PeterRS

And no doubt the popiticians and their cronies have been buying up the land to sell back to the state at a vastly inflated price! Kunming will be a great destination, though, from Bangkok. Yunnan has some specatcular sights for tourists whenever tourism opens up again. Five years ago I went to Dali, the wonderful old town in Lijiang ending with a stay outside Shangri La (Zhongdian) with its stunning Tibetan Ganden Sumsteling monastery, arguably the finest outside Tibet and often called the Little Potala Palace.

I doubt if anyone seriously believes at a time of soaring inflation when national economies are desperately trying to reduce debt built up over the covid crisis and at the same time keeping their national costs of living from going through the proverbial roof, many countries will be in the market to purchase any other country's debts!

On my infrequent visits to Pattaya I stayed there about 6 times. It was located on the right down the quiet Thappraya Soi 1. I loved it. It had only six bungalows set around the pool. In addition there was a bar and they served an excellent breakfast, although no other meals. They almost encouraged you to bring guests back and, yes, they gave you a key to the gate because it was closed at 10:00 pm. When I first stayed it was run by the two French guys. The last time I was there about 5 years ago they had split up and only one guy owned it. The website with a booking form is no longer. I suspect it might be closed although both agoda and booking.com are taking bookings. On their sites high season rates are around 2,250 baht per night without breakfast which is roughly what was being charged 5 years ago.

The NACC has been a toothless tiger for decades. Some of its own members have also been accused of being unusually wealthy. The present acting Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwun, then a member of the NACC, was accused in a much publicised affair of having a large number of undeclared expensive wrist watches. The President of the NACC promised a "professional, transparent inquiry" in January 2018. But the President had earlier been a subordinate of Prawit! By August 2018 with this seemingly simple Inquiry still far from complete, the Prime Minister removed Prawit from the NACC. That December Prawit was cleared of wrongdoing by the NACC! The basis of the decision was that he had allegedly only borrowed them! Earlier in the 2000s there was a major scandal over the founding of the Bangkok FIlm Festival. In a 2007 case in the USA a pair of producers who worked for the Festival were jailed in 2010 for having given kickbacks to the Governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Jutamas Siriwan, and her daughter which the TAT ran from 2003 to 2006. Even though the US Dept. of Justice had provided Thailand with all the evidence, the NACC took FIVE years to complete its own investigations! At least in this case Jutamas and her daugher were finally charged and given multi-decade jail terms. SInce the military coup in 2014 activists have accused the regime of numerous cases of nepotism. One involved corruption in the construction of the billiion baht Rajabhaki Park Complex in Hua Hin built by the army. The NACC disimissed all such cases. More instances of this country having a very different set of laws for the rich and elite!

I am old enough to remember the recession in the UK in the 1970s which lasted virtually the entire decade. The primary cause was the increasing influence of OPEC which started by raising the price of oil by 400%. At the same time, the Conservative government of Edward Heath took on an increasingly militant miners' union. The end result was a 3-day working week and daily electricity cuts. Averge inflation in that entire decade was 13.2%. In 1975 alone inflation reached 24.2%. Between 1973 and 1975 poverty rates doubled. Britain survived but it was only through what might be called a quirk of fate. In the late 1960s the oil producers had discovered oil in the North Sea off Scotland. The UK was to become a nett oil and gas exporter by the end of the 1970s. How deep would the recession have been without the benefit of North Sea oil revenues? As @fedssocr points out, today lots of problems are coming to a head at the same time. With democracies now a den of partisan school bullies with one Republican Trumpist senator in the USA even suggesting last Sunday there will be riots if Trump is indicted - aside: how on earth did Senator John McCain ever find the frightful Linday Graham a close friend? - who is going to lead the world out of the coming crisis?

Sorry, but I tend to think of all the tens of millions (maybe 100s of millions) who will be out of work or earning a fraction of what they used to earn, who will have to get used to electricity bills 70%-80% higher and have diffficulty putting food on the table for their families. There is no such thing as a "good recession" for anyone - apart from the rich.

