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CaptHaddock
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Posts posted by CaptHaddock
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They would have to raise the educational standards to support innovation of which Thailand currently has zero. Hard to see how that would happen. The elite do not want an educated public demanding rights and pushing for real democracy like Korea in the 80's.
China has no real Democracy and doing well.
You need education or cheap labor, no corruption and good infrastructure.
Thailand is not so bad on the infrastructure.....But if you have some production machines and sometimes the electric is missing for 2-3 seconds (1 second the machine might be able to do) than you really love it.....
I didn't say that Thailand needs to have democracy. I merely pointed out that fear of pressure to democratize is one reason, among many, that Thailand refuses to develop a first-world education system, which it does need if it is to compete in high tech industries.
China doesn't have democracy, but it does have areas like Shanghai with first world-level education. Published research in China has now passed that of Japan, although the quality of that research probably does not not approach that of Japan or the US. China is doing well compared to its own past, but, to keep it in perspective, per capita GDP in China is currently slightly lower than Thailand.
Infrastructure is necessary, but not sufficient, to become a fully-developed economy. What is necessary is innovation for which high-quality education is required. Singapore, with its 5 million people, has two universities among the top ten in Asia. Thailand's universities keep sliding down in the rankings within Asia. Thailand is not even keeping pace, much less surpassing its neighbors in education.
The past thirty years of high growth in Thailand have been based just on renting out cheap labor, migrated from the agricultural sector, to foreign companies. That strategy has produced a big leap in living standards compared to two generations ago, but it not going to be enough get Thailand into high tech industries. After 30 years of making autos and hard drives for foreign companies there is not a single Thai company that makes and exports either of those products, unlike, say, Korea. Thailand's exports, other than products of foreign companies, are just food products and rubber, the same as 50 years ago. The Thai elite is content to cash in on renting out the lower classes and is not going to make the necessary changes to compete with the fully-developed countries.
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They would have to raise the educational standards to support innovation of which Thailand currently has zero. Hard to see how that would happen. The elite do not want an educated public demanding rights and pushing for real democracy like Korea in the 80's.
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I am still waiting for The Nation to man up and place an appology for it assisting in the creation of the conditions that led to the coup. I hope that the junta stay in power for atleast another 5 years and they make the life on the Thai media hell. This will be the only way that the yellow livered Thai media will learn that you must allow time for a democracy to work on its own and not take the coup shortcut everytime.
Blame for the coup lies on all sides of the political spectrum.
The coup would never have happened if terrorism was not being used to murder protestors.
Prayuth would have let events take their course if the violence was not set to increase. First the Army had to provide security against the terrorists because the police were letting them through the checkpoints and then when it was clear Pheu-Thai would not compromise in the slightest (under orders of course) and the attacks would increase (possibly to civil war), he took the decision to end it.
All the conspiracy theories about collusion and it being a pre-planned event are typical Thai fantasies. The government had the rope and they hung themselves with the Amnesty bill. Not much more to it than that.
What is clear is just how far the rot in Thai society goes. The press should be key players in attempting to reconcile the two side during this transition phase - but it's very obvious that the leaders in that business are as dirty as everyone else.
So you didn't like Yingluck's amnesty bill (which the govt withdrew voluntarily), but you do like the complete amnesty the coup generals awarded themselves with the "temporary consitution" not only for illegal acts they may have committed, but also for any illegal acts they may commit at any time in the future????
I guess if you like fascism you have got to love it, right?
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Some people have an aptitude for learning languages - some don't.
I was born without one, but overcame it to learn Thai.
I didn't want my Thai family and children to see me as an illiterate who couldn't speak the language.
It's more the case that some people have the motivation and others don't. Of course, some are better at it than others, but that is true of every field of study and not a reason to excuse some students from learning to read, play a sport, or learn another language.
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>>> I want to study thai at home,could you pkease tell me what is the best course. 1 thaipod101; thai pidcast; learn thai from a white guy.
Did the OP ever meet anyone who successfully learned Thai with any of those methods?
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I do not have aggregated money in bank accounts outside the US in excess of $US 10,000 at any microsecond in time during the last 10 years.
My reported income is below the filing threshold.
Thanks for worrying about me; now go worry about someone else.
If your income is so low, then you wouldn't be using the monthly income method to satisfy any of the various Visa retirement income options. What kind of visa are you on and how are you affording to live in Thailand on less than $10,000 per year?
The annual gift tax exclusion for 2014 is $14,000. ... So if 2 persons each gave you the $14,000 max you would have $28,000 that year of tax-free income.
The gift tax is a tax on the giver, not the receiver. Even if a single person gave you $28k in a year, you, as recipient, would not have to pay tax.
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When in doubt, always file the report which always conforms to the law even if not required. Same goes for filing tax returns. Always file.
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It's also important to buy eggs that have been kept refrigerated in the store, not left out on shelves at room temperature. At my supermarket only the CP eggs are refrigerated, so I buy those. These are notably fresher than the unrefrigerated ones in the same store.
