Historically speaking, this is incorrect. The Filipino/Thai/Malaysian Negritos, the Taiwanese aborigines, the Japanese Ainu, did not get pushed to the fringe of society by Christian white men.

I'm pretty sure we could find other non-western examples.

"Conveniently located within walking distance of a McDonald's, a chip shop, a bunch of Thai food places, and several coffee shops (that don't serve coffee), I literally can't suggest a better weekend than getting stoned, biking over to a boat full of cats and then going for snacks with your grubby cat-hands in matching Poezenboot T-shirts."

Now on my bucket list! Meow puff puff pass

I remember pomegranates being very expensive in the US, to the point that they were a "once a year on Thanksgiving" kind of thing for my family. But that was in rural Kansas - maybe they aren't so expensive in cities with more fresh fruit import infrastructure.

Now that I am living in Thailand, they are cheap and readily available. And interestingly enough, the flesh around the seeds is clear or possibly with a very slight red/pink hue -- but not at all like the deep red they were in the US version.

So, here I've gotten into the habit of just ripping the fruit open with my bear hands and eating handfuls -- no staining issues. But, this will video definitely come in handy if I want to be a little more dignified when cracking one open. Thais call the deep red version "Indian Pomegranate" (translated), so maybe the US sources most of their imports from there.

I suppose for a Japan video this is redundant, but ... that was f*cking weird, man.

My first year in Thailand, I was in (the infamous) Pattaya for a short trip. Just as I was getting used to seeing 70+ year old Western men with 2-3 young attractive Thai girls on their arms, I saw an ~85ish year old Western woman with a walker, oxygen tank and lines running to her nose flanked by a total of 4 female "escorts". At the time, I thought ... wow, that is messed up.

But cuddle cafes where you can pay lots of money for the privilege of staring deeply into a stranger's eyes? Now that is messed up.

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Living in Thailand, most TV shows aren't available here until WAY after the Western airdate, if ever.

I live in a pretty small town. Western movies don't play here, and if I travel an hour or so to a town where they do, they do they are dubbed in Thai with no English subtitles. DVDs are readily available, but they are usually pirated cam copies burned to disc, and again dubbed in Thai.

Games? Not available in stores in my town. Bangkok, sure -- but again they are almost always pirated copies burned to disk. Console games are the same way and any shops selling the game will also chip the console to play pirated disks. I could, and admittedly probably SHOULD use steam for PC games.

Other software? Basically same story as games. If you go to a computer store here, advertising usually says that they are sold with Linux OS or bare drives. But, the shop will automatically put on a pirated Windows plus loads of software (office, Photoshop if you ask for it, etc.) upon purchasing the hardware. They are usually fairly inept at it, frequently have viruses or fail to actually activate the OS, etc. so I tell them to leave the drives bare and do all that stuff myself. But for 99% of people who buy a PC here, they will automatically get a pirated OS and software along with it.

Basically, my default mode of getting ANY media is piracy. Price (free versus not) is a part of that. Incomes are low here, but cost of living is comparatively even lower. Still, if media was fully available here but equal to the price in, say, the US the vast majority of people here don't have enough disposable income to afford much if any of it. A bigger issue for me personally is convenience. Piracy (torrents, etc.) as a distribution system is infinitely more convenient, easy, and "customer"-friendly than any more legitimate service. I get what I want very quickly, usually in multiple options for filesize vs quality on up to as-good-as-broadcast/blu-ray 1080p, with most everything available from a single source (isoHunt, kickass, PirateBay, take your pick). In terms of user experience, legitimate distribution can't even begin to compete with that -- and that is BEFORE considering price.

Instead, they exacerbate the difference by treating paying customers with open contempt. Pay for TV service? Enjoy 10 minutes of ads for every 12 minutes of show. Buy a DVD? Sit through un-skippable ads, dire piracy warnings, etc. before the show actually starts. Move or simply take the disk on vacation to another country and you will likely be screwed by region locking. Buy software? Get some DRM that slows things down or restricts fully NORMAL use of the software, nags you to register, etc. On the other hand, if you pirate stuff all of that goes away. No ads. Watch/use the media wherever you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want. Software DRM circumvented easily, usually hours after the first release if not *before*.