China! We talk about it a lot of time time, sometimes in relation to Hong Kong, sometimes Taiwan, sometimes its strict covid lockdown policy. Now though, a whole series of nasty events is affecting that country that threatens not only its own economy but the economy of the world. Last week, the CEO of Huawei warned that the chill from China's forthcoming economic downturn will be "felt by everyone" for the next decade. A long article on The Guardian website today points out that many problems for China have come to a head at the same time. These include a total collapse of confidence in the property market that has kept the economy buoyant - an issue discussed for years but always thought to be one the central government would never allow to happen - now looks likely; increasing popular fury at the zero covid policy; the effects of a disastrous heatwave affecting supplies of power and food; runaway inflation in the rest of the world "threatening a bleak winter for developed economies from the US to Europe, and from Japan to South Korea" and the resulting high interest rates bringing reduced demand from around the world [with the likelihood that China's exports are] "likely to fall off a cliff during the coming 12 months". In the 2008 economic meltdown, it was China that kept the world economy afloat with a 4 trillian Yuan stimulus. "But with Beijing in the process of decoupling from the western-led world order and debt-driven growth out of favour, another Chinese rescue mission seems very unlikely. Instead, China faces Japan-style “lost decades” as it tries to absorb the billions of dollars of dud property loans." [The 1990s and early 2000s were years of economic stagnation for Japan following the huge boom years of the 1980s]. “'In the short-term China’s economy is being hammered,' Rajah [Roland Rajah, the lead economist at the Lowy Institute, a thinktank in Australia] says. 'It remains to be seen what the medium- to long-term consequences could be. But China also faces very significant longer-term headwinds from demographic decline and ageing, creeping statism, and its increasingly difficult external relations.'” "Falling external demand is the 'next shoe to drop' for China, according to David Llewellyn-Smith, the chief strategist at the investment and asset management firm Nucelus Wealth in Melbourne, and will leave China in a perilous state. "'The private sector is being hammered by Omicron, the external sector hammered by global weakness, and public sector doing what it can to pick up the slack but it faces various inhibitions on fiscal policy. It’s a very toxic combo for China. Very difficult to manage,' he says. “A Chinese recession is absolutely in the frame over next year. That’s going to have incredible implications for global markets of all kinds.” https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/28/crunch-time-china-tries-to-fend-off-property-crash-global-economy

I don't think you read my post correctly. I know full well how important discussions on tippping are. I merely suggested there be a separate sub-section specifically for ALL posts about tips. Then it will be simple for those wanting information about tipping to look up. Presently posts about tips are spread all over the place! It was simplicity I was suggesting. Nothing more.

I thought the new system had been in place for some years for TG's business and first class pax.

Tourists cannot get visas to enter China for now. So there is no option but to stay away. Only Hong Kong allows visitors but you need 3 days hotel quarantine plus 4 days medical observation. Boring for tourism!

With so many posts now on the matter of tips, could we have a sub-section of the Thailand board that deals exclusively with tips? It's obviously important for newbies but becomes very repetitive and boring for regular visitors and residents. This thread has a lot of useful information but most has little to do with the thread title!

I just noticed this post (above). I expect - but clearly do not know for sure - that this is the usual downpayment to allow relatives to pay for funeral expenses. Damages for the loss of a life will come later.

An important point and one that few visiting Asia for the first few times find difficult to understand. "Face" means a great deal.

I do like to watch news programmes but thankfully in Bangkok I get neither Fox News nor MSNBC. I only get the BBC World News programme and CNN. Both have good programming from time to time. I only mentioned earlier that CNN is more left of centre because that is how it seems when compared to those few occasions when I have watched Fox (in hotels for example). I also as suggested by a poster read the on-line editions of two newspapers.

Some guys are pure tops and some pure bottoms. Others do both. I don't think your solution would have solved anything! 🤣

I am sure you are correct. On the other hand that means losing an off. The young man was new to the bar and probably was only trying to be helpful. I reckon the words he used when I asked if he'd bottom were very fair. I could easily have told him I'd find another of the boys instead. But I liked him and he was extremely pleasant, more so than many boys I'd met in bars. And even though the sex was not quite what I'd hoped, I had a really good time with him. I hope he reported that other farang to the mamasan and that she then spread the word to the other Twilight bars.

In an era dominated by the ultra-right-wing Fox News and the lies it continuously spews, CNN has been a beacon of reason for those not wedded to Trumpism. Now, though, changes at the top of the network are likely to see it move away to a much more central political position. The start came recently with the sudden unexplained axing of Sunday night Brian Skelter's Reliable Sources hour-long programme. Skelter frequently aimed his barbs at Fox News. At the top of the network, former boss Jeff Zucker was an ally of Skelter and the network's mostly left wing alternative to Fox. CNN has changed hands quite regularly. It is now part of Warner Bros. Discovery. Skelter's firing is the first salvo from new boss Chris Licht. But Licht appeears only to be doing the bidding of his ultimate boss. This is billionaire mostly right-wing John Malone, the major shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery, who is a close friend of its CEO David Zaslav. "Zaslav has been closely involved in driving Warner Bros. Discovery’s vision for CNN, doubling down on its traditional global news-gathering function and moving away from the partisan reputation it garnered—fairly or not—during the Trump years. Hence all the talk of diversifying CNN’s contributor ranks, and the olive branches to Republicans, which Licht handed out recently on a romp through Capitol Hill. 'I think they share a vision for CNN,' an insider who knows both men told me. 'But at the end of the day, Licht is executing his vision on how to get there. No one is telling him what to do or how it works.' Whether Stelter’s exit augurs any additional shake-ups is yet to be seen, but we won’t have to wait long: Licht is expected to put more of a stamp on the network come fall." https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/brian-stelter-canceled-cnn-reliable-sources In addition to killing Skelter's programme, under Zaslav/Licht, the network has already axed the new streaming service CNN+ just weeks after its launch. Warner Bros Discovery is carrying a heavy debt load. Zaslav told investors recently the debt does not matter as he will make US$3 bilion in savings. How much of this will come from CNN, only tme will tell.

