Enzian

My bank Krungsri is not on the list so OK. My gf jokes that she and her sister can be happy because they never have enough money in any bank to be able to worry.

The whole economy is organized to skim from the poor and from the urban middle class and move the proceeds up the ladder. They will just stumble along for a couple of more generations until something drastic happens to force some kind of reform. In the meantime the question is, Where is the tipping point when this becomes some kind of crisis? We never know till it happens, like in the US when people kept saying we should be having inflation but we're not, and then all of a sudden it took off, with Murphy's Law adding accelerators.

This is a shame because there are so many, products of the Thai educational system, who will vote strictly for the name without knowing or understanding anything else. And they have the numbers.

I'm happy to "invest" here in things unmentionable, but not nearly as unmentionable as the quality of the ideas that TAT comes up with.

Otto von Bismarck famously said "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." In Thailand we can definitely reverse this and have it be equally relevant.

A lot of bad taste humor could be drawn out of speculation about what will happen to the many--probably most--who default.

But it's a FASCINATING dump. But seriously one of my fantasies is the government solves whatever unemployment there is by paying people to clean up the environment. You have to wonder if the elite even has their eyes open when they go out of their posh neighborhoods.

I like Bangkok Barry's long explanation just above. My simplification of his #7 is that Thai drivers seem to have no concept of leaving "a margin for error". Just watch them. There is no apparent awareness that driving like they do, if anything goes wrong they and/or someone else is screwed.

Off topic I admit, but really... This is a big issue. They logically should want the tourists out there spending but they haven't acted like it. Maybe they are trying to follow what they see as public opinion. Maybe the fact is that half the money the tourists spend go to country persons they care nothing about, who only exist to be exploited. Maybe they want to go back 200 years. I'm too western to understand.

Pirated means fake or stolen?

Any scheme to defraud or mislead involves, at least at the beginning, some sort of rational plan involving multiple players who all understand and cooperate to keep it secret and are on the same page. This is the problem with most conspiracy theories. So I agree with you. All this is beyond these people over more than a short run.

But won't one's airline of choice require some kind of test result in order to get a boarding pass? And won't airlines differ in this regard depending on where one is coming from and where one is going? And which airline.

I notice that in central Sukhumvit around Nana station the cars and bikes seem a little more considerate now, and the pedestrians seem a LOT more careful, looking all ways like they might see a nuke sailing down the street. I have no doubt that the famous accident is the cause and I wonder if data about pedestrians hit would show a decline. It's not impossible that over time things will improve.

I can believe this might be the case, but then what are they supposed to do, hold it on the books forever? Or get it reclassified as raw land when the house literally returns to nature? Wait 50 years for the inevitable inflation so the absolute number no longer means anything? The flaw in the article of course is the idea that the price of something depends on the cost of production, rather than what someone will pay. Now in the US at this time the cost of production really is one of the factors driving prices, but as always the real determining factor is demand.

I have one of those policies, haven't bothered to read the fine print since it was so mild at the time, and I didn't want to get put in a room, that I didn't go to a doc, didn't get a PCR test. Was over in 9 or 10 days isolating at home. Just writing it off.

Hope is not a strategy.

My live-in Thai gf who I met years ago in a massage shop doesn't much care what I do when I'm out by myself, but boy, if I come home late in the early evening when she's expecting to be taken to dinner and she's hungry then she's almost literally ready to kill me.

I'm considering flying BKK-SFO around April 20. I'm sitting on 475,000 United frequent flyer points (mostly from a credit card), so booking through United, though it would likely be a Japanese or Korean first leg, or both, would be my first choice. The US CDC site seems to be saying that a rapid aka antigen aka ATK test is all that is currently needed for entry to the US for a citizen. This is important because although with 4 vax I just got over an extremely mild case of Covid a week ago and could test positive on a RT-PCR test for weeks to come, (Also my US doctor will write a letter, but that's problematic because he won't see me in person.) The United web site seems to say the requirement to board is the same as the US government's requirement to enter. Does anyone have experience with this lately or know somewhere to get more info? Thanks.

Very similar accident in the US a few days ago when a bulldozer driver at a giant landfill operation couldn't see properly because he had the front blade raised, and crushed a porta potty with a traffic control man inside. Those are difficult jobs.

Hey! Some of my best friends are scumbags. Or as I like to call them, guys who never grew up and aren't about to now.

One would think what is described would have been on the books or clearly implied for a long time now, another case of making a law for something that is already covered.

Spent a lot at Bumrungrad (including for gf who had endometriosis), only one bad experience. In Emergency for a cut hand doc asked what meds I was taking, I mentioned one I take daily, he said what's the plan? are you going to take it daily forever? So I stopped for a while and the condition came back and then I resumed. My doc in California said he's seen people take that med every day for 11 years with no side effects. Everything else has been fantastic, including the time they helped me with my visa when I was too sick to go renew or leave. But for something very simple I might go somewhere cheaper.

Could someone please explain what "refugee" really refers to in this context? I was under the impression that Thailand is rather like Japan and Australia in this regard, that it doesn't normally accept what we think of as refugees. I'm not saying anything bad about the sadly deceased, I just wonder how he had residence here and moreover had control of a not inexpensive MC. Is refugee really the right word in this case?

They exist not so much to serve and protect but more to control the people in case they get infected by foreign ideas; pretty much like the army.

That's exactly how I got into Russia, train from Helsinki. As we crossed the otherwise unmarked border the Russian officers came through the cars and checked (and probably stamped, would have to look at my old passport) passports. I still have a picture of a guard tower like you see in concentration camp movies, at the putative border.