nikster

9 hours ago, ezzra said:

Been reading the same ' advise ' for many years already,  most of those girls

have an inkling of what waiting for them overseas, but the lure of the extra

cash and coming back home with gold ornaments and pockets full of money

to help the family is too strong at time.......

That is the issue; they go and think they will work in a bar or massage parlor where they can leave any time

On arrival they're told they now "owe" whoever arranged this trip a large sum of money that they have to work off... and because they're there illegally they can't turn to police etc, they're told they'll rot in jail for 10 years and so on. Lots of deception and lies, all possible because it's being kept quiet by all involved. 

Those who don't run away eventually get out of debt and can work for themselves and are then sent back to recruit more, and cash in a nice finder's fee (which the next girl has to work off). It's a pretty dumb scheme but also pretty clever. The more people know about all of this the better. 

20 hours ago, Chicog said:

Malware of this type almost certainly needs one of two things:

- Physical access to the ATM itself

- Assistance from a bank employee

 

I''d say it's most likely the bank's fault.

 

 

Well physical access, sure, how else are you going to take the cash? You have to be there.

Other than that, no. 

I remember a Defcon demonstration a few years back, showing how easy it is to make ATMs dispense cash. I don't recall the exact details how the hacker got the malware on the machine but I think there was one using a USB stick (meaning you have to get to the USB ports which may be difficult) and one that worked completely remote, over the ATMs phone line. ATM ended up dispensing all its cash in one go.

Add to that that these things run Windows XP (I've seen many blue screens)... crappy software on top of a crappy OS. Banks are clueless on security they just take the hit and pass on the fees to the customers, just like the Visa card system and so on. None of this relies on secure technology, it all relies on a certain overhead for theft, plus law enforcement. 

I think recently there was actually an article that was pretty accurate - mentioning that sex trade in Thailand is 90% or more domestic. And the vast majority has nothing to do with underage or forced labor. 

This one's pretty much the opposite, full of total nonsense, poorly disguised morality piece. 

Interesting. House visits are normal in Chiang Mai.

When they came to my house they found my wife and asked her all sorts of questions about me. Then they made it clear that they would cause problem if not given money. Had to go through a lot of phone calls and an amazing Visa service agent to save the day and make them go away without paying.

BTW never pay off immigration officials. If you do, you're on the hook for the rest of your life. Never give them anything. Any problems they may cause or threaten are still smaller problems than if you pay.

This sounds like a good thing overall. No idea on sham marriages - our immigration officials tried to rip us off regardless, we have been married over 10 years and 2 kids so pretty obviously not a sham marriage. Didn't stop them making trouble.

This and the other "cynical" posts here:

The fact that this is a big-news story - presented as an amazing revelation or breakthrough in social understanding, namely that it is sensible and decent to let an ambulance pass by unobstructed - says so much about the usual general lack of the most basic, commonsense ethics and morality in this me-first nation. So sad ...

Yup.

I REALLY want to see the TV posters who take the time of their day to ride up to and make hundreds of cars move out of the way for several Kilometers of Bangkok traffic jam, in a country where people are simply not used to make way for the Ambulance, and where everyone's simply on the way to work. Do that, then come back and be cynical.

But I guess it's a lot easier to write a whiny post on TV.

What i never get is with all the money that is made from tourism that they can't hire some people to clean beaches. I must say in most smaller Islands they do clean the beaches. (at least the ones I went to in the South of Thailand)

They didn't think of it.

But some foreigners taking matters in their own hands is exactly the right way to get Thailand to change in this way - and then the locals will also enjoy the clean beaches much more.

I saw a guy in Hua Hin doing the same - he was just going along the beach picking up garbage - every morning around 6:00 am. Not asking questions, not complaining - just picking up garbage and putting it in the bins. This, folks, is the way to effect change here. Really happy social media caught on to it.

Another thing that at annoy me is that there are no street lamps along a Soi in Hua Hin that leads to rather large Thai as well as expat communities. Apart from the viscous Soi dogs, it is pitch black, so not conducive to walking to a local restaurant at night.

So why don't you just go and install street lamps then?

I am sure you could find others to share the cost. And such things are pretty easy to do in Thailand, generally speaking all you have to do is go to the electricity office or land department or whoever is responsible for street lights, and offer them to pay for it.

This was not a soi dog attack so I have to wonder why everyone here is talking about soi dogs. What's it got to do with it? Soi dogs didn't attach this girl. If you killed all soi dogs tomorrow, this attack would not have been prevented. Not even expressing an opinion on soi dogs here - why? It's got nothing to do with the topic.

IMO Thais are OK taking care of soi dogs - some feed them, others poison them when they get too unruly. It's a balance.

Out in the country all dogs are pretty well behaved. When they misbehave they suddenly get very ill and disappear.

