The Box of Chocolates Thread (You never know what you're going to get!)

I think a lot of people don't realize that the official US legal immigration policy is actually less strict than those of most other countries where a lot of people would want to move.

I will not be addressing any mod issues today. A couple of hours ago I was at the scene of a motorcycle/carvaccident. The skidding bike missed my wife and I by inches. I was first to the rider who had no helmet and was gushing blood from a gaping head wound. I was able to control the bleeding somewhat with some towels but guy may not make it. I will be tied up with Thai police for some time.

Yikes! Good on you for helping out, hope there's a happy ending against the odds.

The frustrating part was about a dozen people gathered around filming and no one even called the police or ambulance. When no one showed up after 20 mins I called myself and they said they had no reports of an accident.

Thanks

His helmet was strapped to the back of his bike. He prob would have walked away if it were on his head.

I'm back off to Latin America in a week and i see motorcycle accidents every time I'm there. Just so many more of them on the road. Whole time I was driving while in Brazil it was like "don't kill a motorcyclist....don't kill a motorcyclist". You have to be extra attentive because some of them are crazy.

That's awful. Glad you and your wife are ok.

browser please protect yourself and contact the embassy

i don't know about in thailand, but in china there have been instances where good samaritans who've helped others have had that aid sucessfully used against them in civil court of evidence of guilt "why would they help this complete stranger if they didn't feel responsible"

i'm very serious, i doubt anything will come of it, but a call to the embassy to just give them a heads up could be an annoying waste of 5 minutes that would prove immeasurably valuable if the family realizes a "wealthy foreigner was involved" and decides to sue you in civil court claiming that you must have been part of the cause of the accident

Sorry to hear, b

Sounds like great advice, rr

Yeesh, don’t ride motorcycles, folks.

Especially without a helmet. There's a good reason ER doctors call them 'donorcycles'.

I'm pretty sure riding a motorcycle is far more dangerous than doing a tandem skydive with a trained and experienced host, which is the only way newbies are allowed to jump out of planes.

That's likely true. I expect I'd feel safer doing the latter than the former - I've never ridden a motorcycle so I couldn't say for certain, but that seems about right.

Twenty years ago, I happened to be flipping through a Lonely Planet guide to Bangladesh while I was killing time in an airport. The guide strongly advised against renting a car and driving yourself around (duh), but said that if you chose to do so, and were involved in a fatal accident, you should get out of your car and flee the scene to avoid potential mob justice.

Thanks for the good advice. I did contact the embassy in Bangkok as a precaution. They took my info and just said to contact them if the police contact me again. Police processing went fine though always a challenge due to language barrier. When they realized I was a retired US Army Officer living here and not a tourist looking for a girl 40 years younger than me they warmed up quite a bit.

OK back to the really important things in life--arguing about the world's political issues with anonymous strangers as if anything we say will affect anything or change anyones mind. 😉

til those are apparently mutually exclusive 😀

once in beijing i was in the bike lane on my bike going home from work

there's a market along the road and this old lady is leaving the market with her vegetables, she stops at the sidewalk and looks out into the bike lane to ensure there's no oncoming traffic - stares directly at me for a few seconds and then steps right out in front of me - i barely had time to stop and we did have a collision where i knocked her over

i immediately got off the bike, check up on her, help her up and gather her vegetables, she insists she's ok and she seems frankly a bit embarrassed and just wants this to go away

a crowd had immediately formed around me - the people were demanding justice - vast majority had not seen the accident

they were demanding i take her to the hospital and cover all her bills (she was fine, she even insisted she was fine herself) and they wanted to go with me to ensure i didn't bail on her

meanwhile, the important thing is rent is paid in 3 month tranches and in cash and was due tomorrow, a few blocks earlier i'd stopped at an atm and gotten this rent money (beijing is not cheap) and thus had several thousand dollars worth of their money on my person and their largest denomination bill is worth $13 so just piles and piles of cash on my person dispersed in my jacket pockets

to this day i'm unsure if the old lady was in on it and her sole role was to take the hit and try to gain sympathy by being unassuming while others advocated for the payment or if it was this serendipitous mob which advocated for her despite that she insisted she was fine - but nevertheless this mob of people were now up in my face

reason did not apply, i told them it was a bad situation but i was not at fault, she had stepped directly in front of me giving no time to stop, and that it was all besides the point anyway because she was fine and didn't need to go to the hospital anyway

nobody cared - i hit her, she deserved compensation

i say she's fine and try to get back on my bike and leave - they try to physically stop me and hold me down - at which point i realize that it's now or never - if the police get involved they'll support the mob and facilitate a payment (that's mostly what cops do in china, not this monolithic force of power but rather think of them all as public defenders trying desperately to get their clients to agree to an out of court settlement - someone assaulted you at a bar, well you've both been taken into the station, the police agree it was assault, and now are arbitrating and facillitating a payment from the assaulter to the assaultee and then they close the case

so waiting it out for official intervention - as a foreigner i'm going to lose, and having piles of cash on me, i'm going to lose massively

