macaroni21

I find it rather funny. His massage fails make me feel like an expert in navigating the unexpected here in Thailand. The translation from Japanese to English takes some getting used to, especially when he uses terms like "cave exploration" (I think it means insertive sex), "sword" (penis) and "white light" (cum?), "exit" (ejaculation?) The structure of Japanese sentences also do not convert well into English, so you have to overlook that. Overall, it's nice to see what a straight sex tourist gets by way of experiences.

My thoughts exactly!

What's the point of having wealth unless one shows off? 🤣 It's actually quite universal behaviour, only that the way we show off varies from one culture to another. In the West, it tends to be flashy cars and yachts, in Arabia, I think racing camels and falcons... Remember the term "conspicuous consumption"? The term wasn't invented in Asia.

The issue is much bgger than tariffs, and no amount of tinkering with tariff rates will begin to address the real problem. Essentially what has happened is that the US has flipped ideologically, and wants to be: (a) an isolationist power that nevertheless wants to remain the leading military power in the world, yet without getting entangled with alliances ("fortress America"); (b) a self-sufficient economy - because it sees a self-sufficient economy as critical to maintaining its strength and freedom of action. The two aims are not achievable in combination, but the US does not realise that yet. But I shall stick to the economic side in this discussion, which will mostly be about trade flows, reserve currencies and exchange rates. It is not normal for the US Dollar and Western currencies to be so strong We take it for granted that developing countries' currencies should be weak vis-a-vis the USD and western countries' currencies, such that Americans and Europeans end up with huge purchasing power relative to Thais, Brazilians or Vietnamese. It's an abnormal state of affairs that came out of an abnormal period in human history. The West industrialised between 1850 and 1950, while (partly through colonialism) other parts of the world remained agrarian, with a few places becoming mainly diggers of minerals. The West didn't have much need or use for the agricultural or even many of the mineral products from the non-West. Or if it did, then through the power assymetry of colonial empires, it kept the output of the non-West cheap relative to the metropolitan countries like Britain and France. Even during the post-colonial 1950s to 2000, the non-West had healthy demand for products of the West - industrial goods, consumer goods, cultural goods (movies, music) status goods (wines and Porches) and also services from the West (banking, higher education, aviation) - whereas the non-West produced little that was of interest to the West (rice, anyone? coconut, anyone?). This imbalance of desire led to high demand for Western currencies (with which to buy western goods) and low demand for non-Western currencies among westerners. Westerners had no need to hold bahts, pesos, dinars, when they had little of interest to buy things from baht-cuntry, peso-country or dinar-country. As a result Western currencies became high-valued relative to non-West currencies. At the same time, since so much of trade was directed towards to the West (rather than a non-West country trading with another non-West country), holding on to a buffer of Western currency was useful, not only to facilitate the buying of Western goods, but also as a mutually acceptable medium of exchange between 2 non-West countries. The West's aversion to holding rupiahs, rupees, reals, rials and ringgits also meant that even when the West bought stuff from a non-West country, the trade was almost always denominated in a Western currrency. Because of political stability and independent Central Banks in western currencies, there developed trust in the stability of the value of Western currencies. And thus, these trade-accrued buffers of western money held by non-West countries (sometimes indirectly through commercial companies) came to represent a store of value, i.e. reserve holdings. Buffers are not in themselves bad. They lubricate trade, both with the country of the currency, but also with third countries. Of course, the most desired reserve currency (which used to be gold and the Pound Sterling) came to be the US Dollar in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Just about every country in the world holds a buffer reserve of USD. Oh shites, the agrarian countries industrialised The present crisis owes its origins to decades back when several agrarian countries industrialised. Japan led the way, even before 1950, but post-WW2, we can add South Korea, Taiwan, many Latin American countries and many Asean countries as well. India too, though India seems disinclined to participate in the global trading system as much as the others. And of course, there's China. Not only did they begin to produce industrial and consumer goods, many of these countries produced them at far better price-value points than factories in the West. Trade patterns changed. Today the West has a huge appetite for the industrial and consumer products of the non-West. Over decades, the US began to import huge volumes from countries like China, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, while these countries (as they developed their own domestic industries) had less and less demand for US and Western goods (in general). In certain sectors, US goods still had the competitive or technological edge, but in sector after sector, the US has lost it. These non-West countries were soon selling far more to the US than they were buying from it ---> the trade deficit. Yet, because of the trust in the USD, these non-West exporters were happy to receive payment in USD. But because of the chronic trade deficits year after year, the amounts of USD held by the non-West grew and grew. And for a long while, the US government was happy with that, because they could run a budget deficit and simply borrow China's dollar holdings, Japan's dollar holdings, Singapore's dollar holdings, to finance