impulse

Is that possible at age 16?

The problem isn't what we read. It's what they're not revealing. Like a cause of death, a toxicology result, or even a statement whether they suspect foul play. Zip. Nada. Just that it's an open case. Is there any surprise that social media is filling in the blanks with wild conspiracies, especially with the Burmese duo making the news? Solving the case is just one of the jobs of the police. The other is to communicate with the public, especially on an island that counts on tourist money. Gotta wonder how many British holidaymakers have changed their plans since the news hit.

Ukraine already lost. Crimea, on Obama's watch and Donbass, on Biden's watch. They've made no meaningful progress on any front for over a year, in spite of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of deaths and $Billions of treasure squandered. I'd like to see the killing and the dying stop, and those $Billions spent on rebuilding what's left. Or, you can keep poking the bear, then lament what you've pretty much forced him to do.

The last year in Thailand, every hotel I've stayed in posted notices of a 2000 baht fine for smoking in the room. And most of them don't have an in-room balcony.

Where else do you go for a smoke?

Self selection bias. We usually don't hear from the >99% of tourists who sail through immigration with no problems. We just hear from the guys who had problems, often leaving out salient details of their history. Next week, I'll be on my 13th exempt entry in a row (monthly, for about a week each trip), after having worked in Thailand for about 7 years. Then 3 or 4 exempt entries and an in-country extension before Covid put a stop to my travels for a couple of years. My buttcheeks tighten up on each entry. But so far, nothing but a smile and a stamp.

I miss sanity in the media. They've always been biased. But not so loony. That's relatively new.

I'd agree, but I'd add that there's no such thing as a 220V LED bulb, nor an LED bulb that runs on A/C voltage. They all run on D/C, at much lower than 220V. What you're really trying to control is the circuitry that converts 220V A/C to whatever the LED bulbs themselves require. And makers of "220V LEDs" have a very mixed bag of how they do that. That's why some dimmers work and others just gum things up.

Flip of a coin... The airline could have referred you to a gate agent from the auto check-in. I get asked for an onward ticket about 3/4 of the time when checking in. So it's not worth the risk of showing up with fingers crossed and no ticket. My other guess is the SG looks at the cost of flying a passenger back to where they came from (Singapore), estimates the odds that errant passengers will be denied entry and the odds they won't be able to get the passenger to pay (cha-ching, because that's not going to be a discount fare) and made an economic decision not to ask for an onward ticket. But it's up to the airline.

FWIW, he was apparently a male escort... The Sydney knife attacker had advertised himself online as a male escort and tried to join groups of gun owners, it’s been revealed. https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/14/sydney-stabbing-attacker-killed-six-people-named-joel-cauchi-20643570/ Linked article also has some very tragic details about the victims.

I disagree with you there. There's a public interest in knowing whether there's an active murderer running around Koh Tao. They may not solve the case in a month, but they know whether there was foul play by now.

No. I'm suggesting that griping about it is futile, and working up negative energy about it doesn't serve me, or my health. So I'll let that cloud go by without yelling at it... You guys can give yourselves ulcers if you want.

From the linked article: Thai police said they are waiting for the post-mortem results. Generally, I get suspicious when they withhold details like cause of death and autopsy results. Even a preliminary report of any injuries they found. A month later, it's almost as if they don't want the public to know that (much less how) the guest died on their island.

Have you compared your property tax bills? Back home in Texas, my property tax bill alone was more than 90% of Thai people make. And for that, we got beach cleaners that came by every morning, trash bins every 50-100 meters along the beach, curbside trash pickup once a week, and some level of confidence that the trash contractors didn't just dump it on a quiet road. Texas has its share of pigs (just like Thailand). But we pay a buttload of money to pick up after them. Money that Thai people can't afford.

I think the cops back home can arrest someone if they catch them in the act, but not 2 or 3 months later, like this case. On the evening of April 13 last year, during Thailand’s New Year celebrations, the teenage victim was enticed by the suspect... ...after obtaining an arrest warrant issued by Thonburi Criminal Court on July 11, 2023,

Though I get where the OP is coming from, I think I'll let that cloud float by without yelling at it.

Who's programming the AI, and to what purpose? To identify criminals, or to identify political opponents and look for the crimes? (Google "3 felonies a day").

It's social extortion. Had they found OJ guilty, there would have been rioting in the streets. Works both ways... If they had found Chauvin not guilty, there would have been rioting in the streets. In spite of the fact that Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl in him, which would have given any fair jury reasonable doubt. I wouldn't have wanted to be on either of those juries, and felt responsible for causing rioting by doing the honest thing. They'd have both been hung juries... And the mayhem would have started.

I'll confess ignorance... How is a condo allocated to the "foreign quota"? Does the developer declare it when he first offers them for sale? Is it first come, first served, closing when 49% are bought by foreigners? Or are they pre-allocated? If I own a "foreign quota" condo, can I sell it to a Thai? If I do sell to a Thai, is it still in the foreign quota? Once a condo is part of the foreign quota, is that cast in stone, or can the status change? I can see where being in the foreign quota may make a condo easier to sell (perhaps at a higher price), but I'm not clear on how that works if a Thai person wants to buy a condo from a foreigner. Does that then open the possibility for another condo in the project to be bought by a foreigner if it results in less than 49% foreign ownership?

I've owned quite a few leather golf gloves and a few pairs of leather driving gloves. Any time I put one up for awhile, they dry out and shrink and putting them back on requires re-hydrating them to get them back up to size. That's the nature of the leather. I saw the videos. I could have gotten the glove on. I've done it hundreds of times with gloves that shrank even more. But he obviously didn't want to...

I guess I should have known better than to expect a philosophical discussion on the march of time, seconds, priorities, and the important things in our lives.

Almost a month later and no cause of death, autopsy results, or even a blood test?

It's part of a growing tend in the MSM to redefine "mass shooting" and change the methods that even the FBI use to compile crime statistics. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/understanding-fbis-2021-crime-data Cop shops around the country are noticing that their internal crime stats don't match the stats for the same city and time period from recent FBI reports. Not surprisingly in an election year, the FBI is painting a rosier picture...

And I would give you ten to one odds that you are wrong. On a per capita basis, most of the countries to the south of the USA are much worse than the USA. And that's where most of the unvetted illegals are coming from. And though Trump's claim that Venezuela's emptying their prisons has been fact checked as inaccurate (as if fact checkers are reliable), the fact check itself is pretty revealing. So I doubt Americans will be more willing to give up their 2nd Amendment rights in the near future. From 2022 to 2023, there was a 25% drop in violent deaths, homicides, deaths resulting from police intervention and deaths under investigation, according to the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. Criminologists in Venezuela said the decline is because of the country’s poor economy, mass migration and the government's extrajudicial killings, not the government emptying prisons. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/apr/10/donald-trump/donald-trump-exaggerates-venezuelan-crime-drop-and/ https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firearms Back to the OP... Big guns for self defense are stoopid. Too big to conceal, too big to pull out quickly, too powerful to shoot straight, and way too much risk of collateral damage. I bought my first gun in Texas at college in 1980, of the dozen or so I own. I can count on one hand the number of times I've carried in public. That's just not in my nature. Maybe half a dozen times, I've pulled one out of the closet at home for strangers in the fenced back yard. Never pointed on at anyone. I don't begrudge legal owners when I see them carrying out in public, but I'm 100% in favor of coming down hard on felons and kids who already aren't allowed to carry.

Anyone else curious whether he got his money back, given the thread was started over a year ago? And ressurected by someone's first post that was taken down as defamatory?