dblaisde

Norway, great place. I just wish it were a little more expensive.

Thanks. I didn't see that. 

Thanks, I think I'll need luck. Or just a lot of shoe leather. Too bad hipflat doesn't speak English (natively, that is). Anyway, it won't be hard to know know how my lungs are doing in any particular area. :)

I'd rent by the month. Anyway, it looks like a nice neighborhood, and up in the clouds is further away from the pollution I suppose. I'll hunt for something in that neighborhood that's a bit cheaper :) using the DD website. Thanks again. I'm renting long term (once I find a place I like) and am retired so 30K a month would be my limit I think.

Thanks very much. How did 39 Boulevard Executive Residence cost you? I'm wondering if I could afford it.

42 minutes ago, shadowofacloud said:

The area between Phrom Phong and Thong Lo (Wattana side) is not bad. Quite green, not too many high rises.

Thanks. Could you recommend a hotel or some streets so I can look at a specific area on foot?

The reason I ask is that I've visited the "Dental Hospital, Bangkok" on Sukhumvit 49, which seems to be smack in that area and thought the area was polluted. I walked to it from Sukumvit and could feel it.

Well...25,000B and under *if* possible...

I'm in an apartment about 30 meters from busy Soi 77 on Soi On Nut. Two weeks here and my throat is raw. I need a less polluted area 20 min. or less from the BTS/MRT. The closer to Asok area the  better. Any suggestions?

On 2/20/2017 at 4:41 PM, Crossy said:

Does your current card look like the one I posted above? If so you can add value to it no problem, if it says something like 50 Trip Pass you need to get a Rabbit card first.

 

You can get a Senior card for the MRT with your passport as ID and proof of being over 60, IIRC the discount is 50%.

 

Sadly the BTS, whilst having a similar elder card require you to be both over 60 AND Thai

 

 

Oops! Becoming Thai will take more work than it took to become 60. Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks much SooKee!

thanks very much. I thought I might need a different card since what I have now is for "50 trips".

One more question: I'm 70 and I think they offer discounts for Senior Citizens. I suppose I wouldn't need a different card for that either. They'd somehow put the same value on the card but with a reduced price for it. (??)

There's a lot of image improvement efforts at the moment. <deleted>  Thailand into economic and political chaos, the stakes are large. You see this also in Prayuth's buying off the rebellious farmers in the North with huge rice subsides and real efforts to appease the separatists in the South (whose last bombs were for the first time in tourist areas).

You also see it with cleaning up the streets in the form of food, viagra and dildo salesmen.

Pattaya is a sort of Sodom and Gomorah-By-The-Sea, with bizarre stuff happening all the time, like the recent gang hit on the scammer Brit, and general sleaze. Not that I'm against sleaze mind you, but until Thailand is seen in the eyes of the world investment community as a safe place to put your money, we'll see a lot of "clean up"

Frankly I'd be more worried about the lack of grounding of electrical shower heaters. Many deaths and disfigurements from those. My ex German girlfriend burned off her entire hand in such a shower, and many of the BKK hotel showers aren't wired to prevent electrocution, especially the older buildings, where that wasn't even part of the original design spec. I don't turn on the heater in mine.

I got a Rabbit card but wanted the stored value type, and not the "50 trips for xxxx baht" type, since those trips expire at the end of 30 days. What's the right lingo to use to get a "stored value" card?
 

On 2/18/2017 at 3:58 PM, seancbk said:

> I was only 15 at the time...

A great terrorist disguise. 

On 2/16/2017 at 6:25 PM, oilinki said:

 

So, are all the countries and their leaders part of this conspiracy?

 

When you start using the word "conspiracy", it's another way to say "it's not true". It's a word commonly used by gullible people who spend too much time watching TV. If I'd told you 3 years ago that the US government keeps detailed spying information on all its citizen, you'd probably have call me a conspiracy nut. But then along came Snowden, and now you know it for a fact. Of course people like me knew it a long time ago courtesy of NSA leakers like Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe. But you have to work a bit if you want to know what's going on. You won't get it staring at the boob tube.

What you don't know can hurt you.

On 2/16/2017 at 3:27 PM, Reigntax said:

A Newtonian bomb one would guess!

Followed by a Darwin Award.

13 minutes ago, Dagnabbit said:

>>So did this guy do a good job for Goldman or not? If he did, then why can he not do a good job in this new role?

 

Simply because he never leaves off working for Goldman when he enters Government. He doesn't serve "the People", he serves Goldman. And no doubt after he's done his government stint he'll go back to work for Goldman again. Job well done. As Sanders commented in the debates: it's the banks that regulate government, not the other way around....And you can't get to fire these people because you never got to elect them in the first place.

18 hours ago, Grouse said:

In Iceland, they threw all these crooks in jail after the crisis.

 

How many American bankers went down?

Right...American politicians have the good sense not to try to throw their owners in jail. :)

15 hours ago, elgordo38 said:

Its called human nature. 