their budget deficit. Breaking point You guessed it. We're now at breaking point. Borrowings cannot grow indefinitely. Interest paid out to China, Japan, etc keep growing. Somebody somewhere sees the de-industrialisation of the US as a serious threat to its future as a world power. So we see this ideological change: WE MUST RE-INDUSTRIALISE! Trump's tariffs are meant to serve this purpose: to shut down imports into the US. To close the US market off from foreign producers/exporters so as to motivate re-industrialisation. I therefore do not think any tinkering with Vietnam's or Thailand's or Brazil's tariff regimes wil truly mollify the US now. But it won't work, at least not without other consequences Economists are nearly unaminous that the goal of re-industrialisation will not work the way Trump and MAGA imagine. I can think of three big reasons: 1. So long as Trump's and succeeding administrations flip and flop policy-wise (the most likely scenario), no investor will be confident enough to invest/build factories to the scale required for the US to get anywhere near self-sufficiency. 2. In many industries, the US does not have the knowhow to manufacture to the same quality at the same efficiency as producers in other countries, notably Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea. Or Germany for machine tools. In specific sectors, Brazil and Mexico too. Think EV cars, solar panels, robotics, any number of products you find on Walmart or Target stories. Now think about AI in which China just pulled an upset. 3. Even if American factories manage to produce these goods which the US hitherto has imported, they will be produced at a cost that is uncompetitive on the world stage (US wages being one of the reasons... more on this later). So, the US-factories will not be able to sell abroad, thus, not reap economics of scale that spring from serving a larger global market In short, either the aim of US self-sufficiency will not be attained, or it will be attained in a way with a closed market like India's: domestic manufactures for the domestic market, with American consumers paying much higher prices for their US-made equivalents than what people in the rest of the world pay for the best Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Czech, Chilean, Turkish, Brazilian, German, Canadian products. What are the other consequences? If the US becomes more like a closed market with imports strongly inhibited, then countries like China, Germany and Japan that have hitherto accummulated huge USD surpluses held in the US as reserves, will soon stop growing their reserves (since their trade surpluses will vanish). They may even wind them down because the unpredictability of US policy (e.g. after seizing Russian reserves) makes it risky to hold so many US dollars. There is also a real prospect of serious depreciation of the USD. Consider this: the value of a currency vis-a-vis other currencies (i.e. the exchange rate) is a matter of supply and demand. If countries, because of their reduced trade with the US, no longer see the need to hold so much in buffer (since there is less trade to lubricate), if countries fear their reserves being seized, then they will want to offload whatever USD they have down to a safe amount. The offloading (a.k.a. selling pressure) will have an effect on the price of the USD (i.e. the exchange rate versus other currencies). This then becomes a vicious cycle. Imports desired by Americans first have their prices raised because they now come with a 25% (insert percentage here) tax (also known as tariff) payable to the US government. Then as the USD falls in value versus other countries, imports become even more expensive to Americans. If the effect of expensive imports is to reduce trade into the US further, then countries like China, Japan, will want even less to keep holding US dollars. Which then cycles back to downward pressure on the USD. What about financing the US government's deficit? Well, as China's, Japan's and other countries' USD reserves shrink, the US government will have fewer lenders to help it bridge the deficit. Meanwhile the tariffs are going to be such that imports will likely shrink, thus not raising as much revenue as hoped for (at the same time, more Americans will find themselves buying less since they cannot afford imported goods as much as before). Economists have pointed out that even in the best scenario, revenues raised through new tariffs will not be anywhere enough to close the budget deficit. If the US government cannot fund its deficit, it will necessarily have to slash expenditure. Military expenditure. Social spending. Infrastructure maintenance. But won't there be a point when US-made products become competitive on the world market? Yes, in theory. But costs in the US will have to fall very far to get there. Labour cost has to match what factory workers earn sewing Nike shoes in Indonesia, packing corned beef in Brazil, assembling umbrellas in Vietnam and making knock-down furniture in China. Let's use an example that we're familiar with: paid sex. Today, the US has a trade deficit in paid sex. More Americans buy sex from the non-West than non-westerners buy from America (they can't afford it!). In order for a trade balance to be restored, the rentboy in the US has to cost roughly the same as the rentboy in Asia or Latin America since the rentboy in the US probably does not offer any qualitatively better service. I think currently, the price differential is $250 vs $60? i.e. roughly 4 to 1. Probably more. So, to restore trade balance, the USD has to fall to a quarter of its current value before US products/services become as attractive as non-west products/services. In other words, trade balance in paid sex will be restored when the USD is worth 8.50 baht, or 1.40 Brazilian Reals. At that point, we will buy Nike shoes sewn in Massachusetts, hang up Christmas lights made in Arkansas, and fly over to North Carolina for two weeks of debauchery. Mind you, we might stll be flying over in a Chinese-made airliner, watching made-in-Japan holographic movies en-route on our foldable phone made in Syria by a Vietnamese tech company.

