MW72

Good to see Thailand moving rapidly into the 16th century and still believing in magical powers. Well done. Religion(s) like this are the con of the millenia.

forgive me for correcting you... this is not 'religion' and nothing to do with 'Buddhism' it is hocus pokus claptrap for the gullible and ignorant

Buddism, when practiced and understood, is peaceful, loving and compassionate (i.e Dalai Lama) and so there is NO connection between jet setting, sexual deviant or pot boiling 'monks' and Buddhism

This is going to be controversial but... Do you mean the Dalai Lama that, before fleeing Tibet and leaving the population to the communists, was happy to keep the population subservient and poor? The priest class in Tibet lived in relative luxury during the lama's rule whilst the population lived in abject poverty. Not much compassion there. That will be the same guy who took thousands of dollars a year from the CIA to fund guerrilla camps training to fight the Chinese. A just cause but far from peaceful. What about the monk in Myanmar that wants to slaughter the muslim population? The military junta used to keep him in check but now he is free to stir up hatred all in the name of religion. You can say "this is not 'religion' all you like but it is done in the name of religion. The sooner the human species does away with religion and ignorance the better for all.

Went to Central Plaza in Lampang yesterday. At the entrance to the car park there was a security guard with the old mirror on a pole. He stopped us and quickly looked under the front end of the car. That was it. No check of the rest of the car. I can't imagine a potential bomber being put off with security measures like these.

I think the OP is talking about a junction like the one below. The first time I approached this junction the lights were at red and the GF told me to stay in the left lane and go straight through. Needless to say I continued to slow down and started to question her. The guy in front of me pulled into the left hand lane and continued straight through so I followed him. You will see the white line in the left lane continues through the junction. I have done this a few times at this junction now but I still slow down and look for traffic coming from the right. You can see the lorry pulling out from the right in this picture. If I saw that coming I would definitely be giving way.

Edit: After posting I noticed that you could mistake the far left lane as one of the small lanes at the side of the road that scooters use. It is in fact the first of four lanes and there is a straight on arrow painted on the road that is out of shot.

I've ben coming to Thailand for a few years now. Probably been here over a dozen times. Sometimes the wait at immigration has been 10 minutes, sometimes an hour. I've experienced the same at London Heathrow. It all depended on whether another flight or 2 had arrived at the same time. I've found Dubai to be pretty much the same whith the queues depending on how many flights have just arrived. The worst queueing I've experience was in Addis Abbaba and I actualy queued for longer to leave the country than to enter it.

I've had a mixture of friendly and miserable immigration officers at Swampy. I've had very few if any smiles or warm welcomes in Dubai or Heathrow.

Never had a problem with the facilities at Swampy. Toilets have been fine. Not too impressed with the duty free. As a smoker I am happy that there are smoking rooms. There are none in Heathrow so I don't go through security to the last possible minute which means I am not spending money in the airport. In Swampy and Dubai I go in and I go to bars and restaurants and duty free and can spend money and relax and enjoy the airport beacause they have smoking rooms.

I've never had a bad taxi ride from Swampy into BKK. Never been overcharged and never had the driver try to charge me a fixed price and not use the meter. I've never had to ask them to use the meter. The majority of taxi drivers have been friendly and tried to talk to me in the little english they knew. Maybe I've just been lucky. I always greet them with a sawasdee khrup, sabaidee mai? so they know it's not my first time here. Maybe that helps. A friend's Thai wife knows a taxi driver who works in BKK and he told us that if you speak a little Thai then they are less likely to try and con you.

Let's try and put a happy slant on this thread.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30847333

What a nice human being who truly deserves his French citizenship.

I am not fluent in Thai. Infact I only know a few word but I am fluent enough in English to know that a mattress does not "literally" weigh a ton.

BOGOF

Typical Brit.

Why not half the price as they do in other countries instead

Why not half price? Because with BOGOF the shop sells 2 items at a time and gets rid of their unwanted stock quicker. If it was half price then the customer only has to buy one item at a time.

Barr's Irn Bru

If you are going to buy gold then make sure you buy the real physical object. There is a lot of paper gold going around. People think they are buying gold and it is stored in a vault somewhere but the truth is they only have it on paper. If the world economy goes tits up and everyone tries to withdraw their gold at the same time then you may find that there is not enough to go around. A bit like when there is a run on a bank and people try to take their money out of a bank only to realise the bank don't have enough money to cover everyone.

'A bit like' , 'you may find' and so on.........

Such a valuable contribution to the debate. Thank you.

