Dogmatix

Congrats.

The Hua Hin website seems to have been taken down within the last few days. I wonder if there is a problem other than an IT glitch. Ultimately all the dispensaries may have to stop selling and even advertising online, as that was made illegal by the ministerial regulation published by the Thai Traditional Herbs Department (part of the Ministry of Health) a couple of months back. I am not sure what enforcement powers they have but someone who is growing and has two types of licence says they visit the licensees about once a month at this stage to make sure all is in compliance. Apparently they are helpful in providing advice too, given the lack of clarity of regulations. Neverheless, most other licensees, including the sponsor of this thread continue to have an online presence and online sales, whereas the HH website only had a menu up with no online sales. The thing about having to take ID card numbers of Thai purchasers and send details to the narcotics bureau, which would be a real killjoy doesn't seem to have been implemented yet either. It would also make it easy to say sales can only be made to Thai citizens as a follow up.

The LB miust have good eyesight and have been very hungry to spot a 10k baht gold chain. That's only about 4 grams of gold. They normally go for the 135 gram clunkers claimed to have been worn by Indian victims.

No indication of his ethnicity. He might have been a British Indian. How are LBs expected to tell the difference?

I had to wait for several hours for my turn to sing at the MOI and during that time the interviewers went off and had lunch but there was nowhere for us to have lunch in the old building but we were given some cakes. Of course this was fairly nerve wracking but the staff in the office I was waiting in were very considerate and tried to calm my nerves saying the committee was very jai dee and I should have no problem as I could speak Thai keng, unlike most of the others (mainly Chinese and Indian with pretty fruity accents that were difficult to understand). It is supposed to be a test of Thai language ability, not of musical ability, and they gave me the impression that most of those failed were more for appalling pronounciation rather than for bad singing. But getting the phrasing right is also important with perfect pitch being the least important criteria. Few Thais seem able to sing these songs unaccompainied without hitting some bum notes each time, including Mrs Dog, although she denies that vehemently. Listening to the applicants singing must be a truly horrible job for anyone with a gram of musical sensitivity.

None of this will have any impact on foreign criminals running call centre scams and criminal ventures, who know how to bribe the senior cops. There are still more than welcome.

How about prosecuting the Thais who rent them motorbikes without checking they have a motorbike licence and taking a copy? Whoops! That would reduce bribe income from the rental shops and the unlicensed foreing motorcyclists. Also no crackdown on Thais committing similar driving misdemeanours.

Naturalised Thais are not eligible for military conscription. Of this is only of interest to children who get naturalisted along with parents, as hardly any are naturalised in their own right under 30. Also you cannot be promoted above private in the military, unless your father was Thai through birth which seems somewhat harsh as well as gender discriminatory, as it doesn't apply to those with foreign mothers. This doesn't apply to the police. But anyone another reason for look krung boys with foreign born fathers to avoid conscription.

That kind of thing seems normal. Sometimes I get annoyed when I ask a question in Thai and they ignore me and start talking to me wife. Sometimes she tells them to talk to me because i am the one who asked the question and she doesn't know what I want.

Was considering voting for BJP because they fulfilled the cannabis promises but now Anutin wants to charge people with more than one speed tab as dealers and give them stiff prison sentences vs. current policy of rehab course for up to 15 tabs for first offences. I don't support yaabaa taking but putting the poor sods in prison for small amounts, while leaving his friends the big time drug dealers go free is cruel and insane. This spitting on papers doesn't improve my rating of Anutin either.

I would have thought 16 year olds needed teachers with at least bachelors degree knowledge of their subjects as they are doing at least GCSEs. I did my A levels at 16 and it wouldn't have been any good to have a teacher with less knowledge than we had.

The plod should have swooped by Knightsbridge on the way to Heathrow and picked up Boss to stand trial for the killing of a Thai policeman. Would have been a lot of red faces at the airport. Oh no, we didn't really want him back - he welly lich man.