Looks like a misspelling on the poster: Ink n Aat.

What's the language that he used? Was it French?

I had made this point somewhere else before (can't remember where): When one watches how prices have moved over time, one can guess where customer demand is healthy and where it is not. That prices for offs have not budged in over ten years tells us that demand for offs is flat at best. Probably lower than in 2010 judging by the reducing number of boys on stage. Yet drinks prices have doubled in the same period. So customer demand for shows is not as soft as demand for boys. What does this imply? There can be a separate discussion about why this divergent trend is the way it is (hint: demographics, aggressive advertising by massage parlours, bar boys' tip expectations compared to massage parlours....)

Oh yes, I mentioned the Pepsi douche - one of the numbers in Boys Bangkok's show. Here's a description of it from a visit report from December 2008: -- Boys Bangkok had an innovative new act this week. I shall call it the Pepsi Douche. Two muscular guys come on stage, totally naked (with erect cocks, needless to say). They dance a bit, they wrestle a bit, and then one forces the other onto the floor. The top then grabs a 1.5-litre bottle of Pepsi, agitates it and forces the fizzy liquid into the rectum of the other. Naturally, most of the Pepsi sprays all over the bar, dousing the customers in the front two rows. I think the idea is for the bottom guy to take up some of the Pepsi into his rectum and then spray it out, but if that was the aim of the act, I didn’t see any successful performance. But wait, there’s more. Customers are invited to buy/contribute a bottle (or two) of beer, to be used in a similar manner by the top on the bottom. The whole idea may appall some people, but hey, I thought it was great fun. Drinks: 250 baht.

I forgot to add that in that Sept 2010 visit, the drink price was 260 baht.

