The New Coffee Room

@jon-nyc
Have you figured out dates yet?

Couple of general comments:

• April is actually the hottest month in Thailand (at least BKK, not sure of the south islands). BKK is hot year round. April is seriously hot. LOL

• mid April (April 15) is Thai New year, called Songkran. Non stop water fights. Fun to see once, but can get old to try and travel around. People drive around in pickup trucks with giant water guns and spray every body. Some places, they also throw powder. Before knowing better, I got hit when I was dressed somewhat nice one time. It sucked! LOL

• I actually have not ever been to the south islands. From talking to friends, etc. Phuket has become a major attraction for Russians. On the main area (Patpong Beach), a lot of signage is in Russian etc. But, they generally keep to themselves, but they are the major driver of tourism right now. The are other smaller islands that are more quiet. The more famous are Koh Samui, Koh Phi Phi, etc.

• are you more of a beach person or a mountain person? I like Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. Burning season is starting and the north can have pretty bad air pollution, but "usually" ends mid/end March. Years ago, I did the Mai Hong Son loop in northern Thailand. Lots of fun. (forgot my login info to the Old New Coffee Room, but I had a thread there I think.)

• do you have an idea of hotel you will stay in BKK? I am give my feedback if you have an idea.

• Do you have any specific things you would like to see or do?

@Horace said in The Epstein File:

Are we all supposed to pretend that a novelty letter from Trump to his one-time friend Jeffrey Epstein is something that will require wagon circling? Trump can plausibly claim to not know about it, maybe an assistant wrote it, maybe Epstein had someone write it to make it look like Trump wrote it. There will be no hard evidence and nothing will come of it. This is pretty stupid. I've reached out to Hanania - and he has apologized, and vowed to stop posting stupid shit. I appreciated it, and forgave him. He's a good kid, if way too racist for my tastes.

Replica of the "allege" birthday card from President Trump to Mr. Epstein on the National Mall today.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/01/be-on-the-lookout-for-flesh-eating-flies-cdc-tells-clinicians-in-alert/

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert to clinicians Tuesday, warning that the savage, flesh-eating parasitic fly—the New World Screwworm—is not only approaching the Texas border, but also felling an increasing number of animals in the bordering Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

The advisory, released through the agency’s Health Alert Network, directs doctors, veterinarians, and other health workers to be on the lookout for patients with wounds teeming with ferocious maggots burrowing into their living flesh. The alert also provides guidance on what to do if any such festering wounds are encountered—namely, remove each and every maggot to prevent the patient from dying, and, under no circumstance allow any of the parasites to survive and escape.

LOL

@Jolly said in Most regretted and least regretted college majors:

Classic liberal arts education here.

Over 80 hours science courses, 16 hours math & physics, but ...Fortunate enough to have 12 hours English & Literature, 12 hours theology and basic philosophy, along with a smattering of other odds and ends.

A good bit of those non-STEM courses are what makes adaptable adults. And many of them were core curriculum classes. I think core curriculum classes should be mandatory at any university.

https://capitalpost.uk/education/universities/us-humanities-face-existential-crisis-amid-university-cuts.html

In a powerful act of protest, students at Montclair State University in New Jersey recently gathered for a sombre mock funeral outside their college of humanities and social sciences. Carrying flowers, they stood before a tombstone inscribed with the names of 15 departments, including English, history, and sociology, symbolising what they see as the death of these disciplines at the hands of university administrators.

and

At its core, the conflict reveals a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of a university education. On one side, increasingly corporatised administrations favour market-driven metrics, enrolment figures, and job-placement rates. On the other, defenders of the humanities argue their value to critical thought, ethical reasoning, and democratic society cannot be quantified.

"The humanities simply don't fit a corporate model because they are just not monetizable in the same way," explained Adam Rzepka, an English professor at Montclair State.

said in Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is….:

Thailand/Cambodia - I think that President Trump had something to do with the ceasefire, but the overall situation is really unchanged, other than the PM of Thailand has been removed and replaced.

Update from mid December:

There have been artillery exchanges all along the 800km (500-mile) border, and intense close-quarter battles between Thai and Cambodian soldiers for control of a few forested hilltops.
The Thai air force has had a free hand bombing targets inside Cambodia, which has limited air defences and no air force of its own to speak of.
Cambodia's feared BM21 rockets, an inherently inaccurate weapon, have rained down on the Thai side of the border, killing a civilian and injuring others, despite an early evacuation by the authorities.

The above was taken from a pretty good article on what is happening.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mpje3e2xmo

@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:

It is.

By odd coincidence, this is the opening sentence of his column today.

The Democratic Party’s future — if it wants one; the evidence is mixed — should be based on candidates who understand that U.S. politics, when healthy, takes place between the 40-yard lines, contesting the center of the field.

