSNY, Jimi, Led Zeppelin and others. I can enjoy Blues, Soul and Motown. I can listen to Bollywood dance numbers, or Isaan folk music. The noise played in clubs now, however, is anathema to music in general and me in particular. A hydraulic jack or a pile driver is preferable.

I've been 17, but not 70....but I suspect growing up in the 1950s was a lot more fun. When I was a kid, we were still free to go about things as if society was safe. Walk to school, play sports after school, eat dinner at whomever's house we happened to be at when dinner time came. There was a local gas station run by a guy who loved to ride his old Indian motorcycle, so he left his station self-service. You bought gas, opened his till, put in your money and took your change. Outsiders just assumed the station was unattended, so didn't know the system, and left when no one came out to service them. Locals knew, and we were honest. Couldn't do that today. We had good TV news with real journalists. We learned things in school like math and penmanship and history without any associated 'presentism'. When we were curious about something, we went to a library, poured through the cards, then looked to see if the book we wanted was in the stack or out on loan. We didn't live inside our phones, and when went out for a vanilla coke with friends, we talked with them. As a society run by old school liberals, we were on a path to be truly colorblind. Then the Boomers gave way to the Participation Trophy Generations, where actual talent gave way to inclusiveness...except color and ethnicity have come back in force. We are Black or White or Brown or gay or "cis" first and foremost. Fat is beautiful, even though it's butt ugly and unhealthy. Be careful, 17 year olds, or you'll get cancelled. A 17 year old in 2023 does have the great advantage of almost the entire body of human knowledge a few keystrokes away, but instead of going after muons or the works of Aeschylus, he/she goes after banal TikTok videos, chasing "likes". Horrible. And while each succeeding generation tends to hate the music of the generation after them, there really is a legitimate argument that EDM, techno, house and trance are absolute rubbish. I think the world of 2023 is potentially more boring (unless one is a self-starter), but I don't think it is any more bleak than Vietnam, Biafra, lynchings, the '67 Middle East War, the '73 Middle East War, 1970's Kampuchea, Black September, George Habbash, Angola, the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, "Silent Spring"...and certainly no more bleak that what 90-100 years olds faced with the Great Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, etc.

I think I've seen him ! Oh, maybe it was just Japanese female porn I saw. Never mind.

Does this mean tattooed guys on Harleys, Russian Mafia and Chinese Triads get a slight reprieve? How about overstayers?

Rather than 'strike a nerve' (as I'm not yet in the Death Zone), my thought was: "I wonder if the OP knows he's going to get gutted like a fish by someone sick of his nonsense, and he'll not even live to see Christmas?" At the very least he should keep an eye on his coffee in the break room, as hospitals have all sorts of things that might bring about his quick demise. You have to assume 'once an a-hole, always an a-hole'. More enemies than friends. With questions like the OP poses, his life expectancy is less than a 95 year old on a respirator.

They're going to solve the problem of long lines at Immigration by creating long lines at the Tourist Tax Kiosks. Voila ! Immigration problem solved. And with 40 million tourists X 300 baht - compensation for 2 deaths at Siam Paragon, the Minister of Sports & Tourism has 11,998,000,000 to play with. I'm thinking gold color Rolls Royce Phantom.

I assume you must be trolling, as no one can be so clueless. trump was and always will be an abject failure, who only resonates with the low IQ demographic. He is a convicted fraudster, a convicted sex offender, a convicted charity fraudster, under 91 felony counts for everything from trying to overthrow American democracy to stealing classified documents, and now also mouthing off because of his tiny micro-penis and its impact on his fragile ego. His country club is the target of surveillance by both adversaries and allies, and has members who are employees of China's MSS....and the reason is because he likes to show off by revealing national security secrets. He claimed his 11,000 sf apartment was 33,000 sf, which constitutes bank and insurance fraud for which he will lose his NYC properties. He is likely to face 5 years in a Georgia jail for his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020. He is likely to be convicted of RICO violations, and in GA that carries a mandatory 5 year sentence. He is the first POTUS since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when he took office. He has the worst economic record in terms of GDP change also going all the way back to Hoover. He ran up $7,800,000,000,000 new National Debt in just 4 years, or $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the US. THAT caused the inflation that the Fed and Biden are now largely controlling. He inherited 4.8% unemployment and left 6.8% unemployment. He declared bankruptcy 6 times, foisting all of that bad debt onto the taxpayer (via bank and bondholder tax writeoffs) He got hoodwinked by the fat little cretin in North Korea just because Kim knew how to pull trump's chain. That allowed Kim to ramp up U235 enrichment, improve the Hwasong ICBMs that can now reach all parts of the US, miniaturize nukes so that they fit on the Hwasong, and test nukes via supercomputer, just as the US does. Everything trump has done is a failure. He can save nothing.

