gejohesch

Farang people I interact with might start with such platitudes - that's normal - but most of the time we follow up with some more substantial discussions. Sometimes on light subjects, sometimes about more serious subjects. It does not matter what, the important thing is that there is a "real" exchange, moving beyond endless and repetitive platitudes.

Only in your imagination

The entire world sees what it is: a mega MAGA <deleted> show. And is laughing/crying at what the USA have become.

I did much to learn it, formally including reading and writing which helps tremendously to get the phonetics right. It took me 3-4 years to be comfortable to the point of reading without even having to think about the correct pronunciation. I have to say, not bragging about it, that I'm very good at languages (I'm very familiar to fluent with several). With all that, I lost interest and motivation over the years because: - as you say, most Thais we encounter speak a version of the language which is extremely different from the official Thai. - most do not have anything interesting to contribute to any discussion which goes beyond the stage of "it's hot today" or "is the food too spicy?". - in Isan (my wife's region), and certainly in the villages, many people understand Thai but can hardly speak it. I'm not kidding! My wife has to accompany her elder brother to the hospital, recently, because some doctors cannot speak the local "phasaa isaan", and he cannot speak proper Thai. - I worked a few years in a Thai enterprise, with mid-high class Thais who spoke proper Thai. They hardly interacted with me socially, many quite obviously hated having a non-Thai colleague around. With all that, I lost interest.

Good riddance! The current USA administration has never been a sincere party in this affair, on the contrary, it has clearly displayed its sympathies for the Russian aggressors. The world will be better off not without them!

Thanks. I could not agree more. And like what we see too much playing in the USA, the more fascist-minded and the more crooked they are, those French (and elsewhere) politicians like to parade as "patriots". It's revolting.

That would make sense. Bangkok is built on very poorly consolidated sediments (fluvial/alluvials to paralic clastics from the Chao Prayah river system). I would guess that any building of some size in Bangkok requires rather deep foundations, and of course concrete requires time to cure.... A lot of investigation required here, and lessons to be learnt maybe?

I would agree, Bangkok being really quite a distance from the epicentre (Sagaing Fault in Myanmar). Also, German expert sources mention 6.6, as opposed to 7.7 Richter for the quake. That's a big difference.

Really? "Taxi meters will be recalibrated for farang tax" : is that true? I would not put it past Thailand, though...

Besides other considerations, I find the "high literacy" argument totally misleading. True, it's difficult to find a Thai person who cannot read. But what beyond just being "able to read"? A large part of the population, certainly in the rural parts, does zero "real reading". People there only read the forms they have to fill in or that they get from the administration (and often with difficulty), or religious material. Apart of that, it's all about "reading" stuff on the social media. Few people read books. It's of course not necessarily 100% true, but I guess what I see in the villages in Isan is representative to a good degree of the reality in Thailand : I have never ever seen books in a house in Isan. My wife went to school until she was 12, she can read but with some difficulty. Some members in her family cannot read at all.

Flip-flopping, confusion and unclearness are characteristics of the way things go with Thai people. Hidden behind this, possibly another characteristic : the lack of efficiency of the police forces. If there are so many foreigners engaging in illegal activities, would not a good, efficient and reliable police be able to effectively fight against it? Maybe I'm naive, but don't get sufficient info on who enters the country to profile people and narrow down on potential illegal workers? OK, tracking them once they've passed immigration might be an issue.

"As of the third quarter of 2023, individuals of Mexican descent accounted for approximately 11.4% of the total U.S. labor force. Given that Hispanics or Latinos made up about 19.1% of the U.S. labor force during the same period, this means that Mexicans represented roughly 60% of all Latino workers in the United States." (from ChatGPT) It does not matter one bit if the exact percentage is 50% or 70%, instead of 60%. The point is that Mexicans are by far the dominant component of the Latino workforce. Gringo

But going back to the main topic here - the smiles. I do not spend a lot of time in what seems to be the mainstay places of so many - Hua Hin, Pattaya, the islands, Chiang Mai and so on. When in Thailand, I spend 99% of my time in my wife's region, in Isaan, and I never noticed people around there losing their smiles. They are all, without any exception, very friendly and keep smiling even when I get a bit worked up when a shop assistant or a bank employee (recently) does not understand what I'm after (I cannot help being a farang after all!) - they still smile! They have defaults, of course, but as for smiles : always there!

Burmese in Thailand seem to be the equivalent of Mexicans in the USA. But, possibly, better treated, as says my wife? She also considers Burmese are harder workers than Thai people are - again a possible parrallel with Mexican workers in the USA?

It's not wrong. I know it's disconcerting a bit, I also got worried a few years ago when not getting a stamp leaving Mexico. I've been back 3 times to Mexico since then and each time no stamp. That's also the way they operate. So, I did not get worried when leaving Thailand a few months ago and not getting a stamp in my passport (EU).

