"I cannot imagine that Congress would dare to leave Washington without a beautiful new HealthCare bill fully approved and ready to go!" - D Trump

I can imagine it and I have a very limited imagination.

My Bangkok name is "ATM". It usually gets smiles from the women (the smart ones), but they don't have a clue when it comes to the irony.

2 hours ago, pgrahmm said:

Shutting the barn door after all the horses have fled.......

 

Maybe some countries are finally starting to get that this is an invasion....

 

Round them up & send them back to the mid east.....

 

Send the Africans back to the Mid East and the Mid Easters back to Africa, is it?

17 minutes ago, ben2talk said:

Hardly necessary.

 

Simply a decent 'minute' rate when the cruising speed is too low along with a decent 'distance' rate when travelling over 30 or 40km/h.

 

Also perhaps a limit on the number of licences available for specific areas - there are 75 million taxis in Bangkok, starting by outlawing taxis over ten years old might wipe out a good 40% of them!

Hardly even comprehensible even for an escaped Silicon Valley software developer a certified DBA/DBSA, such as myself. Death by "over-the-top-tech", like a computerized traffic-control system for Bangkok.

As far as the "75 million taxis" goes, try 70,000 (officially) or (unofficially) 200.000 plus Tuk Tuks (not sure if it includes motorbike taxis at what seems to be at least s trillion) according to:

Answers.com

3 minutes ago, Bluespunk said:

If they don't want to take me, I just move on the next one. 

 

I don't like it and more often as not an muttering  "<deleted> you, <deleted>" 

 

Life's too short to waste time arguing with those tossers. 

Not to mention the risk of having a confrontation that could ultimately be hazardous to one's health.

I usually avoid taxis by riding public transportation or one of my bicycles. However, I can see that regulating fares by  relatively "dumb" meters that don't take into account the specific trip details could end up with many potentially unprofitable or minimally profitable taxi fares.

With the pervasiveness of networks and databases, it would be interesting to design a "smart" meter that would take multiple factors about the trip such as time of day and the specific route to dynamically determine (even if it's only ) an estimated fare.

It would not be easy/cheap to develop nor to be accepted nor is it going to happen anytime soon if ever.

1 hour ago, Redline said:

Not 6 million tech jobs silly.  6 million job openings, many in the tech fields.  You wrote 6 billion!  You have failed

Make him an offer!

I'm wondering if making a plea to the passengers to pray for survival should be added to the checklists for several critical situations. Maybe Air Asia already has done this and the pilot was simply reading the passenger prayer checklist item to the passengers. 

Has anyone actually seen a chase of a motor vehicle by the RTP? Been here eight years with a lot of road time and I never have. I did see an RTP pillion rider officer jump off the bike and do a foot chase of a "person of interest". That's about it.

The CCTV indicates that if the pickup were actually being chased by the police, they were quite a distance behind him since he had several seconds following the collision until they arrived (to shoot out his tires).

11 hours ago, thaiowl said:

From the video you can see the left engine has blown a blade. The captain shut it down but air flowing through it at 300 knots is enough to make an imbalanced turbine vibrate the aircraft. You can tell it's shut down because the spiral pattern in the engine is visible (it's going maybe 100-200 RPM as opposed to 3000+).

Just because you shut down the engine doesn't means the blades stop spinning from air rushing past them. There's no physical object to stop them spinning. During the pre-flight check you often seen engines spinning in the wind, depending on direction.

Procedure is to fly at slowest speed and descend so as to maintain the slowest speed possible to decrease air flow going into the engine.

Plane was not in any danger although the vibration is disturbing to passengers.

 

Hmmm. I guess there's no way to "feather" a jet engine (fan blades) that's been stopped. I'll have to work on this problem in my spare time.

Next, they should pull all the Hotpoint fridge/freezers from the buildings (just in case).

Watched the CCTV video several times. The Aussie appeared to be speeding and also appeared to be near the center of the road. The victim underestimated its speed and/or her ability to accelerate out of its way  (providing she even saw the pickup).

I, long ago, resolved to not operate motor vehicles on the road in Thailand. I ride a bicycle and would never have attempted what the victim did. For one thing she entered the road without due caution, IMHO. If I rode my bicycles like that, I would have been a victim long ago and would not be here to write this.

This is very bad news. The only good thing is that Yokosuka has (had, anyway when my sub was in dry dock for an overhaul) excellent repair facilities and personnel. R.I.P. the deceased and condolences to friends an family.