More interesting is when they country will lift its quarantine requirements.

In my bar-going days, when differences arose between a farang and one of the bar boys, I usually found the bar boys' versions were correct. Years ago there was a waiter at Classic Boys whom I really liked. I asked if I could off him. He seemed pleased. I said I would like it if he would bottom. He said he had little experience but would try. Did I still want to off him? I did. He certainly did his best, but being a bottom was too painful for him. So we spent the off time doing other things and I had a really enjoyable time with him. He fully deserved his tip. A few weeks later I was chatting to him in the bar. He said another English-speaking farang had offed him, again on the basis that he'd try to bottom but again after informing the farang he was inexperienced and could not guarantee it would work. The farang took him to the Suriwong Hotel short time rooms. As with me, it didn't work. The farang became angry and told him to get dressed and leave. He did not even give this very pleasant young man a tip. I agree that there are duds amongst both some boys and some customers. But I am sure they were few and far between in those days because the boys always had the mamasans whom they could report a dud customer to. Now with the apps, things have obviously changed.

I think they had no choice but to suspend him. Anyone assuming he became PM after the coup would have to agree this. But the Court could have issued an immediate ban. It didn't. We'll soon see if the brown envelopes work this time!

Following the above posts, my father was a doctor. Prior to World War 2, he enlisted into the Royal Army Medical Corps. At the time of Dunkirk, he was one of the British troops who had earlier been commanded to move west to St. Valery. The British High Command had no additional ships to evacuate those at St. Valery. As a result 10,000 were taken prisoner. My father found himself in several POW camps over the next 5 years, most notably near Gdansk. As the camp's medical officer, he himself could not attempt to escape. But he did help others in several ways. He placed cuts on the tongues of some to persuade the Germans that they were subject to epileptic fits. He also worked out a way to elongate the skin around the penis to make it seem as though others had not in fact been circumcised. In some cases, he was successful. Not having any interest in medicine, I never bothered to find out how this was achieved.

Prayut's backers insist he was not the officially elected PM until 2017. Members of the Constitutional Court have shown before that the Court has no teeth and its members are not averse to receiving the odd brown envelope, the larger the better. I'll lay odds that his backers win and he'll be reinstated as PM at least until the next election whenever that takes place. After all he's only suspended pending the Constitutional Court making a final ruling!

What a wonderful ending to his ordeal for this young man - and a wonderful beginning, too!

In principle I agree. However, I think it is important to realise that occasionally a boy or young man will suffer from phimosis. This can cause difficulty and even pain during urination and sex. For these guys, some form of circumcision is almost essential if they are to live a healthy life. I also have no issue if it is a procedure a grown man wishes to undergo - for whatever reason. We are all in charge of our own bodies. Babies circumcised only a few days old and children not yet in their teens are given absolutely no decision on the matter. An irreversible excision of a part of their body is made without their having any say in the matter. I see much wrong in this.

Being partnered in Thailand, my bf is aware I have some apps still on my phone which I use occasionally when I travel. Yes, I know I could temporarily delete them but it's just easier to keep them there. I therefore have some experience of chatting with Thai boys as most weeks there are a few who click on me. In my limited experience can I suggest that as others have suggested unless you know a guy at least a little, joking with Thai boys often backfires. What a westerner considers a joke, very often Thais do not. Years ago I used to go out on Sundays for dinner and a visit to a bar or two with a good friend I have known for decades. He loved to joke with the boys. Although I suggested several times that he stop doing it as virtually all the boys had no idea what he was talking about, he just kept on doing it. In a bar setting he could get away with it - just. I suspect on the apps there is always a danger it will be taken the wrong way. Then if someone clicks on me whom I do not know or do not want to know, I keep everything simple and merely end the conversation as politely as I consider appropriate. So I usually say "sorry I do not know you" and then enter into no more communication. Or in the OP's case above, perhaps a "sorry I was only there for the shows and was not looking for company" might have been more effective. My feeling is that expressions of "I like/love you" or "I love your photos" rarely mean anything other than sex with you might be fun - tip or no tip depending on how the chat continues. So best to end the chat quickly and make sure nothing follows.