PeterRS

It seems @reader merely duplicated what @bkkmfj2648 wrote 90 minutes earlier in the Bangkok section. Since there are many more comments there, I have moved my post to that thread.

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With all respect to your Mum, I totally fail to understand why wait staff should not be paid a proper working wage. Tips should be tips for good service - not to pay the wages of a waiter or waitress. Japan has it exactly right. No tipping! On my first ever visit to Tokyo in 1981, I tried to tip the cute and excellent bellboy. He shrank back almost in horror. He had only been doing his job to the best of his ability which is what he was paid to do.

Quite a number of aircraft are certified for automatic computer landings. If there is a problem it is that the ground systems must work flawlessly to provide 100% accurate info to the on board computer. Few airports I believe are certified for automatic landings.

I will probably never get used to the American style of tipping, even though I have visited more than 35 times. Those in the service industry should get paid for doing their jobs, not be dependent on tips. To a certain extent I can understand tipping waiters who go out of their way to offer very good service. But 20%?? Leave 10% and everyone glares at you as you exit! Just because the restaurant owner won't pay them a living wage? But when it comes to room maids, why should I have to pay any tip to them? What extra service do I get for a tip?

I can see that this thread will almost certainly throw up some major differences of opinion - which is great as isn't that what discussions are all about? As for the Bible. I have never believed the Old Testament. How can we believe the truth of what was basically merely an oral history for thousands of years before someone comitted it to written form? We all knoow that when telling a factual incident to friends, it may start out as, let's say, 90% fact. When those friends then relate it to their friends, it becomes 80% . . . and so on, with the result that often it ends up somewhere as virtually a totally different incident. I also think we must remember that during the period of which the Old Testament writes, that world was simply a series of smallish tribes living in a tiny part of our world. The future of the tribe was important, perhaps even its growth in order to defend itself against other tribes. Hence, perhaps, the prohibitions against any form of sex other than for actual procreation. I have more faith in the New Testament in that i believe much of it probably did take place, if only becuase it is much nearer in time. But then my doubts arise when I recall that it was the still pagan Constantine who summoned the Council Nicea to determine what constitutes certain key elements of the Christian doctrine and eventually what would be included in- and as importantly what would be excluded from - the New Testament. Where are the Gospels of Judas, Peter, Philip, Thomas and the Nazarenes, for example, the last actually written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus? So why should we believe in that what was effectively decided for us by a group of clerics and others who lived three hundred years after Jesus' death? I therefore question what makes the Christian religion more important in our western thinking than, for example, the older Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, or even the more recently founded islam?

Do you know how many Tesla cars have had to be recalled? More than 700,000! The Model S tops the list with 38 separate recall orders. This is followed by the Model X with 37 recalls. Even the Cybertruck introduced as recently as November 2023 has been the subject to 8 recalls. My view is that airlines will never take a risk with pilotless passenger carrying passengers. Never! The passengers will never stand/fly for it! LOL https://www.brclegal.com/tesla-recall-statistics/