Israel will be asking the US for more aid and assistance. I wonder if in some 'perfect' phone call, if Biden will link the release of aid to Israel first providing dirt on Biden's potential opponent? Would that be an impeachable offense? Republicans have said it would not, at least that's what they used to say.

Bio-terror The human genome has been revealed. Genes are now understood and can be altered, not just in humans but in everything from viruses to bacteria. The weaknesses in the human immune system are better understood. Terrorist organizations have sent and/or recruited people who have attended the world's premier universities and have specifically studied gene manipulation, with the intent of developing and unleashing a superbug. It is entirely possible that someone or someones will developed a bug that will take out all of humanity. They might even use AI to help. Yes, it would kill the developer, too. That doesn't stop suicide bombers. Never in human history has one person been capable of eradicating all life.

Watching my staff take joy in each other's company Smelling freshly ground coffee Being fit, agile and nimble Gene Hackman's performance in The French Connection Snuggling with the woman you love

I suspect they mean a baht billionaire, which is about $27 million. Not exactly Forbes 400 level. It's still surprising if she extracted a sizable percent of that, but even the greediest gold digger would have taken her ill gotten gains and disappeared long ago if she pulled more than a rounding error from a dollar billionaire.

It isn't only the military who uses IQ tests in their selection. CIA gives all applicants to its Clandestine Services Division an IQ Test and an MMPI test, as well as running a complete psychological profile. Outsiders can guess or joke about what the agency is seeking, but in reality they look for those with a std dev or two above the mean re IQ, and a person somewhat disdainful of authority, who can think on his or her feet, has a directed sort of charm to the point of being naturally manipulative, and considers life a bit of a game. They seek almost the polar opposite, in terms of personality, of what the military or SEALS or Special Forces seek. The average case officer likely falls within the range of 125 IQ to 175. From the OSS days up until maybe the 1980s, the agency drew primarily from the Ivy League or from universities like Stanford, MIT, Caltech, UChicago or UC Berkeley.

As a male, this is my curse:

There are short term and longer term trends that bode poorly for the world economy. There is about $300,000,000,000,000 of debt in the world. The US has the highest Federal Debt, but as a % of GDP or revenue vs debt service, the US isn't even close. The country with the worst debt service ratio---by far---is Japan. The world is awash in capacity. China added more steel-making capacity since 2012 than existed on Earth before 2012. Is another China going to be built somewhere requiring all that steel capacity? Household debt in most developed countries is massive. AI is going to obviate more and more jobs, including plenty of white collar jobs. Countries are going to have to provide for more and more redundant workers, and this at a time when sovereign debt is already stretched to the limit. Populations in most developed countries are shrinking. Equity valuations are based on, inter alia, growth. Where is growth going to come from if populations are shrinking? The entire world economy and social programs have been constructed based on an assumption that population will always grow and age distribution is a normal pyramid shape. Now the pyramids are inverting. People used to wonder if we'd have inflation or deflation. To put that in Biblical terms, is it "assets to ashes or debts to dust"? Given declining populations but increasingly limited resources, I suspect the world we will see is deflation in assets but inflation in necessities like energy and food.