I honestly see it as a problem that I am not supporting the creators of the media that I enjoy. But, Pandora's box has been opened on this one. Generation X and Y learned to scoff at the idea of paying for music due to Napster. iTunes has been extremely lucky to turn that around even slightly, making lots of mistakes along the way (DRM and device-locking, etc.). Gen Y and beyond are going to have the same attitude towards piracy with regards to ALL MEDIA that we learned to have towards music. I don't think there is any getting around that.

For content creators, I think that funding via Label / Publisher / Network is going to die out. And soon. The good news is that something akin to an evolution of patronage of arts and creators can work even better than it did in the past. The Motzarts and Beethovens of the future don't need 1 rich duke or king to commision a work, they need 10,000 average Joes on kickstarter or the like. I see things trending more and more in that direction, and all the time. I think it is an exciting time -- unless you're an exec in one of the old dinosaur publishers/networks.

Pretty Sure thats a Thai Accent, Had a few thai mates at Uni, and they sounded just like this. Hilarious at times.

Interesting. I've got a semi-relevant story, but I get long winded so feel free to skip to the next comments if you like.

My wife (Thai) and I (American) had our first daughter this year. When she first got pregnant, one of the doc's first priorities was to get us both tested for "Thalassemia", which I had never heard of before. Apparently it is a blood disorder that affects hemoglobin production and therefore red blood cells -- if both parents carry the (rather rare) recessive gene, it can be a pretty bad deal.

It turned out that my wife is in the 1% or so of Thais that carry the gene (but she doesn't express / suffer from it, it is recessive and she has the dominant gene also). I had to get tested as well, but they said it would be incredibly unlikely that I'd be positive and I wasn't. So, our daughter has a 25% chance of being a carrier like my wife but zero chance of suffering from the effects of it.

Anyway, I was curious about the disease and asked the doc why it is a big deal here (every pregnant couple MUST get screened for it here when getting hospital/prenatal care) but I'd never even heard of it in the US. It turns out that the disease / genetic mutation arose only in places with high rates of malaria. As it happens, the genetic effect on your blood cells that the mutation has makes you more resistant to malaria -- full-on exhibitors of it (two recessive genes) are far less likely to die of malaria than people that don't have the gene. That is, assuming that you don't have the extreme variants of it that make it very unlikely to survive early childhood. Basically, if you have the disease and yet are healthy enough to survive to adulthood, you're close to malaria immune (that's overstating it, but ballpark). The malaria parasite can't survive and reproduce properly on your funky Thalassemia-affected red blood cells.

I thought that was a pretty interesting evolutionary response that must have arisen from some populations being pretty much decimated by malaria back in pre-recorded history. Current carriers like my wife are probably the descendants of lucky folks that survived a deadly outbreak in history by virtue of having a disease/mutation that is, under normal circumstances, slightly or even extremely bad in species survival / reproductive fitness terms. I thought that was kinda cool -- but I'm glad that neither my wife nor my daughter are/can be full-on expressors of the gene.

Yo Dystop:
My first state of the union address would include costumes, for starters, worn henceforth and according to level of corruption of current members of congress and senate: Data would be of course mined from our resources (those stalwart ass-grabbers of the distinguished intelligence community we have to thank for the dirt we would dredge and release), IMMEDIATELY,!....every phone call, every email every bit of naked boat-parties and teen-aged Thai prettyboys there for all to see…THEN decriminalize all drugs and release all offenders to their respective ends and relatives so charged in the past 100 years, immediately.
I’d make it mandatory that everyone be able to read and write, and provide the necessary means-
Two chickens in every pot
I’d tell everyone the real reason we’re in Afghanistan and will stay the fuck there is for their Lithium, because the world needs batteries to go with the new technology and to go fuck themselves if they don’t like us protecting their poppy fields from angry 4rth century thugs screaming , “AKBAR!”( i.e., I would disclose the actual motivations behind the current clusterfuck..) Oh, I’d have a monthly picnic on the white house lawn holiday, offer federal monies to female athletics, and outlaw fast food chains, billboard advertising, and landlords (I’d work to return ownership of land acquired through unsavory deals by oil-rich cocksuckers, anyone assoc. with any bank scandal in the last 50 years, etc. to the open market for restricted development based on projected models for our world in 50 years)

Just getting started, I’d fuck shit up is the answer to your question, jump-start the place based on the original doc and maybe get another 100 years out of it..

There are many misconceptions of Mexican Cuisine. I am probably one of many that apart of this misconception. I have noticed many Indian and Thai restaurants have Mexicans cooking those respective cuisines, not because they are cheap labor but because they are diverse in their respective trades.