I knew that downstairs bar across the soi from Xtreme as "Boys Bangkok", but the name varied a bit depending on which signboard one was looking at. The overhead signboard said "The Boys" pairing it with Dream Boy. This photo was from March 2010: In the above photo, if you look at the extreme left edge, you will see yet another version of its name on a white signboard: "The Boys Bangkok". Another photo, from December 2010: Below is a post I made about Boys Bangkok from a visit in September 2010. Notice the huge numbers of stage boys and customers mentioned in the post. And it wasn't even high season. Boys Bangkok surprisingly enjoyable Boys Bangkok is the overshadowed sibling of Dream Boy Gogo Bar. Its chief purpose seems to be to stop the patrons of Dream Boy from drifting to a competitor bar after Dream Boy’s main show is over. A voice, in thickly German-accented English, tells customers at around 23:30h as the show ends, that they are free to take their drinks with them and go down via the back stairs to Boys Bangkok on the ground floor. “We offer you two shows for the price of one,” the voice says. “And that is vhy ve are the best gogo bar in the vorld.” And so it was that for several years now, each time I stepped into Boys Bangkok, it was via the back stairs, only to stay in the lower bar for a few more minutes before leaving. This trip I decided to do it differently. I went directly to Boys Bangkok at around 23:15h while Dream Boy’s show was still in progress upstairs. And what I found was a bar that was really what gogo should be about. The bar was mostly empty when I entered. There were no more than three or four other patrons who could not have been there long. Boys Bangkok does not open its doors until around eleven o’clock. On stage were ten boys, slim, young and mostly fresh-faced, dancing energetically in their underwear. Doing this every night had resulted in lean athletic bodies that only added to their appeal. From time to time they looked at the few of us in the audience with broad smiles, like they were truly enjoying themselves, though I knew of course that they were mainly hoping for an off. Nevertheless, dancing away, they were far more interesting to watch than the one-knee shuffle more often seen in other gogo bars. At around 23:35h, a surge of people came down from Dream Boy. All the seats in Boys Bangkok were quickly filled (including extra chairs set out beforehand; the waiters had known it would be a big crowd) leaving the last 8 – 10 patrons with nowhere to sit. With so many people in the bar, and many moving about, it was difficult to estimate numbers, but it would have been something like 80 – 90. This implied that Dream Boy must have had a very good night, with perhaps as many as 100-120 people for their show if we assume that only 3 in 4 chose to proceed down to Boys Bangkok after the show. — The ten gogo dancers made way at 23:45h for the full complement of boys. There were about 35 – 40 of them packed onto the stage, and as is always the case with Dream Boy/Boys Bangkok, most of them were rather appealing. There was considerable variety, from twinks to muscle guys, but virtually all were in good shape, with masculine demeanour. In other words, those who prefer fem boys will need to look elsewhere. They shuffled around for about 25 minutes (a bit too long), during which time I counted at least 6 boys being called down to sit with clients, with perhaps more that I didn’t spot. At this late hour, one can assume that if a client asks for a boy to sit with him, an off would almost surely follow. I found the numbers interesting. I knew that at the start of an evening’s work, there would be 50 (perhaps even as many as 60) boys working. If they were down to 35 – 40 by 23:45h, with 6 to 8 more called out by 00:15h, this suggests that on a night like this, about 20 to 25 boys got an off, giving an offing rate of about 35 – 40 percent. It’s not bad at all, especially considering that the off fee for Dream Boy/Boys Bangkok is now at 500 baht. The short show began at 00:15h; it would reinforce my belief that 30 minutes is the ideal length of a show. Too many bars stretch a show to one hour which tends to make it dreary. There were only four acts: A big cock parade by eight boys; A choreographed fast dance item by six boys, with a mix of ballet and hiphop; The “Titanic fuck” – see more below; The Pepsi douche by two biggish guys, the same act I saw a year ago and which I have described in an earlier blogpost. The “Titanic fuck”, judging by audience reaction, was the most enjoyable one. The scene opened with two characters on a bow of a ship in the iconic pose from the movie. Wind and waves came crashing and the couple drowned. The body of the male character, played by a rather macho guy, was washed away. Some time passed. The body is later discovered by three mermaids, waddling onto the stage. These three were played by the bar’s team of resident ladyboy performers. Curious, they poked at the body, and stripped him naked. Aroused, the ladyboys flipped open their fish skins revealing hard cocks, to much nervous laughter from the audience. They then fought over who would get to fuck the macho corpse. It was necrophilia and gender reversal rolled into one; it was Leonardo di Caprio fucked hard by gatoeys. Perhaps it fulfilled a secret wish of many in the audience?

I agree with @vinapu People choose to travel in groups for pragmatic reasons, and we should not be reading cultural innateness into such behaviour. Cost/economy has been mentioned by vinapu. But less obvious, yet equally powerful a factor, is linguistic comfort. Many westerners are able to speak English as a second or third language, and they can assume that in many countries that they would like to visit, such as Philippines, India or Jordan, there will be locals especially in the tourism-related places who will likewise speak English as a second or third language. If you don't speak a single word of English you may suspect that it will be very daunting to try to travel alone. The more "heartlander" or less educated person from China, Vietnam or Japan will decide that the pragmatic value of travelling in the group to overcome language barriers is important. In addition to cost considerations. Also, without English or access to travel guides in their own language, even figuring out where the attractions are or how to get there by local transport will prove difficult. Best to leave it to a tour organiser. As people in these countries get richer and better educated, with some grasp of English, they will become more independent. I see no shortage of independent travellers from China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan etc everywhere I go. Unsurprisingly, they tend to be younger, which correlates with education. It's worthwhile looking at the flip side. How many Westerners visit the secondary and tertiary cities of China or India where very little English is spoken? Some do, and then find that the assumptions they made - that people in these hinterlands also would speak some English - are wrong. Even Google Translate does not work because the people speak with a heavy provincial accent. The signboards are all in Chinese. The roadnames are all in Chinese. The museum exhibits are only explained in Chinese. In the deeper parts of China, I see packaged tourists from the West - the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish.... These travels are not cheap and these Europeans are middle-class or higher-income professionals. Yet, it still makes sense, for the same pragmatic reasons of language and information scarcity, for them to use a group tour. You notice that when I speak of the tourists in the hinterlands of China, I didn't mention Americans. It may be just the luck of the draw, but my observation is that they are few and far between. If choosing to travel in groups signals a lack of confidence in the linguistic challenge of visiting another country, at least they visit. What does it say when they don't visit at all? It's below lack of confidence - is it a fear of encountering difference?