I'll repeat: IQ is a function of the number and efficiency of neurons in the brain. Some people are born with an Intel 8088 and others with an Intel Core i9. Or think of it as some are born with a Bowmar Brain while others are a quantum computer. Nurture can have some impact, but nature sets the stage for unfairness, just as it makes some people beautiful and some butt ugly, some tall and athletic and some short and uncoordinated. JP talks around it a bit, but what he's saying in effect is that we have to accept and deal with the reality that is, not the reality we might want. We can agree or disagree with JP. The long debate on whether different races have genetic differences devolved into PC vs racists, There may be an objective truth somewhere, but we'll never find it and maybe shouldn't, because group ability can be used to ignore individual ability. In the end, each of us is an individual, regardless of ethnicity. No doubt I'm 100% wrong, but it always puzzled me that traits involving just a minimum of gene expression---such as avg height, avg fat deposition, skin color, hair color, eye color---are accepted as fact and part of the rich human fabric, but gene expression regarding the most complex organ in the human body is supposedly 100% similar across every race, resulting in no difference between populations (even though it is accepted that there arise vast differences among populations). Craig Venter and others who decoded the human genome found that various races mated with primates in areas to which some humans had migrated, such as Neanderthals among future Europeans and Denisovans among future Asians, but we must accept that this had no impact on anything other than superficial characteristics. If such differences do, in fact, arise, then I'm glad humans now accept interracial pairing, because everything will eventually even out.

Abilities, whether intellect or athleticism, are a function of the # and efficiency of neural connections, inside the brain regarding intellect, and brain to skeletal musculature for athleticism. Much of this is a function of heredity. Some is a function of nutrition of the mother during pregnancy. A bit more is a function of environment while the brain is still plastic. Some poor souls lose the Birth Lottery and never have a chance of reaching the level of intellect that would allow them to function at the highest levels of society. One cannot fully make up for the loss owing to bad genes. Depending on whether one is politically correct or Shockley and Jensen, Robert Sapolsky or E. O. Wilson, heredity accounts for somewhere between 20% and 80% of intelligence, Where heredity really sits is lost in confirmation bias and goal-seeking research. The brain seems to remain fairly plastic until about age 25, though the ability to form new neural pathways drops considerably after the first 10 years. A minimal amount of plasticity remains into old age, but not much. I've learned a few languages as an adult, but it was through brute force memorization rather than the ease with which a child can learn. One concern I have about any continued upshift in general intellect is that so much of the brain is no longer being used. Most people of a certain age no longer bother to learn their 'tables' and can do precious little math in their heads. People use GPS instead of actually learning the landscape, so many are incapable of conceptualizing the layout of a city and absent GPS would get lost searching for the bathroom in their own house. We also no longer write much longhand, so spatial orientation skills suffer. Our language ability is deteriorating because we speak in emojis or LOLs. I think there's a 'use it or lose it' experience with brain function. James Flynn has argued that intellect has been increasing because the world demands more interaction and provides more stimulation than in earlier times. His research, however, predates the most recent technology, which removes humans' need to interact so directly with the world, as computers or phones do the work for us. We might lose what we had previously gained. Though there is no research to back this up, it seems to me we are also losing natural curiosity. So many young people know absolutely nothing and don't even care, so long as they can post a banal TikTok and get "likes".

No government debt of any nation is going to be repaid. Everyone buying bonds knows that. All they expect is that it be serviced, which means paying the due interest and returning capital upon maturity. Most debt is just rolled over, so maturity is just an accounting entry. Debt service as a % of revenue is worst in what country? Japan. It's not even close. Even Greece looks solvent in comparison. The US' advantage remains rule of law. Billions in capital can enter the markets or leave the markets with no difficulty. Can't do that in China. Dollar value is based not on something as meaningless as a metal, but rather the ambition and creativity of the people, who can then be taxed. Nixon realized that, so took the US off the gold standard. As others followed suit, the world saw an era where more people were lifted from poverty than at any time since Oldavai Gorge. Money has always been a confidence game. Money only requires one side of a transaction to believe in it. Will it all collapse one day? Probably, but folks have been predicting that for longer than most people have been alive. No point in preparing for that, because if the dollar or the world's financial system fails, humans return to the Hobbesian world of 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short', which is to say hardly worth living.