If you are going to buy gold then make sure you buy the real physical object. There is a lot of paper gold going around. People think they are buying gold and it is stored in a vault somewhere but the truth is they only have it on paper. If the world economy goes tits up and everyone tries to withdraw their gold at the same time then you may find that there is not enough to go around. A bit like when there is a run on a bank and people try to take their money out of a bank only to realise the bank don't have enough money to cover everyone.

When I saw that the 'rankings' has Egypt as increasing democracy by +4.8 (points presumably) I quickly decided that the survey was worthless.

It would be good to know how they worked that out. The overthrow of Egypt's democratically elected government and the release from jail of the old dictator has increased the level of democracy?It is true that the elected Islamic Brotherhood may well have weakened democracy but I doubt the coup and the release of Mubarak could improve the rating.

Because as I said in my header, so many new cars are sold to falangs here. How many Thais are buying cars in England?

Just how many of the 900,000'ish new cars sold each year in Thailand do you think are bought by Westerners?

I suspect you think the farang market is much bigger than what it actually is.

I don't know, you tell me. There are estimates of up to a million falangs living in Thailand, how many buy a new car? I know when I was shopping around for a new pickup there were more falangs looking than Thais. That's Pattaya, be different in the country.

How many "estimates" have you seen? And I'm not talking about what you heard some stranger say in a bar.

I too have no authoritative statistics, but I seriously doubt there are anywhere near 1M farangs in Thailand. And, I have common sense to know that the number of farangs who buy autos/trucks in Thailand is a very small number compared to Thais.

Don't know where you live, but many farangs mis-assume the ratio of farangs to Thais in Thailand is the same as BKK's Sukhumvit or Pattaya's Walking Street. When you get out of the tourist areas there are actually very few farangs.

According to the internerd there are roughly 200,000 foreigners living in Thailand. That is 0.3333% of the population. Considering many of them will be Russian, Scandinavian, German, Japanese, Chinese etc I would guess that the number of English speaking vehicle buyers is pretty small. I doubt there is a great need for supplying English language manuals when selling vehicles.

Here is a list of firearms-related deaths by countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

Russia not there, but homicides using firearms per 100,000 population:

Australia 0.11

United Kingdom 0.04

USA 2.83

Need I say more?

"Need I say more?"

Yes, please say you are going back to school.

Homicide is the killing of one person by another. It doesn't denote murder. There is "justifiable homicide" as in self defense and other reasons. Your source doesn't break that down.

Your source also doesn't say how many Americans successfully used a gun to protect themselves or someone else. Often when that happens the gun isn't fired. Its mere presence deters the bad guy.

Americans are risk takers. That how our ancestors got here. It's in our blood and our culture. We don't want a nanny state.

One of the reasons I own guns is to protect myself and those who come after me against tyranny in government. If we need a revolution there are 100 million of us owning 300 million guns. That's the largest army the world has ever known. Ever think about why no one tried to invade the US during WWI or WWII? There would be a rifle behind every tree. Armed US citizens ran the King of England and his Red Coat Army off US soil in what the US calls the Revolutionary War. Their offspring have no intention of giving up their guns.

While the UK and Australia get overrun and outbred by violent "immigrants" who force new laws and political correctness upon them, the United States of America will stand pat.

We'll be here long after you gave up wishing you had a gun. That's in your future or your children's future, but by the time you wake up it will be too late. You have been indoctrinated into complacency while your cultures are failing before your eyes.

When the second amendment was written all those years ago it would be possible to imagine a militia armed with muskets taking on a tyrannical government's army armed with muskets. Today even with semi automatic rifles I don't see you overthrowing the government who have jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks etc. Each to their own I guess. I don't think that guns are the main problem in the States. The Canadian's love their guns but don't kill each other on the same scale as Americans do. American's as a society seem to need an enemy to fear all the time. Bit of a generalization I know.

You are the abomination not the sick and the dying.

According to Leviticus (18:22, 20:13), it would be the other way round.

According to what some bloke thought a couple of thousand years ago? It is easy to pick a passage from the bible and use it to justify your beliefs. An eye for an eye or turn the other cheek, which is it? Wasn't Jesus supposed to have healed the sick and touched lepers? I don't think he tried to evict them or call them an abomination.

Assuming most of these patients were druggies or prostitutes, I can see the villagers point.

Maybe they don't like living near criminal types.

48 criminals added in a community of 161 villagers isn't all that nice.

Well, it maybe you've made an assumption about the 48 living dead but you must be close to the truth. Other people have given you crap about your post, but I think it's disgusting the attitude of some TV posters who have no consideration for the good people who own property in this village and those with families that have to live in the shadow of this abomination on god's earth.

