BuriramRes

I can add information from the other side of the coin. I posted some freelance work on one of those sites and was peppered with "proposals" by eager freelancers who obviously hadn't even bothered to read my RFP. I hired none of them and haven't returned to those sites. They seem like a waste of time from this would-be employer's perspective.

Steve, a lot of the "serious" developers on these sites do this as a "place holder" bid. They know that if they put a realistic bid in for the work they will not be looked at. As with any site their are real professionals there & also scam artists, just learn how to play the game.

Forget about the helmet. The lady in question might not have had helmet anyway and, further possibility that if she did have one then it was unsecured. I see it all the time.

Driving against the flow of traffic was the killer, I'm sure we all agree.

No, of course it was the foreigner's fault. If he wasn't here .......... I was disappointed that nobody noticed this before!

Must plead guily to riding a motorcycle on the wrong side regularly. Only on the main road though. The real killer is the lack of U-turn facilities on the 4-lane highways!

is the welcomed American man, Mr. Klerk Gillot, an American, who is the American President of an Independent Charity Foundation from America?

Nah, he looks American to me.

Yes, he must be American, who else would go on such a hairbrained venture & believe anyone would take any notice?

Have more success going to Washington & throw a love in for the pollies.

You'll need a WP....regardless of what the above post says.

Get caught...bye bye you. And eventually you will get caught.

With all due respect, that is crap! What they say about crappy Indian freelancers is quite correct but the Parkistanese are just out of this world!

I am on the other side of the fence & it works for me because I can do all my own testing & my NZ company employs them, so no concern for the Thai government.

It took me 3 tries before I found a reasonably good developer (plus an audit from a NZ guy who works at it as a second job).

My present freelancer is an Indian lady who is a "professor cum Associate Professor (more like lecturer) at an Indian International University. She seems to do most of her freelancing at work, is slow but since I can write the specs & do all my own testing (on my own hired Aus virtual server @ $45.00/mth) it is working fine as long as I have the patience and perseverance to see it through.

I would take it up with the Singapore embassy and get them to refund the air tickets. She just needs to prove her story. In the ASEAN context this is unacceptable.

As said by others earlier, that someone does not need a visa for Singapore does not mean that they are guaranteed entry upon arrival. Even those who do hold a visa are not guaranteed entry.

Visa or no, immigration officers at ports of entry have the right to question travellers and if not satisfied, refuse entry.

This is not a Singapore thing; it is standard in most, if not all, countries.

However, if entry is refused then the traveller should be given a written explanation of why. This does not seem to have happened in this case.

So that would be the grounds for any complaint.

But getting the Singapore government to offer a refund of the cost of travel, or any other monetary compensation; in your dreams. At best they'd get an apology.

Not sure why you say that "In the ASEAN context this is unacceptable."

ASEAN nationals do not enjoy the same freedom of movement rights within ASEAN that EU nationals do within the EU. Though I understand moves are afoot to introduce such rights.

Have you ever read the ASEAN agreement on the free movement of people between member countries. In cases where citizens of Asean countries are denied access to another country clear reasons must be supplied for refusing entry. If they are refusing Thai women entry as a rule its a transgretion of the Asean agreement. If enough noise are made the Singapore government will have to rectify their actions or face action under Asean conflict resultion rules. If she does nothing like you say it will happen again and again with her and other Thai women travelling to Singapore. So the starting point will be Singapores embassy where she will get no answer after which the Thai foreign affairs will be the next stop where nothing will happen and then armed with all her letters and emails she go to the place where things happen the internet. Is she doesnt want to fight discrimination she must learn to live with it.

Very true, but it is NOT the Thai (female) way. Somehow they are brought up to accept authority without such questioning.

I NEVER allow my Thai wife to go to bat for me. I know she would accept the first knock back that comes.

riding in the dark without turning on the lights in the hope of saving some gasoline shows ignorance and stupidity

How is that relevant to patching a tire (which will work fine if the puncture wasn't very large)?

With patching a tube rather than installing a new one, at least you do not have to take the wheel off???

It doesn't just happen in Thailand.

A good friend of mine, who is Swiss/German & has lived in England for most of her life told me about a similar situation.

She was on a public bus, somewhere in the UK & a couple of German ladies got on & sat right across from her.

After a while they started talking about my friend (in German). This continued for quite some time.

Finally my friend got off the bus and as she left she spoke to these two ladies, in perfect German. She did not wait for a reply!!

Would it be OK if I just had pride in my intellect, my tremendous sense of humour, and the benefit of being born in the greatest nation on earth?

Has anyone got any actual evidence that people get turned away at immigration

a) because they do not look smart

because they do not take pride in looking smart?

Perhaps the immigration officers are not as prejudiced by first appearances as is the OP

Chinese, I presume?

"Important" for the Poms perhaps, not so for the rest of the community! (Boy, are they a pack of whingers or what?) It's quite a pleasant drive to the big BKK occasionally, eh?

Poor bloke. He must have been in his second 8 hour shift, without a break.

Suffering from sugar deprivation.

If my wife comes to Australia on a tourist visa longer than 90 days, she has a multi-entry visa with every entry being not longer than 90 days. (sound familiar?).

This is not so for every foreigner visiting Australia, but only for those coming from a country outside a given list.

It so happens that it is a lot harder to do a border run from Australia! If this is not retaliation, I do not know what is!!!

Easy answer.

I can lose the fat.

You can't stop being ugly.

Where have I heard that before? A la Churchill who retorted:

Madam you are ugly, and tomorrow I'll be sober (in answer to a lady saying: "Mr Churchill, you're drunk").

My wife went to Khon Kaen a few weeks ago to order a new passport.

They mailed it a week later & it arrived OK. We found it poked into a space in our front gate. That's what you call security.

