No beleeeeve!

"So what? What's demand and supply got to do with a the rightness and wrongness of a country insisting on equal standards?

Isn't at best a little patronising to be discussing this topic implicit with the prejudice that it is somehow morally acceptable for Thais to accept lower standards than you would accept in your own country yourself? "

It doesn't have to do with accepting less. It has to do with demanding these higher trained and/or educated teachers but paying low wages for said qualifications. It's that simple.

You want a better teacher, yes, you have to pay appropriate wages. If these qualifications make one a better teacher is a different issue altogether.

Wasn't it in the RCA area where Thaksin, in his wife's name, bought a large tract of land at a huge discount after a similar bar crackdown of that area sometime around 2002-2004?

Whatever happened to that?

Allow me to incorporate a few tips from here and add a couple. I happened to work at a top level private Catholic school for two semesters and this is what I learned (other than it was a living hel_l).

1) Lower your expectations. Assume no one wants to learn English and if you get a couple that do...voila...victory!

2) Don't assume that if you just try harder, you will convert the kids to love English...you won't. Many kids already know going in they have absolutely no desire to learn English and their parents will not push it.

3) Know that many parents do not care if their kids learn English, only that they take the class so they can boast to other parents of this. Plus, the parents do NOT want their children working hard.

4) I made the kids do the same wai ritual before class that they did for the Thai teachers. You have to command respect, they will not give it. Yes, the kids hated this but it is because they don't think they have to respect foreigners. If you get respect, that is a victory. They may not like you much, but they will listen more to people they respect a little.

5) I used Thai to get their attention and for simple commands, mostly to redirect their disruptive behavior. It worked. Shows them you know the language and they will all know what is being said. Plus, I would give instructions in English and then in Thai (I was scolded for speaking too much Thai in class but it was the only method that worked).

6) I often gave them work and had them do it together in groups of 2-3, but not larger.

7) I had a semester long project where they developed a comic book. If they completed the days assignment they got to spend the last 10-20 minutes of class working on this.

First they developed the characters biographies, a good guy, bad guy, girlfriend etc. You will have to do a lot of prompting though...give many examples and walk them through it. Then I had them write a story involving the characters. Again, a lot of prompting and examples are needed. Don't give them blank paper and just explain it. You will have to give an example of each and every step.

Next, I took a blank piece of paper and drew shapes resembling a comic book page without the art for them to fill out...a template. They would draw the characters and the word balloons to bring their story to life. Each class, I made a new blank template for them to draw on.

The comic was used as a reward each class for kids who did their work. Most loved it. They handed it in at the end of each so they didn't get lost. You can go over the stories in class every now and then, they loved sharing them with the class. Get creative. Maybe you can make one as they do. Make yours very silly and they will love it. I even hole punched them (the comic, not the kids) and they cut some yarn to bind the new pages each week.

Good luck!!!!

Businesses cycle, economies cycle, life cycles. You aren't used to this by now? Besides, your portfolio only lost value, not dollars, unless you panicked and sold.

What did you do when the US economy was driving world growth? B*tching then too?

And yes...I have a portfolio too. Then again, I've been in the game since the 80s so I don't panic easily.

I don't think people are trying to say there is "good" or "bad" trafficking.

I think people are trying to make the distinction between a woman who willingly goes to another country to be a sex worker (and who often is a prostitute in her home country)...and a woman (who most likely is not a current prostitute) who is deceived/forced/coerced to go to another country and when she arrives then finds out she will be forced to be a prostitute against her will.

Just because a woman chooses to go to another country and be a prostitute does not automatically mean she is trafficked. And...yes, some woman choose this life, contrary to what our Western beliefs make of this.

That is what I am reading from the previous posts.

Just a few tidbits from REUTERS...

BANGKOK, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Thailand's benchmark stock index was up 0.50 points, or 0.06 percent, at 885.03 points in thin turnover of 6.4 billion baht ($187 million) at 0737 GMT on Thursday.

Stocks on the move included:

- Tipco Asphalt PCL fell 1.7 percent to 28.25 baht on analyst expectations its third-quarter net profit would fall sharply from a year earlier.

Asia Plus Securities said in a research note it expected Tipco's asphalt sales to fall 15 percent to 2.39 billion baht in the third quarter and operating profit to drop 31 percent to 61 million baht.

The broker rated the stock a "hold" with a 2008 target price of 28.85 baht.

