Walker88

Eternal nothingness. Entropy wins. The trillions of molecules that were "me" get redistributed into the environment. What atoms, molecules, neurons, synapses, ions and chemicals that were temporarily my 'consciousness' go on to become trees or rocks or are contained in someone's glass of water or are part of the atmosphere. 70 or so years after I'm gone, when anyone who ever knew me is also gone, I will be totally forgotten, as if I never even existed. When the sun goes supernova, or if it's too small to supernova and just burns out, some black hole will suck all that was Earth and this solar system, and do whatever it is black holes do with what they've reduced to a singularity. Ceasing to exist for all eternity will bother me as much as not existing for - infinity until my awareness of self arose bothered me. While I exist, however, I'm going to enjoy it....because I can.

"Now that I am 71, do you think I still have what it takes to satisfy a woman of 43?" A profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed, luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence …I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, ah, women sense my power, and seek the life essence….I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence

I think that data was heavily influenced by Josef Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Gotta love Gershwin. Blue, because of censorship, but who thinks that ending coda is anything less than an orgasm? I would suggest for Gamma's mood music (to get that <43 Thai woman frisky), he try Miles Davis' "Tutu". "So What" might be superior, but for a Thai woman one should make a small concession for funk. And since Miles didn't like to use it, Gamma can provide his own vibrato.

On the contrary, I always found the outfits quite attractive. Every so often I stop in the Hooters on Soi 4 in BKK, and I decided that if I ever become a deity, my paradise is going to have women in those orange hot pants. They seem to bring out the absolute best in a woman's asstributes. The staff turnover in Hooters Soi 4 is massive, but they always seem to find women who do those hot pants proud. I dated a woman for a while who won a Ms Hooter's Thailand Bikini Contest. Lovely assets.

Look to the work of Drs Andrew Huberman, Andy Galpin, Don Layman and Peter Attia. Their recommendations are for 1.6 to 2 gm per kg of total body weight. They also recommend animal or whey protein, not just plant protein, as animal/whey is more accessible and has the key amino acid of leucine. All state that because muscle mass and strength correlate with lower levels of all cause mortality, and as one ages protein utilization is less efficient, more protein is needed to maintain muscle mass.

Don't give up on the weights. Strength is highly correlated to lower all cause mortality. Here's a few suggestions: ----More protein. At your age you can process protein with about 30% of the efficiency you could at 25, so take in more protein to overcome the inefficiency. New guidelines from exercise research scientists suggest 1.6gm/kg of body weight per day, up to even 2 gm/kg. You can utilize obn;y about 40 gm of protein in an hour period, so spread out over several meals. Don't worry about activating mTor, because amino acids stay in the blood for less than an hour, so from dinner to tomorrow's breakfast, mTor is turned off. ---Take collagen peptide supplements or powder. You produce about a quarter of the collagen you did at age 20. You need collagen for your joints, tendons and skin. Mix 15-25 grams of it into a protein drink daily. ---Take creatine monohydrate supplements, about 5 gm daily. Not only does it help with energy for muscle growth, it appears to have cognitive benefits as well ---Carbs after a workout, along with more protein. The anti-carb crusade might be useful if you're fat, but carbs are needed if you're athletic and exercising heavily ---Mg has already been mentioned ---Omega-3 supplements...take about 1 gm of a combo of DHA and EPA Omega-3 daily ---For cardio, use a bike rather than running. Each step put 3x your body weight on your knees; running puts 8x body weight on your knees. Knees are not indestructible.

Actually, it's borne out in research, I think some by E.O. Wilson, the father of Sociobiology I read an article about that a few years ago, and it became additional motivation to stay in shape, so when I reach older age I might still be appealing.

