Sir Dude

Well, letting in all the Indians and Russians will make that happen, as HIV is widespread in both populations... even if under reported.

About time as this stupid nonsense has gone on far too long and is an afront to women's sport.

Actually, not really, after you stop... assuming you live at that speed. If there is damage to the back of your car and damage to the front of their vehicle plus debris all over the road it's pretty much a done deal. However, what you must do is to take photos of the incident from an angle that shows the whole situation with an identifiable landmark in the background... i.e. a row of shops or road sign etc. so you can prove where it happened. Although, for those out there that want to be super-sure and maybe a little paranoid, then fair play... get a rear-facing one too, but it is a little overkill.

Well, with the rear mounted one, it's less important, as you can just jump out your car and start taking pics on your phone and it's easy to establish who is wrong with that situation... more difficult to do at the front without a dash cam.

Nah, someone will find a way to turn it in a Trump bashing thread somehow.

Unfortunately, these sort of totally stupid situations are pretty much par-for-the-course when driving here. You need to be very careful when driving around because getting into an impact/altercation with any other vehicle/person can be problematic on a few fronts. Firstly, the way the insurance works, as most people (if they have it at all) just get the cheap one that pays for someone else's vehicle if it turns out to be your fault... problem is that you need a dash cam to even have any hope of getting it straight with the local cop that it wasn't your fault. Also, many Thais don't bother with it so the cop might side with them to help them out and get your insurance to pay for stuff. Secondly, anyone driving like a moron you should just let them speed past you and get out of the way... the hidden benefit to this is that if the cops are up ahead on the road doing a check, then they will be busy dealing with the moron when you arrive, and it's not a race track even if certain sections of the moron locals think it is. Thirdly, don't get angry or show road rage, even using your horn and annoy some of them, just employ your emotional intelligence and pass it off... lots of Thais carry weapons in their cars and can act like 12 year-old-boys in the playground. Also, make sure you are completely legal, like with license, tax, copy of blue car book info, insurance et al or they will use it against you if anything goes wrong. The type of driving from the locals I really dislike is the habbit that motorbikes have of just joining a road from the side and not looking or even stopping, just drive out and expect you to miss them... often committed by older Thais that still think a highway is the same as the village. To be honest, getting into a crash or altercation on the roads can be one of the worst possible things you can get involved in here, as it can have drastic consequences... much caution is advised to all that drive here.

This clown of a woman can't even wear matching shoes when out in public... nuff said, complete muppet.

Anutin is a big facepalm.

I wouldn't even think of buying a Chinese EV at the moment. Why? Well, I'll tell you why. In China there are over 100 EV companies making EVs with subsidies from the Chinese government so that they can kill foreign producers, and the market is so cut-troat at the moment, they are all selling at a loss to make their rivals go out of business and ulimately get market share, hence they are trying to dump their EVs in foreign markets... most chinese EVs are heavily discounted to silly levels through subsidies. I watch many Youtube interviews with the CEOs of the likes of GWMs saying that BYD is the Evergrand of EV companies. I wouldn't buy anything Chinese on this front, asking for trouble... the EV company NETA, that you see people driving their cars around here in Thailand has just gone bankrupt... good luck if you just bought one of those. The sheeple are buying these things and have no idea if the company will be around in a year or two. I recommend not buying a Chinese EV as it's a fools' errand... no way. You are better off buying a second hand Japanese car if you want a general reliable pickup or saloon... and if you want sometime nice, then buy a second hand European brand car.

Generally, a lot of these social ills can be laid squarely at the feet of toxic social media, as it promotes isolation and social engineering/manipulation and the idea that it's easier just to not connect meaningfully with others as you don't have to now... however, older people that remember the analogue world fare much better than the kids that have never known anything else. The effects of such things like social media manifest themselves in many ways, like the increase of not just isolation, but the lack of social skills/soft skills like communication, teamwork, or interpersonal skills etc... young people are scared of answering the phone or consider a question at work as a micro-aggression, you know, that sort of nonsense. You don't actually now have to interact with others to live your life and many people that surround you now have nothing in common with each other... long gone are the days of community where people were forced to come together as they had common problems that affected all. Sometimes I think that this isolation only serves those who wish to control, as it makes it easier for the puppeteers to control the marionettes of society. People are also far too self-centered with a delusional sense of grandeur and self-righteousness these days, instantly taking offence to the slightest percieved slight... not conducive to community and relationship building. One of the few things the UK PM recently said that was actually true, but then he limped out and apologised, was that the UK is in danger of becoming a "A land of strangers"... nailed it there.

