false advertisement - Vanta Black is blacker, at 99.8% (in spray-on form). It's immeasurably black in raw form (> 99.96% - no spectrometer in the world was powerful enough to measure how much light it absorbs)

probably this mousou stuff is slightly less expensive (ridiculously vs ludicrously?)

Holy cow, is that for realz? Oh snap!

That seems way too heavy to be practical. Seems it should be made of carbon fiber or something. Who pours the vast sums of money into something that's effectively just really cool cosplay?

Btw, false advertising! Walk testing, not so much. More like lifting a leg to pee testing. Still this is exciting, but I'll be more excited when it really is walking.

Clearly. Just pointing out the false advertising.

Pretty good video. Specific things:

Too many prostitutes: Most of the non-Thai people that complain about this went to the wrong places in Thailand. Pattaya was a tiny fishing village before the Vietnam war. Then, soldiers started getting shipped into the country for R&R. The Thai government didn't really know what to do with them, so they sorta passed the buck and decided to send them to Pattaya to relax. Bunch of stressed out dudes there, nothing to do, high demand for alternate activities ... the market answered.

Fast forward to today, and Pattaya knows exactly what put it on the map. I hate that place -- it is like what would happen if you took the worst/sleaziest elements of Vegas and Tijuana, and then built a "city" around it. Shittiest beach in Thailand, chock full of sleaze, disgusting. However, it is one of the most major tourist destinations. Gee, why could that be? Is it in spite of the nature of the place, or because of it? No false advertising here, you know what you're getting when you book a trip there. And if that is your thing, more power to ya.

Now, I don't want to act like prostitution exists in Pattaya and Soi Cowboy / Patpong in Bangkok, and is absent elsewhere. Far from it. Every town, down on to tiny ones, likely has a red-light district and brothels. The ones you hear about are sex tourism pits like those major ones, but the trade is alive and well pretty much everywhere -- and mostly caters to local Thais.

I've honestly never been to such an establishment or sought those services (in 11 years of being here), but I don't care that they are available. The most significant negative is that they are NOT well-regulated like, say, what I've heard about Amsterdam. Prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand. So the de-facto situation is that brothels have to pay protection money to police in order to avoid getting shut down or "inspected", etc.

Corruption is a major problem -- much worse than prostitution, in my opinion.


Too many ladyboys: It is certainly true that there are more trans people per capita here than pretty much anywhere else that I know of. It took me a while, being a country kid from Kansas, but I see that in pretty much the same light as the German narrator in the video at this point. Acceptance is good. You do you, man.

As a stereotype on the flip side of the coin, I think the ladyboys tend to be great in custom interaction kinds of jobs. Cashiers at 7-11, waitpeople at restaurants, etc. Polite, attentive, helpful. And often the most willing to attempt to use English. A lot of the best students that I've taught English to have been ladyboy leaning.


Freedom: I'm with @Mordhaus here. When your personal liberty is mainly due to the apathy / incompetence of the governing authority, and they may choose to get off their asses and revoke that at any time ... perhaps it isn't something to brag about. Very basic stuff like dissenting speech and protesting is met with being carted off for little re-education chats, etc. Pretty scary shit, actually.


Basically I tend to think that just like anywhere on Earth, there's a lot of good here and plenty of bad too. There's plenty of legitimate gripes with cultural elements and stuff in Thailand, but the most common ones (that the video pretty accurately listed) are pretty insignificant in my opinion.

When is Faux "news" going to be shut down for false advertising? When pressed, they always admit they are pure entertainment and opinion, not news.
It should be illegal to lie about being informative and factual, not a viable business model.

Lawsuit for false advertising?

Overall, this seems rather analogous to bottled water. Penn and Teller did a brilliant "Bullshit" episode about bottled water back in the day. It got sifted, but is now dead. The entire episode (first half is about feng shui, second half about water) is available on vimeo, though:
https://vimeo.com/193125042

Long story short, most bottled water presents itself as coming from a mountain spring, or glacier, or whatever. But in reality, the vast majority is simply municipal water from whatever city the packaging plant is in, usually not going through any additional filtration or purification at all.

At least with water, it is possible to test for contaminants. Diamonds can be graded / assayed to certify some basic characteristics, but of course there is no straightforward way to track their history and know where they came from, etc. At least, not short of having a paper trail tracing it back to the place and time that it was mined, which could easily be faked.

Bottled water gets away with promoting an "image" of being sourced from mountain springs or whatever by never actually claiming that it is in a legal sense. Usually there is fine print available noting the location that the water came from / was packaged. This diamond company seems to go beyond that and to make claims about their diamonds that are impossible to actually prove. Hopefully they get nailed/shut down.

It's a bit of a false advertisement that the fonts upside down are not symmetrical in relation to when they are right side up. The small loops on the 8 are at the top before and after they flip it. This is a clear, yet subliminal "tell" to try to trick the viewer. If they really wanted to do this they would not have swapped the fonts when rotating.

False advertising on all counts!

I only counted 8 animals, most of which were not adorable: deer, cow, turtle, pelican, rabbit, squirrel, pony, seagull.

Also, it looks like they only eat things smaller than they. If I were just sitting still in front of any of those animals, they would not just come over and take a bite out of me.

Congratulations! Your video, The Natural Effect or How False Advertising Has Conned Us, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 38 Badge!

I never said it was a violation, I was specifically referring to the "false advertising" bit of lucky760's post. Not sure where ass-wiping comes into it.

From a sift perspective, I guess this suggests that maybe TubeChopped embeds should edit their metadata to reflect the "chopped" duration rather than the original.

Other than that, for what it is worth I found the video itself somewhat amusing, largely BECAUSE of the false advertising / bait and switch title. Not necessarily amusing enough to upvote (sorry Morhaus, just my opinion), but certainly not insulting/annoying/whatever enough to downvote (which I couldn't do even if I wanted to -- no privileges).

I'd be tempted to downvote your reaction if I could, though.

No violation here and no false advertising on @Mordhaus's part. That's how the video host provided the thumbnail, so they're to blame!