0738 GMT

- Shipper Thoresen Thai Agencies PCL jumped 3.13 percent to 66 baht following a four percent rise of shares in its subsidiary Mermaid Maritime Public Co , which made its trading debut earlier this week in Singapore.

Broker Globlex said in a research note TTA was likely to report higher third-quarter net profit due to rising freight rates.

0739 GMT

- BEC World PCL , the country's second-most popular television broadcaster, rose 0.4 percent to 23.20 baht on analyst expectations of strong quarterly earnings.

Kim Eng Securities said BEC third-quarter earnings would rise 18 percent from a year earlier to 502 million baht due rising advertising spending and good television rating.

0746 GMT

- ACL Bank PCL rose 1.6 percent to 6.25 baht after it chose China's ICBC for negotiations on selling its 19.3 percent stake in ACL Bank, Thailand's smallest.

See [iD:nBKK336147] for details

0747 GMT

- T.K.S. Technologies PCL , a digital printing and IT firm, rose 1.3 percent to 3.10 baht, having climbed to a near four-month high of 3.22 baht after the firm said its 50-percent owned subsidiary Synnex (Thailand) Co planned to list in Bangkok by the end of second quarter of 2008.

See [iD:nBKK309675] for full story

0748 GMT

- NUmber one Bangkok Bank was unchanged at 121 baht, but number three Siam Commercial Bank rose a little to 81 baht ahead of third-quarter results due after 1000 GMT.

0750 GMT

- TMB Bank jumped 3.55 percent to 2.04 baht after newspapers reported the company's board was likely to approve Dutch financial services group ING Group's offer to buy a 24.9 stake in the country's fifth-largest bank.

Aren't they charging his kids with tax evasion? Shouldn't his wife take the hit for that land deal if it was done in her name? Where is Toxin's lovely wife? Why not extradite her if she did the crime and they cannot get him anyway?

Not sure how one "encourages" laziness. I had a maid who came once a week just to clean my bathroom and tidy up a bit. My apartment was pretty close to being clean all the time so she didn't have much to do anyway. I also had someone in the neighborhood who did my laundry once a week.

So, did I suddenly or over time become lazy? No, not at all. These wonderful people just did some tasks I preferred not to. Nothing more complicated than that.

No more does transportation make one lazy because you could have walked instead of driving, BTS, subway, taxi, etc. than having a maid does.

Did anyone notice in the first picture of this thread the guy with the girl standing on the ledge looks like he is wearing white panties over a pair of black speedo shorts?

How do I notice these things?!?!?!?! Hahahaha...maybe someone already wrote about it.

"The King Fisher boat, which was carrying a group of scuba divers sank near Phi Phi island in the Andaman Sea at approximately 1 pm."

Kind of like when you hear a plane going down that carried skydivers. How can anyone get killed? The plane has trouble...jump.

The boat has trouble, don your scuba suit and voila...extra dive time!

(sarcasm alert)

It depends on your fitness goals. If you want to lose weight you can use fruit and protein shakes in your diet to eat cleaner, as well as exercise.

If you want to build up that is another approach.

Determine your goals and we can comment more.

I invest more than I trade. One I bought a while ago is CHL (China Mobile). You can buy it through Hong Kong or NY. Good long term hold.

Just a tid bit for ya! You do your research on it, I already did mine.

Yeah, I love it when someone's only response to the difficulty of others is "if you don't like it, leave.' Just about every thread here will have at least one genius who posts this. A discussion forum, by definition, is for DISCUSSING issues, both positive and negative, and sometimes even looking for solutions.

So, if someone writes for help, and in the process vents too, maybe, just maybe, if you don't have a possible solution, think real hard for a while. Then maybe you can contribute something that helps. I think people know that leaving the country is an option, don't you?

"Oh, really, you mean I can actually leave?" As if they didn't know this already Captain Obvious. "Why yes, you didn't know you can leave the country?"

"No, I didn't even know this!"

Sometimes people vent and don't want answers.

Sometimes they ask for answers.

Sometimes they do both.

Why pursue these somewhat minor charge(s) first instead of the larger ones? I would do the same thing. This forces Thaksin's legal team to play their hand, so to speak. I would use the same approach when I was an investigator when I interrogated a suspect. Once I learned the defenses a suspect used it helped me when I pursued larger charges, regardless of how much evidence I had. It worked.

You learn a lot about how the defense will react and the prosecutor will see the strategies and use that when planning the future charges.

This may or may not be the strategy but it does have some merit.