This seems to have been an unfortunate accident, not reflective of "all dogs" in general, or all dog owners (also got nothing to do with soi dogs, as a reminder). I agree with those who say the owner should be made to pay ALL expenses, plus a significant amount of damages, and his dog needs to get a restraining order, e.g. has to remain inside or on a leash. He got away with too little, it's not right. Putting the dog down or not could be debated - it's pretty harsh, I think it deserves a life sentence instead - just remain inside, so it cannot hurt people anymore.

BTW as horrific as the incident was, I am sure the girl will make a full recovery, in time. I've seen people recover from worse, our human healing powers are pretty amazing.

... "traditional motorcycle taxi services which are governed by rules laid down by the National Council for Peace and Order" ... rules? What rules!

Translation: Motorcycle taxis are run by some sort of mafia and they don't like it when there's competition. Doesn't really matter if it's government mafia or regular - it's the same everywhere, somebody is making money off of allowing others to be a taxi.

I love that Thai authorities are so naive about this - don't they read the news? Uber has legal trouble everywhere they go, and it's always for the same exact reason: Some incumbent lobby which benefits from the current, significantly worse taxi scheme, doesn't like it. Be it the NY licensing scam, protected workers in Paris, or whatever is going on in China, Uber is fighting uphill battles everywhere. And they're winning most of the time. I am sure in Thailand they'll eventually pay off the right people enough to make it all go away.

Took my first Uber in Bangkok recently, it was awesome. It was late and we were in a popular tourist spot and nobody would take us for a fair rate and/or with meter. Uber took 1 minute to arrive, and got us to our destination for all of 71 baht, and I didn't even have to produce a wallet, wait for change, etc - just get out of the car. The car was also nicer than most taxis.

10 rai lol - look at the picture!! This is way way bigger than 10 rai - 100? More?

Double pricing the "exclusive domain of the Thai Government"? Think again

1. Water near the first elephant village on the Mae Wang road: 5baht Thais/25 baht farangs

2. Thai Cycling Association: Race licence 100 baht (foreigners 500 baht and this goes against international regulations)

3. The Art place in Chiang Mai: Treble pricing

4. Chiang Mai Zoo: Farang price innormal numerals, Thai price in Thai numerals (same as 3 above)

5. Night Safari: same same

...........I could go on.

keep going, please... zoo is government owned, not sure about night safari... thai cycliing association does NOT sound like a private enterprise to me...

I am impressed with your ability to find the other three places that have double pricing, maybe you can name a handful more... out of tens of thousands... thanks, this is amazing, we should keep it going.

As an aside, I've been to the Vana Nava water park in Hua Hin and it's really good.

It's also the first water park I've ever been to, so take this for what it's worth.

But some really spectacular attractions there.

Wonderful. I'd like to go there if they do not charge "Farang Price".

In the Hot season a similar facility would be welcome, in Chiang Mai.

Nasty, see the enclosed tube will get very hot from sunlight and if typical the water will be highly chlorinated for obvious reasons, chlorine evaporates quickly and will become a gas in the tube, you will be happily sliding in a hot chlorine gas environment. Many people are sickened and puke at these types of water parks.

The grand canyon old quarry looks nice, how is the water quality?

Oh, I had no idea we had a water park engineer on the forum.

The enclosed tube does not get hot, it has water running through it continuously at a fairly steep angle. It's really just fine. All if it is rather nice, clean and well maintained actually. And no double pricing, which is worth a mention. For all those reasons it's really quite a bit above the usual modus operandi for attractions in Thailand.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd6KTPvfy5U?t=43s (Start at 45 seconds or so)

(And the 'grand canyon' quarry does not look nice, although that's a matter of opinion. It's an artificial pit filled with standing water in deep holes and trenches left over after quarrying sand and rock out.)

LOL... not sure he's a water park engineer or a comedian... "Hot chlorine gas environment" wouldn't have been able to make this up, thanks for the laugh...

It's worth noting the entire Vana Nava water park is using salt pools, or something similar there is no chlorine smell and it's very clean.

To those who have not yet realized this: Double pricing is the exclusive domain of the Thai government. Normal Thai businesses are smarter than that.

@tropo what you believe to be a feature - PCs running the latest OS - is more of a bug, really, as Desktop computers have completely stagnated the last 7 or so years. I have a 4 year old laptop with a Quad core i7 - the latest model of this same laptop is something like 15% faster. A low end core i7 (mobile) is slower than my 4 year old one... I can't remember that ever happening before... we're in the middle of a dramatic slowdown in progress as desktop computing is concerned. Operating systems have progressed even less, both Mac and Windows. A short history would be Windows alternates between totally useless and kinda-OK releases, whereas Mac OS X adds lots of features that are useless or changes features that remain useless in every release.