I have worked in Japan - albeit more than a few years ago and I accept things have changed a bit since then - and also in China. But I absolutely cannot accept that the Japanese economy is so advanced because their people have the capacity to think out of the box. I was in the offices of so many Japanese businesses with dozens of Japanese sitting at identical small desk spaces overseen by managers or supervisors who usually had small individual offices with glass panels. I saw a great deal of paper pushing and very little actual thinking - and certainly not thinking out of the box. It was not the job of the average Japanese to think out of the box but to fulfil meticulously the mandates of their managers and ultimately their companies. That was certainly the situation in the company I worked for! Japan succeeded partly because of a host of visionary business leaders like Soichiro Honda, Konosuke Matsushita of Panasonic, Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota, Masayushi Son of Softbank, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka who founded Sony, Satoru Iwata of Nintendo, and a host of younger leaders at the head of e-ommerce and video gaming industries, for example. Leadership within companies was and is top down with little if any room for thinking out of the box by those lower down the ladder. Secondly, the unique Japanese concept of the keiretsu. These are huge business groupings that link banks, trading companies and industrialists through ownership, cross stock holdings and long-standing exclusive relationships. There is no doubt that in the west these would be regarded as cartels and broken up. In Japan they are both permitted and encouraged by the government. It was their very size that gave them the financial strength and the connections to grow quickly, aggressively gaining market share. This resulted in great competitiveness both nationally and internationally. Thirdly, businesses had access to a huge pool of domestic household savings, far greater than in the EU or the USA. On the other hand, from virtully the first time I visited China and started looking seriously at businesses, I saw there was a much greater level of individual responsibility in many offices. I quickly came to the conclusion that partly because of this, China would surely grow faster than Japan. And that proved true, at least in the 1990s/2000s when Japan entered into a major economic recession which no attempts enabled the country to start growing again. China in those years, admittedly with assitance from a welcoming west, grew at a staggeringly high rate. Today I would have no hesitation in putting money into China rather than Japan, if only because Chinese generally have a greater entrepreneurial spirit than their Japanese counterparts. I have not worked in Korea but from various visits over the years I believe it is much more in tune with the Japanese way of business than China. All that said, having to devote oneself to a company and its company-think, individual Japanese obviously have greater freedom to make up their own minds outisde of work. But as in Korea, for the vast majority of the citizens societal and historical forces still render this difficult for most.

I do think the dining example is one that does not really illustrate the true sense of collectivism to which I was referring. As we all know, in many Asian cuisines (in fact almost all) it is tradition that several dishes are served during one meal, usually but not necessarily always all at once. Each individual at the table then chooses which dish they wish to sample first - and so on. There is no first course, pause, main course, pause, dessert etc. This is a time immemorial tradition. I suggest, though, this is not the reason that, for example, the Japanese and Koreans have an ingrained sense that the group is more important than the individual. That is a much larger societal/historical issue and not even related to the point I was trying to make earlier!

And you are happy that the computer flies the plane without a pilot? Rather you than me. In fact I wouldn't go near a plane without a pilot AND a computer!

There are certainly major differences. I have spent 46 years now living in Asia, mostly in three specific countries but for part of that time with an Asia-wide remit for two relatively major companies. I made my remarks in respect of those visiting Thailand specifically for some form of nighttime entertainment and why gogo bars are generally not an Asian thing in comparison to spas, saunas and discos. And by collectivism I certainly do not in any way refer to entire countries. Merely 2 or more guys from one country visiting Thailand for a vacation.

To take the topic as its original meaning, I wonder what God actually means for priests and those preaching other faiths. I have yet to have any "man of God" explain to me various questions. As a fairly practical person, the Big Bang has always thrown up questions. I can understand that somewhere a gazillion years ago, our universe started with the Big Bang. Yet when I think of this I wonder: into what did our universe expand? To my thinking you cannot expand into nothing. Just as a balloon expands into the air around it, so the universe must have started expanding massively quickly into something! Did God create nothingness? Was God there at the Big Bang? DId God create it? Then we are told the universe is still expanding into realms of space our minds simply cannot comprehend. Two years ago we were informed the diameter of the universe is likely to be 93 billion light years and still expanding. Is God responsible for this? Where is he/she/it? If God in all 'his' manifestations is merely an idea thought up by various men at various times in what is, let's face it, very recent history, why do we not own up to the fact that God is a fiction? Why do we not accept that we really have no clue what God is? Why are we stuck with concepts of God which accept the appalling treatment of children in Canada, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere, World Wars, genocide, natural disasters and so on - and yet we are told week-in week-out about a God of love? Is it any wonder that in many countries, church attendance is falling rapidly?

