BKKBike09

Hot on the heels (or should that be "bottom legs burn") of 'Our World in Pictures #1: Tasty Treats' (https://aseannow.com/topic/1245947-our-world-in-pictures-1-tasty-treats), with lockdown and the pleasures of home confinement potentially soon to be but distant memories, it's still important not to let that guard down. Safety first, children! 1. Don't let the artwork fool you. These hounds are savage! 2. I was all for buying this electric scooter until I realised what was required to slow down. 3. Reading further, I discovered, too, that, potentially, Covid and other ailments might also preclude use. That said, the last time I remember leaking out any, ahem, 'material', was after a pub crawl in Southend. 4. I'm not a big fan of zoos, and I guess the inmates would also rather be elsewhere. So gold star to this zoo in Laos (hopefully now shut - it was a woeful place) for best use of the words "unpredictable sharply biting" in a sentence. Reminds me of an ex, but that's another story. 5. "Mind The Gap" as they used to say on certain Tube stations. Not so sure about this "gap" in Taiwan. 6. One of my favourite destinations is Nepal. Domestic flights can often encounter turbulence so, in a case of a picture being worth a thousand words ... 7. Sometimes instructions are best kept simple. 8. While on other occasions, compliance can be, well, challenging. 9. Finally, this has nothing to do with safety. I think. Signing off until the next time ...

Also works with UOB.

Yes.

In these dissonant times, it's easy to lose sight of the big world out there and the simple pleasures of life ... such as food! And what better way to stimulate the palate than by recalling some of the delicious treats on offer out there: 1. Mmm.... 4 inches of pure pleasure. 2. Any tasty treat is best washed down with a refreshing beverage. Although I'm not so sure about the diet option. 3. I like nuggets as much as the next person, but these are certainly some novel ways to enjoy those bite-sized delights. 4. I like 'Vaggie' too, but I've never had it from a tin. 5. Let's not forget our furry friends either. It's good of the brand to indicate that too many treats might lead to a feculent feline. 6. Of course, if a bad case of 'Browny Ring' means an untimely end for kitty, why, here's a Delia Smith favourite to the rescue! 7. It's always good to have a healthy salad at your fingers. But that's where it should stop. 8. But if you didn't enjoy 'fingernail salad' in Laos, I wouldn't complain about it and then order ice cream. 9. If there's no time for a sit-down meal, nuts make for a handy snack. Depending on the nut, of course. 10. The old '<deleted>' for 'crab' blooper never fails to amuse, but it's even better to order <deleted> with plawn. 11. Sometimes a sandwich is just what you want. I think. 12. I'm sold on the 'huge fried prawns' but not so sure about the bread.

The new rules should be published in a NOTAM by Thai CAA, the NOTAM being what airlines should follow - the latest NOTAM is still this one from 21 Dec which doesn't say anything about 10 Jan per se. Of course I appreciate that airline check in counter staff probably won't care ... VTBB BANGKOK ACC/FIC/COM CENTRE A2693/21 - COVID-19: THAILAND REVISED PROTOCOL REGARDING THE THAILAND PASS REGISTRATION SYSTEM IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REVISED MEASURES FOR ENTERING INTO THAILAND AS FLW: THAILAND PASS WILL BE CLSD FOR ALL NEW TEST AND GO AND SANDBOX APPLICATIONS (EXCEPT PHUKET SANDBOX) NEW MEASURES APPLY FOR ALL APPLICANTS ON THAILAND PASS ARE AS FLW: 1.APPLICANTS WHO HAVE RECEIVED THEIR THAILAND PASS QR CODE CAN ENTER THAILAND UNDER THE SCHEME THEY HAVE REGISTERED. 2.APPLICANTS WHO HAVE REGISTERED, BUT HAVE NOT RECEIVED THEIR QR CODE MUST WAIT FOR THEIR THAILAND PASS TO BE CONSIDERED/APPROVED. ONCE APPROVED, THEY CAN ENTER THAILAND UNDER THE SCHEME THEY HAVE REGISTERED. 3.NEW APPLICANTS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO REGISTER FOR TEST AND GO AND SANDBOX MEASURES (EXCEPT PHUKET SANDBOX), THAILAND PASS WILL ONLY ACCEPT NEW APPLICANTS SEEKING TO ENTER THAILAND UNDER ALTERNATIVE QUARANTINE (AQ) OR PHUKET SANDBOX ONLY. 4.PAX WHO WILL ARR IN THAILAND UNDER TEST AND GO AND SANDBOX PROGRAMME MUST UNDERGO THEIR 2ND COVID-19 TEST USING THE RT-PCR TECHNIQUE (NOT ATK SELF-TEST) AT GOVERNMENT-DESIGNATED FACILITIES (NO ADDITIONAL COST. 21 DEC 17:00 2021 UNTIL 31 JAN 17:00 2022. CREATED: 21 DEC 11:47 2021 https://www.notams.faa.gov/dinsQueryWeb/ (The original CAAT NOTAM is here https://ais.caat.or.th/file/notam/161/NOTAM LIST A JAN 2022.pdf)

Let's play a new game called "spot the book reader" ... Perhaps they're all on their way to a book fair and are looking on their phones for ideas as to what books to buy? I did try an image search using "people reading books in BTS train thailand" but it didn't throw up any results. Funny, that.