A good start? It appears that some had better start learning Arabic. I'll they know the written numerals already, at least. They should let the Chaldean Catholics w/o criminal records stay as refugees.

There's a pretty good chance in my country that after the knife is pulled, a pulled gun might be the expected response.

10 minutes ago, YetAnother said:

should be movie fodder

I'll schedule it as "Fast and Furious 11". Can't have enough of these F & F movies can we? They keep things safe and sane on the highways and byebyeways. You can come up with the alternative title.

44 minutes ago, FritsSikkink said:

It is illegal to speak to the Russian secret service when you are a civilian as they were at that time. How hard to understand is this?

That depends on how attractive she or he is. An 8 or greater is not illegal. Besides one has to show an intent to break the law, using the Comey standard. Intent of what w/r an attractive Russian SS agent, I'm not sure.

2 hours ago, Keesters said:

And for every one lucky man like this who lived there are thousands who don't. The majority of them not even driving the vehicle that caused the accident.

 

Celebrating this event will do NOTHING to prevent the daily carnage on Thai roads. It is more than likely to have the opposite effect.

 

 

Indeed! I'm more likely to lament the wasted, destroyed vehicle ... if it's a nice one rather than some reckless, speed-freak driver.

22 minutes ago, Jingthing said:

Nope. 

Comey is not in trouble. 

trump is.

Big trouble. 

 

 

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/06/trump_s_claims_that_comey_lied_under_oath_put_him_in_a_pickle.html

Thanks for the link to the totally unbiased, quasi-news site. I did read the article and ... well ... Good Luck, Mr. Comey, but shouldn't you be looking for a new position (or did you somehow get independently wealthy?)? 

BTW, Jingthing you should consistently capitalize proper nouns and learn how to use text-anchored hyperlinks, to allow you to more easily better document your embedded hyperlinks. In search of excellence, right?

PS: It would be a real dilemma for me to determine who, between Trump and Comey, would be telling the truth about who said what when they were alone. I say throw them into an empty conference room, lock the door and let them duke it out.

Kim Jung Un couldn't even supervise a hair cut (obviously).

OP: "I think the situation is getting much more serious for Mr. Trump,” said Jon Bond, a political science professor at Texas A&M University.

I think the situation is much worse for Mr. Comey after he incriminated himself as a leaker of internal government information and someone willing to invoke a euphemism ("matter") for the criminal investigation of Hillary of as demanded by the, then, Attorney General Lynch. An obvious tool of Obama and Lynch.

The political science professor and a lot of (other?) leftist, Trump Derangement Syndrome victims and the mainstream media had better get over it. Soon.

This anti-Trump mania has gone one too long already.

Judging from the very wide tires and the front-mount intercooler (FMIC) it appeared to be a high performance vehicle. I suspect the driver was doing some outrageous maneuver in the vehicle and lives to do it again! He's very lucky it didn't catch fire as the ending in that case would have been quite different.

Kudos to the rescue crew's skillful extraction.

19 hours ago, YetAnother said:

that just doesnt happen to avid bicyclists; motorcy rider will get away with manslaughter

Yetanother quoted OP:: "claimed the cyclist fell against him and tumbled over."

 

I just saw a photo of the deceased lying next to his bike. It was a narrow-tired (700c wheels, < 28mm wide) road bike. Narrow tires (< 28mm) can be very treacherous on Thailands roads and sidewalks (aka pavements) due to numerous cracks crevices that exist. A cyclist can easily be lose control and be ejected from the bicycle (and possibly into oncoming traffic) if a wheel goes into such a crevice. I'm not saying that's what happened in this particular case.

 

I have a bike with 23mm tires and I have to monitor where they are constantly when I take it out, so it's a lot more difficult bike to ride and should probably be kept off the roads and on a well-maintained track. However, the tires are lower friction and it is an exciting and fun bike to ride otherwise.

1 hour ago, richard_smith237 said:

 

Gear up ???...  

 

Helmet, always..

Gloves, yes because my hands get sweaty and can slip off the grips otherwise when hitting a bump..

Lights, always (day and night)

 

What other 'gear' is there when you suggest 'cyclists gear up' (on the road)?

Mirrors, high-visibility vest, eye  protection, continual situational awareness and an attitude that sharing the road with motorized vehicles that are much heavier and faster is easily fatal so is to be avoided when possible - Ref Post [link].