So the question is...why do guys come to Thailand and make foolish financial decisions and take high risks with their money? What is different for them in Thailand that they do not have in their homeland might be the answer.

The guys get a woman in Thailand that they couldn't possibly get in their homeland and get hooked on the pu**y!

There are exceptions but the dozens of guys I have personally seen it happen to ALL got led around by the nose by their little Thai girlie and lost all sense of reality. Captains if Industry back home turn to morons after they get the taste of a nubile 21 year-old who hooks him in.

Guys come to Thailand and get the "$50 Brad Pitt makeover" on the flight over. Once off the plane, with at least $50 in their pocket, they have been transformed into getting attention from women they never received back home and think they are suddenly different people (Brad Pitt-like) and they fall for the deceptions. Not thinking that they are the same person who couldn't get laid in a whorehouse back home two days earlier who now has women hanging on his every word.

Again, not all (save the flames if this doesn't apply to you) but you know what I mean.

Somewhere in that lies your answer.

As a psychotherapist, I have never believed in the "disease model" to define alcoholism. I do not believe there is a genetic contribution to what makes a person drink too much. There may be genetic differences among people for how the body physically reacts to alcohol consumption, but not predetermined genetics that make a person run to a liquor store and buy a bottle everyday.

Allowing a person to say they have this disease, my experience has shown me, gives the alcoholic an excuse to blame the condition on instead of taking personal responsibility for it. So many times I have been told "But I have a disease, don't you understand this?"

To be honest, most alcoholics are self-centered, selfish, and need psychotherapy for the other events in their life that made them feel the need to get lost in alcohol. Again, I formed this opinion after working with thousands of psychiatric patients over the last two decades who had substance abuse issues as a primary or secondary diagnosis. I wish there was a quick and easy pill to give to cure it, but there isn't (Antabuse is a treatment, not a cure).

I just read a pretty decent article on the Bloomberg.com website about stock market opportunities for SE Asia. Here's the link:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home

It made some valid points.

Chok dee

Kevin

<<<is it better to be like this guy and go native, or is it better to be a bar hoping drunk, hormonger at a sea side resort.?>>>

Why do you think these two extremes are the only two options? How about somewhere in the middle? I too see a lot farangs who improperly wai, butcher the Thai language, and a slew of other cultural missteps and I see Thai people laughing at them too. It is a sign of trying too hard to be someone they aren't.

Learn the language, eat the food, and at least try to learn the tiniest bit of what a Buddhist country is about and the Thai people will appreciate and respect us more than if we try and be a 100% Thai person, which we aren't.

I assume that when you mention "lead to" you mean cause mental illness.

In a word...no. It cannot cause mental illness. One must have a more comprehensive understanding about psychiatric illness causation to really know why. There are psychosocial triggers that kick start underlying genetic contributions for illness.

If someone is born with the genetic propensity for mental illness it does not mean the person will exhibit the illness, just that they have a higher percentage of onset.

So, in summary, meditation can't cause illness by itself but rolled in with other factors it MAY trigger underlying propensities but that is a stretch. I have never seen it happen and quite the opposite, I often recommend meditation to my patients.

One must be careful of falling for a false causation where because two events occur that they are related. So, "A" comes before "B" therefore A causes B. This is a false causation if no confirming evidence is present to support A causing B other than their order of occurrance. Meditation happens before such and such therefore meditation causes such and such.

Another false causation example...

"Churches cause fires."

(False logic follows)

There are more fires in cities.

There are more churches in cities.

Therefore, churches cause fires.

I would keep meditating and work on the other issues which contribute to your symptoms. Or, you could stop meditating and see what happens. Seek assistance.

Buy a digital video camera, a laptop with media software, and hire some bar girls to do porn! Charge male tourists a small fee to appear in the video and nail a girl that they never could back home, like half of what they would pay for said bar girl(s) if they arranged her himself, and give the guys a copy of the low production video as a momento of their trip! Or not charge them to appear but for the video itself.

Set up a website and sell the videos online! Have different kinks and fetishes too (like ladyboys for the Japanese tourists).

I know porn is illegal in Thailand before I get flamed! Like that has stopped millions of people in the flesh trade here!?!?!?!

Or....

If you know Thailand really well you could do some sort of tour service. We always met guys on holiday who wanted to hang out with us because we knew the lay of the land (pun intended) and would fulfill their requests by taking them to whatever type of place they wanted. They knew they wouldn't get riped off and would cut straight to the chase. We didn't charge, it wasn't a biz for us, just fun.