Er, it's very easy to look at people's phones and see what's on the screen. Or you can tell by the frantic swiping up and down, left and right, that they sure as heck aren't reading War And Peace.

16.326 I don't take names and numbers, but I do see foreigners reading actual books from time to time. Japanese BTS users in particular (and not reading manga). While I would not claim that Caucasian BTS users are avid readers, I would say that they are much less likely to be staring at a smartphone.

You almost never see any Thai person reading an actual book on the BTS. I'd say 95% are staring mindlessly at their phones. Some may be reading an e-book but mostly it just seems to be social media. On the Tube in London you still see a fair number of people reading actual books, but it's a dwindling number.

Surely the key point to make for anyone wanting to get rich via crypto / markets / commodities or whatever trading is that if you're going to do it yourself (rather than via a broker or a fund or whatever) it requires a full-time commitment to identify the opportunities and make the most of them - as you appear to be doing. The future of crypto will indeed be more adoption for real world use - but at the cost of more regulation and much less volatility (opportunity). In this transition period, I do think that there's opportunity to make a lot of money from BUT that requires full-time focus. And I can see there being the mother of all crypto crashes along the way. In the meantime as a speculative long-term investment, who knows? A lot of people who bought in a couple of years ago and held on - or who spend all day every day trading - have made and will make a lot of money. Good for them notwithstanding that a joke meme coin with a dog on it can be treated as an investment opportunity - and make serious money. And that's before we get into the whole ethics of billionaires like Musk boosting or tanking a coin with a single tweet - which he can do because there's no regulation. And NFT 'art' ... don't get me started. However ... all that said, if approached purely from the basis of "can I make money from this regardless of my personal views" (after all, one person's NFT could be another's Damien Hirst Pickled Sheep - I think it's worthless but if someone else thinks it's worth millions and stumps up for it ...), then worth a punt if you can afford to lose whatever you put in. I bought some BTC, ETH and MKR earlier in the year and the portfolio value was up 60% at one point; today, despite the bloodbath last couple of days, it's still up 15% thanks to the ETH. I also gave some money (on a profit share basis) to a good friend who does this stuff all day. If the crypto bulls are right, in a couple of years I'll have a tidy sum. If not, I won't be on the streets.

I'm going by what CDC data says for the last few months. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status I suspect it's a question of 250 being a figure for all deaths since start of pandemic vs how things are now. Many more people were likely to die at the start because the virus was unknown, treatment options were more limited / less well understood, there were no vaccines etc. Nowadays there are much better treatment options, there are vaccines and, to be blunt, probably a fair number of people who would have died if they got Covid have already died. It's misleading, I feel, to focus on death rates from earlier in the pandemic. However you cut it, the individual risk of dying from Covid can now be greatly reduced. Government should focus on real time death rates to inform policy.

1. I was responding to a post that stated the rate at 6:100,000 (citing CDC data) 2. Here's some more CDC data along the same lines. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status

Interesting data. Below is data for influenza deaths in USA. Averaged out across all age groups (as per the CDC stats above, that's basically 7 deaths per 100,000 for influenza vs 6 deaths per 100,000 for Covid even in the unvaccinated. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127799/influenza-us-mortality-rate-by-age-group/ Covid is clearly a serious health threat to specific vulnerable groups but from the way data is often presented, you'd think it was the Black Death.

Ah, the temperature scanners! I think I'd change 'largely redundant' to "complete and total waste of time'. They're like those ridiculous plastic face shields that some people wear. Make sense in an OR or a dentist's chair; pointless in a department store. There should be a TV sweepstakes for who's recorded the lowest temperature on one of those scanners. 29.3 C for me.

I've had 3 x AZ (1 in UK in mid April, 1 in TH in early July, 1 in UK in early Nov). I wanted a 'complete' vax cert from one country hence the 3rd shot in UK. That was before Omicron but guess I can count it as a booster. Didn't have any reaction to any of the shots. I did catch Covid here in late September but it was very mild. I also read an article recently that cited Dr Clive Dix, former chairman of the UK Vaccine Task Force, when stating "The AstraZeneca adenovirus vaccine scores well on cell memory and may ultimately protect better than messenger RNA jabs such as Pfizer-BioNTech, now that we are relying more on this second line of defence. He believes the UK should have stuck with AstraZeneca for mix-and-match boosters." [Article is here but it's behind a paywall: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/12/23/prof-lockdowns-apocalyptic-omicron-claims-undermine-faith-vaccines/] Who knows. I don't care whether I catch it (again) if the vaccines provide good protection against serious illness. There's so little clarity around this, though, because so many studies talk about protection from "symptomatic infection", which runs the gamut from sniffles for a day to intubation in ICU. So 3 x AZ or 2 x AZ + 1 of something else? I suspect both options work well but I'm not a clinical virologist and I suspect the issue of a 3rd booster will soon be supplanted by the issue of a 4th, 5th, 6th etc booster ...