Exactly. The middle decides things, but too oftentimes, the party's seem to lean towards the outsides.

@Mik said in Mildly interesting:

The hole in the roof isn't a mistake. It is the only reason the building is still standing.
When people walk into the Pantheon, they look up at the rain falling through the 9-meter opening and ask: "Did they run out of money? Why didn't they finish the roof?"
The answer is Roman genius.

Very cool building. And mildly interesting is also that after 2000 years, it is still the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world.

Old-ish news but the price difference is interesting.

India successfully performed a soft touchdown near the lunar south pole on Wednesday, August 23, for its Chandrayaan-3 mission.

By doing so, it made history by becoming the first nation to land on that region of the lunar surface as well as the fourth country to ever land on the Moon.

and

Impressively, Chandrayaan-3’s $75 million budget means it cost less than a number of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters. Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic ‘Interstellar’ cost $165 million, while ‘Gravity’ and ‘The Martian’ each cost around $100 million to make.

To put things further into perspective, NASA’s Artemis I mission last year, which sent an uncrewed capsule around the Moon and back, cost approximately $4 billion.

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/indias-moon-mission-is-a-low-cost-success-story-heres-why

How did she get into the store.

(I suppose she walked in like she walked out).

I feel bad for her. I would not think that anybody would want to live life like that. Probably part genes and part bad habits, etc.

Do you have a choice of which color "team" (black, white or silver) you guys will be part of?

But +1 on what others have said. Appears that it will be a lot of fun.

Good to see every body again also!!

I guess it is just emigration of a different type. LOL

It is funny how reading something like this posting can trigger a memory. Long long long time ago, I was kind of remote location and the office had a library and one of the books that I read was "The Marsh Arabs". It focused on the people in Iraq rather than Iran, but there were probably a similar group in Iran also. I hadn't thought about that book in years. LOL

During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq—long before they were almost completely wiped out by Saddam Hussein—Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire, and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Traveling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicine and treating the sick. In this account of a nearly lost civilization, he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage, and endurance of the people, and describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy, and moments of pure comedy in vivid, engaging detail.

I agree. I think @mik talked earlier about these micro-bets. A person does not need to ruin the whole game, but just a teeny part. Don't make any more than X points in the first period. Only catch so many balls. etc etc. They really need to ban those types of bets.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/tsmc-likely-post-fourth-quarter-profit-leap-driven-by-ai-boom-2026-01-14/

TSMC (2330.TW), opens new tab, the world's main producer of advanced AI chips, on Thursday posted a forecast-smashing 35% jump in fourth-quarter profit to a record high, predicted robust annual growth and flagged more U.S. manufacturing capacity was in the works.
Riding high on what it calls the "AI mega trend", TSMC said its customers, and their customers, were "providing strong signals" and requesting capacity, forecasting 2026 revenue would rise nearly 30% in U.S. dollar terms.

always two sides to a story....

https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=260570

An analysis has revealed that TSMC, the world’s largest foundry company, faces semiconductor production costs in the United States that are more than twice as high as those in Taiwan. High labor costs and materials procurement prices are the primary causes.

SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor market analysis and consulting firm, analyzed the production costs of TSMC’s Taiwan facility and its Arizona plant in the United States. The analysis compared wafer costs between Fab 18 located in the Tainan Science Park in Taiwan and Fab 21 in Arizona, U.S.

According to SemiAnalysis, , the Taiwan facility’s total production cost per wafer based on the 5-nanometer (nm) process was $6,681, while the U.S. facility’s cost reached $16,123. Production in the United States resulted in approximately 2.4 times higher costs.

출처 : Businesskorea(https://www.businesskorea.co.kr)

@Renauda said in Just one unforced error after another:

Not at at all. Collective security is what the NATO Alliance is all about. Greenland falls under the umbrella of NATO.

There you go making sense again! 555

President Trump saying he wants to take over because otherwise Russia or China will is nonsense. They know that an attack on Greenland is an attack on NATO, and NATO will respond.

(I have a distant friend (Lara) who is from Greenland. Ethnic Denmark (I think) but grew in Greenland. Asked her what the mood was in Greenland. Probably 99% against becoming a colony or US state.

#wave

I will look for it!

To be fair, I am not sure this is a bad thing. From my undestand, the money (I think about USD$500MM so far) is to be used directly to Venezuela for humanitarian and small business aid.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/york-city-congestion-toll-success-152000484.html

When New York City flipped the switch on congestion pricing in early 2025, the backlash was immediate and loud. Critics warned it would punish drivers, hurt businesses, and simply push traffic into surrounding neighborhoods. One year later, the data tells a very different story. By most measurable standards, New York City’s congestion toll is working — and working better than many expected.

Of course, President Trump is calling it a disaster...................