I think you need a license to do this legally though, not sure.

Good luck!

After living in Thailand for about two years and just coming off a work permit I needed to start doing visa runs myself for the first time. I did my usual whenever I had to do something new in Thailand and hit the Internet and researched it. I found the legit charges and the bribes beforehand. I printed a post about how the 100 baht bribe at the Cambodian side was illegal and printed it.

When I encountered this part of the run I politely, with a smile, and in Thai told the Cambodian official that I cannot pay the 100 baht. After a few sentences exchanged he called his supervisor over. I repeated my statement, again with a smile and in Thai (I don't speak Cambodian). I showed him the paper, held it up to the glass.

He leaned forward and said "You speak English?"

"Yes" I replied.

"Good, I speak English to you now" he said, not smiling as I was was.

"Why you not pay?" he asked.

"It is illegal, and I don't want to break any laws." I answered. "Here, it says right here not to pay this"

"Let me see that." he motioned to the paper I still held up to the glass. I figured if I give him the paper, he would rip it up throw it out, and then say "What law?" and push for the bribe.

After a few more exchanges like that, I think he became frustrated and motioned to the clerk and said "Go" and we got our passports back and off to the next stop. No 100 baht paid.

My friend who was with me asked "How far were you going to push that for a lousy $2.50?" (Back when the baht was around 40 to the USD)

I told him that was about it, if he demanded it after all of that, I was going to pay.

I think the key was I smiled, never raised my voice, and gave him a way to save face because I acted like I was concerned about obeying the law (yeah right) and not about depriving him of his cash. Had it been a battle of wills I am sure he would have demanded the money or no passports and we would have either paid or been pulled aside and been forced to pay much more to get set free.

The same went for the "health check" on the Thai side. A girl sat at a card table with brochures and asked for 20 baht for the health check. I smiled, thanked her, and when she asked for 20 baht I thanked her again and kept walking.

I sure learned about the "Land of Smiles" phrase that day.

"So What Brought You To Thailand?, Work, love, travel, adventure, sex, drugs, perversion?"

Yes!

Oh wait, not the drugs.

I think what makes Thai difficult to learn for a Westerner is that Thai is a tonal language, something completely out of the box for us Westerners.

As mentioned, throw in the social influences of the language and it becomes more complex.

But, much like anything about a Westerner living in the East, we must cognitively erase our Western concept of just about everything and learn things as a Thai would. I told a friend who moved to Thailand after I did to forget 95% of what he knows of life living in the West and relearn life living in Thailand. It is not a better or worse issue, just different. It's what makes this country facinating to me!!!

I'm sure a bit easier for me being a psychotherapist.

I like cruising the Internet for hours just like the next guy. But I find wandering the streets of Bangkok a thousand times more interesting than anything the Internet can provide (well minus some Japanese websites, haha).

I can see if one was living on a farm in an isolated location and the only escape was the local 7-11, but not living in Thailand, and especially Bangkok, which is one big chance of escapism!

Get out of the house man!

Well ! I do not think what you said is right . In todays world we are all citizens of the world first. If we start narrowing down our vision then definately one cannot hope for widening horizons and learning and sharing and contributing for the cause of quality education. I am possitive that very soon I will make it to Thailand with the help of well wishers and teaching fraternity at large.

Have you not been to Thailand? Your statements, if not a a troll, show you have no clue about this part of the world. Please read A LOT on the Internet about Thailand and modify your attitude so you can survive when you get there. Otherwise, trying to push forth this kumbaiyah (sp) attitude will get you broke and jobless quickly.

"We are all citizens of the world first?" You must be joking!

What most parents want to see when they pick up their precious little kittiporn after school is a Caucasian person in a clean dress shirt, tie, and shiny shoes and as pretty as an A & F model. Then they can go brag about that to the other parents who send their childen to "lesser" schools. This is a generalization with exceptions of course. But don't kid oneself that this exists. Heck, the Thai people I do business with joke about it all the time. They have no problem being honest about it. Unfortunately others delude themselves.

When I hired on in Thailand (at one of the better private government schools mind you), they were more interested in my modeling and acting career in Asia than my university degrees.

Back on topic....Geet, for you're own sake, learn about Thailand. It has wonderful things about it, I love it, but the culture is different. Not a better or worse thing, just different. Racism exists big time.

You alone will not change it.

Different rules with different countries.