For all we know the truck could have had steel sticking out past the back of the vehicle with no working lights, while Jr on the motorbike is blasting full speed ahead as is the norm.

And probably raining!!

I get medication mailed from an on-line chemist in AUS about once a year.

The first time it came straight through to my mailbox, no problem.

Last time I had to track it from the post office & found it had been delivered to customs at Chaeng Chom. Had to go there personally (with a green slip from the post office). The cost of release was for goods worth $120.00 was:

(a) GST of 7% - 261B

( Duty - 177B

© Handling - 50B

Total 488B - with a receipt.

Biggest pain was the post office did not tell me that it was at customs, so I had to do my own search.

Customs was about a 4 hour drive away but was just near immigration & I had to go for a 90 day there at the same time.

A friend was telling me yesterday that the post office had contacted him for a duty payment he had purchased a pair of shoes/trainers in the USA via ebay at a cost of 3,000 baht the import duty demanded was 6,000 baht . he has now filled a form in at the post office on appeal and has requested that customs review the charge as there is not a 200% duty on shoes he has also told them that if they are insistant that he has to pay such an obscene amount to keep them. Last month his wife ordered a kitchen product from the UK for 2,500 baht the duty was 7 baht maybe she used her Thai name just a thought.

I have 50 cubic mtr in boxes coming from the UK they are personal posession's and I have to be honest I am expecting to get stung big time !!!!!

I had a consignment of personal effects sent by sea from AUS a few years ago. I went to the port at BKK and cleared it personally.

When we arrived a private agent lady convinced us to use her services, she was great. She knew where to go & what forms to fill out. She also knew how to jump the queues with a small bribe. Finally after about 3 hours running hither & thou we were displayed the consignment in a storage shed & picked it up, no customs fee. A forklift even took it outside for us to load into our vehicle.

The lady's fee was nominal, worth every baht. If you try & do it yourself it will take you days.

Just what Thailand nees, an extra public holiday. It will soon be easier to itemise the working days than the public holidays.

Of course the poor public servants are the only ones who benefit from the Thai hols, the Buddha hols, the Christian hols. Have I missed any?

probably the Lao & Cambodian hols too??

Why do you think that such insurance should cover someone who should not be using the motorcycle.

Simply stop anyone without a licence using your vehicle.

Chinese state media calls for ‘de-Americanised’ world after US shutdown

Xinhua says 'new world order should be put in place' where all nations can have interests respected on equal footing

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1330873/chinese-state-media-calls-de-americanised-world-after-us-shutdown

China just needs to stop funding the US. If the US defaults, China should just pull the plug and demand immediate repayment of their bonds. Just forclose on New York and the Pentagon for a start.

The US needs to understand that the rest of the world no longer needs to prop up their extravagant life style. Make the US live within their means and stop fighting wars using a credit card (and stop their QE, which is just as bad as Robert Mugabe's tactics).

Sitting in a huge restaurant the other night, dozens of people (mainly women of all ages) were totally transfixed to their phones. i-pads or whatever, and totally oblivious of their friends or even the food that was on the table.

Their minds will be messed up within 5 years if not sooner.

Pathetic!. They need to get a life!

In my opinion, they don't have a mind. They are just addicted to computer games. TV is more of an addiction than I like.

Sadly this is just Microsoft's way of scaring common folks into spending more $$$

on an OS they ( the common folks) may not want or need. If my memory serves me

right this all started back in the days between Win 98 (a very good OS in its day)

and MS's releasing the new Millenium OS because of the Millenium Bug which

wasn't a bug at all...in fact it was nothing at all...but MS made billions flogging

a "new" OS that was a piece of shit...off of a scare tactic. If you have Win XP

Pro on your PC now and you have additional 3rd party security software I see

no reason for an "upgrade" to Win 8...forget Win 7...it's ok but 8 is somewhat

better if you don't mind the touch screen BS. And don't taks MS's advice when

they tell you Windows Defender is the best there is...that's a load of crap.

About a week ago MS sent out a 80MB update for XP which I downloaded then

turned off auto-update for good. Guess I'll wait & see what happens in 6 months

time. Mind you...I'm not worried...

This was probably to ensure that the XP users, who are probably running on 1/2 to 1MB of RAM simply die through lack of RAM.

The advice to turn off automatic updates is very good advice, contrary to what Turkleton has just said.

It is not always like this. A couple of years ago, at my wife's village, two children on a motorbike were hit by a Thai driving a pick-up. The children were very badly hurt (having no helmets of course). Also on a m/c with no registration & children too young to have a licence.

The pick-up did not stop for the accident but had to stop a couple of kms along due to a wrecked radiator.

Police came & said the children were in the wrong having no licence,registration, etc. No mention about the hit & run.

We arrived on the scene when the children were being treated by locals, including the manager of the village (who had a new pick-up).

He would not take the kids to hospital because he was scared that one would die in his new car (leaving their ghost there).

We bundled them into the back of our Fortuner & made an emergency trip to the nearest hospital along with a parent.

The child who was making the most noise turned out to be OK, the other one was released from the hospital but died a couple of weeks later having had brain trauma. The pick-up driver who was the hit & run party had to repair his own vehicle, I assume.

Bit different from the Narai lintel stolen by the Americans from Prasat Phnom Rung during the Vietnam War. The Thais had to BUY that back from the American museum where it ended up.

<deleted>? Hey Einstein, provide references on that ^^^ OK?

Just take a look at the American history, they like to steel other people's national treasures,

Yeah, those horrible Americans are to blame for all the world's problems throughout history. We're terrible. We've done some bad things but we usually (not always) end up owning up to it and apologizing. That much can't be said for most of the rest of the world.

Hail be to the great US of A. Go sing your star bangers elsewhere.