Jacques Clouseau

I don't think any advice can help you, brother. It's really up to your wife to simply ignore them and cut ties. Emotional blackmail can't work if there's nobody left to blackmail. Good luck.

Last time I visited a national park was in Chiang Dao. The ranger at the entrance asked me for 400thb. I said no (because I knew it was only 200thb for white people) He said no problem, for you it's only 200thb. Lol Price was something like 20 or 40thb for locals... Trail was pretty average and extremely dirty (plastic everywhere). A few decent viewpoints at the top but that's about it. I'm done with Thailand's racist policies and lack of added value. Why should I finance their national identity bolstering BS when in return they won't even clean their parks properly? Never again. Trails are much better in Laos anyways. Too bad Pita Charoenanatikhornwhatever couldn't make it to the top. He might have had better ideas. You know the kind that wouldn't damage the tourism industry even further.

Sounds like serious competition for US-based Quantumscape...

Having skills allowed those people to buy themselves some time. Enough for Germany to be defeated before the nazis could kill them. So saying that some Jews survived thanks to their skills is indeed a statement that requires contextualization. Ultimately they survived because they got lucky. Skills or no skills all Jews were meant to be killed. The memorial representative is right imo.

Luxembourg is very small. Probably much richer though...

True it is really the equivalent of the US, Russia, China or India on every single level...

Nope :)

A fatal blow is probably an excessive statement but tourism is struggling for sure. Covid is one reason but I think Thailand is also struggling to bring added value to what it has to offer. Cheap sex for the western lower middle class isn't gonna cut it anymore. The average westerner has lost too much purchase power while Thais' expectations have been going up. This creates a contradiction that won't be easy to solve imo. I think that Thailand knows it doesn't have what it takes to attract rich people. The narrative about attracting "quality tourism" has been fading away gradually it seems. Recently I've seen initiatives to grow domestic and regional tourism. TAT seems to be looking into growing Thailand's well-being industry as well. How successful is it gonna be? I don't think anyone knows. One thing is for sure, it will take time to shift and diversify the entire industry. Wouldn't be surprised to see deflation in the adult industry at some point...

Thailand ministers are Thai people with political responsibilities. It's part of their job to make sure tourists come to Thailand. Bothering the bog standard Russian isn't gonna help with the war in Ukraine. Btw I suspect a lot of Russians coming to Thailand to be anti-war.

Why would a small Asian country like Thailand take side in a conflict between two slavic nations? Thai people probably don't care much about what's going on in Europe. They have their own problems to deal with. Seems pretty normal to me. And by the way, I don't know what's worse: taking Russian tourists in or pretending to support Ukraine while buying Russian natural gas (which is what the EU is still doing to this day) ? Welcome in the world of realpolitik. Dualism doesn't have its place here.

I feel you. I've been like you all my life. I took the nomad path. I know it's a form of escapism but I don't care. For a year now I've been traveling all over SE Asia, I went to different parts of Thailand, Malaysia and Laos - most of the time hiking in nature. I travel on the cheap and make the money I need online. It's not gonna lead me anywhere but that's ok. Society bores me to death and I know I'm not alone in this. The meaning crisis in the West has just begun imo. Soon we'll be legions. Legions of neo dharma bums :))

"Apporter de l'eau à la mer." (bringing water to the sea) But it doesn't really capture the "bringing a sandwich to a restaurant" spirit. "Apporter de l'eau à la mer" is essentially bringing something unnecessary somewhere but it fails to capture the idea of quality in "bringing a sandwich to a restaurant". You know? The sandwich is common and boring and the restaurant is sort of fancy and on occasions only. I've no idea how I would convey that in french. I could say something like "Amener ta femme à Pattaya, c'est se mettre des bâtons dans les roues"... (bâtons dans les roues = sticks in the wheels) But that stresses the idea of self-sabotage... I don't know !

Not international enough, mademoiselle. I don't like it.... Didn't know that Newcastle coals thing even existed :) Learning everyday !

It's like taking a sandwich to the restaurant. I think this is how you're supposed to say it.

