tropo

6 hours ago, CraigInBangkok said:

I would say its more a measure of how much publicity they get and nothing to do with good or bad. The general public are generally like sheep and will buy any old sh!te if you feed them it enough.  The voice", American idol and "country's got talent" are examples of this.

Obviously for a song to be heard it needs to be played. That doesn't change the fact that everyone enjoys different sounds, just as they enjoy different food. If you like it, it's good and if you don't like it it's bad. I really don't need some expert telling me what sounds are good or bad. My ears make the choice.

16 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

With 7 billion people in the world it's not hard to have a big fan base or get rich by selling lots of cheap things to a lot of people. Explains why there are so many billionaires in China.

I'm not really dissing her personally as I don't know her, but I hate this modern thing that says because someone has loads of money they must be really good. I have seen her on a music VDO with a very sexy blond singer, whose name I forget, but the blond was more attractive than her so I didn't take much notice.

 

Is being popular and selling lots of music not good? I would say it's the barometer of what is good. Everything else is subjective.

Music is art, and it's up the person listening to decide what is good. It's quite simple, if you like it, it's good and if you don't, it's bad. If not, we'd all be listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin et al, all day long, as our grandparents thought that was the best of the best. Arguing about what is good and bad in art is a fruitless endeavour.

On 5/18/2020 at 3:41 PM, transam said:

Some jealous folk on here..........................????

Me too, but I still have to congratulate her on her success.

On 5/15/2020 at 8:15 PM, Captain Monday said:

Other than "Umbrella" which is awesome  does she have any good songs? Did she write it herself?

The point is she has been very business savvy. It was quite clear from the report that her wealth comes from shares in successful companies, not from writing songs. Having a 15% stake in LVMH is amazing. How did she manage that?

5 minutes ago, giddyup said:

Half the guys living here left their home country because of problems with wives or girlfriends.

No, never been married and came here as a foreign couple... so that excuse doesn't work in my situation. It was actually having a foreign wife that started the problem as they thought they could bully her and get away with it. If you even start to disagree with Thai people, the rhetoric soon resorts to "This is not your country - f*** off!"

Just now, giddyup said:

Like that never happens in the west, except it's usually their own family that takes advantage.

No, the problems I went through don't happen in civilized countries... however, I'll finish it here as I don't want to mull over 2 years of hell that my wife and I went through. I'm just agreeing 100% with Canuck and disagreeing with you.

9 hours ago, rasmus5150 said:

When there is a proven cure, the tourists will come back - also from Europe.

 

People have a deep urge to travel, and would rather skip their big steaks and red wine in order to be able to travel for a holiday.

Proven cure? Perhaps you mean when a vaccination has been developed in a year or more, meanwhile the virus will continue to destroy the economy of Europe and the rest of the world.

It will take more than a decade to get back to normal assuming other viral outbreaks do not occur over that time. Life as we knew it is over. A new normal will replace it. 

2 hours ago, DJ54 said:

In US News today and tend to agree. Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.

Have you met an expert that even has a clue? If so, please point me in his direction so I can learn what might happen.  

In my lay opinion, mitigation merely delays the inevitable, and as soon as social distancing ceases, a new pandemic wave starts over again. I don't hear anything from experts that makes me think anything else can happen.

In 1918, a more deadly second wave hit hard in the US fall. What happens in the Southern Hemisphere may give us a clue what could happen as winter approaches.

On 4/19/2020 at 9:15 AM, Pravda said:

I'm thinking high inflation worldwide due to money printing.

 

Some retired folks from certain countries who have their pensions locked may be in  the world of pain.

Let's all hope it will only be high inflation and not hyperinflation, rendering your savings virtually worthless. If a second wave takes off around the world, this could happen. Perhaps the major economies will recover from money printing in a single wave, but it won't survive a second round.

4 hours ago, ChaiyaTH said:

Sounds like a lot of BS to me. First of all the general warranty will depend on the seller and not Lazada, legal things too.

Secondly, the standard time to return something is 7 days. This has nothing to do with the Item breaking, to do this one needs to escalate the issue with Lazada.

That can even be 2 months after the purchase. With other words, OP is screaming too fast. Not sure why a CEO of Lazada would want to help you on this, Lazada is owned by Alibaba. You have to deal with the customer service department, nothing else.

Also sounds very strange to get a smell from a machine as origin of a problem, when it is almost new. Poor water quality / dirty water can actually ruin a washing machine as well it has bad effects on clothes. Specially the case with hard water.

 

My wife actually had to refund customers up to 3 months later, even our returns are 7 days and warranty is 30 days + the customer broke it himself.

