spidermike007

This is not just about EV's, this is about the overall automotive market. Trade tensions are just a small part of the equation. The economy here is in tatters, and it is still suffering from 10 years of the Prayuth Decimation. The debt is higher than it's ever been, the banks are being very stingy with loans at this point because the default rates are so high, the new car market has stalled, property sales are very slow, and exports are dropping, so the problems are numerous. As if those problems weren't enough, though the tourist arrival numbers are high, the quality of tourists continues to drop, and the amount that the average tourist is spending continues to drop, so the total revenue being brought in from tourism is significantly less than it was pre-covid. I could go on. A message to the young PM. You might as well stop with the lies because nobody believes you anymore. Do something. Do anything.

I don't buy that, the population is falling in many countries now, and hundreds of millions of people are deciding that this is not a good time to bring a child into this world. Deciding not to reproduce can be one of the smartest decisions that an individual makes in their lifetime. It may have been these single smartest decision I ever made.

I have no idea whatsoever how your reply was connected to the topic at hand, there are 650 million people in the world earning less than $2 a day and it doesn't matter what country you live in when you're earning less than $2 a day, you are dirt poor. There are another billion plus people beyond that, earning less than $7 a day.

Well, in that particular case both the perpetrators and the police that were involved need to be punished severely, I can think of a few ideas.

It's a shame that money buys so much influence in this country, hopefully an organization can get involved that has some power or connections and figure out a way to punish these people, if they can establish a burden of proof. If what she is saying is true these people need to be punished severely, and if not by law enforcement then by the community or society. They deserve a great degree of shame and humiliation, which is fairly easy to accomplish here.

Aggression and fear are two completely different sets of emotions, the Chinese are highly timid when it comes to things that appear to be dangerous, though they may be aggressive in public with their mannerisms.

Between Rama II, the continued delays on rail lines throughout the nation, and then this relatively simple route, one has to wonder who is supervising these projects, why are they so incompetent, and why didn't they hire a better contractor? Better yet, I wonder why not just take China up on their offer of a Belt and Road initiative loan, borrow hundreds of billions of baht, have the Chinese do all the work, have all the work done within a year or two throughout the nation, and just be done with it. Then like every other nation on the initiative just default on the loans. It's a really simple answer to Thailand's decades long transport problems.

The man of hate goes after his perceived enemies with a vengeance, don't use the presidency to do good, don't use it to improve the world, don't use it to establish peace and harmony and aid the poorest of the poor. Use it to go after your enemies and seek revenge like a petty 13 year old child. Good work Don. Making America less significant and less influential by the day.

Fascinating how Trump supporters completely dismissed the polls when it was bad news for their side, but if they see a bright light on the horizon they jump at it. This is likely fake news, his numbers are dropping dramatically and will continue to drop based on his radical policies and his inane desire to support despots and dictators and shun 80-year-old alliances with our allies. If you combine that with it's extreme lack of negotiating skills and basic incompetence it's a perfect storm, his supporters are just starting to see that now.

Chinese people can be extremely timid, and they tend to be easily scared by rumors, so the drop in tourism would not surprise me at all. Perhaps the Thai authorities need to stop supporting the Burmese junta?

Contrary to what is posted here Trump's popularity is declining and has been since day one of his presidency, just wait - the next few months are going to be fascinating, and a lot of his supporters are going to end up very disappointed he is definitely not the man that they thought he was. It's not that I don't agree with some of his policies I just don't agree with the degree of overreach and the extrajudicial authority that he is practicing.

With many people, once they got attached to a theory, it was hard to get them detached. They’d screen out unhelpful facts, invent favorable ones, and ignore contradictions in their own claims. Look at those Sandy Hook, multiple fraud convictions, and Jan. 6th truthers, babbling about false flags and crisis actors and all the rest. When people were motivated enough to believe something, they were going to believe it no matter what. There was no such thing as a bridge too far. I've certainly heard of the concept of a sore loser in the past, but I've never really seen a great example of a sore winner. I'm seeing an awful lot of gloating and it's of a rather nasty variety. It just seems to be the continuation of the kind of division and hatred that the fake master has forged, and established, and his devotees seem to be continuing to run with the torch, and doing a great job of continue the animosity. It's precisely the opposite of what he promised which was to unify the country, however many of us knew this was exactly what was going to happen. Anytime Trump says something you can more or less predict the exact opposite is going to happen. Any sort of individuality and any of your own opinions are not welcome within the maga movement. You have to subscribe to the policies of the master and if you disobey, if you disagree you are thrown under the train, or you are considered to be disloyal.

The Republican Party is all too often effective at campaigning and winning elections, but there’s another fact about it that a lot of Americans forget: The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy. For round two in office, instead of prioritizing the problems he campaigned on — public safety, immigration and the border, and most of all the economy — President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government. To accomplish this, he has put his faith in the most incompetent cabinet in modern history: a health and human services secretary who is already targeting federal vaccination efforts and dumped a bear carcass in Central Park as a fun prank at age 60; a director of national intelligence who was devoted to an allegedly abusive yoga-centered cult; a former WWE tycoon turned head of Department of Education; and a former cable news talking head as defense secretary. Which will result in one clear thing: disorder. There will probably be more enormous tax cuts for the wealthy and Medicaid cuts hitting a lot of other people, but there is nothing the American public despises more than disorder and a broken economy.

