thailiketoo

pensions alone on a monthly basis doesn't give you the right to stay in Thailand.

I am guessing a lot of farangs are returning back to Europe specially from Pattaya. I called it a cleanup/correction.

If you are an older fellow and have a pension valued at 800,000 baht per year or 66,666 baht per month you can stay in Thailand as long as you like. As Naam mentioned above your information is not correct.

Well, Mr Drummond may have left but his blog today is what it always was. Hard hitting and an embarrassment to certain people

Not being on the scene himself, how is he going to keep it up?

Read Thai Visa

You may have a point there Thailketoo, I have never heard of a lone Thai mugger. What about a lone Thai pickpocket in a crowd. Was there not a report about a guy in the market at Soi Bukao near South Pattaya Road who got caught with his hand in another guys wallet? I can't remember the outcome.

Normally it's two old ladies who work Pattaya and ride song taus looking for Americans.

1Baddat, if someone pickpockets you, they are not going to stand next to you and open your wallet, they are going to get out of your sight, then open your wallet. It is highly unlikely they will be anywhere near you.

I suppose some of them could be working in teams, even so, once the wallet is in their hands, they won't open it in front of you.

I agree about the pickpocket assessment. I am talking about being mugged, meaning forcefully being robbed. If you hand a mugger a wallet filled with paper and fish hooks I don't think they will be too happy.

Neither do I. I would not be as stupid as to hand him a wallet full of fish hooks unless he was by himself, if he was, while he was screaming, I would then kick the hell out of him until I was certain he would not get back up. I would not expect him to have mates nearby, as a mugger will not mug you unless no one else was there, that is when you have to watch your back and also watch for weapons.

A lone mugger in Thailand? That'll be the day.

Sorry if this has been posted before but I doubt if anyone else here is capable of thinking of it. Of course I could be wrong but I didn't read the whole thread. She goes to jail and she becomes the Nelson Mandela of Thailand.

I found the answer. Even though it has a Samsung name plate on the back it is listed as a Truevisions HD-5200C. So If your remote app has Truevisions HD-5200C it works. I found one that works and downloaded it and everything is fine except it costs 228 baht. I don't know how they are going to charge me. Play store does not have a credit card of mine I don't know why they let me download it.

When I go out on my daily rounds to the thousands of cafe's in Thailand I carry a rolled up wad of 20 baht notes next below a rolled up wad of 50 baht notes below to a rolled up wad of 100 baht notes. I carry my expensive new cell phone inside my shirt in a soft leather pouch; one strap over my shoulder and the other tied to my belt. .

last weekend, went to homepro

my god, more employees that customers

a store like that in my home country, maybe would have a staff of 5

here it was 5 per isle

they seemed to enjoy each other, talking, texting

oh, on the cashier side, only 3 people, long lines and nobody got into their brain to go help where help was needed most

thainess, right ...

No, the employees work for the brands not Home Pro. They are supposed to stay close to the merchandise they are paid to sell. Same thing with cosmetic girls in department stores. How many times has someone told you this on Thai Visa? I can't be the first one can I?

They are called beer bars and there are thousands of them.

Around Siam? I didn't spot any. And are they comfortable, upmarket places? Where you can get a decent coffee and a nice snack? All the beer bars I've been to in Thailand have been distinctly downmarket, and not very comfortable.

Well right now the weather is akin to that of Southern Med Europe...

I can assure you that it gets a hell of a lot hotter than this during the summer in Athens. 40C+ is not uncommon, and 35 - 38 is the norm. Perhaps not quite as humid as here, but not far off sometimes. And Athens sits in a bit of a bowl and is as polluted as here - the traffic is terrible. But the Greeks still have thousands of nice outdoor café areas where you can sit comfortably with an Ouzo and meze (or coffee and toasted sandwich, if you prefer) and watch the world go by. And in the more upmarket areas like Kolonaki they charge a fortune (€5 for an espresso coffee, anyone?), and yet they are still heaving, year round.

I don't think the weather is very much more extreme here than it is in the southern med, and in Greece they have these fans which blow a fine mist of water in front of the fan, which doesn't make you wet, but makes the airstream from the fan much cooler. They work really well.

I'm quite sure that if someone was to open a nice café bar in this square I was in today, with comfortable seating, lots of plants dotted around, plenty of large umbrellas for shade and a good range of drinks and snacks, they would make an absolute killing.

Pattaya has 300 and Bangkok 1000. I think the last time it was Siam was 1946. So maybe not so many then.

I'm pretty sure if the King of Thailand convinced his citizens that their country is in danger of being overrun by western powers they would surely get up and get shit done to prevent that. This is what happened in Japan.

Thailand/Siam was in far more danger of being overun by Western powers in the 19th century than Japan with it's natural defence of being islands, in fact parts of it were overun. How comes they didn't "get up and get shit done to prevent that"

1939

Thai Army 60,000 regulars

134 tanks

140 aircraft

18 vessels

They didn't get over run so I guess it must have worked.