This is correct. The warranty is up to the seller and something a buyer should consider when purchasing any item.

I got a full refund of a 4000 baht electric toothbrush last year as it came with a seller's 1 year warranty, nearly a year after purchase. I was very happy with Lazada's customer service.

I've had computer accessories refunded very quickly without even having to return the items.

A lot of counterfeit goods are sold on Lazada, but mere mention of counterfeit gets very quick refunds. I think Lazada shopping is quite safe.

1 hour ago, ukrules said:

I'd like to see someone test the viruses ability to survive at 35 degrees C and 80% humidity on non wet surfaces.

 

The human body is 37C and very wet, so why would 35C at 80% humidity kill it? That would be near perfect conditions for SARS-Cov-2.

22 minutes ago, HashBrownHarry said:

Just because some people like a beer does not make them an alcoholic.

 

Are you a junkie coz you like to smoke dope?

 

Have you bought a care package for anyone?

Yes, that is true, but it often does. Also, most alcoholics will not admit they have a problem.

This is about an alcohol ban mainly aimed at young fools - to stop them from partying. The old fools are probably stocked up and enjoying themselves at home.

No, I haven't bought any care packages yet, but the suggestion was to use money that you normally spend on alcohol. Did you miss that? I don't have an alcohol budget.

Anyways, I'm struggling to help my wife's family in the Philippines at the moment. Wasting money that I can buy food with on alcohol would be a crime.

17 hours ago, HashBrownHarry said:

Have you been drinking?

Hopefully you haven't been.

Instead of all the miserable alcoholics on here crying about the ban on alcohol sales, they could donate their massive alcohol budgets to buy care packages for the many Thai people in Pattaya who don't have food and are still waiting for help from the government.

Now wouldn't that be nice - turning a negative situation into a positive one.

Might be a good time for expats to donate their huge alcohol budgets to buy food packages for the needy.

Just now, cyril sneer said:

because it isn't enjoyable. no reason to socialise without it, it becomes a chore

LOL. there lies the problem.

39 minutes ago, HashBrownHarry said:

I've never been to a party where only soft drinks are served, not since i was a child anyway.

Exactly. No alcohol - no party. Ask yourself why? 

2 hours ago, brewsterbudgen said:

There's no ban on drinking alcohol!  The average Forum member will have stocked up, so shouldn't have any problem posting under the influence.

One can only hope that some members failed to stock up and the stockpiles of others run dry.

3 minutes ago, White Christmas13 said:

Yes and how come in Australias north where it is stinking hot we have increased

infections.

Australia could provide some very useful information on the effect of climate as they have cold weather and tropical weather areas over the next 6 months.

Looking at today's numbers, I see only 27 confirmed cases in NT, but of course the population there is small. We can't draw any conclusions for Queensland or WA as they span from cooler, more temperate climates in the south to tropical climates in the north of those states. 

https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers

6 minutes ago, yuyiinthesky said:

Undoing the loss of jobs and desperately needed income for so many would be good in my humble opionion.

It's too late for any businesses associated with tourists. They're not coming back for a long time as economies around the world have been destroyed. Obviously a wake plan has to be rolled out in stages starting with the most essential jobs. It might take quite a while for life as we knew it to return, and then of course there's a very big chance of a 2nd wave. These viruses mutate and 3 strains are already know.

19 minutes ago, Eibot said:

They actually do. The prime temperature it between 5 degrees and 15. Anything below or above slows the virus down. Some research has shown at least. This has not been peer reviewed so shouldn't be taken as fact. However, the northern countries in the world do support this (Canada, Alaska, Russie etc)

Do you have a link to the research?

Moscow is going over 5C at times during the day, and a large part of Russia, the south, has higher temperatures. If your theory is correct, the numbers in Russia should soon skyrocket. 

35 minutes ago, i84teen said:

"However, the reality is that speed to international servers is slow no matter what speed your service offers."

 

That's hardly the case now as it's easy to achieve 300 or 400Mbps (which is NOT slow) to US and European servers from Thailand and that's with a vpn connection.

OK. Let's see some speed tests to a European and US server that high, or even a fraction of that. Please use testmy.net, and a large data sample. Tests on this website won't be anywhere near as good as you see on Speedtest.net, but they are far more meaningful because you can see exactly how long it takes to upload or download a large data sample. Try downloading and uploading a 200 MB data sample to various servers. 

I haven't done any speed tests for quite awhile, so let's have look. Don't use a VPN.

Perhaps you are downloading torrents, which is totally different thing as you're connecting to many servers at the same time. I also manage to get good speeds when downloading torrents.