I think she was booted for doing a bad Floki impersonation.

Yours is a statement built on false logic, or rather no logic at all. Of course religion requires the absence of logic in order to work, so par for the course. What would this 'competitiveness' look like? The breakfast cereal aisle at the supermarket or toothpaste commercials on TV? "Believe in me and I promise whiter teeth and fresher breath !" If these gods always existed, 13.8 billion years is chump change. Perhaps they take turns creating a Universe, putting in a Planck's Constant and all the other things a Universe needs to behave a certain way, then let it play out over a trillion years or so. Then the next team of deities takes their turn and lets it run a trillion years or so. Or maybe one god is looking for praise and thanks (quite human frailties qualities), and an impish competitor god tosses in a major tsunami that turns some people away from the first god. Humans have this provincial view that it is 'progress' or 'civilized' to abandon polytheism and adopt monotheism. The Greek gods got tossed, and then the Roman gods. So did the Scandinavian gods. Hindus have retained 10 million gods, holdouts that they are. Non-believers just eliminate even the last fantasy, and have zero gods. You are a non-believer with respect to Thor, Zeus, Allah, Krishna and all the others. Non-believers get rid of your god, too. Personally, I think the Greek gods were the best, and if I were to believe, I'd go with them. They're on the one hand helpful, and on the other impish and somewhat sadistic. That is how life passes, with good moments and also tsunamis and childhood cancer. Zeus et al can't be trusted, but maybe you can make a deal with them.

I'm going to guess she's the top earner from Buriram. $37.6 million likely tops the Buriram women who instead ended up on Walking Street. Good for her. I hope she enjoys the ride and doesn't become a victim of K-Pop stardom.

Of all the issues facing the US and the world today, it seems to me transgenderism is not high up on the list---save for POTUS-wannabes who want to pander to the trumpist fringe who live for outrage. I accept that for biological reasons, some people are drawn to the same sex, some are attracted to both, and some feel as if their being is at odds with their physical body. It is not a choice. That being said, I do think being what is now been given the term non-binary is a fad. Bill Maher made a joke of the trend by graphing the changes in sexual orientation over the last fifty years, ending with "if current trends continue, by 2050 we will all be gay or lesbian". I don't know the true % of humans who feel they're in the wrong body, but I doubt the % is as high as the number now claiming it, caught up in the fad. I also think some parents are caught up in the fad and want their child to be 'special', as in transgender, so they can boast or get sympathy from friends, post their 'journey' on FB or other social media, etc. I remember being young, going through puberty, etc., and being confused. I wasn't confused about my gender or sexual orientation, I was just confused. Raging hormones will do that. Everyone goes through that period, and I suspect at that tender stage and age many young people could be influenced by someone telling them what that outside person thinks is their issue, when the actual issue is just the rush of hormones that come with puberty. For that reason, I would not think it is a good idea to use drugs or surgery to alter someone's gender physique before the age of consent.

And what happens when you find out it's Allah or Krishna or Zeus? It will be too late. Religious fanatics get all silly when they imply their morality is superior. The 'faithful' think they can be evil their entire life, then repent at the last second, and because they've bought into a superstition, they get a reward denied to others who might have had a far superior morality and rarely if ever 'sinned' while living generous and noble lives----all because they questioned a woman's lie and a plagiarized deity tale (Joey, I swear god knocked me up; I'm a VIRGIN). Pascal's Wager---which you are trying to use to put the fantastical fear of eternal damnation into others---was really a horse race with a very crowded field. You chose your winner, forsaking all the others. Others forsake all of them. Your odds are not really any better; you just believe they are. The joke's on you. As for what the OP asked, this is a free Forum. The OP is welcome to tell me to go to Hell, as you have implied I will go.

If I was Big Joke's PR team, I would argue that, yes, he has long know all manner of dark secrets about the corrupt police, but he had to bide his time until appointed #1, so that he could then go about correcting the wrongs. If he spoke too soon, he'd never get the top job and never be in a position to rout out corruption. Maybe that excuse would wash.