Up until very recently, and in some places still today, none of what you mention is available. Consider rural Niger. Or Mali, Chad, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not much Viagra there, nor condoms, nor drugs to treat STDs. Also, most days are spent finding the day's calories. Everybody is tired, but the men still find a way to boom boom, as these nations have the highest fertility rates in the world. Unlikely there is a whole lot of romance involved. Daddy just sticks it in and finishes while Mom just wants to sleep. The other kids in the room sleep through it. The world actually has less sex now than in the past. (Personally, I try to maintain the higher averages, but I can't do it alone.)

She has a Hobson's choice of letting her family down, or doing whatever she can to provide for her child. I am not qualified to look down on what she does, because I never faced anything close to that. I could also be open to falling in love with her if she had qualities I admire. What she did to make ends meet is not for me to judge. What I can judge is how she relates to me, the character and traits she has that appeal to me, and how we get along. I wouldn't close the door on a woman simply because of her background. As I wrote earlier, I am not a virgin, and sometimes I have engaged in non-paid sex simply because I was in the mood for sex. I do not consider that sort of sex in any way morally superior to a woman who seeks money to take care of her child.

Many young women are attracted to considerably older men, and it's not just because of the Electra Complex. Instinct is sometimes at play. A very fit and healthy older man is suggestive of a strong genetic makeup, and women seek a partner with strong genes to mate, as that gives her offspring the best chance at survival. Money might be important, but for this instinctual drive, only in the sense that a man generally needs to be skilled/bright/ambitious/etc. to be wealthy, and intelligence is something indicative of a good genetic makeup. For men who enjoy the company of young women, there is no better incentive to be in shape and stay in shape as one ages. If you're in your 30s or 40s, get that gym membership now and use it. Work hard and make a lot of money, too. That might allow you to be a stud muffin into your 50s and even 60s.

I wonder if you understand the economics of being a bargirl. Many were pregnant at 15-16, their baby daddy did a runner, and they were forced to leave school because their condition would be 'confusing'. Without the HS degree---as useless as it is---they can't even get a cashier job in 7-11 or a product stacker at Big C. Their child is likely with a relative, that relative cannot work due to child care, so the onus is on the young woman. Maybe she can get a waitress job and make 10K baht a month, or if she's really lucky, a factory job that pays 9K a month with a chance for OT. That money isn't going to pay for her flat (if she has left job-starved Isaan), her food, her transportation, her grooming products, plus leave her enough to remit to her mom or grandma who is looking after her little bundle of joy. Maybe the young woman is 'cursed' with good looks. That opens up a job where nobody cares if she can even read, much less have a HS diploma. Suddenly she is making 100K baht a month, maybe more. I know I lack the 'integrity' to walk away from that and go back to Isaan to pick rice for 250 baht a day, though I never had to make such a choice. If you never had to make that choice, then you have no clue which path you would choose, so saying a young woman 'took the easy way' is sanctimony born from ignorance.

Since I'm a gym rat and quite rich, I can have as a goal a similar age gap to what I occasionally see now.... ....and if anyone thinks it's wrong, well...the f-word them. Before I get placed into the box or get poured into the urn, I'm going to enjoy life to the fullest. Any critics I might have are also going to get placed in the box or poured into the urn, albeit they will not have had 1% of the enjoyment I have had.

Not in Pattaya, but in Bangkok I've seen very fit and well-kept older foreign gentlemen walking or dining with lovely, early-20s Thai women. Age gap could be 40 years. Sometimes it looks rather elegant. The two seem....what's the word....happy. Life could be worse...for both of them.