The Thai person has to sign up on the official app for it, not sure its name but the locals know, and then they qualify for it under certain situations which are in the app info... not for foreigners though, obviously. These apps are also infamous for not working properly due to the sheer number of Thais trying to sign up for the freebees... you know how that works.

It's where the government subsidizes half the hotel/holiday costs in certain ways to encourage the locals to go on holiday and spend. How well it works is up for debate, as subsidies on many things ultimately fail unless you keep on doing it forever, which gets expensive... for example, diesel fuel is subsidized at the pumps, but no matter the price on international markets, it gets to a point where it can't be removed and resort back to market prices, as there would be a revolt and chaos. Anyone remember way back when it crept up to 45 baht a liter? The locals were about to have psychotic episode over it and it was sharply subsidized to get it back to acceptable levels again.

Maybe you should just teach in Thailand as you can get a WP on an non-O visa.

Chinese tourist numbers are going down because the CCP government are making it harder to get passports or even just leave the country... scared everyone is going to flee and not come back. Indian tourists aren't great either as there is a gaping chasm between Indian cultural norms and Thai cultural norms... i.e. Indians love to crowd together, be noisy, just wander down the middle of roads in large groups of men, share a bottle of beer between 5 of them, or ask a bar girl if she's game to tag-team it with 8 mates together in an apartment etc. There was that infamous report recently of hundreds of Indian dudes descending onto the beach and taking it over plus leaving a mess afterwards. I haven't been to Pattaya for a while, but from all reports it sounds like it's a Indian dude sausage fest with a load of Russians too... yikes!

Absolutely useless... amateur hour from Labour. The Labour Party is a hodge-podge of anyone not Tory/Reform UK, or completely out there like the Greens/Illiberal Undemocrats, that dosen't actually agree on much. Their policies have been terrible from the go and they've just done the usual socialist spending spree that isn't financed properly... but, hey, let's just jack taxes up for everyone including businesses and make them flee with the wealthy and job creators. Labour can't even understand basic business 101 stuff. Unbelievable too over this "Rachel from accounts" crying nonsense in parliament that they don't realise that the financial markets are pretty jittery and skittish, basically resembling rabbits in headlights at the slightest negative thing... especially now as Labour has done its best to mess everything up, tax everything in sight, and bring in an unfriendly business environment to the UK. The markets control the money and even governments to some extent, and they won't be putting up with this nonsense from these muppets for long. Major facepalm really.

Gallagher is right on this one. People want entertainment from musicians, not political lectures that they might not agree with. Also, pretty dumb on the behalf of the musician as politics is very polarizing and when you do this, then it will pretty much annoy at least 50% of everyone... bad for business. Stick to what you are good at and gained fame for, as once you start straying from that, then your "opinion" on unrelated topics is no more valid that Bob's down the pub... and as Clint Eastwood elegantly put it "Opinions are like as$holes, everyone has one". Many people have no time for this preachy nonsense from musicians and also from Hollyweird too in films, they just want to relax... let's call it "upward failure" in movies, i.e. they who get promoted beyond their ability and make films with political woke nonsense in them, then blame the public for not liking them when they flop.

The optics of this whole case just get worse and worse with all sorts of suprises and doubt being cast over everything. I hope Letby wasn't just a sacrificial lamb to cover up gross negligence, or worse, by people higher up (i.e. arse-covering). It certainly needs to be properly looked at again, but I guess that the authorities fear the reaction and consequences if they are outed to have been so wrong and it wasn't her, probably why they are doubling down on it... and the arrest of her senior managers does not have a good look.

Good that he has been jailed for his awful misdeeds... complete PoS and was so active on social media pushing an agenda and being sanctimonious, only to be exposed as a criminal of the worst type. I agree with JKR.

