President Donald Trump

I promised my son that after he graduated high school I would take him on a trip to somewhere that is less visited by American tourists. He chose Laos from a couple of options that I suggested. It was just the two of us. We were there for a little under three weeks over his winter break from college.

Is there a significant Hmong population in Minnesota? I didn't know that.

That's wonderful!

I'm sure he'll fondly remember that trip for the rest of his life.

if ICE was incentivized to kill people then they would get there tomorrow. as mentioned above, ICE makes money at all levels by deporting incarcerating and deporting people and lose money by killing them.

the IDF, on the other hand, are extremists that kill for the mere pleasure of it on a personal level, and are incentivized to kill at a state level.

Yes. It’s very large. The newly elected mayor of StPaul is Hmong I believe.

That was the hope.

I also wanted to give him the experience of traveling in a less structured way in a place like Laos so that he would absorb that he could do it on his own in a few years without feeling lonely. You meet people. You figure out the buses and boats. You make a mistake or two. And it all works out fine.

Thanks. I've been in that area a couple of times for work, but I've never spent much time there. It's always interesting to see where different immigrant groups end up clustering. It would be hard to find a place with a more different climate from Laos than Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Indeed. I used if as the precursor in my first post, but I didn't tardo-proof subsequent posts and you found one with a when in there. Congrats.

Yes, because you think Trump is sane.

Oh, no chit? Name a drug you can't get from shady Chinese websites? Why don't you set up shop and sell Metformin to old ladies and undercut CVS?

Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht. He knows all about the black market drug scene. Not sure if anyone should buy drugs from a dude that doesn't know how to spell the drug he's selling, but good luck with that.

Awesome and inspiring.

why are we back on ice again... hes pushing the boundaries of everything including world domination but yall gotta worry about the 400 illegal immigrants a month that shouldn't be there anyway theres like 3 threads for that

I think a lot of people struggle with the idea if we should blame trump or Biden’s team more for all of this.

On one hand, Biden’s team encouraged and paid so many illegal immigrants to come in this country knowing the next repub to take office would have to pull an Obama and kick a lot of them out. Biden’s team obviously didn’t care he was uprooting these illegal immigrants lives twice because having them in the right states means more power for dems.

On the other hand, we have trump doing what is best for the country long-term but it hurts the illegal immigrants.

Blaming ice seems a bit silly, bigeasy. What percentage of the blame do place on Biden’s team vs trump.

**** off with this garbage.

why would that mean more power for the democrats? anyone that came here illegally would not be able to vote, and if they have children that can vote they can easily move to a different state. and it would take 18 years for them to be able to vote starting from the point of birth, which is really 18 years and 9 months of waiting, if they conceived child on the same day that they got here illegally.

it’s the most convoluted scheme to get power I’ve ever heard, and there is precisely zero evidence that this was the plan, but of course none of that matters because you’re just throwing crap out there to see what sticks.

Stilt homes are common. I’m not inclined to doubt one of my oldest friends who lived there for 18 months, though that was 20 years ago.

I hope your son forged some very positive lasting memories about how people with very little are often much nicer to each other than pampered westerners and you had a tremendous time there with him.

Just caught it, answered thanks 😆

On the upside, he's backed off over the Greenland thing, he won't be invading and he won't be imposing tariffs on European NATO partners. Somebody must have belatedly pointed out that the US can put bases in Greenland by agreement anyway. Mineral rights have been mentioned, but, as the cost of extraction is uneconomic for now, that may be just a convenient device to make the orange dotard go goomba-goomba.

I doubt that the bolded is the explanation. Trump started to see that the market was going to react very negatively to a trade war with Europe over Greenland so he backed off. The blindest of his supporters of course will say "art of the deal" and claim that he achieved what he was aiming for all along, but I don't think that is true at all.

Laos is one of my favorite countries to travel. Stilted houses are definitely for flood protection and the ground floor area is just a bonus for most of the time when it's not flooding.
Homestayed in this village for two nights years ago. The family was so proud of their new mosquito nets they had for visitors.

If I do a project to raise money for and install solar and batteries in a village in Laos, you think that would be feasible? Useful? Are many of those places without reliable power?

I definitely saw stilted houses like this, probably more than I initially remembered. The prevalence seemed to vary from place to place. I think that the style of traditional housing in rural areas varies a decent bit by ethnicity.

My impression is that far more rural villages are connected to a power grid than was the case, say, twenty-five years ago, but some definitely are not. I know that at least some of the ones that are not connected rely on solar panels for a bit of juice to charge phones, etc. I am far from an expert on rural Laos, but I would say that there is still a need for what you are describing, and I'm sure the help would be welcome. I'm happy to contribute if you get motivated to do that sort of thing.

Access to clean drinking water is probably an issue for a larger number of people than access to electricity. There is no such thing as drinkable tap water anywhere in Laos, even in Vientiane and Luang Prabang, and the water from rivers and streams isn't safe for locals to drink either because livestock roam free for the most part. Even the locals drink bottled water., which is both expensive and environmentally unsound. Sanitation services of course don't exist outside of a few major cities. And with everyone drinking bottled water, you end up with exactly what you would expect -- a **** ton of plastic bottles everywhere. You can burn them along with the rest of the trash, of course, but that isn't great either.

Never been to a rural village in Thailand that didn't have stilted house. Lots of them built from teak. Not uncommon for people to buy old houses to disassemble and harvest the wood for their new build.

Laos is lucky they only have 8mil people to take care of but insane terrain in places.
I would guess there are tons of islands in Indonesia that have a rougher time getting access to power but could only imagine the red tape and bribes needed to get material imported there

I traveled in Thailand twenty years ago, but I didn't have time to go up to the areas in the north that are more similar to northern Laos. (The food in northern Laos is quite similar to Isan food.) I haven't been back since.