Funny you should mention that. I recently met a 'bargirl' from Isaan. As is often the case, she once became pregnant, and the Thai baby daddy did a runner. She chose to bring the child to term. She has accounting qualifications, but her job did not earn her enough to take care of the child, the grandmother looking after the child, and fund the law education of a very clever sister. This woman's parents did a runner when my friend was about 3, leaving her and the sister with a granny. Yes, typical Isaan story. She had much to overcome just to get where she is now. My friend is a skilled artist and has a great deal of knowledge re art, both Eastern and Western (self taught....isn't the internet wonderful !). She is skilled in Thai dance, which may not be the Bolshoi, but it is lovely and culturally significant. She is a fan of jazz, and has an unusual play list on her phone. She is beginning to study jazz piano. She can cook Japanese food, and knows the difference between shiso and mitsuba. She's 21. Maybe not a typical Isaan woman, but she's proof they are not all cut from the same cloth. Can she do algebraic topology or discuss the Chern-Simons Form? No. Does she know what the War of Jenkins Ear was all about? No. What she is, however, is a heck of a lot brighter and far more curious than the average expat I meet here, albeit lacking a rigorous education that probably flew right over the typical expat's head. The intellect and the curiosity are there, so for the right guy, she could make a wife every bit as good as any common Russian woman raised in the Putin dictatorship. Do you think Dan and his Russian wife discuss the phrasing of a Borodin symphony over dinner? I'm guessing 'no'. When one wonders what a Western expat would have in common with an Isaan bargirl, I might ask what any Westerner has in common with any Thai, or even why any Westerner would choose to live in Thailand, since Thai and Western culture and ways of thinking are so different. Do we have anything in common? People find reasons to like things that are so different from what they know.

But they might marry a man who treats them as an equal human being, worthy of basic respect and to be afforded dignity. I spent many years using my own money to spot micro loans to people with ideas, ambition, a solid work ethic, but who had no access to capital. It might surprise you that even 'bargirls' often have ideas and good business sense, and merely need a chance to show what they can do. Some bargirls, perhaps through their work, have incredible people skills, which go a long way to making a start-up business successful. Most of the people I funded were not bargirls, but some were, and many came from families where an older sister or two worked the bars. To overlook a woman simply because of a job she does or once did is to miss opportunity. It takes effort and an open mind to help level a very unfair world playing field. As for 'creepy sex tourist', I wonder how that is defined, since your comments suggest you have 'played the field' while in Thailand. What makes you NOT creepy?

I see you believe you think you live on the Moral High Road and are a flawless judge of character and integrity. It smacks of false virtue and some Dunning-Kreuger to boot. While I am not married to a woman who chose to work in a bar, nothing would prevent me from doing so if I fell in love. I am not a virgin, and I do not expect any long term partner to be one. A woman might have engaged in sex for money; I have engaged in non-paid sex simply because I was feeling randy. I do not view my exploit in any way morally superior. Women choose to work a bar for many reasons. I did not live their life, so not only do I have no right to judge them, but I have no clue how I would behave under similar circumstances. You seem to think you are better than what you call 'hookers', but I suspect that is pure delusion on your part. Certainly the stridency with which you dismiss all women who worked bars suggests you believe yourself to be a superior being, but I wonder what proof you have of that. I suspect none; just a kind of Potemkin ego that life has never put to the test. I have known many women who worked bars at one time or another. I include some as good friends, and find them to be extremely kind, caring, and generous....exactly the kind of people who could make a wonderful life partner. I have also worked in fields where people had easy lives and who ended up making millions not so much due to talent, but more to an accident of birth. I include myself in that, as I entered this world with more advantage than 99.999% of all the humans who ever lived. I see zero difference in character or integrity between former multi-millionaire colleagues with elite educations and some of my friends who entered existence in rural Isaan, got pregnant at a tender age, were forced to leave school, and who had precious few options other than find work in a bar. Without a HS degree, even 7-11 cashier is out of reach. I can judge such a person ? What makes me---or you---so superior than we can look down our noses? In every sphere of human existence there are good people and bad people. That includes women who worked bars. I might even think that someone who has experienced great difficulty in life, yet who is still kind and caring, may be a morally superior person. Goodness is a choice. As for what other people might think if I married a former bargirl? What do I care what others think if I am happy? Who are they to judge me? How has their supposed superior morality evidenced itself in making the world a better place? If it is just about 'face', that is a meaningless concept in my world. Anyone who looks askance at me is going to end up worm food in a short while anyway, and for the rest of eternity their sanctimonious opinion means exactly nothing.