In mobile, hardware moves along as it has in the past on desktops, doubling the speed about every 18 months (sometimes even faster). At least Apple's A... series processors have been doing that the last few years. The competition isn't too far behind either.

There are no (**ok: hardly any) 6 year old Samsung phones around, quality was never a priority at Samsung. This is not bashing Samesung - I don't think they need to last a lot longer, and longevity simply is not a consumer priority.

Going to sell an iPhone 4 today, it still works perfectly. It has a retina display which still looks better than any cheapo phone you can buy now, 6 years later. It might actually be a really good deal for the few thousand baht I am expecting to get for it. I would really like to see some statistics on how many of those old iPhones are still running...

But what I really wanted to ask: What's up with the iPhone SE in Thailand? I can get all the way to buying it in the Apple online store Thailand, but then the "buy" button is disabled.... very weird.

As an aside, I've been to the Vana Nava water park in Hua Hin and it's really good.

It's also the first water park I've ever been to, so take this for what it's worth.

But some really spectacular attractions there.

Wonderful. I'd like to go there if they do not charge "Farang Price".

In the Hot season a similar facility would be welcome, in Chiang Mai.

Vana Nava is expensive - it's 1,200 per person except for smal kids but then small kids are not allowed on any of the big slides so it's not worth it for them.

Enjoyed a day there, some thoughts

- expensive but worth it

- awesome slides

- scary slides (even more awesome)

- high level of safety awareness- staff is well trained like you would find in the US. There's water guards everywhere.

Negatives:

- Lack of shade, renting a hut costs extra

- food and beverages slightly overpriced

- nothing to do for kids < 120 cm. a wave pool and a water playground that's it

Sure would like to have this in Chiang Mai.

I guess we bailed out just in time again this year... on the beach now.

There are some interesting developments happening - everyone who is interested in this problem, and by that I mean all of you who are reading this or posting here, should know about these, and pay attention to them, and support them:

- Government bans are apparently working, even if only in limited ways. Many have held the view it couldn't work because it's not enforceable and/or the smog comes from outside the country. This is very good news! It's easy to see that pollution levels were way down during the ban this year.

- People - Thais - living in the north get more and more pissed off about this. This campaign is all over my facebook, and there are many others like it:

https://m.facebook.com/Bye-Bye-SMOG-1595770327403770/

I have been witnessing this every year, it is getting a little stronger every year. More social media use makes it harder for the government to control the information.

- Many people and organizations - also Thai - working on solutions for the farmers. I've seen a few of them who really take a holistic approach, actually considering the problems that farmers are solving with burning, and coming up with solutions that are cheaper and better _for the farmers_. This is the missing piece in the current government ban approach - government is banning things without providing an alternative. But the alternatives are being developed. The pyramid compost scheme, and the pollution free ovens are two of them. I am sure there's more, if technology and brains are applied, this problem is solvable.

There might be racism here if you look hard enough. But most Thais are open to anyone, and there's even specialty businesses that pop up to serve customers other businesses do not want to serve - for example but there were always special Israeli restaurants and hostels in tourist places. I've always admired the flexibility and accomodating-ness of Thai businesses in these circumstances. A lot of places didn't want to take Israeli groups because they were loud, obnoxious, rude, and haggling for every small thing. And a friend of mine - Thai - opened a restaurant with a Hebrew menu, cheap prices, and good food, and she had no issues with the loudness, she just wouldn't take any shit from them, in other words she could handle them fine, and they in turn felt very much at home and as a result behaved a lot better in her restaurant, too.

Similar case with this apartment, the owner either had bad experiences with Indian customers, or heard about bad experiences with them, and decided they didn't want to rent to them.

I totally understand from my experience. We once rented our flat in Europe to an Indian family for two months while we were on vacation. They left the place trashed: All kitchen counters had burn marks from pots. All walls were dark from dirt / children's hands. Apparently their parents never washed their hands?! A bunch of cooking gear was rendered useless. Numerous things were broken. Bad smells. They didn't compensate us for any of it either, they just took off. I'd never rent to Indians again.

Not because they're bad people, or I hate them, or they have brown skin - I don't hate anyone, and I like brown skin. But I don't want my apartment trashed, and I'd just much rather rent it to other people who will not cause these problems. I mean we rented that apartment on several occasions before and never had any issues. It's not personal, only practical.

In the bigger picture, it's all a result of overpopulation (at the source countries) as much as anything else (awful leaders, wars, lack of resources, lack of water, trying to eke out a living on sand dunes, mountains of trash, open sewers which used to be creeks, etc.).

The syrian refugee child who drew this picture and gave it to German Police seem to disagree with your assessment.

nikster: for issues involving parts being ordered from Italy I think 2 months isn't far off from the norm. I don't have numbers for all cases but it took also forever for my parts to get here.