Tammy Arbuckle? Are you serious? She was a schill for the Pentagon. Here are some facts for the uneducated.

Vietnam: A War on CiviliansKill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Nick Turse, Metropolitan, 370 pages

By CHASE MADAR • July 30, 2013

Illustration by Michael Hogue

With all due respect I was speaking only of Hanoi and only as it applied to this topic. Japanese cities were leveled by bombing. If you have any other information to present about the bombing and rebuilding on Hanoi as it applies to Thailand, Japan and the surrounding industrial cities I think it would be on topic.

I have no trouble talking about the Vietnam war but I don't think except for rebuilding cities/Hanoi it is relevant to this topic.

Tammy Arbuckle, correspondent for the Washington Star- News, who visited Hanoi at the end of March. In a dispatch printed in the Star-News on April 1, he said: United States air strikes against legitimate military targets in Hanoi seem to have been carried out with almost surgical precision. The impression after nine hours spent in this city is that Hanoi's people, contrary to some reports, seem to have had an easier war than some .... Pictures and some press reports had given a visitor the impression Hanoi had suffered badly in the war--but in fact the city is hardly touched. This compares with South Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao towns that are completely razed.

http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1973/05.html

If you weren't there at least get your facts straight.

What a load of crap. Vietnamese deaths due to the 20-year plus war with the US are estimated by the Vietnamese govt at 3 million out of a population at that time of about 60 million.

Those who were there are probably the least likely to get their facts straight.

With all do respect I was only talking about Hanoi. I have my facts straight.

To get back on topic I made a simple statement that Japan in particular Tokyo and other major cities were bombed flat necessitating rebuilding from the ground up. Nothing like that happened in Thailand/Bangkok or Hanoi for that matter. Japan received the newest technology at the time when rebuilding it's auto and steel industry and that was important to growth.

another question: is Thailand a failure???

and if it is why are so many foreign people here???

A lot of foreigners in Thailand moved here because they're failures.

valid point...

Kind of silly really. If I was going to pick a place to be a failure I would pick a place where the government gave me free housing, food and spending money. Do I get that in Thailand or Old Blighty?

Both Japan and Germany were devastated by WWII.

Their industry was smashed.

It had to be rebuilt after the war.

That is why both Germany and Japan got new start after WWII.

Ironically, that gave them a newer more modern base to restart from than Thailand, or for that matter the U.K.

Thailand never had that "advantage", that Japan or Germany had.

If you follow that, consider what Vietnam will be like in another decade or so.

The USA never bombed North Vietnam in the same way they bombed Japan and Germany. If they had the war would have been over in two weeks. The primary thing the US bombing did in the Vietnam war was kill trees and dirt.

If you made a conscious effort, you could not possibly be more incorrect. You really need to go back and study your history. It is estimated the US was responsible for more than 2 million deaths in Vietnam and Laos. 2 million! And you speak of bombing dirt? The death and destruction in Hanoi alone was unspeakable. That war was a completely unnecessary atrocity. And I speak as an American. One who is quite ashamed of that chapter of American history. Granted WWII was a different level. And a far more righteous war. But, that does not excuse what happened in Vietnam.

Tammy Arbuckle, correspondent for the Washington Star- News, who visited Hanoi at the end of March. In a dispatch printed in the Star-News on April 1, he said: United States air strikes against legitimate military targets in Hanoi seem to have been carried out with almost surgical precision. The impression after nine hours spent in this city is that Hanoi's people, contrary to some reports, seem to have had an easier war than some .... Pictures and some press reports had given a visitor the impression Hanoi had suffered badly in the war--but in fact the city is hardly touched. This compares with South Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao towns that are completely razed.

http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1973/05.html

If you weren't there at least get your facts straight.

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't traders determine the market price? Don't the FX traders have to have a certain percent of the cash on deposit and if there is too much movement they get a margin call to put up more money?

As far as I know this is exactly what didnt happen with the companies that went bust over the last couple of days; they were obliged to assume the losses.

FX trading is different to trading in stocks and it is the latter than interests me more, though I appreciate that it is not the topic of this thread. Even so, people trading (as opposed to investing) both do generally deal with derivatives or leveraged representations of the item rather than the actual item itself. I am against this.

What are these currency derivatives and on what markets are they traded.

Thought I was banned, hehehe.

However the SF manipulation was one of the biggest mistakes a national bank can make. First of all opposing a similar thing carried out in 2011 and then which is even more absurd of an idea trying to compete with USD and it's latest run in order to underline their country's long lasting privileged role (trial of resurrection) in Finance as a save haven and investment paradise for tax avoiders.

This will have dire consequences for Switzerland, well except for expats temporarily.

The economy will bleed in a big way from one of the dumbest decisions in financial history.

Gruetzi

Yep. But damned if they do. Damned if they don't. If the ECB starts QE. Think of what they would have had to do to defend the peg. This is the world we live in now. Central bank intervention by lead by people who don't know what they are doing.