Surely it is actually quite obvious. Individuals can equally have their own specific choices even though when as part of a group, it is group thinking that takes over. If in a group X wants to visit a gogo bar and Y and Z prefer to go to a disco, in a western mindset one would go his way and two to theirs. We sometimes seem to forget that for many Asians, especially younger Asians, travelling in a group, a group consensus is usually more important. In another sense, thank goodness for individualism even in a "collectivist" society. Without it, in a spa we'd all want the same masseur and in a gogo bar to off the same guy!

If his memory is that bad, why is he flying a passenger aircraft?

I know little about American history, but I expect not in individual institutions. I'm not sure if native indian tribes were forced to assimilate their children. I always assumed that the white settlers preferred to fence off native Americans in reservations where they did their own thing, as it were. Yet the treament of such peoples was certainlly appalling in so many ways. It strikes me that taken as a whole this is similar in many respects to what was done in Ireland, Australia and surely some other countries. A paper by Dr. Michael Kryzanek issued by Bridgewater State University 2 years ago summed up the history ot American treatment of native Americans thus - "The history of the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans (also called Indigenous People) is a sad and cruel one filled with broken promises, forced removal from tribal lands, murderous conflict bordering on genocide and an adamant refusal to respect basic human rights. Presidents from Andrew Jackson to Ulysses Grant to Rutherford Hayes, to modern day presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon all supported legislation and rulemaking that diminished if not eliminated tribal control over land and denied them adequate health care, educational and housing support. The goal of presidential administrations and the Congress was to provide economic and financial opportunities to the “white man,” while driving the Native Americans into extreme poverty . . . "It is important to remember that the Native Americans were not granted citizenship until 1924, even though these Indigenous People were the first settlers in the New World. Yet, greed, racism, cruelty and neglect on the part of the United States government and indeed the American people led to second class status for these first Americans." It strikes me that taken as a whole this is similar in many respects to what was done in Ireland, Australia and surely some other countries. As you may know, I am British and I am equally appalled by what the British did in many of their overseas colonial possessions. As I have stated earlier, I am writing a book about Myanmar. Britain basically destroyed that country and is mostly responsible for the horrors of the near eight-decades of civil war in that country.

I sometimes ask friends around Asia why it is that they have little interest in gogo bars, preferring instead saunas, massage spas and discos. I can't say I have any definite conclusion that has not already been discussed. @spoon makes the good point that many Asian visitors come in groups and so they get involved in their evening entertainment as a group. A couple have said they just do not like the concept of a gogo bar which, for them, can be hit or miss enjoyment-wise and as much on the wallet, especially if they are in the bar with their group. Others find them boring, having little interest in ladyboy lip-syncing and cocks on display. They can see the latter in the saunas more easily and cheaply. Trying to distill their various answers, I'd suggest that to a certain extent of the three mentioned in my first sentence, each individual patron can relatively easily make his own choice, whereas in a gogo bar the choice is dependent on the type of bar they enter and often types of guys in whom they are less interested. So bars can mean an expensive waste. Just impressions.