Thai citizenship is definitely worth having, if you live in Thailand and plan to stay long term or permanently. No more visas, work permits and you can own your own business and land. I upgraded to citizenship after having PR for many years. PR is OK but still need a work permit and go through the re-endorsement and and re-entry permit rigarole every year at CW, if you want to travel abraod. I got fed up with having to provide photocopies of 5 different books as a PR: passport, residence book, tabien baan, alien book and work permit and the fact that hardly any Thais know what PR is and treat PRs just like foreigners on tourist visas. NON-B visa with WP is not too bad, if you work for a large company that has no problem getting WPs and is willing to do all the paperwork for you and does it efficiently. At least PRs have a special section at Immigration and are treated with civility. I can't imagine having to go through the hassle of renewing retirement or marriage extensions every year, running the gauntlet of the ever changing rules and rude and nasty Immigration officers that deal with the general foreigner population. Regarding the citizenship announcements. You need to search for them in the Royal Gazette, announcement by announcement. If you search for Thai nationality in Thai they will be listed in date order. There are only one or two announcements a year. So it will be easy for anyone who can read Thai to check if someone was approved in the last few years. if not in any of the lists, perhaps he got a fake ID card, although I think this is a lot more difficult for farangs to pull off. There seem to be plenty of Chinese with fake IDs though. They pay off the registrar at a district office to issue an ID in the name of someone who has disappeared from the records with no record of death. Some of these lost souls have moved overseas, got a new citizenship and not bothered to come back to Thail to renew ID cards. There is a thread about someone who came back after 30s in the US and found the district office had issued her ID card to someone else and refused to accept her complaint.

Sad to hear that. My father also got dementia while living alone in Tenerife after his second wife died. My sister went out there to take care of his affairs and found that several expats in the village masquerading as his friends had touched him for loans of several thousand pounds each. She found his wobbly handwriting on his cheque book stubs and went to confront the so and sos she could locate. She managed to get some of it back but one big debtor committed suicide before repaying anything.

Worse than that. After being scammed by a bar girl he is now being scammed by Nr Nobi the sympathetic English speaking lawyer.

Re intent to renounce US citizenship. Yes the US embassy no longer certifies this affidavit. They have probably decided it makes no sense for the US government to indulge the Thai government’s efforts to get other governments to enforce for them a Thai law that doesn’t exist but MOI officials wish it did exist. My American friend applied last year and SB had mandated a comical work around for US citizens which involved submitting a selfie of himself standing outside the US embassy on the point of going inside to attempt to get the affidavit. They had some wording for him to declare that he did indeed plan to renounce and had attempted to get the affidavit but had been thwarted by zealous US government officials at the embassy. Re birth certificate. I don’t understand why they have been asking for this as it has never been in the regulations or guidelines. The British embassy has never verified these (the UK has a government records office that provides certified copies) and I and not surprised if the US embassy doesn’t either. There must be a way to get certified copies in the US too.

I was once pushed for a bribe by an official in the Commerce Ministry who wanted a "part time" job in exchange in exchange for a necessary business approval. It turned out that the employment she wanted didn't involve showing up in our office or producing any work product. I refused and still got the approval. I would definitely not offer voluntarily to employ someone's family or friends. You could be putting your head into the lion's den. Giving cakes and stuff is fine, as you say. if anything else is needed, they will tell you. Remember they are police and the whole force is builit on corruption and they are not shy. They might have had to scratch someone's back to get such a cushy job with very little work to do. Also be aware that SB has zero influence in what happens to your application once it leaves them and that is when most delays take place. They will also avoid passing anyone who is not fully qualified as that will come back to them. But they do need to get your file approved by the various agencies before it gets sent to MOI. The narcotics people are said to be the worse and will probably not sign at all, if no one from SB calls and chases them a few times. So, if your case officer doesn't like you, all he or she needs to do is not chase the narcotics bureau for their signature and your file will never be forwarded to the MOI but not the fault of SB.

Unfortunately Dr Yong has zero credibility. So not worth reading anything he says.

Chuwit wants alleged triad boss Yu Xingqi prosecuted under Section 112. This is Thailand's infamous Lese Majeste law. He is claiming that Yu appeared with senior public figures like PM Prayuth Chan-ocha and members of the royal family to gain credence from investors in the UK and China. That is an interesting angle from Chuvit. A few years ago a British criminal, Tony Kenway, was murdered by farang hitmen, apparently on the orders of a farang rival, in Pattaya and the hitmen were somehow allowed to escape. Like Yu Xingqi Kenway also contrived to be photographed with members of the Thai Royal Family which was probably designed to make him and his criminal enterprise appear respectable to potential victims. Without well connected Thai associates it would be impossible for these foreign criminals to gain access to the Royal Family. Surely Chuvit could make a case for prosecuting those who provided the access under Section 112. In the case of Kenway it was allegedly a political family in Chonburi, the patriach of which served a token amount of time behind bars for murder and corruption. Prosecuting only the foreign criminals would leave the essential Thai accomplices unpunished. .

