richard_smith237

Do you consider the police force representative of Thai people? I hope not or your a Thai bash of the year. Is that your assertion or your opinion and can you back that up with any links ??? ????

When trying to comprehend the mentality towards driving / riding here it is often explained that the forward field of vision is the riders / divers responsibility, every other direction. Is someone else’s…. That would explain a lot of the blindly dumb maneuvers ! … and also an absence of mirrors !

I'm not even sure the car needs to be in your Wife’s name... She can just rent it out as ‘her business’... Obviously the insurance needs to be water-tight and use GPS trackers etc.

The ‘as a foreigner' part makes it difficult... IF the car can be rented out from a Thai (i.e. Thai wife etc), then that is quite possible although there are obvious other pitfalls, such as risk of theft and insurance etc... but that is a different matter from your question.

Any community or group is going to be a sociable as you are. IF a person is one of those foreigners here who for some very odd reason take pride in how they manage to avoid other foreigners then you are not going to be spending much enjoying the company of other open minded foreigners (its not them, its you !). Conversely, if a person is open minded, easy to talk with, not over-opinionated in person etc they will find themselves meeting plenty of interesting people, from sports groups (i.e. playing football), to meeting friends in bars, other school parents, become friends with people through introductions etc. There are obvious groups etc but I don’t find there to be a specific ‘expat’ community, there are simply too many foreigners here for there to be a specific expat community.

Why should that be allowed ???? Is he considered a hi-so ?????

Exactly that.... They may also start making an utter nuisance of themselves and start fining people in the streets etc... this could easily grow arms and legs and the potential ‘face saving’ measures used will impact tourism further. The only sensible option - just legalise vaping... that it isn’t already is ridiculous.

Yup... for the same reason they painted a handful of pedestrian crossings last year...

Getting and MG EV was not one of your life goals ???? ????

No... it becomes the same ‘opportunistic ploy’ when in the UK they charge you a higher entrance free than others because your wife is not British...

How can the authorities expect businesses to behave any other way they the ‘dual pricing’ and surcharging of foreigners is something the actively pursue and support ???? (dual charing in hospitals and national parks etc). The authorities send out the message that this practice is not only ok, it's expected.

Can be safer than going on a scooter depending on the model. Better visibility, better breaks, better tires and better safety systems. Big bike does not mean you have to go 200kph... Yeah but still.... Get a car (If finances permit of course). My Son goes on the back of my motorcycle for a bit of fun when we ride up to the pool in our moo-baan... Never on a regular road, never will he ever....

Oh for <deleted>'s sake! Anyone buying that kind of a monster machine at that age needs their head examined. Its not exactly a ‘monster machine’.... its a ‘Multistrada’ a touring bike, up right seating position... like a BMW GS or a Triumph Tiger, Kawasaki Versys 1000 etc etc.... Its not quite the monster machine road racer you seem to imply.....

Yes you are.... and I would be too.... the idea that he sounded the horn for someone approaching from behind is ridiculous. With something like this.... my automatic suspicions are usually that the vehicle pulled out in front of the the motorcycle which was going quickly. Not always... i.e IF the vehicle suddenly changed lanes etc and there was nowhere else for the motorcyclist to go. BUT... all of that said.... a brand new powerful motorcycle... was the American guy an experienced rider ? New bike, brand-new tyres... the tyres usually have a ‘coating’ and don’t perform well straight out of the showroom... (they need wearing in).... Was the rider going too fast on his new bike and simply couldn’t slow in time or couldn’t counter-steer quickly to get around the lorry which may have been going a lot lot slower than he initially anticipated ??

Quite the dumb comment that... This very forum is designed specifically around ’seeking advice’ from the ‘community’.... .... many of the very people you call the arm-chair experts are the very ones who have encountered the very situations being discussed and are well placed to offer solid advice. Where do you go for your local advice ?... ’the rough guide’ ???

Officially, or unofficially.... because there is as a difference. Officially - to police and assess the entry or presence of people from other countries. Unofficially - to police and profit from the entry or presence of people from other countries !!! Now, I know you won’t like that latter response and ask for something to back up that ‘assertion’... of course the Police do not keep records of their illegal behaviour, there is no link to published statistics and the ‘unofficial job responsibilities’.... But... I can tell you what they do - A lot of Immigration outside of the visible ones we see at the Airport and Offices investigate businesses etc... visit them, levy charges on them for the 100’s of illegal immigrants they have working (migrant labor)... then there is either the ‘pay off’ or a phone call from the local Chief of Police who’s been contacted by xxxx army general another police chief, politician etc to let everyone go... money has already changed hands in advance... its lucrative business ! (And no LL - I don’t have links or proof, you’ll have to take my word for the way this works, but I’m sure you may also know Thai Policemen and Senior Immigration officers who can tell you first hand how this works).

indeed, it is always better to depend on others to navigate life for you. No... thats not what he wrote, thats just your interpretation. Another interpretation is... Allow those better placed to resolve an issue to do so. Sometimes there is a language barrier with the Wife can circumnavigate to your advantage. At other times the perceived social status of the wife may impact proceedings, or the wife may be to timid and not offer any help, or the wife may shout and force things sideways etc... each situation is different, its not always better to let the Wife handle it, but there are also times when the Wife can do a better job of handing a situation - It's up to us to be clever enough to know when.