"Good authors too who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose. Anything goes." These lyrics from the opening of Cole Porter's gorgeous 1934 musical "Anything Goes" could well have been written with the writer and novelist Christopher Isherwood in mind. Although Porter and Isherwood may never have met, both were gay. While Porter married in part to mask his sexuality (the fact that his wife was rich no doubt also helped!) the English-born Isherwood was one of the 20th century's most openly gay men. 1950s photo of Christopher by William Caskey with whom he had a tempestuous 5-year affair Deprived of his father killed during the First World War and thereafter of life with the remainder of his family when, as was customary for those of the upper middle class, the young Christopher was packed off to boarding school, he quickly made friends. Equally quickly he discovered his homosexuality. Boys' boarding schools in those days were notorious havens of homosexuality, an activity that was often more innocent than romantically serious and usually discarded when young men advanced to university. One school friend who followed him to University was the young poet W. H. Auden. The two became best friends and frequently shared a bed, even though Christoppher was at Cambridge and Auden not far away at Oxford. Unlike Auden, though, university for Christopher was not to be taken seriously. At the end of his second year in 1925, he was sent down, the polite phrase for being expelled, after he wrote joke answers on his end-of-year exam papers. This caused great annoyance to his mother who had expected her son to become a Cambridge don. Christopher did not care. He took a variety of part-time jobs – as a private tutor, as secretary to a music group, as an attempted writer of novels and attended medical school. Like many Cambridge students of the day, he had dabbled in Communism, believing like so many others in the Russian propaganda which painted a picture of a superior egalitarian society than the very unequal society then in Britain. Perhaps fortunately he was some years older than all but one of the infamous Cambridge ‘five’, the British spies Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, all recruited from university who went on to betray many of their country’s secrets to the Russians, the first three defecting to the post-war Soviet Union after their discovery in the 1950s and 60s. The austere face of Sir Anthony Blunt, exposed as a dangerous spy for the Soviet Union in 1964 as “the fourth man”, but permitted to retain his position as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures provided he confessed what he knew. He was finally unmasked and disgraced in parliament in 1979. Christopher was far more interested in what was happening in poverty-stricken Germany. When Auden moved to Berlin for a few months in 1928, he wrote to his friend extolling the availability of gay men in the Weimar Republic. Isherwood followed a few months later. Berlin had earned a thoroughly deserved reputation for sexual freedom and debauchery. The words of Cole Porter were never more true: sexually, in Berlin “anything goes”! As his lover of many decades, Don Bachardy, later made clear, "To Christopher, Berlin was boys!" (Isherwood did not meet Bachardy until 1953 on a beach in California when he was 49 and Bachardy 18 - they remained together until his death in 1986). Whereas Auden had left to teach in England, Christopher stayed on and positively revelled in Berlin's thriving gay scene. He was later to say he had had sex with at least 400 boys. In staid old England and indeed the United States to which he would emigrate in 1939, 400 must have seemed an outrageous number. The compendium of the three novels based on Christopher's Berlin days Then in 1932 he met his first real love, a handsome 17-year old German named Heinz Neddermayer. But storm clouds in the form of the Nazi Party were on the horizon. In 1933 the pair escaped to England, but Neddermeyer could not obtain a long-term visa. After a second short visit in 1934, they gave up trying and started four-years of wandering around Europe. The relationship had to end when the Gestapo finally caught up with Heinz in 1937 and enrolled him in the German Army. Neddermeyer survived a short period of forced labour and military service. In 1938 he married and had a son named Christian in 1940. Heinz met Christopher only one more time, in 1952 when Christopher was researching what was to become one of his most famous books of his time in Berlin. In 1938 while getting over the split with Heinz, ever the wanderer Christopher had joined his old pal Auden on a trip to the Paris of the Orient, the very permissive Shanghai. They had a commission to write a book on the Sino-Japanese war, but it was Shanghai that fascinated Christopher far more. He wrote – “The tired or lustful businessman will find here everything to gratify his desires . . . if you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray like afternoon tea.” Just before war broke out in Europe, Auden and Christopher moved to the United States, the former to New York and Christopher to California. In addition to writing and working on various movie scripts, he became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda and remained a Hindu for the rest of his life. Soon after arriving in California he became one of the celebrated European émigré set, mixing regularly with the likes of Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht and Greta Garbo. As he left for the USA he had written a novel based partly on his experiences, "Goodbye to Berlin". In 1951 one of his friends persuaded the playwright John Van Druten to adapt the novel into a Broadway play, "I am a Camera". Eventually it was fashioned into a movie of the same name, Later this was refashioned to become the Broadway musical "Cabaret". With its haunting music, provocative story and lyrics, all set against the backdrop of emerging Nazi Germany, "Cabaret" became a huge Broadway hit. Soon the new movie version was to make it into an even bigger worldwide sensation. Liza Minnelli instantly became one of the world's top stars (and a gay icon in her own right) and the first person ever to appear on the cover of TIME and Newsweek magazines in the same week. Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles - YouTube Allied Artists In one scene, Sally Bowles is confronted by her erstwhile English lover about another man she has been seeing - Brian: "Oh! Fuck Maximilian!" Sally: "I already did!" Brian (sheepishly): "So did I!" Even for 1972 that was close to pushing the limits of public acceptability! Isherwood continued to write and Bachardy became a noted painter. Their partnership had its ups and downs, especially when Bachardy started a series of affairs. Yet the relationship survived. Indeed, it became a model for many gay men of the time undertaking long-term relationships in the new openness of the gay liberation movement. The cover of a DVD about Christopher and Don’s relationship A frequent visitor to their home was the gay artist David Hockney and the couple feature in several of Hockney’s paintings. Christopher and Don at home painted by their good friend David Hockney Christopher died in 1986 aged 81. In recent years 90-year old Bachardy has overseen the publication of Christopher's voluminous diaries and the republication of his novels. Even if only his Berlin stories and "Cabaret" are to survive into the future, they must surely be a fitting tribute to Christopher Isherwood, one of the celebrated gay icons of the last century.