Chuvit's revelations are to be applauded but the timing of them must have something to with the upcoming general election.

Above is a google translation of the source article from SVT Nyheter.Seems that the charges are related to invasion of privacy. The SVT Nyheter headline says he was running a sex network in Thailand but there is nothing in the article to support the sensationalist headline. It definitely seems unlikely that he could have taken all 75k odd photographs and 20k odd videos himself, even though there is a suggestion that he obtained pornagraphic footage from video calls. As others have suggested, it sounds more like he lifted stuff from the internet and repackaged it in a way that it could be monetized in Thailand where most of the customers are located. In this case, it seems unlikely that he acted alone with Thai accomplices. How could a 23 Swedish guy be so fluent in Thai and knowledgeable of the underground porn culture that he could beat the locals at their own game and make good money from it. There is no suggesting that Thai police are bothering to take action against any accomplices in Thailand and probably the won't because they will be paid off and the Swedish guy will be the only person prosecuted. I have seen some Thai LINE groups where people upload some porn, usually soft core, and show the FB or Instagram pages of the model which they may have tracked down through some kind of facial recognition software. Perhaps he did something similar and maybe his value to the Thai crooks was that he was an IT guy. Just guessing because the article provides very little meaningful information to go with its sensationalist headline.

Possibly but only a small percentage of cops have the chance to shake down foreign tourists. The implications of his plan to deem possession of more than one speed pill as intent to sell are far wider and will create much more earning possiblities for cops all over the country, specially the ones in the drug trade themselves who constantly resell the same stash after busting their customers.

There is no logic to this man's decisions, except financial enrichment for himself, his boss and their cronies. I don't like vapes around me but banning them in law but allowing them to be sold everywhere online and physically and then cracking down on tourism vapers is ridiculous. Also allowing cannibis smoking but not vapes for health reaons makes no sense. Another terrible decision is the legal amendment he is introducing to make possesson of two or more speed pills considered dealing with automatic tough prison sentences. The law had only recently been liberalised to allow those caught with up to 15 speed tabs to be sentences to rehab for first offence which made a lot of sense. The prisons are already horribly overcrowded with drug offenders and sending someone there turns them into a hardened criminal with little or no chance of decent employment or rehabilitation afterwards. The speed decision is purely political to make it look like he is in fact tough on drugs before the election despite decriminalising cannabis under the smoke screen of medical use and the pretence that ordinary farmers could make money out of it. I didn't disagree with decriminalising cannabis but his motives show him to be a truly odious, self serving politician.

The problem was his insistence on putting those silly sunshields in the windscreen.

I had a usufruct before we registered our marriage, as advised by a lawyer. There are two problems with usufruct after marriage: 1) assets acquired after marriage are deemed marital property to be divided in the event of divorce; 2) under the Civil and Commercial Code a contract between man and wife can be deemed null and void by a court on the basis that, in this case, the wife was under undue influence from the husband who forced her to enter into an unfavorable contract. Probably a court would not hesitate to nullify a usufruct in favour of a foreign husband. In that case there is no longer an asset left even to divide up in the case of divorce. I assume a lease would be treated the same. The advantage of a usufruct seems that it is stronger than a lease and not subject to a 30 year limit. Thailand doesn't have developed property leasing laws. So a alease is just a common contract binding two parties under the Civil and Commercial Code. It doesn't bind anyone else, such as a new owner, if the land is sold or inherited, whereas there is a Supreme Court judgement that ruled a usufruct should survive the death of the original usufructor until the death of the usufructee. At the end of the day, if the land is in her village, you had been scarper if the marriage breaks down and the family will probably want you gone, if she dies too. Nevertheless, I think a usufruct is probably worth the cost, particularly if not in the wife's village. It is an encumbrance on the title deed that makes it more difficult for anyone to sell the land from under you. Even if you are already married, it is still a extra knot to be unravelled before kicking you out.