OB

Edit: ECB not EU

The people at the Central Banks know very well what they are doing, they only don't give a flying fag if you lose your life savings by their actions.

In fact, I think their actions are actually meant to make you lose your life savings. It puts them in a better daylight than if they just confiscate it.

How have Swiss savers lost life savings as a result of this?

What blunder? He can't call any people in the Philippines dummies? Meaning that there are no dummies at all there? Please. You can, without any insult, call people of any nation dummies, when you describe the dummies that live there! In more fortunate countries (not necessarily speaking in economic terms), there'll be a lower incidence of dummies, don't you think?

It's probably quite accurate of you to classify people with a manual job, and lower formal academic qualification as persons from whom no Thai would want to hear. That is the anachronistic, grossly ignorant blunder, since it's not difficult to find people in manual occupations with no tertiary education who are intelligent, perceptive, knowledgeable and decent, whereas some people I've met with higher degrees are scheming, duplicitous, fiercely ignorant azzholes. Where's the real blunder?

So to simplify, you are saying people without educations are intelligent, perceptive, knowledgeable and decent and people with educations are scheming, duplicitous, fiercely ignorant azzholes.

Save me the pedantic explanations. But you are trying way to hard to justify not going to college.

I'll save you some trouble. Lazy, ignorant people who live in Thailand and don't learn the language and are basically clueless about what is going on around them.

you are right about cooks they don't need passion...but heart.

but if they want to become CHEFS they need it...from a certain level cooking is a kind of art...

Maybe I'm wrong but I think you show a cook how to do something and want him to do it the same way. Over and over again. Practice makes perfect. You are the boss. You want replication before creativity. Yes?

you are 100 % correct, but there are two things you should consider:

first: you can't follow blind recipes because we are working with natural products.sometimes the taste is stronger sometimes less; sometimes the meat is naturally tender sometimes you have know how to make it tender;sometimes meat is already aged enough sometimes not but you need to spot it,sometimes potatoes have more sometimes less starch but you need to now how to equal it...and so on don't want to bore you

second: if you don't give a young cook the chance to develop own recipes or to be creative how he can grow?

i will always support ideas from my team.

sure they have to present them at first to me and no changes without my approval.but if somebody comes up with a great idea i take it on the menu and his/ her name get mentioned- this makes them proud and they will grow...

I worked for Wolfgang Puck, Ruth Chris and Rich Melman. All the recipes were taken care of at the corporate level by big money guys with big cooking brains. Meat was all the same, steak after steak and the potatoes always the same starch content, potato after potato. The butchering and farm production methods determine specs within tight tolerances.

We had kitchen managers at the unit level but not really chefs in that they were not responsible for creating anything except profit and the elimination of waste. So I never saw any reason to want creative people only good workers. I guess our experiences are too different.

I'm a corporate guy that was responsible for millions of dollars and thousands of people to produce a certain experience.

Kids are kids and I found them to be the same 50 years ago as today. Mostly it was me that changed and made the place a success or failure. As I got better at motivating young employees they got better. As I got older I hired people to do the motivation. In any event it was not the employees that made the business go up or down it was me. If I hired good supervision the place worked well. If I hired that good looking bimbo with the giant assets for my afternoon breaks the business went to heck.

is meant to be a forum. I do not see the point in asking a question only to reproduce a newspaper article. I actually thought you were asking for information because you missed the news about the swiss franc

Who are you talking to?

What you are,issuing is that you need to have someone on the other side to buy your currency of choice or someone to sell to in order to sell back a stock you no longer want or someone who has a stock you want to buy who is willing to sell it to you. It is called a market and the auction process ensures spreads are small. Imagine if you got sick and epwanted to sell your Apple stick to pay the medical bills in an emergency and there were no sellers at the time. The spread could be enormous without traders. Equally if you want to exchange currency you might find a job finding someone in say the UK who wants to exchange with you - or of course allow the banks to gouge you with a terrible rate.

Unlike real investors who are in for the long term, the speculators generally don't own the actual thing they are trading; they just buy and sell derivatives of some type. This provides no liquidity at all and is of no benefit whatsoever to anyone except those who buy and sell the same derivatives.

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't traders determine the market price? Don't the FX traders have to have a certain percent of the cash on deposit and if there is too much movement they get a margin call to put up more money?

Not aware of anyone ever trying it.

Could be a case of 'spoke too soon' but I always imagined it would be hard to pickpocket me as I have enough trouble getting my wallet out my own (too tight) pockets never mind anyone else doing it without me noticing whilst I'm on the move (I guess I'd be on the move as I don't tend to stand about in the street very often and walk quickly always even when not in a hurry).

I didn't even know it was common in Thailand. I haven't heard of it happening to anyone I know or heard any stories of it as far as I can remember.

Generally not something I'm concerned about. Would never keep my valuables in back pockets and I'm cautious enough in busy places to be mindful and keep my hands close to my pockets (if sober enough anyway).

They don't pull it out the top. They cut the bottom of the pocket in the case of tight pockets.