And you can consider yourself lucky that you got a loaner bike at all.

I know what's the norm but I find it totally unacceptable. Because it is unacceptable. I love my Ducati, I want to help Ducati do right by their customers - for that they seriously need to upgrade their parts ordering system.

From everything they tell me, there is not a very good reason for things to take this long. Their entire servicing process just seems to be incredibly inefficient. I can see that they're maybe too cheap for stocking lots of parts for imported bikes from Italy but for made in Thailand ones... they are basically receiving ALL the parts for these bikes multiple times every day... so what is the reason again these cannot be used as spare parts? Answer: There is no good reason.

Ducati gave me a loaner bike while I am waiting for the fix. There was some additional back and forth to ensure it's actually a warranty claim; now they are waiting for parts. It's all a bit of a joke at this point. Should I consider it normal for this bike to be in the garage for 2 months? I mean - come on!

Oh yeah they want the loaner bike back, too. I told them yeah sure they can have it back, but give me another loaner bike. Let's see what happens.

Ducati has some very serious Quality problems in Thailand. They seem hell bent on saving pennies on any parts not directly visible to the eye - as a result, a lot of stuff breaks.

The last in a long series of problems on my Hypermotard - my air intake manifold (the rubber parts not sure what the name of that is) developed cracks. You can't see those from the outside but because of this, dirt got inside the engine. Engine is basically toast. Needs to be rebuilt.

I've talked to a few friends who know a lot more about bikes than I do - they said this part does not usually need replacement until about 10 years in. And it should certainly not develop actual cracks where stuff can get in.

It's really disappointing. I don't know if this is just Ducati Thailand, or it's a world wide problem. But it's got to the point where a Ducati should really only be considered as a second bike. To take out on weekends with good weather, no rain, and no dust.

Love the looks of the Sixty2 - nice variations on the Scrambler.

The problem with this bike is it's not a new model - they just took the Scrambler and sleeved the engine and cut in half the cc and HP. It's a Scrambler with half the HP, otherwise same bike.

The only reason I can imagine somebody would do this is to hit regulatory limits in some countries. E.g. Japan has a limit at 400cc, so this bike would make sense.

For other markets, the idea of a smaller bike is great - beginners won't need an 800cc bike, they'd be better off with a 400. However, that 400 should then also be lighter and cheaper. Sixty2 is neither.

Ducati "939" information:

LINK

Many, many words for something that amounts to: It's basically the exact same bike, with 10% more torque, 3 more HP, and more weight. Looks exactly the same. Even the headlight is the same.... the increase in HP and torque seems insignificant and the increased weight is unwelcome.

The only sliver of light specifically for Thailand would be if they start assembling the SP version here as a CKD. Then the price would drop to somewhere in the 600k range.

WOW!!!

That's amazing. This is basically the same price as the USA MSRP!

A Duke 390 for 200k!! Retail in USA is $5,000.

Their viewing something as useless doesn't mean that it is, or that they shouldn't learn it. Should they avoid learning maths because they consider it useless? Should they be able to elect not to learn to read and write, because they can't see the point? Should they be left in ignorance of the cause and effect of two world wars - I know, many are, but that is not the point - because those wars are ancient history?

The kids' interest, or not, in learning comes down to the ability of a teacher to harness and nurture that interest.

That's an opinion that is not backed up by any facts. It's assumed to be true because that's what we learned in school...

The Montessori school says different - they say that kids have an inherent and innate desire to learn. I'd say this is obvious to anyone observing children. But that's just my opinion. Beyond that, Montessori is actually well researched. It's based on observations, not opinions.

Why don't you trust your kids ability to learn things they need? That's really the question.

Obviously kids need to be exposed to all knowledge that we as humanity have accumulated. Showing them all that is available is important. But letting them choose to follow their interest is equally important.

I'll ask anyone here how much they really remember from their school years. Apply some logic. Anything that you know you learned, and don't remember now, was probably a waste of everyone's time. Yeah there's some allowance for the idea of "general knowledge"but why should anyone memorize the year where Napoleon did X. In my life, I'd be just as happy knowing nothing about Napoleon, and actually I would know just as much about him as I know now.

You have an interest in world wars, so you probably know quite a bit about them. But if I ask random people who have learned about them in school, I am willing to bet good money that 99% won't remember a thing. They'll remember that Nazis are bad, but I'm pretty sure nobody would know anything about WW1.... who fought against who, and why. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be left to those developing a natural interest in these things. I'm not interested in them, I've forgotten pretty much everything about it - although it's just a Google search away should it be needed. So why did I have to learn this in the first place? If it's not forced on people, there will still kids that love history, and that will learn all they can about it.