To be fair to trump, his paramours did get a lot of magazine covers, so there's that.

It's at least sexual assault. Plus, he was a deadbeat dad. Never could figure why a supposedly omnipotent being would 'create' a Universe of 200 billion galaxies, each with up to a trillion stars, most of which have planets revolving around them, just so he could knock up a female being on one planet in one part of a pedestrian galaxy.....all somehow part of a bizarre initiation ceremony to get one species of being on that one planet into some celestial country club. Oh, and this omnipotent being has no problem whatsoever with slavery, and even told one of his early Guys with the Red Phoneline (Moses) how husbands/significant others could and should abort fetuses if they suspect the wife had dallied (albeit NOT with said omnipotent being, Joey, so get thee to Bethlehem in December). Is the explanation for all of this in those schoolbooks just after the denial of evolution?

Not quite sure what that means. Do we get bonus points on our last day if we avoided bars, nightclubs, agogos, etc.? Can we cash those points in somewhere for 'valuable prizes'? Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and the only thing that matters is if one enjoyed the interim. For some people that might be bars. It might be going through a large library of books. It could even be agogos. For the remainder of eternity it will make no difference how one spent this brief existence. Do whatever pleases you. It was Somerset Maugham who said he had met many men who lived the straight and narrow, and at their end had regrets they hadn't let loose more, but Maugham claimed he never met anyone who had spent life sowing his wild oats who had any regrets at the end.

I'm lucky enough to fit that profile, and I'm quite happy right here. I have homes in other countries I now barely use. I do travel occasionally, but for the time being, Thailand is quite pleasant. It has yet to exhaust its appeal. I'm not old enough to have health issues, and I work my butt off staying in shape, so ideally I'll be late entering the Death Zone. All I would like is more time to enjoy, and nobody gets that. Now if the question was you could go back to age 25, albeit with all your current wealth, then.....Oh boy !!!!!

Funny. I know you're well read enough to know James Clerk Maxwell. Do you know he used just mathematics to determine the structure of the rings of Saturn? When we have a quiet Saturday afternoon we might reread The Power and the Glory, or watch Peaky Blinders. Maxwell took quill and paper and figured out what makes the rings. Yes, there is no reason in this modern world to ever be bored, unless by choice.