And will they even be bothered if you call them at 1 or 2 am while half cut and tell them you are being extorted by the Police at a check-point in Lad-Prao ????? Its fine saying... they have a 24 hr manned emergency number.... but do they really consider police extortion an emergency, or something that we can just deal with ourselves ??? I may be incorrect of course, but my guess is that we’d be told that they are not authorised to deal with such issues or some such response - I’d obviously like to be corrected with first hand information from someone who’s been helped in similar circumstances.

personally despite having such friends, I would never waste their time for a taxi stop. Things would need to very serious before i would play that card, chicken little. The friends i have would likely laugh at me as they know I am well capable of navigating a simple police stop. Depends.... my mate jokes that I never use him and deal with issues myself... most can be. Sometimes they can’t. I was actually on my way to meet my one friend (close friend of 20 years who’s also in the Police). It was 7pm... Checkpoint, saw a westerner in the taxi, stopped the taxi, asked for my passport and told me to get out... No !!! - they were just going to waste a load of my time... I called my mate who spoke with them, took a minute, they waved me on. On another occasions I was actually talking with my mate (on the phone handsfree) while driving... ... Police checkpoint up ahead... “hold on, your mates are pulling me over”..... "let me speak with them”.... “No... you’ll probably tell them to do a rectal search !!!”..... “I’ll call you back !!”.... dealt with the issue easily. So.. it depends on the situation.

So some criminals got a Thai Elite visa.... Is this any different to criminals getting any other kind of visa ???....

Thats not completely true. There are check-points whereby fines can be paid on the spot. Those checkpoints have to be ‘official’ (i.e signed off on and approved by the local chief of police), there have to be commissioned officers present. Otherwise, a ticket can be issued and fines can be paid at the Police station. The reality: When police issue a ticket, ‘most’ people do not go to the police station and pay the fine. Everyone knows this, so the police come up with ways to ‘generate’ some leverage. The used to take your licence off you and only return it once you’d paid the fine (if on a traffic stop), now they can’t take your licence off you. At checkpoints such as these, they target the naive (i.e. those thy think are not strong enough to argue - i.e. foreigners or the young) and use threats of serious fines, delays at the police station etc to ‘encourage’ the victim to pay an on the spot fine. They are supposed to have ‘cause’.... but they don’t use ‘cause’ they use ’suspicion’ and they can be suspicious of any person out at night as they may or may not have some drugs on them... so in their eyes they can stop and search anyone... The police do not understand, respect or follow the rules by which they themselves are governed. How could the police have ‘cause’ to stop a group of tourists in a taxi ???.... Answer is they can’t... Unless the tourist was in the front seat not wearing a seatbelt, the driver was speeding or driving dangerously etc...

You know the track record of the rtp, in your mind, I don't have that constraint. On the balance of probability.... Who’s telling the truth in such a circumstance... - The lady - unknown. - The Police, known to be systemically corrupt with a long history of similar behaviour backed up with personal experience. It wasn’t the ‘coin toss Nigel implies. Fair enough that we should be impartial and judge things individually, however, sometimes there is simply too much ‘history’ (track-record as mikey puts it) which would be daft to ignore. We have the luxury if using experience and bias to draw conclusions from events. We don’t have to forget everything we know and remove all past knowledge and deal with that singular individual event without letting reputation influence our judgement as we would if jurors in a court room. Nigel is right of course - we should be completely impartial, give everyone the benefit of doubt etc... but, that is also unrealistic given the world we live in. When a Thai Policeman stops me at 1am and starts asking questions, I’m not impartial at all, I am on alert as there is a high probability that the policeman is about to try and relieve me of some cash IF he thinks he can get away with it.... or he’ll waste my time trying.

A guess based on experience... based on the education of being here. I also ‘guessed' that the Police were lying through their teeth and the lady in fact was telling the truth that she had been extorted for 27,000 baht.... It was a lot more than a guess though, it was conclusion based on what was said (written) and the experience of being here for 25 years and having an understanding of how the police behave, particularly in the evenings at checkpoints such as the one described. The 50/50 ‘roulette’ guess you describe implies there was only ‘luck’ involved in making that guess, which is of course wrong - Those who believed the lady and thought the police to be lying did so based on the balance of probability using their experiences here to influence their assumptions.... bias yes, that too.

One of the very fortunate things in Thailand is that while there is a lot of corruption, corruption on that level is extremely rare, such that I’ve never heard of ‘drugs being planted’.... And... Thanks to the latest extortion case (An Yu Qing - AKA Charlene An) there may be more focus on ensuring things such as this no longer occur or occur much much less. BUT... in that hypothetical station you exampled [OneMorefarang], with no phone a friend option, I think it would be very difficult to stand on principle and spend a night in jail when paying some cash can make the problem go away. What to do?... attempt to secretly record the event... and then seek help the following day filing an extortion case. That said: IF I felt that were a realistic situation (getting drugs planted) I wouldn’t be living in Thailand - things like that would be a show-stopper for me.

One would be lucky to get hold of anyone at all..... and then have them assist you at 1am in the morning because the police are shaking you down ???... The article seriously over egged that one...