DaftToPutRealName

16 minutes ago, ThailandRyan said:

You obviously have me confused with someone who brought my way of life from the US here and imposes my rights and beliefs on the Thai people.  Far from it.  Families here have always adapted when someone moves on from this world and have others to depend on for childcare so they can continue working when the time comes. The values folks grew up with in there own country are not of any value here except maybe to themselves.  If someone wants to live here the way they lived back whence they came then more power to them.  However, heartache and misery go hand in hand when you decide to think that your culture is more important than the culture where you now live.  A restart is necessary, and albeit others want it fully open, there is a proper and sustainable way of doing things to ensure safety and security go hand in hand.  The biggest issue is that as they continue to espouse the No domestic cases in 50 days and so on, all they are doing is creating complacency upon the people who start to believe there is no way there is any Covid here.  My family here wears masks when we go out.  We avoid clustered and crowded areas to the best of our ability and choose where we eat based upon being able to sit where others are not jammed in.  The GF's Salon she owns will not allow in more than a few people for an appointment at a time and constant cleaning and sanitizing goes on.  

Exactly - for as many uneducated "salim" ready to let the dinosaurs eat at the trough, there are plenty of Thai people wondering why they have to lose their livelihood when there hasn't been any local transmission in nearly 2 months.

Meanwhile the Gov continues to push the emergency decree and lots of concern coming from Health workers. Either it's a mix of a power play and another excuse to plaster their face all over the media for accolades and another medal, or there is more going on than what is being given out publicly.

But, suffice to say, there are plenty of people here who can see the hypocrisy of saying extreme measures are needed even if that costs you your livelihood, whilst at the same time saying Thailand is #1 and haha look at the USA (and also, China is cleaner than a whistle).

10 minutes ago, Kadilo said:

They have even got the foreigners spouting it now. Amazing well drilled machine. 

They've learned a lot from China. 

Next step - a dedicated Twitter account!

3 hours ago, hotandsticky said:

 

 

Compared to the performance of other countries there seems to be more consistency and decisiveness under the 'military'.

 

 

Perhaps a coup in the UK would have resulted in less than 45,000 deaths.

 

 

(I certainly couldn't envisage Prayuth allowing Shamima Begum back in)

Plenty to be said about bleeding hearts in the West - an overly empathetic culture that self-corrects albeit at the cost of its own destruction.

I'd love a benevolent dictatorship; democracy is only as great as its dumbest voter - which is probably why the original concept required skin in the game through land ownership, business and economic investment and education. Fat bit of good it will do when for every informed voter there are 10 twitter morons to cancel it out.

Mind you, Prayut and Co 4.0 is probably still a step back.

2 hours ago, wisemonkey said:

If there is no extension its pretty dismal for them to leave the notice so late, I mean 2 weeks till deadline. Surely the decision has been made already. 

Yes, but there's a backlog of vinyl posters at the printer.

17 hours ago, overherebc said:

If you come for medical reasons why do you need to travel anywhere apart from the airport and the place of treatment?

Just askin'

It's been proven that every visit to Gucci, Louis and Chanel improves healing rates by 30%. If you're from a conservative arab country then a stop over at Vic's Secrets has a +5% boost on top.

39 minutes ago, drbeach said:

Exactly. The only country that did seem to haul away all foreigners, back in March or April I think it was, was Cuba. They forced all foreigners into quarantine while awaiting flights out of the country.

 

Highly unlikely a country like Thailand would or even could, do the same. Aside from the obvious beating to it's reputation, the logistics would be impossible. Plus Thailand has far, far more foreigners than Cuba. And for what?

 

I think people should just calm down and stay put (but with a solid "just in case" plan). 15 days is a long time and I think something will be announced by next week. Even more likely now that the government seems to be keen on slowing down the arrival of newcomers and flights, in light of the incident in Rayong a few days ago.

39 minutes ago, drbeach said:

Exactly. The only country that did seem to haul away all foreigners, back in March or April I think it was, was Cuba. They forced all foreigners into quarantine while awaiting flights out of the country.

 

Highly unlikely a country like Thailand would or even could, do the same. Aside from the obvious beating to it's reputation, the logistics would be impossible. Plus Thailand has far, far more foreigners than Cuba. And for what?

