squarethecircle

Thank you for all the comments.

I'm prepared for the worst now and ready to leave next month but I just want to get even

with the employer legally simply because he's not honest at all. I don't mind reporting it

to the Labour Office just to scare him. For some months he didn't pay me as much as

he agreed to on the contract. I can show them my passbook to prove this. Are the odds

in my favor or against me?

Sounds like he doesn't respect you; I'd say it's time to move on to find an employer who does respect you.

Crackdown seems to be on people abusing the in-out visa exempt stamps and using that to stay here long-tmerm, what you are doing is not that so no problem. I am trying to figure your schedule but it seems if you will be returning to Thai within in 30 days before your March 2 departure you will not need a visa and can use the entry stamp, no worries.

Not sure if you're trolling, but you can do freelance remote work, either for a company you are connected with (which would be great as the trust is built and pay would be higher) or for other companies or your own.

There is a Tropical MBA podcast run by two guys who built a seven figure business from SE Asia, they have plenty of tips. Also the book The End of Jobs details some of the ways people have leveraged living in SE Asia while building online businesses. Start up costs are more time/work/ingenuity intensive rather than financial intensive, ie: $500 laptop and coffee money.

Skype or Bandcamp makes it feasible without doing oil rig work, teaching, or corporate expat. Nothing against these if that works for them.

The south is no different than Afghanistan. Exact same attacks.

Nonsense.

It's nothing like the violence and carnage that is happening in Afghanistan.

The violence in the south is terrible, but it is nothing like Afghanistan.

Well I am ashamed to say that I used to not understand the situation in the South.

But watching documentaries from Afghanistan, with the madrassahs and the 5x daily drone.

It's not as violent as Afghanistan, but the same level of brutality, and the same idealogy.

And both are counter-jihad situations from the LE and military standpoint.

"There is a possibility that the gold price will shoot through the roof once the market realises how much gold China actually has accumulated through the years"

Well that's interesting. It is almost as if the author has "inside information".

By the way no offense to China but the RMB has always had a play money "feel" to it. Like there is no genuine value standing behind it.

The Shinawatra's are well-liked in this part of Thailand. It's a nice part of the country too.

"The current Thai government will respond favourably to the Chinese model - namely an authoritarian government devoted to high economic growth.The slight problem is that while the leaders in Beijing are men of remarkable intellect and vision, their counterparts in Thailand ( well politeness prevents me spelling out the differences in too much detail )."

Nope, the CCP boys are thugs pure and simple, and they murdered or drove off the Chinese of remarkable intellect and vision, and didn't learn from history. My grand-dad said that the next major war with the US would be with PRC. CCP knows or should know that would be their demise - or maybe they are thinking like Goebbels, that they will either be defeated and vilified in history as criminals (which IMO they should be for turning their country into a gigantic slave labor camp), or ??? Not sure what else they're planning.

I don't see Thailand holding them off; they're also actively working with the Cambodian military.

India, Malaysia, Vietnam, PH, Taiwan/ROC, Japan, South Korea do not want China ruling over them. They'll probably end up like Russia, due to crooked governance they don't have the internal structure to generate 21st century leading culture, so will end up militarily invading surrounding countries to maintain their nationalism. They have a satellite weapons program planned too!

He missed the genocide/mass starvation in the name of Maoism - guess he's trying to stay on the good side of the PRC.

One tale of "magic" while travelling in N Thailand a couple of years ago

I was hitchhiking from Mae Sai to Chiang Mai, with ultimate destination Mae Hong Son.

Hitching in Thailand usually means catching songthaews or local buses - not the fancy direct modern buses but the local ones that stop and go - but it's still fun. Sometimes an off-duty cop or teacher will stop. (Actually there is a lot of bashing on this forum about Thai police but I have met many who are very respectable men)

On this occasion, I caught a bus down to the turn-off towards CM, I think it's called Mae Chan. Walked a couple kms down that road, and waved down an empty songthaew. They were only going 20 km down the road, but told me I could take a bus to Chiang Mai.

I sat in the front with the driver. We drove maybe 10 k's and came around the bend in a curvy mountain area, and there was a bus stopped there, in the middle of a rural road, with the driver and conductor standing out. The bus was packed full, with a couple of youngsters on top.

The songthaew driver said this was the bus to Chiang Mai, so I paid him and got out.

They had no room on the inside but said I could sit on top, so I did, hanging on to the roof with a couple of youngsters, all the way to Chiang Mai.

What was magic about this? Well I told the songthaew driver I was going to Chiang Mai. There was no one around and he called no one. But the bus to Chiang Mai stopped, waiting for me, on a rural road. They were clearly waiting for me since as soon as I got on they took off. But - as far as I could see - there was no way for the songthaew driver to communicate with the bus driver - it was just me and him in the songthaew.

