Is whitey's niceness in SE Asia being taken advantage of?

No I don’t , but a decade or so ago I got drunk myself a few times and said bizarre stuff in public lol.

1 Like

I accused, in Mandarin, more than one facemask-hardliner of being a shapeshifter during COVID. Just make sure there are no witnesses, and you are golden.

1 Like

It’s hard these days to have no witnesses with all the smart phones around.

So how did they respond to shape shifter ? :joy:

Don’t wait for a response. Say it once. Wink at them, then stride off.

Different factions own different MRT stops, as you know.

Sometimes I think it’s a blessing in disguise I learned Mandarin slowly. If I’d have stumbled off the plane with HSK 5 - Fighting-Chinese, I might have got into tons of trouble. ha.

1 Like

Okay, here we find your motivation: your perception that the 95% good experiences outweight the 5% bad ones and will continue to do so.

Everyone has a breaking point. Several actually. You may go through life evading yours and succumb only to the old age breaking point. On the other hand, you may find yourself with a change of perception, whether because the situation in that country has shifted away from the current weighting (either the 5% grows or the weight of the 5% grows, or both) or because your own breaking points have shifted, or both. Your tolerance of lack of lifejackets, for instance. Or your lungs’ tolerance of water…

A change of place may also yield a different ratio of good to bad experiences and/or a different weighting of the two categories.

What are you priorities at this point? Do you feel that it’s your mission in the Game to find these People of Myth of whom you speak, specifically in Indonesia and specifically by using the talk to Anyone strategy? Is there another strategy you might want to try instead? Is there a type of experience that would tend to persuade you that you’ve done your part in Indonesia (or that part of Indonesia) and should move on so as not to miss opportunities to meet other significant People elsewhere?

Just thinking out loud here…

These are all good questions…

These Persons of Myth tend to approach me whenever I am on my Game and not really thinking about them. They also gravitate towards people who are independent. Running around chasing them is 100% going to get you to hit a wall of mirrors.

I see them as helpful characters in a game who appear when you have enough… X… accrued.

So yes, the strategy now is to…,.

  • Knuckle down and learn languages.
  • Stay healthy.
  • Slow down aging by eating a kilo or more of basil per day. Its working.
  • Continue to build software.
  • Study small claims law.

So its not really esoteric techniques… as clever people cant be fooled.

Its really about the straight and narrow.

And yes, Bali is a hotspot… but interesting people appear anywhere. Many in Taipei.

Cheers for making me think hard.

Is that Discobot’s own truth? :thinking:

@discobot fortune

:crystal_ball: My sources say no

1 Like

Yeah, I think there are too many definitions of clever for it to be a reliable maxim. :2cents:

Definitely… I wasn’t clear…

I meant that People Who Know Things tend to have pretty good intuition about motives.

So if someone is looking for a free ride, they will stay away.

You’re expected to do 99% percent of the work by yourself, or in your team. Then Lady Luck will drop the occasional helpful soul in your path, from time-to-time.

Leaning on them excessively, though, can be deadly. As we may have observed around here.

I’m a whitey, I moved to Taiwan after living and working in Brunei for two years. Both countries have taken advantage of me. I let them do it so I am complicit of being taken advantage of…

I don’t find that any country has taken advantage of me.

I live well here.

Im just talking about the 5 to 15% of hustlers in any society. They haven’t got anything off me, but if you go to the wrong street, they line up and have a go… I don’t have any time for the “I need rice for my family” routine, if they are morbidly obese, and grinning.

Now people can sneer and go… “haha, dumb white people are prey for edgy locals.”

Yeah, OK. If you like.

But if a place gets a reputation for scammers, it loses a lot of tourism money.

So…

For every 10USD scammed off a tourist, the area might lose 1000 to 10,000USD.

The parasite eats itself.

Two wrongs don’t equal a right.

Without getting into gender or race. I think it’s easy to understand that nice people, naive people and loving people are always preyed upon by shittier people. Regardless of race, gender, culture or otherwise.

It might be best for our species if we stop making this about class, race, gender and other issues of judgement and just get specific about individuals and individual systems being total shit or super awesome. Then describe why, because every individual has a different idea of what awesome and shitty means. Like legal Acts, define the words so people know and then they know if they are being total trash or not :innocent:

1 Like