 

I think people should just calm down and stay put (but with a solid "just in case" plan). 15 days is a long time and I think something will be announced by next week. Even more likely now that the government seems to be keen on slowing down the arrival of newcomers and flights, in light of the incident in Rayong a few days ago.

"15 days is a long time" - isn't that what they said a month ago?

15 days is absolute no time when you have many visas requiring this amount of time for processing, and you have tens of thousands of people who will be affected by this.

We all know it'll be announced at 11:59pm on the 31st of July, but this "it's plenty of time" logic doesn't make sense with this government given their track record of announcements.

Nothing gets done by going through their customer service. 

Get a case number and paste it on their social media asking when they will resolve it. Keep doing this. Loss of face gets things done - nobody here cares about "fairness" or doing their job. It's why they're a backwards swamp instead of Singapore 2.0, and losing all their big business to vietnam.

It took Tops 6 months to refund me 2500 thb of "out of stock" items, and I had to escalate to a Kasikorn chargeback. They took up until the last day they were allowed before it would default against them, and then put the cash back into my account.

I suspect there is some foul play going on or something in the background and they stupidly assume farang are not going to chase them up. The reason for this is because they kept sending me the details of another foreigner when talking about my transactions when it had nothing to do with it (not close by ID or other).

This is also why I pay international credit card wherever possible - once they have your money then "have escalated to operations" will be the only response you get - customer service here don't actually have any power it seems.

10 minutes ago, Bluespunk said:

I trust Dr Fauci, an expert in their field, a person who is prepared to change their views based on evidence and new information, someone who has decades of experience to draw upon over blowhard narcissistic individuals any day of the week. 
 

maga

What do you call a layman when an "expert" can't seem to figure out the basics?

1 minute ago, ravip said:

There should be some laboratory where one could get a sample checked, for what ever it is worth?

You can buy a cheap TDS meter off lazada/shopee which will do the trick.

If you want to send to a lab, try contacting Brianet to see if they have any home kits.

22 minutes ago, RobFord said:

Shouldn’t be so negative. Come November 3rd there will be a huge flush and this US regime will be eliminated. The next will be more aggressive and intelligent. 
The conflict with China under Xi is only just heating up. I don’t think it serves anyone to have dominate Chinese technology with what’s coming. Huawei had to go. 

Can't wait to see Joe try to figure out which part of Taiwan Xi is from.

3 minutes ago, moontang said:

I couldn't help but notice that many of the most successful corporations in history do not have one employee in LOS.  COSTCO comes to mind..and they sell numerous Thai products, too.  But, they are in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and even braved China.  Screw Walmart, but same thing applies.  

No doubt they had a right go at it - before figuring out that they're dropping 11k a month on an accountant to click "submit" on a macro, 35k for an agent extension for every executive, and no value on their paid taxes - and then moving somewhere else!

4 hours ago, CNXexpat said:

Why do you need border runs if you have a valid visa? 

 

Why do you need to exit?

Non-B Multi Entry with 90 day max stay per stamp, can only extend to 1 year "no bounce" once you have 4 thai employees. You can do the math on how much that costs, and consider whether or not the economic crisis from Covid would have affected your ability to hire said people.

Imagine opening up a brand new business and being granted a visa in March - but needing to have 3 months of SSF payments and 4 thai employees before being able to get the extension.

There are plenty of reasons why it's simpler to do a border run than to jump through those impossible hoops - Thailand is not just tourist visa backpackers and old retired bar drinkers.

On 7/11/2020 at 6:53 PM, sencelebi said:

Again ! Most people are bitching as always. It's unbelievable.

Unbelievable people might be annoyed that OP nearly ran out of letters for all the steps required to get into Thailand?

Yeah okay, sure bud.

2 hours ago, CLS said:

Wow, we talk here about 50 million US$, less than 1$ per resident.

If I give my daughter 30 baht to buy khanom in 7-11, does it count as FDI? I’m foreigner, she’s Thai and I invest directly.

When you put it that way, I should be getting a special SMART visa just for the dough I throw my accountant's way each month.