Step back and look at the big picture. Despite silliness like TikTok (a platform where those without talent produce content for those without taste), QAnon, trump, Ukraine, Darfour, squirrels who hire chipmunks…..this is not the worst time in history. I suspect things were a bit worse in the 1930s. And definitely in the 1940s. The US wasn't such a fun place to live in the 1860s, nor China in the 1960s. The world before antibiotics wasn't so much fun, where having sex might mean a nasty burn until one was in the box. Pancreatic cancer before morphine was likely rather unpleasant. Going back further, Genghis Khan wiped out 20% of humanity, and yet some consider him some sort of hero. Today we might have crazed religious zealots who still believe in Skydaddies, reincarnation, a 6000 year old Earth, "souls" or the Big Alibi ("Joey, I swear god did it"), but only in a few places (mostly in the Middle East) do we have Inquisition-style behavior. Plus, the Earth is no longer flat. Slavery is also at its lowest point in human history. Let’s take a moment to be grateful. Today's plus side includes things like the entire body of human knowledge being available at one's fingertips. Maxwell and Faraday, inter alia, would have sold their "souls" for that kind of access. Also, old guys can take a meager pension and retire in a tropical paradise like Thailand, a place where they might even be able to pretend they are the stud muffin at 70+ they (never) were at 21. For those who think today is Dark Age 2.0, take a page out of the notebook of Isaac Newton (and Leibniz). When schools got shut down due to a recurrence of the Plague, Newton used his time to develop calculus. That certainly beats what students did during our Covid school shutdown, where they bingewatched Walking Dead or TikTok videos. Perhaps we should truly never let a crisis go to waste. It’s our own fault if we don’t use our time wisely. Now there is a downside to the modern world. We are getting dumber, and we are getting proud of our dumbness. Maybe there are Maxwells and Faradays out there (Nima Arkani-Hamed? Jim Simons?), but absolutely no way do I see we have the intellect that was gathered together at Los Alamos to develop the bomb (Oppie, Bethe, Teller, Fermi, Serber, Wilson, Lawrence, Feynman, Bohr). Of course, maybe that is a good thing in some sense. We're also getting dumber because we no longer need to use our brain for simple tasks like multiplying 8 x 13 or making change for a 75 baht purchase using a 100 baht note. We don't physically write much anymore, instead typing on a keyboard or simply speaking into a mic. We couldn't find our neighbor's house without GPS. Entire areas of our brains are going to go fallow. Luckily we'll be subjects of AI robots who will make sure we take our vitamins and clean the lint from our navels. One thing that is concerning is never in all of human history has a single human been potentially as powerful as today. Sure, Genghis killed millions, but the average crazy guy was severely limited in how many "souls" he or she could take out. A guy could go into a village with a sword and maybe kill a dozen before villagers strung him up. Bad for the deceased, but not an apocalypse. Today, a single bad guy could do something like develop a pathogen that could wipe out millions, even all of our species. Terrorists could get their hands on a nuke (like from Pakistan or India) and take out a Paris or downtown Bangkok. "Forward-thinking" entities like al Qaeda have sent their best and brightest to the West to get advanced degrees in biochemistry, and their intent was not to cure the common cold. On a national scale, in places where autocrats rule, a single command could start WWIII. Imagine a thousand Tsar Bombas being set off (Tsar Bomba, detonated 30 October 1961, had the power of ALL the bombs dropped in WWII times 10....that is nasty.) Think of the firepower in a single modern sub, loaded with 20 multiple-warhead carrying Trident missiles. Scary stuff. Now as an eternal optimist, I don't think we'll nuke each other and we probably will avoid a lab-created pathogen that wipes us all out. Our greatest threat may well be that we die of boredom (Imagine what Bach or Liszt would think of EDM/Techno/House/Trance). Aaaaaaaahhhhhh !!!!!!!

Good intentions and campaign promises are one thing, but reality tends to intrude. The world is awash in productive capacity. It doesn't need another Singapore or China or Germany. There is no idle space sitting out there waiting for a 'developed' Thailand to assume, even if Thailand could up its game to developed status in the term of one election cycle. There is a process to becoming a developed state, and Thailand has a long way to go before it could have a Silicon Valley or be cutting edge in any 21st Century technology. Thailand's economic success over the last decade or two was the result of two things: FDI because it was cheap, and debt. All that FDI did not come to Thailand because of the 'highly educated workforce'. All that FDI has a cycle, too, and when plants become obsolete, sometimes they just pick up and move to the next cheap place. Maybe it could become more difficult for expats to reside in Thailand, but economic development is not going to be the cause. Nationalism, maybe, but not economics. The potential new PM is quite international, and whatever his long term goals for Thailand might be, he is experienced enough to know development isn't going to happen from within. It will require friendly relations with those who can aid Thailand. He is unlikely to alienate the very nations he will need, even if their retired expats are of minimal use to Thailand. He will have other priorities than worrying about Western pensioners. Of more concern to those pensioners would be a Party who might pander to Thais who suffer from xenophobia, though even that would be unlikely to change things in the near term. If Thai Rak Thai couldn't do that, little is on the horizon that might. If I were a pensioner living here, I wouldn't be too worried.

Some get their 'education' and worldview from pulp fiction and Hollywood B-fare. These people also think Men in Black is a documentary.