You are right. I had meant to include the Japanese among the Indonesians and Thais, but somehow left them out. The Koreans and Chinese are more straightforward. Even then, there have been occasions when my Chinese interpreter was flummoxed by the speaker using a literary or historical allusion when saying something. It was a round-about way of making a point, but unless the listener/interpreter was as well-versed in the literary classics or history, the cursive speech can be hard to interpret. The point is, the culture of such a language allows for disagreement to be expressed in indirect ways, which can be very hard for an outsider to pick up. Everybody is smiling and saying nice things, but they are vigurously objecting to something.

On "collectivism", I think we are talking about different things at the same time (myself included), so let me try to make myself clearer. In many societies outside of the West, a person's identity is strongly anchored to a group, usually a family group (but sometimes a religious group). It manifests itself in two easily visible ways: (1) the individual feels a strong responsibility to care for and support other members of the group, and we see this for example, in the priorities of some of the moneyboys vis-a-vis the financial demands of their families back home; (2) the individual's lack of responsibility to non-members of the group, and this manifests itself in behaviour that is unsympathetic to people who are different from them (racism, caste-consciousness) and also a general lack of responsibility towards the "commons", i.e. the shared public spaces (littering, rubbish dumping, even anti-social behaviour like noise). In my mind, "collectivism" is not a good word for this difference in the way group identification and group loyalty manifest themselves. Nor is "individualism" as perceived by non-Western societies looking at the West, necessarily a good thing; they see in the West a certain selfishness in the lack of strong responsibility towards kin. Strong group loyalty does not necessarily equate with groupthink or groupie behaviour. People can feel a strong loyalty and responsibility to a group and still have strong opinions of their own. That was what I was referring to in terms of my working life in various Asian countries. They don't tailor their views into groupthink, they don't make themselves mindlessly subservient, at least not any more than can happen in the West (witness MAGA groupies). They are quite capable of thinkng inependently, inventively and creatively, and also to cast aside traditional ideas - Japan, China and Korea would not have advanced as much as they have if their people did not have the capacity to think out of the box and overturn conventional ways of doing things. In some language cultures, their way of speaking may mask the differences of opinion unless one is attuned to their speech patterns. For example, in different cultures, different meanings are assigned to "yes" (Japanese "Hai"), to the nodding of the head, to silence. Do you read "yes" as agreement? Do you read silence as consent?

True, the fun doesn't take place in the lobby, but how does lobby fun make it fun-nier? All sorts of interesting fun can be had in the room; they don't have to be vanilla. Hey guys, suggest a price for each of these service items, where the orange boxes are.

Interesting dilemma when the Asian norm is "collectivism" Is it really the norm? Or is it just a stereotype that westerners carry with them? Having spent much of my working life running around various businesses and countries in Asia, I have seen a lot of individualism. Also, there are huge differences between the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thais and Indonesians - countries I am quite familiar with. I would rather not homogenise any impression of them. The japanese, Thais and Indonesians tend to be more self-effacing, the Chinese and Koreans can be blunt. The Thais and Indonesians incorporate social status considerations a lot into the way they speak. The others... not so much. One reason for the stereotype may arise from the language habits in many Asian cultures, where people tend to be more sensitive to others' feelings even when expressing disagreement. While fellow speakers of the language can read the subtle disagreement, I have seen my western colleagues completely deaf to the fierce argument that was going on behind the pleasant words!