Eleftheros

I disagree. Nobody needs to buy into my delusion; that's ultimately a cruel thing to do. They'd be doing me a much bigger favour in the long run if they told me to pull myself together and stop being so silly.

Then the words 'male' and 'female' become totally meaningless. I could identify as a cat or a tomato if I wanted, "not based on body parts" - it doesn't make it true. If everyone is expected to respect my new 'identity' as a cat or tomato, that way madness lies.

Interesting. I wonder why Charles Darwin & Herbert Spencer put "the survival of the fittest" at the center of their theories of evolution.

The easiest book to research and write in Thailand would be called "1000 Easy Thai Excuses for Every Occasion".

^^ If you are referring to the recent admission that the trials did not address the matter of transmission post-vaccination, this has been known about and written about for 2 years. It was in the trial data that Pfizer released. It was the focus of an article written in the British Medical Journal in October 2020. It is certainly true that governments chose to ignore this, and why they did so is, perhaps, a matter of not very difficult speculation. There have been independent (i.e. non-Pfizer) studies carried out which purport to show that vaccination does protect to some degree against infection and transmission, and other studies which suggest the opposite.

Is that because it has the most number of changes?

I don't think there are any. Certainly not mentioned in any reports I've seen.

Horrible.

How about the cost - I guess you saved on labor costs, but can you estimate the material costs? Plus, how much do you expect to save in a typical month? Thank you.

The original Thai article linked in the OP does not refer to foreigners in its headline. The foreigners are mentioned once briefly towards the bottom of the story.

In other words, here we have a product which is one of the few products where, the worse its performance, the higher its profits.

Free access to books etc is fine for adults, but we should always think differently when it comes to children, who are uniquely vulnerable because of their lack of development and experience. They do not have adequate defenses against all kinds of harmful things, and so any civilized society seeks to protect them. Part of the problem in the West is that too many adults want to remain as children, and so feel they have to be protected from minor things they should have learned to overcome years ago.

I'm surprised he didn't run him over with a truck just to make sure, and then drown him in a lake. Thai males, and sometimes females, have very brittle personalities. It doesn't seem to diminish with age, either. My newspaper today reports that an 83-year-old plugged his 73-year-old neighbor with a shotgun over a long-standing dispute about water run-off from one house going past the front door of the neighboring house. Sort of a cross between Grumpy Old Men and Unforgiven.

Ah, yes, they have no clue. That sounds normal.

One day you were out of the office, the next day you were out of office ....

So the misery in Thai families is caused by the gambling, not the nature of the sport. The same misery could be caused by betting on boxing, buying lottery tickets or even speculating on the forex market. Don't conflate the two. The sport is the sport; the stupidity and consequent misery is quite separate. You can legislate and control the sport. But the same can not be said for the stupidity, which will always find a way to express itself.

I'll take a bet with them that it will be less than that. Total international arrivals up to the end of August were recorded as 4.5 million, according to the tourism ministry, and though it is possible there will be a sudden surge of tourists towards the end of the year, the international situation does not look encouraging to the industry.

Tourism numbers are stagnating, according to the Ministry of Tourism. Both July and August saw about 1.1 million arrivals, and given the economic and geopolitical situation, they'll do well to hold on to that. That would equate to an year total of about 8 million, just 20% of the pre-Covid best years.

Blood money, essentially. The Thai TV news is infuriating on this subject. They keep showing mawkish clips of how the families react, temple preparations, and of funeral arrangements (25 minutes tonight), but nobody appears to be able to, or want to, address the question of "How do we stop this happening again?" I don't say that is an easy question to answer, but you certainly can't answer it if you don't ask the question in the first place.

A thug from a thug family, no stranger to vote-buying and corruption, and no doubt still an influence in Buriram, the only province in Thailand, I believe, to mandate Covid vaccinations for its denizens. He is the poster child for the sort of soulless warlord who has to be removed from Thai politics if any progress is going to be made.

"Up to a point, Lord Copper." Many of the crucial materials which go into solar panels and particularly wind turbines are controlled almost exclusively by .... China. It may not be an unstable dictatorship, but it has already flexed its muscles in this area by restricting exports of 'strategic materials', as it calls them. In particular, the rare-earth metal neodymium, called by some the "heart of wind turbines" because it is used to create the strongest permanent magnets known, is almost exclusively produced by China, incidentally at appalling cost to their own environment, not that they care about that. So we can choose between having the oil weapon leveled at us by dictatorships or the rare-earth metal weapon by other dictatorships. It is certainly not "unlimited energy independence" either way.

Power cuts affect everything, from food upwards. Maybe the Brits will return to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9wNJ78S2GY

Tell me. Why does a reputable government agency have to be forced to make health information available to the public?

Looking at the FDA data shows that the risk of a child aged 0-17 dying of Covid after testing positive is 0.00010149532, or about 1 in 10,000. How much lower is vaccination supposed to drive that, especially since all medical vaccines carry some measure of risk to the receiver, that very young children are especially fragile, and that we can by definition not know anything about the long-term effects of these new vaccines?

It was a happy ending that had an unhappy ending.