SoCal1990

That is true Charlie. The old Thai "Hawm Gahm" embrace. Love that!

I have always been slightly baffled by Thailand’s long running love affair with menthol and camphor inhalers. Years ago you used to see people everywhere walking around with those little stick inhalers jammed up their nostrils. Often they would just leave them hanging there unattended like an ornamental piece of nose jewelry. Some of them even had that double barrel design so you could apparently ventilate both sides of your brain at the same time. Back then it was a common sight to see a Thai bloke hanging out of the window of one of those green Bangkok buses, traffic not moving, diesel fumes everywhere, and there he was with an inhaler stuffed up his nose like it was the last line of defense against the apocalypse. Fast forward a couple of decades and Thailand seems to have upgraded the technology. Now the inhalers come in these little civilized canisters with a screw cap and a wide opening. Inside there is a mesh pouch filled with some mysterious mix of herbs, menthol, camphor, and whatever else they have thrown into the pot. You unscrew the lid, take a deep sniff, and apparently all is well with the universe again. People in the West normally use them when they have a cold, when their sinuses are blocked, or maybe when they feel dizzy, but in Thailand they seem to be everywhere all the time. What I find humorous is how often you see them lying around, left behind in random places. On a table in a cafe. On a bench somewhere. At the gym next to a treadmill. By a sink in a public bathroom. It often looks like someone absent mindedly set it down after a quick nasal tune up and buggered off. The whole obsession seems slightly ridiculous to an outsider, but maybe they are onto something the rest of us have not unlocked yet. Either that, or Thailand has quietly become the world capital of recreational menthol inhalation and nobody bothered to inform the rest of the planet. 😄

I used to assume there was at least some basic level of intelligence and cognitive function required to make it all the way to Pattaya from a foreign land. After all, you have to book an international flight, get yourself through airport security, board the correct plane, deal with immigration at the other end, and then somehow manage ground transport from Bangkok to your final Puh-Tai-Ya destination. That seems like a sequence of tasks that would require at least a halfway functioning brain. For a long time I genuinely believed there had to be some minimum IQ requirement hiding somewhere in that process. But after watching the endless parade of characters starring in Instagram clips of fights, group brawls, and crime in general who manage to arrive there every single week, I have started to revise that theory quite dramatically. The place attracts an astonishing collection of knuckle draggers, fugitives, drunks, oxygen thieves, mugs, muppets, industrial strength bell ends, and every other variety of wandering idiot from the UK, Europe, the US, India, Russia, the Middle East, and anywhere else that sells airline tickets. Some of these blokes look like they struggle to operate the zipper on their suitcase or even put on an airplane neck pillow correctly, yet somehow they have successfully navigated international travel and landed themselves on Soi Buakhao with a cold beer in their hand and a well-ridden slapper on their knee. So maybe the real requirements are much simpler than we thought. A passport helps. A credit card also helps. A prescription for Viagra probably does not hurt. The ability to shout “well hello beautiful” every fifteen seconds in a bar is clearly essential. A heroic tolerance for beer before 10 AM is useful. The confidence to chat up a ladyboy without realizing it is a cock in a frock seems almost mandatory. And above all, the unshakeable belief that every girl half their age (or less) who smiles when they saunter by has fallen deeply in love with them in the first thirty seconds. First place "Handsome Man" contest winners, the whole lot of them. When you view it through that lens, it becomes fairly clear that IQ probably never played much of a role in the journey over to the melee in the first place. My bad. 😄

Excellent point. The majority of the politics being discussed is American politics and the majority of the guys discussing it aren't American.

Amazing how one of the busiest corners of the site is always the political soapbox. Not travel, health, finances, food, or nightlife. Nope, it is the endless political arguments. The same two or three dozen blokes grinding the same gears every single day, writing essays about governments on the other side of the planet while sitting in a rural house or a condo somewhere in Southeast Asia. Half of them left their Western countries years ago, some decades ago, yet they still wake up every morning desperate to argue about politicians who have absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives. The real reason that section is so popular is pretty obvious if you think about it. Most of the soapy diehards are older guys who have quietly run out of enjoyable things to do. The sex drive has evaporated, social circles have greatly shrunk, and hobbies faded away twenty years ago. So what is left? Politics. The perfect topic because it never ends, never resolves, and never requires anyone to agree on anything or admit they are wrong. You can argue about it forever and still feel like you are doing something important while actually achieving nothing at all. So the soapbox becomes a kind of retirement home for restless whiners. No solutions, no progress, just endless circular debates about leaders, policies, and practices at least a 12 hour plane ride away. Meanwhile the sun is shining outside and the world is full of things to do, but instead the day gets spent refreshing the threads and firing off another angry paragraph about a country they no longer even live in. It is not really about politics at all. It is just the last remaining spectator sport for people who forgot to replace the things that once made life interesting.