I don't know. It might be multi-factorial. But I feel like many many many companies have been struggling to make consistent money and went deep into debts to remain attractive. I don't know who's to blame for that. Maybe digital platforms and globalization ? I don't know. Anyhow the private sector was drowning in debt and the inflation crisis we're going through wasn't that much of a surprise to me. At some point the situation became unsustainable and prices went going up because companies needed the money to avoid death. Lack of competition among larger companies might be another reason prices went up like they did. Some people were talking about greedflation if I remember well. I don't know :)

True. Thing is we ain't talking about the same kind of poor. You got the poor consumer and you got the poor poor. The poor poor would benefit but the poor consumer is getting screwed and might even end up becoming a poor poor. I don't know, bro. I'm really not convince by this carbon tax. It seems to require a lot of monitoring (hence bureaucracy) in order to have a chance to work. Yeah the article itself is stating that several countries have done it. I don't know. I might look into it at some point but I'm pretty skeptical. The 2008 subprime bs was also triggered by some sort of credit scheme imagined by bureaucrats to allow more people to become house owners. Nice results... It would require some sort of communist planning of the economy honestly :))

My guess is that it would end up exactly like what we've seen recently with inflation. Every company trying to beat the competition by reducing profit and getting into debt until it becomes obvious that strategy won't work. Then you have a huge wave of inflation and poor people suffer the most. Here it would be something like companies struggling to make a profit because they don't pass on the carbon tax and at some point the system breaks and you get inflation.

Exactly what I thought... "The first is its impact on low-income households, who use most of their income for consumption. However, this regressivity could be offset in any of a number of ways, including refundable income tax credits or payroll tax credits. Thus, while this is clearly a concern, it should not be prohibitive to implementing a carbon tax." I disagree. This is gonna go south for sure. Economists are a cancer. Always have been. They really should stay away from climate change.

In a free market economy I don't see how this is doable. If you tax a company, the company has the right to pass on the cost to customers. Trying to prevent this would result in rigged prices and eventually severe market problems. I'm missing a piece of the puzzle here.

Pretty superficial way of evaluating people but that's really up to you. I didn't went off any tangent. Since the beginning I'm criticizing climate alarmism. As for the IPCC the only thing I'm saying is that the report I've read was pretty vague and didn't mention any catastrophe for humans. I'm not denying climate change and its challenges. We gonna go through big changes for sure. I'm just saying we have the ability to adapt to these changes. The real catastrophe is gonna be for lifeforms unable to adapt. Those are gonna go extinct. But then again, it's up to us to protect ecosystems and help them adapt to a new world. It's all about will and fear isn't gonna help getting the work done. That's why I hate alarmists and their end-of-the-world bull<deleted>. You think like that, it's over before it starts.

"Externality" seems to be pretty self-explanatory. But yeah maybe I'm missing something. Please enlighten me.

I agree. I just think the carbon tax isn't a fair way of doing it.

It amounts to a tax on individuals to be fair as industries would pass on the cost of that tax to customers. I disagree with that carbon tax idea as it would affect poor people the most.

Yeah "captain obvious" and "unimaginative morons" really say a lot about me. More than the twenty comments that I've left so far. That kind of defeats the purpose of a summary though. Please don't pretend you don't understand what I meant. Concepts must be precisely defined. Period. As stated previously, I read one of their reports and I felt like I didn't learn much. It was pretty vague and clearly didn't aim at giving people a clear understanding of the world of tomorrow. Reason for that I suspect is because they don't really know where we're going. The world is gonna change for sure. Does it mean we are headed towards the collapse of the modern world or the extinction of our species? I didn't read that anywhere in that report. I said climate alarmists were morons. I never talked about the IPCC members being morons. Stop trippin', bro. Well pretty normal cause I never talked about condos withstanding tornadoes and even if I did it would have had nothing to do with protecting ecosystems. I don't even understand your point. 1/3 of the food we produce is being thrown away. People don't get the food they need because of greed. Blaming climate change for this misery is lame. Read the first sentence of your article on Syria. Climate change can't be blamed for this mess. Human greed (again) is responsible. Anyway. I don't see anything as bad as WW2 in all this. It is sad, yes. But all these atrocities were avoidable. People decide not to take the necessary decisions. Climate change makes a convenient scapegoat for sure with you... Says a lot about who you really are !! (lol)

See you do it again. Rather than making your point, you attack me. Of course I detest alarmists for reasons that live in my head. Where else are these reasons supposed to live exactly ? Alarmists are motivated by many different things. But the common denominator seems to be the moronic idea that scaring people is a effective strategy. Nope. Sorry. Doesn't work. At all.