Well Spidermike007, that could be applied to almost 80% of world country's leaders these days... everyone from the US to UK to France to the EU to Russia to Turkey to Thailand to China to Burma to Africa as a whole to South America to the Middle East, to almost everywhere. Almost everywhere you look, countries are being run by morons that have a deluded voter base. I know everyone on this forum likes having a pop at Trump, but it/the same goes for pretty much everywhere now... why the world is in such disarray and disfunctional.

This whole debacle is not just a cautionary tale about investing here, but also shows that things can just do a 180 on a dime without any concideration to who takes the hit and billions will be lost... happens on so many issues, just this is a glaringly clear one. There's no wonder investment, public and private, has stalled because no-one knows where the goals posts are or will be in just a year or so. Business confidence and sentiment, plus things like tourists' perceptions on things in a country are fragile as hell, and once degraded or gone, then very hard to get back... especially business people, they are like skittish rabbits in headlights when stuff like this happens. The clowns that keep changing things just to justify their existence do far more damage to the country than anyone else. This whole weed episode has been very poorly handled without properly consideration from start to finish... reap what you sow, I'm afraid.

Fine with me, have a military coup and watch the economy and currency collapse. However, there is only one person who can authorise a coup.

The BBC is not fit for purpose and has long strayed from its legal mission to provide unbaised content for all... that has long been cynically tossed to the side. The BBC should be restructured into a pay-to-view system rather than a politically biased and enforced thought-control experiement media that people have no choice over other than to watch (how out of date can you get)... make it pay-per-view/subscription and it will implode into meaningless nonsense as it is so agenda-driven.

Yeah, I agree with that sentiment, they were sat on the cusp of complete victory, only to snatch defeat through Xi's policies, and your last sentence in that response about Chinese leaders wishing it would go back to the early 2010s is very accurate indeed... guess it's a case of hindsight is 20-20.

The OP is completely correct as Xi has completely messed it up with his authoritarian policies, even the Chinese people are rebeling and the other Chinese "elders" are getting worried (people like Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao) and Zhang Youxia - who is head of the PLA - are taking back power behind the scenes. So many Xi supporters and military general loyalists have been purged... change is coming at the 4th plenum, scheduled for mid-late August or thereabouts. The Chinese economy is in free-fall, factories closing, joblessness rising, even college grads with MA/PhDs can't find a job and are becoming Grab drivers etc. in the gig economy. House prices are falling off a cliff edge, workers haven't been paid, banks are folding with savings disappearing with no response or explanation. The Chinese have something in their culture called "The heavenly mandate", which is that the people cede power to the CCP authorities if they provide employment and prosperity... and the CCP is in serious danger of breaking that contract. Expect some serious changes soon... although, it "might" (never can tell with Chinese politics) be a soft landing out of power for Xi, as the CCP elders will want to maintain social order but reverse many of his policies, which harken back to Maoism really, so as to save face and let the party survive. The CCP has got itself into this mess because of personality cult policies from Xi, a hopelessly corrupt system, debt and the way it runs its economy, plus local government financing vehicles selling land to developers that were actually operating a massive Ponzi scheme, which has now collapsed... can add on to that the grey economy and all that debt too. This is why companies are fleeing, including Chinese ones due to tariffs from the US and Europe too. China is in deep do-do but the CCP MO is to just suppress information on everything or just stop collecting data and pretend it's still okay. A house of cards at the moment waiting to fail... don't believe the CCP propaganda, it's shot.

Labour had 14 years to plan for being in government and this car crash is the best they can do. Starmer also has a public-perception problem regarding what his values are and what he stands for... considering all the flip-flops and contradictory statements he and his uncontrolled cabinet keep making, doesn't even know what a woman is. Don't even get me started on Rayner, Rachel from accounts, Lammy the clown, and eco-nutjob Milliband. The UK public also know they are being lied to on many things, which leaves a bad taste in the mouth... add to that eye-watering tax rises, bashing pensioners and the disabled, anti-business policies, wealthy people fleeing faster than you can say "socialism" (and these people pay huge amounts of taxes anyhow), and finally the idea that the illegal arrivals get preferential treatment over our own homeless/disabled/pensioners/veterans etc. There is no wonder that Reform is surging in the polls... might as well give them a shot, as they haven't had a go and couldn't do a worse job than the two main parties. Even the Illiberal Undemocrats are gaining support.