"Tariff money will be extracted from the internal economy and so will decrease the volume of cash in the taxable public domain." Exactly. Everyone with 1 gram of working brain cells knows it! So it is effectively a tax on importers and on local consumers. Sure, a lot of money will flow into some coffers at a "higher" level. The question then is : what are those coffers, who manages them and what do they do with the money? But the fact remains that at a "lower" level ie "the man in the street", there will be less money to spend on daily necessities.

Thanks for these explanations. I'm not an economist but I find all that clear, and it makes a lot of sense to me. One thing, in particular, catches my attention: the concept of economic ecosystems, as opposed to the old-fashioned concept of "isolated" economies which could very well function by trading "wine here for cheese there". The idea was that if 2 countries A and B can both make say cheese and wine, but A makes cheese more effectively than B and B makes wine more effectively than A, the both A and B will benefit by B buying cheese from A and A buying wine from B. That frees manpower away from less effective tasks and ends up lowering the costs. Let me develop a bit on your wire and car seat story. Say the USA are better at making the start-up wires, send them to Mexico who are more effective in bunching wires together, who send the bunches of wires to Canada who are better than the USA or Mexico at fitting the bunches into some hardware and software, who then send the wire bunches + hw/sw to the USA who are better than Canada or Mexico in building all that into car seats and so on, and so on. So, in a way, these modern ecosystems, are they not like an extension of the principle that "trading is good"?

I agree. I'm a EU citizen. These last few years, I have avoided buying anything made in China, which I see as a bullying and arrogant nation that threatens several neighbours with its aggressive policies. Think of Taiwan, or of China building artificial islands in the South China Sea to support its very dubious claim that it all belongs to them (or nearly). Now, I have started checking brands to make sure I do not buy anything made in the USA anymore. I buy sports and biking equipment, like 1-2,000 EUR worth a year - OK, it's not that much but believe me I'm certainly not the only one to do so. I must say I'm sorry for all the very decent Americans, I know there are millions of them, and I have several good American friends. But the situation is clearly that we now have an insane dictatorship in place in the USA who throws <deleted> and abuse at everything that does not fit with its hyper-nationalist view of the world. It's war without declaring it, and the world is responding to it - I'm just one small representative of that reaction. Coming to other points in this discussion - does Trump know and/or understand what he is doing? Is the USA economy going to benefit, if not in the immediate, at least in the mid to long term, so the Trump policies will be vindicated? I think the answer to all that is : NO. What I see in the Trump policies and in the people around him, a classic case of hubris and overreach - ie of overplaying one's hand. People all around the world will pay a heavy price for Trump's manipulations, first of all Americans themselves (apart maybe of the superrich). It is well known that markets hate chaos and uncertainty. Normal people hate that too. People who feel the threat of losing their jobs or at least losing some of their purchasing power (and there are growing echoes in that sense) will protect themselves by reducing their expenses. That will have a knock-on effect on all sorts of industries. I'm not an expert nor a prophet, so I might be wrong, but I see a severe economic crisis being in the cards. How certain can anyone be that all that Trump stuff is going to end with a sweet, soft and gentle landing for the USA????? I think people are playing with fire big time here....

Thanks for your "correct....". However, I'm sorry, but I don't think I agree with you for the rest.

That's my reading of Starmer's statements. He cannot say openly that he distrusts Trump, that would be amateurish to the extreme. At the same time, he knows how to let people understand where he stands when he said (somewhere, I cannot remember where) that "He cannot accept that the US are an unreliable ally". What this really means is that, he thinks/he knows/he understands that the US are now an unreliable ally, and he finds that new reality difficult to accept. It's a typical British understatement, very subtle and diplomatic.

Good summary. The prime beneficiary of Trump-MAGA policies will certainly be China, I'm 100% sure of that. Certainly not Russia (!), and I doubt the EU can compete with China, although it might do its best. Whatever, The USA will be a big loser.

I'm afraid there is some truth behind the perception that Israelis often behave badly when abroad. I remember seeing a group of young Israelis in a restaurant in Hampi, years back, one guy was reclining on his seat and had his legs put right up across the table, he was wearing no shoes and was displaying his very filthy feet to everyone. That would be shocking in any country. Such arrogance! Such total lack of respect for other people! That's just one example, I have seen more. I'm not anti-semitic one bit, btw. On the contrary.

I saw that in India in a few places I visited just a few years ago, eg Rishikesh, Gokarna or Hampi. I met a nice Israeli mature couple in Orccha who brought the subject themselves, being embarrassed by the poor behaviour of their younger compatriots in India. They tried to explain it by "they had a tough time while in the army and now need to let their hair down". But I think there is also sthg true in what you're saying - they feel superior to others. Maybe it's more the case with poorly educated people, as also happens with of other nationalities?

The Thai culture is charming, but if only they would spend a bit less time laughing, playing, praying and singing when at school (or even at work!), and a bit more time actually concentrating on learning and/or doing something.... Ah, the word "concentrating" ...... I will stop here!

It seems to me that Thais consume a lot of Chinese products (plastic stuff, tools, electric pumps etc). I wonder what effect US tariffs on China might have on Chinese sales in Thailand?