15 hours ago, Eric Loh said:

This is a chance for China to provide full unhindered cooperation to WHO and repair their battered international image on the origin and handling of COVID-19. China owes the world and to themselves to present truth and facts. 

They already bulldozed the market so good luck with that. I'm sure they'll find another way to twist it into avoiding blame for the "american" virus (dripping sarcasm)

2 hours ago, american2 said:

Complainers, Ask yourselves what political and or military assistance  is your home country offering Thailand.  What are they offering the rest of S E Asia (and the rest of the world).  Help is being offered and alliances continue to be fostered  even with the present isolationist U S administration.

I especially like the bit where China is offering all this assistance in exchange for 99 year leases and onerous loan schemes that will allow them to nationalise important infrastructure while their vassals -- sorry, allies -- pay for it.

Somehow I'm sure this will also be the USA's fault ????

8 minutes ago, Leaver said:

I'll try to remember that next time I look at the price of a bottle of Australia wine here.  ????

And beef ????

1 hour ago, lopburi3 said:

I am of the same age and they always have issues finding a vein (especially if trying to do in hand for IV during MRI).  They often note blood flows well but suspect that may have more to do with Plavix than water drinking.  Do you take any blood thinner.  Suspect most of us at this age do.

If it makes you feel better I have bright blue, thick, and easy to stick veins - they're just not used to locating them on white skin here so more than one nurse has given it a funny look.

On 7/7/2020 at 11:55 PM, gargamon said:

From consumer reports August 2020...

 

Might still be worth doing some research there - the Mazda CX-5 for example is well known for having diesel sump issues from their 2013-2015ish model years. The fix is fairly simple and should have been pushed at the official maintenance in the West - not sure how it works here in Thailand considering their anti-consumer business approach, but you'd have to know about the problem beforehand to check otherwise expect an expensive bill.

Something so simple and small could have a massive effect on longevity considering it was leaving unburnt diesel in the DPF which would then have ongoing effects in terms of engine performance etc.

Yet the graph above makes no distinction between model and seems to be fine with the set of years which were model killers.

Lol, that is such a rubbish excuse. 

Sounds like they want to snoop on your (insecure) traffic and don't want you getting around it by using point to point encryption that they can't unwrap.

The point of using a VPN is that the source is obfuscated to the outside world, so their excuse that they receive notifications is false, and internally they would not be able to see anything except an internal connection making an external connection to a VPN. 

Whatever traffic is inside that connection is irrelevant and not something they would be able to see unless they had some special NSA level tool that decrypted the data in-between, re-encrypted it etc. Of course, if that was the case they wouldn't care.

I'd say go with the VPN as it sounds like otherwise you're basically allowing them free access to your web traffic. 

(Made an account just to weigh in as I've recently bought a whole bunch of gear!)

Depends what you need it for.

I picked up an LG 27G850-B for a mix of photo/video editing and gaming. It works a great treat; fantastic colours and you can switch between gaming and color accurate mode in a couple of button presses. 2k resolution 144hz. 

Price hasn't changed at all in the year since I picked it up - they're pretty much smack bang 12990 THB across every channel I've found. 

Benefits for me are that it's an IPS panel instead of VA. It has the LG nanocell tech for better colours and it's a great compromise on size and performance - being able to switch between work and gaming/movies is fantastic.

The only downside I have is that the stand is a bit bulky if you have a small desk. I've recently built a custom one for the office so that's a moot point now - but I've got 220cm x 100cm to work with now. Definitely in a smaller space (eg: typical 50-60cm dwarfstation you find at Index/Homepro/Ikea) you might find your keyboard butting up against the legs.

There are a few other models out there, including some that are cheaper, but whether or not they are suitable would depend on exactly how picky you are about your gear, how long you expect it to last, whether you care more about price over quality etc.

I just bought a 2nd one of these last week and would be more than happy to add another 2 to the office when the time is right, so that's close to 60k sunk as a vote of confidence.

Edit: oh, and it has G-SYNC if you're on NVIDIA cards. Not sure if it's free-sync compatible but as far as I know, updates from earlier in the year essentially made most G-SYNC models compatible with free-sync cards.