As you mention God's Earth I'll assume you are religious. IMHO one of the biggest abominations on Nature's Earth is religion. Especially those who use their religious beliefs to persecute people just because they are not the same as them or don't have the same belief system. Religion breeds ignorance.

I would go as far to say that if your post was not tongue in cheek and you actually feel that way, then you are on the same level as the Taliban who just slaughtered over 100 children for no better reason than their parents are in the army. You are the abomination not the sick and the dying.

I hope Thailand takes notice of this awful story.

Oh for Heaven's sake,is there no negative news that someone doesn't decide is directly connected to Thailand, and if anyone should take notice, when it comes to unsound convictions, the west has as much to take notice of as anyone else.

The list below is just those scheduled to die in the first few months of 2015 in Texas and they don't require much to sentence someone to death.

I shouldn't joke about something as horrible as state sanctioned execution but I couldn't help notice that there are 4 Black, 4 White and 4 Hispanics scheduled for execution next year. Do you think Texas is operating some kind of equal opportunities system on death row?

The death penalty is effective, maybe not for the prisoner but it certainly gives closure for the family of the victim. It’s a lot easier to say and believe you’re against the death penalty when you have never been faced with a crime like the horror of someone raping and killing your daughter.

I don’t know, thankfully I have never been affected by a situation like that but maybe the only peace and closure for families of victims of these types of crimes is to wipe that degenerate filth infecting our planet off the face of this earth.

You kind of contradicted yourself there. You said "It’s a lot easier to say and believe you’re against the death penalty when you have never been faced with a crime like the horror of someone raping and killing your daughter." . So how can you say that the death penalty is effective and gives closure for the families when you admit "I don’t know, thankfully I have never been affected by a situation like that"? If you can be pro death penalty without having been affected then surely others can be anti death penalty without having been affected?

as was said by a smart guy ..better 10 guilty go free than the execution of 1 inoccent man.....

And then the 10 guilty go off and kill another 10...

Better if the 10 guilty get jailed for life. At least they have a chance to appeal any miscarriage of justice unlike the poor guy in question.

I think you will find that the Dear Leader is correct, I understand that a spokesperson for the Thai Ministry of Disinformation will confirm, later today, that somebody else said that these individuals " arrived by teleportation direct to a US diplomatic site, which is US Sovereign territory and left via the same route. Therefore they technically never entered Thailand".

So I guess it is an internal US issue.

Whilst embassies and the like are considered to be the sovereign territory of the country occupying them, I don't believe that the host nation should accept that illegal activities can be carried out and they can do nothing about it or should even care about it. The question then becomes, was this activity illegal? By the looks of it there are not many who consider it to be legal save for the CIA.

I doubt this is about a cheque. Something else is in play here.

Agreed. 20 cops to serve a warrant for a bad cheque? A bit over the top. Perhaps they were expecting trouble or maybe they all just wanted to get in on the photo opportunity . That seems to be the way of things in LOS. Get the uniform looking good and get in the photo. Style over substance.

I feel sorry for the poor people of Isaan. Here in Bangkok we have taps or faucets as the Septics call them and the water flows through these things. Tanks are things that roll into town every few years when the Isaan people snarl up the roads with their protests.

Plenty of storage tanks in BKK. Especially on the roofs of apartment blocks.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the people snarling up the roads with their protests in the last year were from BKK and the south. They were trying to depose a government supported by those Isaan folks.

How your post contributes to the OP's query I'm not sure. Having a quiet night in? Bored?

Not taking into account the reliability of your water supply, it is not recommended to store more than a single days supply of water. If you have too much storage then the water can stagnate. Water that is not moving in the storage tank can encourage the formation of a bio film on the surface. This will lead to the perfect breeding ground for bacteria, yeasts and moulds. This includes the Legionella bacteria. Legionella bacteria thrives in temperature between 21 and 50 degrees centigrade so it is fair to say that stored water in Thailand will be in that temperature range for the majority of the year so the way you store the water is very important. Also, metal tanks are prone to corroding and corrosion is the perfect food source for bacteria. Modern plastics and glass fibre tanks provide the best means of storage as bio films, bacteria etc find it difficult to attach themselves to the walls of the tanks and there is little in the way of food for them. Bacteria will only thrive if they have a food source, stagnant water and the correct temperature. You can't do much about the temperature but you can choose the correct materials and the correct size to ensure the stagnation and food supply are taken out of the equation. A good biocide like Chlorine will kill bacteria also.