I'm still puzzled to this day how that worked out. Maybe it wasn't telepathy, maybe the songthaew driver has some system where he notifies buses if he has passengers for them. But as far as I could see, there was no rational way the bus would have known to stop there and wait for me. I put it down to Thai telepathy.

"Using any kind of drug in this country, you deserve to get caught and punished. I have no sympathy for anyone who is

involved with any kind of drugs, especially here in Thailand."

Alcohol and tobacco are the two big killers...and yes they are drugs, just not illegal.

I believe the OP is not in the wrong at all, just at the bad end of crooked laws.

"As I've posted in other topics, Oz govt should not permit these people to travel to M.E. If deemed necessary imprison for life, do not permit them to travel overseas where they will commit crimes against humanity."

Well then the human rights watch crowd and their teams of attorneys will be behind them, all the way.

How about secretly embed with GPS trackers (if there's any way to do that) then let them go. Gives the drone operators better intel.

Another one to the list:

Read on Irrawaddy that just last week a Chinese government sympathizing businessman in Yangoon was tortured and murdered by the police there. Turns out he had some connection with the Kokang rebel groups which killed a couple dozen Myanmar soldiers. Seems like Thailand is alone in SE Asia in kissing up to the Chinaman, unfortunate because Hans consider Thais to be their slaves.

"After hitting a tree, the plane "kind of spun a little bit and belly-flopped" with such force it felt like a small earthquake, Khurana said. He estimated it fell "like a rock" about 100 feet (30 meters)."

Hey, more accurate than the other witness who said it sounded like a car dropped out of the sky.

Before I met a Xinjiang kebab maker, seemed like a nice enough chap. He said, outright, he was saving money to be smuggled to Malaysia, his dream escape country.

3 thoughts

(1) Wasn't Marxism-Leninism, on which Maoism is founded, arise in Parisian cafes?

(2) So will this mean an end to Chinese state industrial espionage against countries with functioning intelligentsias?

(3) And will this mean an end to the mass exodus of the elite and their families to the west, such as Australia?

Same here, that was a mistype.

They are also big time in Hong Kong. Wondered about it myself.

Who says it's the right direction? I like how they do it in China. Homosexuals marry and have kids to preserve the tradition, but then have same-sex relations on the side. It's effectively tolerated but in a mixed way.

With people in certain 3rd world countries breeding like rats, do we really need a lower birth rate in the civilized world?

And I always find Russians and Chinese who criticize the War in Iraq to be hypocrites. I thought the US was too mild in dealing with jihadists, and neither China nor Russia would have used similar restraints. Then again I wasn't there but ROE require you to triple-identify people before you can kill them. Basically a recipe for disaster in a counter-insurgency operation. China and Russia have both been quite brutal in their own in-country insurgencies; I read that when 2 Xinjiang "insurgents"/"terrorists" stabbed 3 people in the west there, the PRC military killed not only the 2 XJ insurgents, but also 6 more of their close friends and family.

Then again, when you rule with a ruthless fist like the feudal lords of China and Russia do, you inevitably end up creating a country NOBODY wants to stay in. It's like they think Russia is a great ruling empire, but send their families out as soon as possible. Where's Putin's b**** daughter by the way?

Publicus you will be telling us next China is building this to accommodate Air Force One

We will see eventually whether you are right or wrong about America and China being buddy buddy when China starts determining who and who can’t pass through this shipping channel

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2015/02/22/what-is-china-building-in-the-south-china-sea/

Well that's going to create some problems with ASEAN. But yes I agree PRC is not buddy buddy and in fact chose to be an enemy in 1949, when the same American troops who fought the Japanese faced PLA troops in the Korean peninsula. PRC has very much spit on the grave of the soldiers who died fighting the Empire of Japan, oh well no good deed goes unpunished. I personally believe we will see the rise and subsequent fall of the New Chinese Empire within our lifetimes, and the fall won't be pretty. Same with that Russian gangster.

^^^don't mind him. It's JAFRH, Just Another ... Russian Hypocrite.

Villagers said they heard the sound of gunfire from the school at about 2am.

At 8:30am, local police were alerted and rushed to the scene

Wow, Just 6,5 hours later!

That's because they are afraid of being attacked by ghosts! 555

Not to diminish this violence, which for reasons I guess we're not hearing has been refreshingly absent the past few months...

Doesn't the new "friendliness" with the junta's second cousins up in China pose a greater threat to Thai people's freedom than the terrorists in the South?

The alphabet's actually kind of simple. For 20 baht at the bookshop you can get the "Go Gai Ko Kai" children's books at the bookstore. Pay someone or trade them with English lessons to help you go through them. It will take you a couple of weeks at most of daily hourly study and then you'll be set with the basics, there are some "exceptions" and more complicated things with the tone marks but the pay-off is big.

Contrast it with Mandarin which I'm also studying, at least Thai has an alphabet/letters (linguists call it something different), the Chinese characters are much more to memorize.