If you live in the Sukhumvit area, Soi 19 Dental Clinic / Dr Dusit (just down from Terminal 21). Excellent English. Not had any implants but a couple of crowns over the years. I don't know if he's much cheaper than the bigger places but I like the fact that his practice isn't industrial sized and I also have never had the feeling that he's tried to sell me work that isn't needed.

Spot on. The more detail emerges, the more rum the whole affair looks. Also seems like no-one is interested in hearing this guy's side of the events (his 'lived experience' as I believe we should call it this days). I can easily see a comms screw up at the original one-night hotel leading to him thinking he could leave and then panic after they realised they let him go but he was "positive" (if he even was; seems to me that arrivals since November are consistently testing positive at around 1:1,000 - something close to the 'typical' PCR test false positive rate [we'd need to know whether his original 'positive' test was positive on a single gene, or more than one: the former likely being genuinely false, the latter more likely to be genuinely positive]). CCTV from the hotel would be the most revealing: if he's clearly on camera sneaking out of a fire escape, would support him knowingly doing a runner. But if he's on CCTV at reception settling his bill and his bags with the bellboy, well that would be a different story. Let's see if the CCTV footage from the hotel is suddenly 'missing' or there was 'a technical problem and it didn't record'.

Where did I say it was her fault? It's not fine for anyone to be attacked. Nor was she 'asking for it'. Nonetheless I stick to my observation that for a young woman - okay, any woman - to be alone on a subway platform at 4 am might not be the best choice. Here's hoping they catch the scumbag. She was on her way home to Queens after seeing Daboyway, a Thai American rapper, in concert. At about 4 a.m., she was grabbed from behind in a chokehold, dragged along the northbound platform servicing the D, F, N and Q lines, thrown to the ground, punched in the face and robbed of her purse at the 34th Street Herald Square station. https://news.yahoo.com/lucky-alive-nypd-looking-suspect-230907503.html and elsewhere if you can be bothered to look. Kentish Town for me, chief. Deffo some places there you don't want to be walking around on your own late at night. Canal side walk anyone?

Women should be free to go where they want, when they want, and wear what they want. However, common sense might also suggest that an NYC subway platform at 4 am is not the best place to be for a young woman in a short skirt.

Not a lot, unless they're predominantly young and otherwise healthy. People die all the time. Unless I know them personally I don't dwell on it. Roughly 10,000 people die each week in the UK from all manner of causes.

I agree completely as regards the deceased but she must have caught it from someone and, being 78, probably didn't get out much so most likely from one of the relatives who attended the subsequent funeral. If there was risk involved, it would be from one of them.

A 60-member with 16 Deputy Chairmen chaired by the Deputy Transport Minister. Why Transport, not Min of Fin? Transport is Bhumjaithai: if BJT (Anuthin, Saksayam et al) want it to happen, probably more likely now than at any time in the past.

The beneficiary of the insurance policy is a leasing company, so I'm sure one of the reasons he's in a flap is because he's still on the hook for the car payments. The insurance company citing the numbers is a bit rich: the full number is ZEF67NHC000182063 with that middle 'H' incorrectly recorded as 'I I'. It's clear it's a simple error. His next port of call should be the Office of the Insurance Commissioner.

I've used MedConsult (Sukhumvit 49) three times now for pre-travel PCR. Highly recommended. Gets cheaper every time: now THB 2000. OP also asked "what if you test positive". Short answer is "nothing good". Given current Omicron panic almost certainly would result in enforced hospitel / hospital quarantine for a visitor without a permanent residence in Thailand (where you could home quarantine). Extending visa wouldn't be a problem I expect since the person would have official medical documents showing they had been quarantined. Changing air ticket would depend on airline. One of those cases where the right travel insurance could be a good investment.

I'm perfectly aware that you can be infected and asymptomatic. But I was talking about going maskless after 2 negative PCR tests and probably 5 negative LFTs in the 6 weeks after catching covid, having previously been fully vaxxed two months or so before catching it. And while in the UK I also did a weekly LFT (and got a further jab in early November). Surely we can agree that, in such circumstances, the chances of me catching covid again and giving it to anyone else during my month in the UK in November were as close to zero as they could be. In such circumstances I chose to go maskless whenever and wherever I could: you likely would not, which is completely up to you and would be sensible if you are over 50 and / or have any existing co-morbidities. That's what I would do if I was in a high-risk category for Covid. But I would not expect everyone else to wear a mask.