As others have written, this is not surprising. The problems seem to occur when arranging meet ups when you are free, as many of those happy to get together for free sex are students or those with a job who are generally only free in the evenings.

This surely helps to confirm the general preference of most gay Asian tourists for massage rather than attending gogo bars.

Buffet invests for the long term. With the ¥ now so relatively low, any major investment in Japan, however enticing the companies' future growth, would seem to be a good long term bet.

On my very first visit to New York I was advised that if I had time for just one Gallery/Museum it had to be the intimate Frick Collection on East 70th Street at 5th Avenue. I went, and was enchanted. On many subsequent New York trips I have frequently revisted the Frick. It may be small but it has a stunning collection of paintings by Fragonard, Holbein, Vermeer, Turner, Rembrandt, Goya, Rubens, Monet, van Dyck and others. All beautifully displayed in what had been Henry Clay Frick's lovely home and continued after his death by his daughter Helen. The renovated home for the Collection will be open from Wednesdays till Sundays and closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Entrance for adults is $30 with a reduction to $22 for those 65 and over. Youngsters between 10 and 18 get in free. Details of the collection can be found here - https://www.frick.org/visit

You might wish to start here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_laundries_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations

In all my years of flying, I have encountered a number of emergencies. But never have I been on an aircraft that has had to turn back. The 270 souls on board Flight UA198 had to endure that last Saturday afternoon. Flying from Los Angeles to Shanghai on a 787, the flight surprisingly turned around after 90 minutes and landed at San Francisco. Engine trouble? No! Air conditioning problem? No! Other mechanical problem? No! The pilot had forgotten to take his passport! Gulp! A new crew flew the aircraft to Shanghai.

I have made so many in my life I am sometimes surprised i am able to finance my retirement. Back in the late 1990s, I invested a little here and there. One stock that interested me was Starbucks Asia, then far less visible in Asia than now. I resisted. Then 10 years later another stock caught my eye. I noticed that Warren Buffet had invested in the Chinese battery maker BYD taking a 10% stake in the company and a seat on the Board. I had thought about putting $1,000 into the company. Again I resisted. BYD has since become one of the fastest selling battery powered vehicles, now outselling Tesla due to Chinese government investment and lower prices. In fact it is the world's third most valuable car maker after Toyota and Tesla, and China is the world's largest EV market. Warren Buffet started selling half of his shareholding starting in 2022. In doing so a $230 million investment turned into an $8 billion profit. And he still retains roughly half of his shareholding. I could be in a penthouse now!

The OP stated his desire for "younger twink type" guys. I have no experience of either country but on occasional visits to sites like chaturbate and stripchat, I seem to find the young twink type more attractive than the younger Brazil guys. Merely an observation.