Prubangboy

17 minutes ago, 2baht said:

There is some good herbal anti boredom medication about! 

 

I love weed, but it doesn't eliminate boredom, it just postpones it.

If you meditate, you're never bored. You always have a little bit of something to do.

I did some focus groups for vodka. In the proverbial blind taste test, Sky beat out all the higher end brands, including Grey Goose. Reason: no burn going down.

But then, a lot of people like that ethanol kick in the back of the throat.

Flavored vodka, like lemon or passionfruit (the only one I bought twice).... 

-I'm go to guess is a big Bob Smith no-no.

What is your favorite short time hotel?

How much does that cost these days for how many hours?

20 minutes ago, JimTripper said:

it's both. the point is that it's not ideal for everybody and has a lot of negatives.

I enjoy your ruminations. I'm at the opposite end of the bell curve where I think I died and went to heaven.

It may be place-specific. I hear a lot of unhappiness in Issan and Pattaya, but almost no complainers in Bangkok or Chiang Mai. Hua Hin seems chill too. Phuket, less so.

37 minutes ago, JimTripper said:

It may not be Thailand though, 

 

Any mention of being dissatisfied on this forum gets met with all kinds of attacks, usually of the "it's just you" variety

 

This is a great place to ponder expat life with other ponderers, BUT

If it is indeed not Thailand, then it must be some variation of "just you". Bad fit, or whatever.

The next 5 posts from the OP:

"I want to go. I do, really." 

"But do I? Do I really? I've been there a bunch of times, but I still can't even fathom a guess as to whether or not I'll like it".

20 hours ago, Walker88 said:

 

A few comments....

 

How do you implement a wealth tax? Cannot be done.

 

 

 

Agreed. I'm using Wealth Tax as a broad short hand for a range of ideas like Land Tax, new income tax bracket, ending offshore accounts, properly funding the tax collection arm of government.

All of them are problematic, but so is is 1500 a month for a studio in Bristol. I've been to Bristol. Bleak. And it's still in the South. It's grim up Norf. How long can they hold out with rents popping up 10% a year on their increasingly shorter leases?

This will be like civil rights, a multi-decade process. Like that one, it will divide the old from the young. The contempt the young have for us for our iPhone and latte-lecturing is now intractable and hard-wired. 

25 minutes ago, stoner said:

 

you should be a pothead instead. 

This is the Intervention-style reality TV show the world really wants to see. Alkie to Pothead.

Problem: no drama when they convert to being potheads.

Frasier Suites, waaaay down Suk soi 11 has a small one without the dreaded DJ ruining it.

A few floors down is the 5* Indian restaurant, Charcoal (home of the worlds biggest nan).

The China Grand at the edge of Chinatown has a revolving rooftop bar.

It's a terrible hotel, but the drinks are cheap. The full rotation takes about an hour.

4 minutes ago, fredwiggy said:

As compared to here? I lived in the US 62 years, and knew hundreds of intelligent women there, of all races. If you listen to a woman, they might talk more with you.

He's an old racist who mops floors. 

So no Mensa-women will be chatting him up.

20 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

 

Given that the rich make the rules, does wealth tax have any chance of reality?

Yes, once dirt is shoveled on top of the last lifeless, boomer face.

And then, a massive wealth transfer to the Gen X'ers.

Will they be any more generous/enlightened?

Prob a bit. Like we are compared to our parents.

I arrived here via Appalachia where you see your no people reality playing out hard. The young rightfully flee, there's no one available to make your taco or mow your lawn. At any price.

The only way a shop can make money is by selling pumpkin lattes to tourists -inside a "real" hardware store that used to be a real hardware store.

Racism prevents Mexicans solving these problems, but honestly? They've left this area to paint houses up North already. Their illegal wages are no longer at a discount anyway.

The hospital is a big employer, but no one wants the job in this Podunk that now all of the sudden it's a grand a month for rent. 'May as well live in a real place. In a decade, the average resident's age went from 56 to 68.

This is a snapshot of the typical Post-Trump landscape across the USA. These people, these towns, are wholly obsolete. They need help, they're not going to get it.

Bought vodka by mistake, plopped a few stalks of lemongrass in it, very nice straight out of the freezer.

But you have to let the lemongrass and vodka steep for a week.

So not really a Bob-doable idea.

3 hours ago, sqwakvfr said:

I was shocked because lunch at Chipotle was $17 dollars. Chipotle is one of the fast food outlets that start at $15 to $17 an hour.  

It costs about the same in Europe.

But they have decent financial aid for college and some kind of medical care. Yelling at the young for noticing this is futile.

Denim, thanks for the attempt at elevation here.

This guy is a poor speaker for his point that technology unduly concentrates wealth, resulting in social problems. If Grab takes 30% for the ride, that's a massive redistribution upwards to a tiny amount of people. (I tip my Grab driver 30% with this in mind).

The flip side is that a lot of Grab delivery people now have a job. But then wealth again concentrates between the class of people who own a motorcycle and those who don't. These various dislocations are now so extreme that they cannot be sorted out by the invisible hand of capitalism -so what to do?

I prefer the approach of the book, Capital In The 20th Century which more cuts directly to chase: When the rate of return for capital is greater than the overall rate of growth of the economy, money will only flow like gravity ever upwards. To change this, you need wealth taxes. 

You need to lower the rate of capital return so that all boats might rise. That's what rightward/centrist politics calls punishing wealth creators. It's not politically doable for at least the next 20 years.

In the 70's, in Manhattan, the dollar was cheap and the town was awash with middle class European tourists. The resentment was strong;  it was from this time the term Euro-Trash was coined. Some benefitted from these new tourists, but there was the sense of getting priced out of "your" neighborhood.

Now I live in Nimman, and I am the equivalent of Euro-Trash to them. I represent a little bit of money for laundry and takeaway coffees, but mostly, I am a rent-raising, $5 mango shake-buying, net-negative.

They're outwardly nicer than I was due to various cultural norms. They're less educated and so less able to form opinions about gentrification etc. And they're more hierarchal so less inclined to even think much about it.

But even being the culturally sensitive, good guy that I am, if they could waive a magic wand and make me disappear, they would.

2 minutes ago, sqwakvfr said:

He has not bean able to find a decent job and I suggested he might try and enlist in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps or Air Force.   

As a former Sociology major, I can only guess how gratefully this advice was received.

No, I never saw dime-one out of Sociology. But it did get me the stupid desk job at the bank.

They forget we ever existed whenever we leave the room.

You prob don't go much. Me neither. I have a proper balcony.

But where's a memorable one you've been to either in Thailand or elsewhere?

Do you prefer a nature view or a city view? Would you drink a craft cocktail involving dry ice and smoke?

In Nimman Chiang Mai, I can just about hop on one foot to 3 of them. At the Maya Mall, it's more like a rooftop park WITH a bar.

Here's the one I might pop into every other month:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g293917-d10556993-Reviews-The_Rooftop_Bar-Chiang_Mai.html