impulse

If drinking is causing problems in your life, you have a drinking problem. If you want to stop (and be happy about stopping), there's a seat for you. It's free... https://www.aathailand.org/

One more case where legalized weed may have saved 3 lives. He'd have been too busy laughing and looking for a snack.

Was there a duck nearby?

We've all been in shops like that in Thailand... Where it's not really a shop as much as someone's living room open to the street, and it's never closed. It's impossible to stay awake 24/7, and hard to hire help if you're only making a few hundred baht a day.

A spokesman for the consulate-general told the Malay daily the Malaysians had to apply for emergency travel documents through the Thai government to return home. “They also have to pay a fine of 20,000 Thai baht (RM2,600) to the immigration department before being allowed to leave the country,” it quoted the spokesman as saying. Rahman said the stranded Malaysians were expected to pay a fine of between 20,000 and 40,000 baht if they wished to leave the country. They would also be blacklisted and denied entry to Thailand for three to five years, he said. If they leave without an exit stamp, I doubt they'd be allowed back for many years, or at least until they get a new identity and passport. Some of them count on traveling to Thailand to make a living.

They couldn't care less about Songkran. They just don't want to kick off protest season. Keep 'em in fear...

Yup. Just like I was excited about sitting in long boring sales meetings and sucking up to butt munches who told awful jokes but happened to make buying decisions. At least that's what I told them... Oh, and they also told me I'm a very hansum man.

My body shop (employment agency) always came to the One Stop with a ream of documents that I never even got to see. Didn't want to see. Didn't need to see. They just told me what time to show up and where, where to sit, when to stand, and what to sign. It was great. They did ask me to get a Soi 11 medical cert, but I have no doubt they could have conjured one up if I had resisted. Edit: Getting back to the OP's question, it's Stage 3 syphilis they're looking for. If you don't have body parts rotting off, I'm pretty sure it's okay.

Did anyone else notice that there's not a run on hospital beds for Covid patients? Time to open back up and let the peasants make some tourist money.

That's true, but with 80% remaining capacity after 25 years (as called out in a typical warranty), I know a lot of Thai people who would gladly hop on that "dead" horse and ride it another 25 years. By which time, some genius will have come up with an economical process to recycle the materials. You'd have people lining up to take those 80% "junk" panels off your hands, and they'll still be better than a brand new panel was 10 years ago when they weren't nearly as efficient and cost twice as much.

Just curious... Does it shield you from quarantine if you test positive?

I'd want to see something more substantial than a conversation with a random Russkie tourist. It's quite probable she doesn't understand exactly what was on offer, or the exact terms and conditions. Insurance requirement sounds more like conditions to get some kind of credit instrument like overdraft protection. I'm open to the possibility that BKK Bank is just being skeejy, but there are tons of threads where foreigners (especially tourists) misunderstood bank policies.

If you buy an unlocked Samsung phone, you're going to get a lot of Samsung apps that you pretty much have to root the phone to delete. Same with pretty much any brand.

Sure, if it's weed or nothing, weed looks like a pretty poor life choice. But weed as an alternative to getting drunk is pretty appealing. I've never seen a stoner club anyone to death, get the DT's or ruin their liver. They're usually pretty mellow compared to drunks.

That may not be true and in fact may actually save the planet by hastening the transition to green energy. In the short and medium terms, it's more likely to send countries back to burning their own coal and to support even less sustainable and riskier methods of producing oil and gas. If you think about it, coal "saved the planet" by preventing countries from burning all their trees, and oil and gas "saved the planet" again by offering a cleaner alternative to mining and burning coal and cutting down forests to burn wood. Imagine Thailand with 60 baht diesel and twice the price for electricity, which is 65% gas fired... Not a pretty picture

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-expects-earn-96-bln-more-april-due-high-oil-prices-2022-04-05/ Unintended consequences, anyone?

You need to get a professional exterminator in while you still have walls.

If you were to keep Russian oil and gas completely out of the international market, it would drive the prices up high enough to collapse the world economy. Not an attractive outcome.

True, but transitory. The bigger picture is that if Germany quits buying gas from Russia, they'll have to buy it elsewhere, and that will displace the countries that will have to find a new source, and that will lead back eventually to Russia selling their gas to someone who isn't in on the sanctions. So what has that particular sanction accomplished other than driving up the world price of Russia's main export product(s)?

So were mine (BOI), but 1 year. And I always had to go to the Soi 11 clinic, pay the nice lady 400 baht, let her draw some blood, say hi to the doctor and get a certificate that attested to the fact that I didn't have syphilis. I'm sure some companies fake the medical certificate for their employees without even bothering them with the minutia.

Died out, gone underground or just hard for us to detect? Our understanding of life as we know it is carbon based, using liquid water as a solvent. What's to prevent silicon based life, using liquid methane instead of water? Perhaps living on a time scale that just looks like it's standing still to our puny eyes. Or living underground?

If they know the popo is up ahead, they generally handed me a helmet and made me put it on. And they always knew when the popo was up ahead, and whether they were looking for helmet violations or just paperwork.

I don't ever advocate violence, but I'm not sure what I'd do if the Elites from the capitol city pushed my family off the land we'd been farming for 20 generations, with newly minted paperwork. It's not that simple, of course. But that's a big component of the insurgency. Up north, the violence gets blamed on land and business disputes, drug cartels, human trafficking, loan sharks, etc. In the south, it all gets lumped into the insurgency.

Here's a decent (?) review... This guy is generally pretty picky. No comment from me since I usually fly the cheap seats.

https://www.lazada.co.th/products/uni-t-mini-sound-level-meter-uni-t-ut353-i2828575386-s10317348018.html Uni-T is pretty reputable, and for $16.... I don't know how they could calibrate one based on a smartphone app. It's possible it could tell which sound is louder, but not the absolute dB level.