What Biden should admit is that he should have stepped aside after the first term and allowed the Dems to pick a highly qualified candidate who would have had a chance of beating Trump. The secondary aspect of this is that the Democratic party is very broken, they have leaned way too far to the left, they've aligned themselves with the progressives and the extreme left, and the ridiculous woke movement, and that turned off millions of centrist voters. As James Carville said we should just wait, allow the Republicans to implode on their own which they will, as a result of so much inane and ridiculous policy from Trump and then go on the attack. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction. It won’t take long: public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening: Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls. The people did not vote for the Department of Education to be obliterated — they voted for lower prices for eggs and milk. Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away. At this rate, the Trump honeymoon will be over best case by Memorial Day but more likely in the next 30 days. I don't like Trump, nor do I have a nanogram of respect for the man, but I understand why people voted for him. However, they are in for a major wake up call. He is most definitely not the man that they thought he was.

Security guards have long been a problem and a nuisance in Thailand, and it's very likely that there was a dispute over a bill resulting in an assault by the Goon Squad. This is a fairly frequent occurrence although it doesn't make the news that often.

When you have an open arms visa policy and lower the requirements for any nation, in a desperate bid to keep arrival numbers high, during a wartime period in Russia, you are going to invite in the dregs along with vast numbers of other Russians, including the Bratva. Woe is Thailand.

I think first of all you have to qualify what you describe as a leftist. Do you consider every Democratic voter to be a leftist? Are you one of those people who labels a Democrat as a Socialist, Marxist or a Communist too? I certainly don't. Those are just ignorant and hateful slogans, from my point of view. I've been a democratic voter my whole life and I'm very Centrist. I do not like the extreme left, I do not align myself with the progressives, I despise woke and PC, I approve of the death penalty, I do not approve of abortion past the first trimester and I have a myriad of other positions that would make me a conservative by the standards of most of my Democratic friends. So please elaborate with more clarity, if you care to.

That which you consider obsession I consider to be pushback. I think for those of us with rational minds it is reasonable to expect that there will be more and more pushback against his extreme policies and poor decision making. You consider him to be a good president. I consider him to be an extremely divisive, hateful, stingy, and dangerous one.

You are avoiding the point of my argument by quoting or should I say parroting Trump. The vast majority of USAID goes to alleviating poverty and fighting disease in the poorest countries of the world. If you are interested in engaging in an informed debate, prove to me otherwise. Granted, the public doesn't have that luxury since Musk dismantled their website which disseminated that information. I guess they subscribe to the philosophy that information can be a terrible thing.

And it's not just pure medical costs. A friend of mine from Holland just recently put his mother in a rather luxurious nursing home, he said it's the equivalent of many five-star hotels that he's been to. She has a large, luxurious room with a private balcony overlooking the river. His total outlay per month is 900 euros month. A trashy facility in the US is $9,000 a month and a nice facility is $15,000 a month and up. I know couples who spend $2000 to $3,000 a month on health insurance alone, in the US. It is an unregulated mafia. Just another reason why Greenland and Canada would never choose to be a part of the US. In the process their quality of life would diminished dramatically.

I certainly think so, the whole purpose of USAID when it was first created, was to increase American influence and goodwill around the world. Now he is distorting the truth by making this into a sort of fake woke issue, an issue about support for transgenders, and a myriad of others issues, that represent a tiny minority of the aid the US provides around the world. And it seems to me that in the process he is giving a huge gift to China, by allowing them to step in, where the US left off, if they wisely choose to do so. So is he truly making America great again, or is he diminishing America by the day, and vastly reducing American influence around the world? USAID funds an array of humanitarian projects around the world, including those related to providing clean water, infrastructure, and health care. The State Department provides broad foreign policy goals to USAID, but the agency decides on the specific projects to achieve those goals. Generally, independent private contracting companies bid on the projects that USAID funds. Congress appropriated $66.1 billion for foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. That works out to 1.2 percent of that year’s total federal expenditure, which was more than $6.1 trillion. USAID administers around 60 percent of foreign aid. Why Does the United States provide assistance to other countries? There are many reasons countries provide foreign aid to other nations beyond simply helping people living in poverty or conflict. Fostering positive relations with other countries. A country can leverage the foreign aid it gives, and that resulting relationship, to get preferential treatment later. For example, China has spent nearly $680 billion since 2013 on its Belt and Road Initiative, funding infrastructure projects in 150 different countries. The project is meant to increase Chinese trade and influence around the world. Promote global stability. This was the primary goal of the Marshall Plan, when the United States gave Europe $13.3 billion to rebuild after World War II. A stable Europe was economically beneficial to the United States, and there was fear that the Soviet Union could further expand its sphere of influence from Eastern Europe if Western Europe remained fragile. The aid also helps to prevent the global spread of disease. Treating and preventing diseases from spreading is another way to promote global stability, as diseases such as COVID-19, smallpox, ebola, among others can be destabilizing. The United States funds several initiatives to curb infectious diseases; one of the most successful has been the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The United States has invested over $100 billion in PEPFAR since 2003, providing developing countries facing HIV epidemics with medicine, medical care, and preventative resources. https://www.closeup.org/usaid-and-cutting-international-aid/

That is who Trump is and what he does. He shuns our allies, he shuns nations with Democratic rule, and he coddles and supports dictators, despots and those who suppress, kill and oppress their own people. In addition he's showing an extreme level of heartlessness and a total lack of sympathy for the poor people of the world by shutting down hundreds of USAID programs that benefited the poorest of the poor, at a relatively low cost to the US, and in the process this extremist Grinch has raised the influence of Russia and China significantly around the world.

It seems like people are finally starting to rise up against the absolute nonsense and insanity of this new Trump regime. They are just saying no to the "wannabe king" and exercising a bit of common sense in regard to geopolitics. Hopefully this trend will continue and it will soon include a significant percentage of the people who voted for Trump. They are now just beginning to realize just who they voted for, and what he is and wants to be.

Whether or not you believe anything I say will likely have a lot to do with your positions on American politics, and whether or not you support both robber barons.

For certain both! But, first the clock.