It's also called indoctrination and propaganda. The dumbing down of the population by an educational system which shuns critical thinking and promotes mindless distractions of "infotainment".

Worth seeing again:

18 hours ago, ilostmypassword said:

There's a huge difference between Obama and Trump. Obama and the Democrats tightened the rules on the big banks, the shadow banks and the hedge funds. And there's also the Consumer Protection Bureau. These are measures that Wall Street mostly detests.  Now Trump and the Republicans are going to try and undo them or at least water them down.

After the  '29 stock market collapse, bankers went to **jail** for fraud, but not with Obama (and there was *obvious* fraud with Lehmann and Goldman). Dodd Frank was written by two congressmen with allegiances to the banking industry, and was fairly quickly undermined anyway by modifications to it, making it rather toothless. If the Democrats really wanted to, they could gotten Glass Stegall back again: for the first two years the Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency. Yet they didn't even try, and in this period they didn't even *consider* Single Payer as a possible health plan. ACA was written by the insurance industry, and there's abundant evidence of that. A mandate that forces people to buy their insurance? Oh yeah, they love it. And they're jacking their prices up all the time too.

Watch "Inside Job" if you haven't. It's all about the banking crisis and the players who made it happen: the banks, the in-bed-with-the-banks SEC, and the paid off ivy league economists who earn fabulous money from speaking engagements at Goldman and others to tell them what they want to hear.

Each political party knows that without heavy corporate and bank funding, they'll loose the elections. It's political suicide *not* to accept their money, and to get it you have to do what they want. That's so obvious.

I'm with you on the Republicans. They're a good deal worse. My point is that the Democrats are really awful too. Obama along with them. But people don't read enough to understand that. Obama had two constituencies, those who paid for his election and those who voted for him. To the former, he gave almost everything they wanted. To the latter almost nothing. I call them Demos and Repos. Demos because the demo model always promises a lot more than what goes into production, and Repos...well, Repo Man. They like to steal.

2 hours ago, elgordo38 said:

I watched the one episode of Bill Maher Live where he did a rundown on the Trump cabinet selections and it was really scary.

But for example, look at Obama's Treasury Secretaries: Tim Geithner and Jack Lew. They weren't much better:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/business/27geithner.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-02-21/citigroup-s-man-goes-to-the-treasury-department

And of course, Eric Holder, big bank lawyer who got to be DOJ chief when it came time to discipline the big banks for the 08 disaster. Nobody went to jail and Holder's back representing the big banks again, job well done.

Yet, the public chose to be blissful unaware of Obama's appointments.

I dislike Trump even more than Obama, but it's just amazing how people are willing to be fooled when they like a guy and irate when they don't.

49 minutes ago, mtls2005 said:

Trumpers love to dump on Hollywood, when it's convenient.

 

Another reason: Hollywood usually votes Democrat, and they have deep pockets.

This is very normal in US politics. The revolving door between Goldman and the US Treasury. Remember Hank Paulsen, Treasury Chief under Bush and ex Goldman Prez, who was at the heart during the great banker bailout.

It's also true in the Justice Dept, with Eric Holder, an ex-attorney for Too-Big-To-Fail banks  appointed Justice Head to dish out justice after the financial meltdown of '08. Needless to say, no bankers went to jail, and now he's back working for the same banks.

Ditto for the Pentagon with Boeing and other arms manufacturers taking Director of Procurement posts. (I know, I worked for Mitre Corporation, a big Pentagon contractor. Most of their focus was on bribing Washington bureaucrats in one way or another, and Mitre always billed the government for twice the time needed to complete any contract, so we all sat around for 3 months on every 6 month contract twiddling our thumbs). Same, same with Obama appointing a Monsanto VP Snopes as director of the FDA.

This is "the government within the government" as Teddy Roosevelt put it way back when.

They've all been rotten since Reagan, on both foreign and domestic policy.

Presidents represent those who pay for their campaigns, not those who vote for them. It's a rigged system and has been even more so since Citizen's United opened the floodgates of corporate cash. Goldman Sachs for instance puts a billion on each candidate so that no matter who wins, the winner owes Goldman Sachs big time. If you don't have the cash, your visibility is next to zero. Two thirds of Hillary's election funds came from billionaire George Soros.

Sanders surprised many by going directly to the people for financial support. He had literally almost no contributions from business. He did very well, polled way ahead of Trump, and should have won the whole thing but as Wikileaks has proven, he was sabotaged by his own party in favor of the corporate candidate Hillary. I sent Sanders $100, not in any expectation that he'd win in such a rigged system, but to keep him in front of TV cameras as long as possible telling Americans the truth about its corrupted political system, media, banks, health system, and foreign policy. It was money well spent and Americans are a bit wiser than they were.

"I don't care who does the electing as long as I can do the nominating", Boss Tweed, a corrupt NYC 19th C. politician.