"Mexican" food is popular all over but the Taquerias in San Francisco are well known around the US and locally. But, the food served in the Taquerias are actually a San Franciscan cuisine. The San Francisco burrito is just that. It was made here, it is an American food influenced by Mexican cuisine but geared towards us gringos. This is not necessarily true for everything on the menu of course.

Regardless, it is very good. Surprisingly, one of my favorite "Mexican" food spots is in a very industrial area of Oakland in the form of a food truck. You would never know it by the taste of the food. IT IS AMAZINNNNNNN!!! Amazingly tasty fresh salsa. a secret spicy salsa, great beans, great tortilla, tomato friend rice, carne asada to scream for. The best tacos I have ever had in Cali and a burrito that rivals SF's best and they do it everyday, so it is not a fluke and it takes place on a truck.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-taco-panzon-oakland

I'm a whitey American who has been living in Thailand for 6 years, so I've been on the bizarro-world opposite side of this coin (sorta).

I get asked what country I come from all the time. Opening question, before name or anything else, in English or Thai, etc. That doesn't really bother me, but I know some other westerners who get tired of it.

The Thai word for any western non-Thai person is "farang", and a greater percentage of people take offense at being called "farang" all the time. Part of that is that "farang" is particularly linked to France/French nationality (France in Thai is "farang-set"), but now all westerners are lumped in with the same word. People from the UK, particularly England, tend to be a bit more annoyed at being associated with Frenchies. I don't really care -- it is simply their word to describe westerners, so why get riled up about it?

On the other hand, fortunately I don't usually have to deal with a constant bombardment of stereotypes associated with being a farang, and I can certainly see why various Asians living in the US could get annoyed with that.

Yep-Thai pretty-boy version better than original, from the incredible detail on the cardboard suit to the intoxicating allure of the Thai Pepper Pot....Two thumbs up where ever you want em, baby!!

I will get to what is wrong with strongly denouncing Islam in a second....

As for the article, I hadn't actually read the whole thing but rather had heard coverage about it along with an article on Al Jazeera. Specifically, I take issue with Harris and his stance on the 'war on terror' (and aren't you essentially advocating for religious profiling by condemning Islam and its practitioners? Or is it rather that you identify it as a threat but wish to see no action taken?) I also have problems with Hitchens and his enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq.

As for the quote I posted, after re-reading it, I think that I saw something that wasn't there. I believe that trying to prove that one religion is more evil than another is pointless. Reading history books, which oddly I have done, will not disprove that belief but rather reinforce it as the tragedy of all religions would be laid bare.

Finally, I would gladly take up your 'snidely', non-issued challenge. As a matter of fact, I've already done it. I lived in Indonesia for a year both in Muslim dominated areas and tribal, animist Christian dominated areas. While I am by no means an atheist activist, I nonetheless lived openly as an atheist and honestly answered the question of my religion (I have none) when it was asked of me. Nothing happened to me. Furthermore, I currently live on the Thai-Burma border in a Buddhist dominated country and do not hide my lack of belief when asked about it.

And that is where I come back to the problem of denouncing Islam. Just last month there were pogroms against Muslims by Buddhists in Burma (a smaller conflict than that which occurred last year against the Rohingya in Rakhine state). The proximate cause of this pogrom was a Muslim jeweler refusing to pay for damaged jewelry of a Buddhist woman. But more generally, it is a result of a campaign of extremist Buddhist monks issuing edicts about the evils of Islam and the dangers it represents to Burmese culture. Unequivocally condemning an entire religion invariably leads to this type of violence, and therein lies my concern.

Cool idea and execution for a video -- nice sift!

I'm an American living in Thailand for the past 6 years. Thai food is cheap and good, but stuff like Western fast food (for example the Big Mac in the video) is probably near double US prices here. But as long as you're happy with Thai food, you can get a plate of average-to-good quality Thai fare for roughly 60 cents (more in Bangkok). Beats the crap out of stuff like the "dollar menu" back home.

One more thing -- I wonder if the price of rice was comparing the same variety of rice in each country, or just comparing the most commonly consumed variety for each location. Thailand exports a lot of sticky rice ("glutinous rice", but not from gluten) to Japan -- they love it there and pay a large premium for it over "normal" rice varieties. Maybe that accounts for the video noting that rice is expensive in Japan?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Love that the Thai chef's reaction - it surprised me is good, honest way.