retsdon

The other day I saw a picture of Ao Nang beach. Back one day in November 1989, myself and an American sat on that beach wondering if it would be possible to visit the islands we could see offshore (it wasn't). We were the only two people there. Behind us were coconut groves and a few grass huts. If you dove into the water, which was a beautiful azure blue, shoals of tiny baitfish would leap out and scatter. There must have been millions of them because it happened every time. The place was a picture postcard tropical paradise. Given the increase in cheap flights, commercial pressure, etc, it was always going to be impossible for Ao Nang to remain pristine. But what they've done to it is borderline criminal. Who would go there now, and for what? All across Thailand you can repeat the story of Ao Nang in greater or lesser degrees. The golden goose is dead. They've killed it.

With the increase in car numbers, riding a motorcycle in Thailand has become a very, very dangerous way of getting about.

Safety isn't the issue. The issue is that Thailand really doesn't have much to offer these days. All urban areas have become exactly alike - traffic, ugly concrete and messy wiring and the 'nature' part has been ruined by over-development and pollution. The air quality verges on hazardous half the time too. What's on offer to tourists is an ersatz caricature of what Thailand used to be, but in a polluted lower-midde-income industrialized environment. It's no wonder they've stopped coming.

"My house/ apartment/ car is in my wife's/girlfriend's name" Correction: Your wife's/ girlfriend's house/apartment/car is in her own name.

When your growth model is based on the availability of cheap labour it stands to reason that growth is going to falter when the labour stops being cheap. It's hardly rocket science.

Yesterday, after 3 days of 400+pmi readings, the wind blew and here in Chiang Rai the PMI readings dropped to 160. Overnight the wind dropped to nothing and the PMI readings this morning were back up to 400+. Is this because the smoke is being carried in over the borders? I don't think so!

These days pretty much nobody cuts by hand. All the farmers use contractors with a combine to cut their crop. And this has made the problem worse because the contractors, to save wear on their machinery, cut as little of the straw as they can get away with. The result is that the farmers are left with stubble over a foot high which is impossible to plough down. So they are almost forced to burn it off. The fix isn't difficult. Just make it a law for that rice stubbles must be chopped and mulched and provide grants to cover the cost. And if it adds a few baht to the cost of a ton of rice - so what? In the meantime, introduce an educational program to encourage and promote no till cropping. It's not rocket science. All that's needed is the will.

It was almost inevitable that the breakup of the Soviet Union would be the catalyst for conflict because that's what always happens when empires die. WW1 was sparked by the breakdown of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Vietnam war by the decline of French power in Indochina, the Biafran war, the Rhodesian war, multiple Indo-Pakistan wars, etc, etc, following British withdrawal, not to mention all the Middle Eastern conflicts stemming from the Sykes-Picot agreement and its arbitrarily drawn borders. Why would the breakup of the Soviet Union be any different, especially in regions and countries that had gone centuries as part of the Romanov empire before the Soviets. Knowing all this, political issues and divisions among post Soviet states should have been handled with kid gloves diplomatically. Instead, the opposite happened. And now there's war.

Good luck promoting tourism with visibility down to to 300 meters on account of the smoke. 'Oh look, there's a Viewpoint. Let's stop and look at the view!' 2 minutes later... 'Cough!Cough! What view? Where!?'

Never mind the tourist industry, what about the health of the people who live here? My eldest gets asthma and every year he's subjected to what amounts to low level torture for three months because the government is too feckless to crack down on the national pastime of pyromania and to educate people on alternative planting and cropping methodology. It could be done easily but would require a bit of organization and a properly thought out plan. But no. Every year, half the country has to go through this nonsense. The annual pollution is not an Act of God like rainfall or drought, it's an easily fixable man made problem.

Having a contract and having the means to enforce it are two different things.

Years ago I worked in a law firm that had a big trade union as one of our clients. Nearly all the work involved negotiating with insurance companies who were basically trying to wriggle out of their liability to pay accident and personal injury insurance on behalf of their insuree (the workers' employer). These insurance companies would deny all liability as a matter of course, and every time we'd have to go through this tedious rigamrole of multiple meetings in which they'd try to gyppo some poor sod out of compensation for having lost his leg or whatever, before eventually with a County Court action pending they'd roll over and pay. They had no compassion whatsoever and if the union hadn't been there to back their members with the money for legal bills, these injured people would have got nothing. Never been a fan of insurance companies since....