going along with the mob, it's going to be the same result only through threat of mob violence and not official channels

running - that's the only way out of this

but the mob is surrounding me and 2-3 people are now putting hands on me to hold me back

but, they've forgotten one thing, these are all elderly and middle aged chinese people, people who grew up malnourished in famine and are thus artificially small (modern chinese are significantly taller than their parents) - their average age is probably 50 and average height 5'6" and rail thin - about 2/3 are women

so being 6'2" 220, i started swinging elbows back and forth to disperse them, they fall back and before they can overtake me i pick my bike up and run with it, swinging it violently in the direction of anyone who dares approach, i get out of the mob and just sprint about half a block to finally clear some space and then hop on and ride away as fast as i could

i've had friends who fared much worse and didn't get away, it cost them thousands of dollars - being an obvious foreigner in a monocultural county means you'll never get the benefit of doubt in any disputes

Rickroll, how many five year olds could you take on at once?

this incident actually made me think about that a lot

i only escaped because people followed natural instinct of backing off and seeking protection - they would rather i get away without getting hit than i am subdued but they get a black eye in the process

this applies to everything, war casualties are much lower than people expect because people spend more effort on not getting shot than they do in trying to shoot others

so could this crowd of 30+ middle aged Beijingers could have taken me down, absolutely, we're they willing to get bloodied to do it - no they weren't

so are these zombie 5 year olds or regular 5 year olds who will feel pain and will avoid getting hit?

zombie 5 year olds (but importantly, bites don't make me a zombie), i can probably take at least 50 and that number gets exponentially larger if there's favorable terrain and i can improvise a weapon, under the right circumstances, i could fend them off until overtaken by exhaustion, which would more be a product of the rate and frequency of their attack more than anything

i also genuinely don't think any 5 year old could deliver a lethal blow to me, not without a weapon at least, so again, it's more death from exposure/exhaustion just getting smothered and dehydrated once i lose the energy to fight them off and and they just swarm on top of me

it would be like this

regular 5 years like my nephew who have natural fear and reluctance - i could take on an infinite number because you'd only need to take out a few of the more adventurous ones each time and then the others would back off

I like your confidence! Fifty five year olds would be an incredible feat, but you are a big man and I am sure you can take on more than the average dude.

These were the terms as described in this classic post: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/ot...

The specifics:

- You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
- You are not allowed to touch a wall.
- When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
- I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
- The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
- There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
* The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

This is an important moderation issue, as the lives of our precious moderators are at stake. This is necessary info!

so they are movie henchman who will fight to the death to protect their boss in what is presumably not the highest paying gig out there

in that case, i'll use movie logic and always face large groups because if there are many of them then they'll be easy to take down

in the event there is only one left, he becomes the defacto boss, in which case it'd be a genuine struggle to achieve victory - to avoid this boss conflict, i'll just face infinite 5 year olds so i'll never be in a boss showdown of only facing one and just mow them down relentlessly

Thailand is a perennial top 3 road deaths per capita every year, we made #1 a few years ago. 70% of the deaths are motorcycles. I drive 4km to work and it's rarely a day goes by that at least either to or from work that I don't see a motorcycle rider do something extremely dangerous (stupid). I feel especially bad for their passengers.
I guess I'm an apathetic a-hole but I couldn't see myself trying to help scrape one of these guys off the ground. It's so much self inflicted death it's infuriating.

Ugh!
Kitty Genovese 2024 style.

Glad to hear you and your wife were ok. Good job for doing everyone's work until help arrived!

asians will give the shirt off their back to a friend or relative or even someone from their ancestral village in need at the drop of a hat

i know many of them who have an extra home and instead of renting it out (and yes that income from that house would be a difference maker to them), they invite an elderly woman who's down on her luck to live there her final years because she was good friends with your long dead aunt

there's villages that are so impoverished that they can't afford to give their children a college education, but will pool money together to send the brightest children from there to college despite that the vast majority of the people contributing have no direct blood relation nor may even know the kid's parents personally - and if that child grows up and becomes a success, they will spend much of their life aiding that village back in return

even those who didn't receive such kind of aid but did well still feel obligated to aid them, imagine if zuckerburg or bezos decided to pay off the mortage of everybody in their hometown and buy a home for all the long term residents who were renting - this actually happens in asia, where a billionaire will spend tens of millions of dollars building and entire series of villas for the hundreds of families in his hometown to live in

it's a big reason why foreigners get terrible treatment, and also a massive reason for corruption, if you're only going to deal with friends and family anyway, then things like nepotism are a lot more accepted "of course the governor grants the mineral rights to his brother, if i were governor i would have done the same" whereas our version of corruption is more going to the highest bidder, x corporation can spend more donating to my campaign and providing junkets and giving my son a board seat - which is a much better offer than what my brother offers and looks way cleaner on paper so x corporation is getting the government contract

but if they have no connection at all then you do not exist at all

this is a major reason why when people do intercede and give aid, the natural assumption is "they must be guilty, why else would they be helping out a total stranger"