When people talk about getting older, the usual concerns are money, health, security. Makes perfect sense. If you do not have financial stability or basic health, everything else becomes much harder. But let’s assume you have those boxes reasonably ticked. Then what then becomes the real concern? For me, it is mobility. I think about it more and more everyday. The ability to move freely, confidently, independently, with agility and speed. Once we stop moving enough, the body responds fast in a bad way after the age of 50. Muscles weaken. Balance slips. Joints stiffen. Strength fades. Before long, simple tasks can feel like a lot more effort. I see people around my own age who already look hesitant in their movements, lacking confidence because of an absence of basic balance and core strength. It makes you realize how quickly function can decline if it is not maintained. On the plus side I think much of it seems preventable. Regular movement does not have to mean marathon training. A daily walk. Some light resistance training. Stretching. Basic bodyweight exercises. 30-45 minutes of consistent exercise 4-5 times a week can go a long way. The old saying about using it or losing it seems especially true as you age. After the age of 50, consistency is far more important than intensity. What do you think? After finances and general health, what worries you most about aging? Do you think much about mobility and physical independence, or is that not something even on your radar?

No revelation here. Just a question about Thailand, in a thread about Thailand. Pointing out that similar dynamics exist elsewhere does not address the question. Of course outsiders are treated differently in many countries. That is hardly an unknown phenomenon. The discussion is whether the perception of double standards in Thailand is broadly accurate or exaggerated. Turning it into a global sociology lecture sidesteps the point rather than engaging with it. It is possible to acknowledge this is a common human pattern while still asking how it plays out in one specific place. That is not claiming Thailand holds a patent on anything. It is simply narrowing the lens to the country in focus here. If you think the perception here is overstated, say why. That would move the discussion forward far more than reframing the question into something it never claimed to be.

There is a recurring theme that foreigners in Thailand are sometimes held to a different, often higher, standard than locals. Whether it is on pricing, legal enforcement, bureaucratic hurdles, or social expectations, sometimes it seems there are moments where equality does not quite apply to everyone in the same way. You could argue that these examples are also isolated and not representative of everyday reality. And two sides to every story, right? So is Thailand truly a systemic "hub" of double standards, or are we reacting to a handful of visible cases and turning them into a hyped up narrative? It is a sensitive question, and probably not one with a simple answer. Context plays a role. Every situation is different. Culture matters. Individual experiences can also vary widely. _users_7da2f47d-ec9e-432a-967c-91d009448a13_generated_b78213a7-de41-4e19-8598-4ab979f1869b_generated_video_hd.mov

You appear to have cracked the code. Share your "best reads" list.

This might upset a few people who spend most of their waking hours staring at screens. But how much of your mental capacity in this age of information overload is taken up by absorbing digital slop that adds nothing to your own life? As you scroll through your daily feed you are flooded with updates about what some tosser on another continent ate, wore, bought, lost, argued about, knocked over, got arrested for or pretended to achieve. Endless noise. Performative outrage. A stream of superficial rubbish, often narcissistic fragments of underwhelming lives. Every minute spent consuming that bunk is another minute of cognitive bandwidth flushed down the bog. So how much of your awareness is invested in other people’s trivialities? I have been cutting back heavily myself. More focus should be directed toward genuinely useful things like understanding more about the world around you, learning new skills, improving your physical mobility, or perusing passion projects and longer term goals. Attention is finite and consciousness is limited. The question is not whether the noise exists. It clearly does. The real issue is how much of your mind you are willing to hand over to nothingness. The world was not always like this, constantly pulling us away from direct experience and into an information void of nonsense. As Travis Rice put it, “Experiencing the world through endless second hand information is not enough. If we want authenticity, we have to initiate it.”

That's more of a moral issue, whether humanity deserves the planet, but the question certainly has merit. I don't worry too much about the planet over the next few hundred years. It will survive man's own destruction of humanity. Other animals are under greater threat. Especially their habitats.

Financial commentators are divided on when AI will begin replacing human workers at scale. Some say within a year it could double or even triple unemployment across the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and the UK. Others think it may take three or four years. Either way, it feels less like a question of if and more like when the tide turns against educated people searching for solid careers. Companies such as Amazon, Citigroup, Dell, UPS, Intel, Klarna and Cisco are already cutting staff. Not all of it is driven by AI, but automation is clearly part of the picture. The most exposed roles are junior cognitive jobs. Data entry. Basic coding. Paralegal research. Copy-writing. One senior employee using AI can now produce the output that once required several juniors. So why bring in inexperienced hires? If that trend accelerates, graduate recruitment could shrink quickly. Maybe unemployment spikes. Maybe it climbs more gradually. But two years from now things could look very different, and if joblessness rises sharply, interest rates could drift back toward zero worldwide for some time. Good if you live on credit. Not so good if you rely on passive income from savings.

I also just grabbed a copy of this, Wild London, just one hour, but haven't watched it yet: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39298503

All David Attenborough BBC series documentaries are great. About animals, nature, the planet and the environment. The knowledge gained is endless and the imagery is stunning. It takes me places and shows me elements of the natural world I would never see otherwise. One could go through an entire lifetime without ever knowing that we share the planet with such amazing creatures if it weren't for these documentaries. I have been watching these series documentaries for at least 15 years already and the photography just keeps getting better and better as technology improves: Planet Earth III Frozen Planet II BBC Asia (2024) Start with those. Each has at least 6-8 episodes. Afterwards, tell me what you learned. One major forthcoming series I am awaiting is "Kingdom", a six-part nature documentary narrated by him. It was produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit and filmed over several years following four animal families in Zambia. Should be available later this year.

Just wait until Samsung releases their first AI controlled sex doll later this year which will know exactly what you want and need from it even before you do. When that happens, it's gonna be game over for you, Gigi. The whole new Samsung pleasure principal options are going to leave an even bigger hole in your bank account.