Increased gas in an older egg is due to decomposition of the egg itself. The shell is impermeable.
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Ignorance has always found many champions at TV.
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That yellow rag, The Nation, was falling over itself supporting the anti-democracy movement leading to the coup. Now they don't like the results since they are subject to the same repression that the Thai citizenry generally enjoys.
Som nam na.
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Not counterfeits, merely unauthorized copies. A counterfeit only has value if it fools someone into thinking it is the real thing. The purchasers of knock-off products like those listed do not believe they are genuine. Overwhelmingly, they are not people who would pony up to buy genuine if the copy were not available. Therefore, the holder of the trademark suffers no loss at all from the sale of unauthorized copies and it should not be illegal. Louis Vuitton once admitted that unauthorized copies do not result in lost sales for them.
Unfortunately this is an often heard argument, but equally unfortunate, it is plain wrong.
While it may be true that someone who just bought a knock-off with the Louis Vuitton trademark and design whould never have bought the genuine one, there are many more aspects to this than just a single sale.These counterfeits damage the reputation of the trademark owner to the point that many people would never buy a LV bag or even a Rolex watch anymore, because they look like they are wearing a copy. So there is real dammage to the trademark owners.
Further on it is considered as unfair competition to slavishly copy someone else's product and sell them for a profit.
And what about copies of pharmaceuticals or aircraft spare parts? Here it is downright dangerous and we certainly all agree that this must be stopped.
The fact of the matter is that trademark infringement is a crime and right so. It must be stopped and infringer must be punished. Gods must be conifscated and destroyed, even form private persons.
Quite the opposite is true. As we know, designs themselves cannot be patented or copyrighted. So, the fashion industry is and has long been without so-called "intellectual property" protection. Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped the fashion industry from growing until in the US it is now larger than books, music, and movies combined, all of which do have copyright protection. However, the fashion manufacturers, like Louis Vuitton do have trademark protection. So, they abuse trademark protection by stamping their trademark all over their products enabling them to establish protection of their designes under trademark protection laws. This is a clear abuse of the trademark laws, which should be amended to exclude trademark protection when the trademark becomes a design element.
Intellectual property provisions are, by their nature, the granting of monopolies. Monopolies are subsidies granted, in this case, by governments at the expense of consumers. Companies love monopolies, but they are against the theory of capitalism since they restrain competition, which is the source of innovation. The term "intellectual property" is misleading and dishonest since it disguises the granting of monopolies as the mere recognition of property rights. Many industries that benefit the most from intellectual property provisions, like the drug industry, at notably lacking in innovation.
However, no one claims that producers of copies or anyone else should be entitled to sell unsafe products. Product safety is already addressed by product safety laws. Genuineness is no guarantee of safety in products as the many automobile manufacturer recalls attest.
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He sounds like a professional speaker more than a newscaster. His way of speaking is a good example of how Thais put emphasis on one part of their discourse by slowing the rhythm down and stressing each word. Then they speed up through the less important part of the talk. This is a particular language skill that I am working on now to get away from changing pitch as we do in English for emphasis since that tends to turn our tones into gibberish for the Thai listener. Newscasters, by contrast, tend to speak at a constant, high rate without slowing for rhythmic emphasis, as though they are getting paid by the word. The two Thai anchorwomen in this broadcast speak that way most of the time, for example.
Few Thai men speak as clearly as this. Most mumble. Even highly educated Thais do not necessarily speak better than anyone else. I don't watch Thai movies, so I don't know who the Thai George Clooney would be, if there is one. Can't help you there.
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Interesting request. The economist who appears daily on this Thai PBS broadcast speaks more clearly than most Thai males, although he also speaks very quickly at times. His segment begins at about 15 minutes into this program.
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Better to bite the bullet and just learn the fundamentals than waste time and energy making lists with phonetic spellings which you will have to redo eventually in Thai script anyway.
Better to learn the correct pronunciation that to learn a wrong pronunciation deduced from the spelling. You need some phonetic guide for all but the simplest Thai words. Fortunately, it usually doesn't have to be very precise - Thai spelling is mostly ambiguous or obscure rather than phonetically wrong. I felt it was a great step forward when I correctly worked out the pronunciation of พจนานุกรม just from the spelling. You may have forgotten that ผลไม้ isn't obvious. You were lucky to be taught that ฑ is pronounced like ด in some words; perhaps less lucky in having to learn them all.
There are some Thai words for which the current Thai pronunciation originates as an error caused by the Thais not being to correctly guess the sound from spelling. With your knowledge, you should recognise ราษฎร as an example. If Thais have had trouble reading Thai, what about the rest of us?
A ridiculous post. Both when speaking Thai or English we sometimes need to reference a phonetic transcription because the normal writing of the word is ambiguous. That's why there are dictionaries. The suggestion that learners should therefore dispense with the normal Thai writing system used by 65 million speakers and exclusively use instead the phonetic system, which no one else can read or write, is hare-brained.
All of the Western PhD level specialists in Asian languages whom I have met have agreed that learners must learn the local writing system right from the start. I assume they know what they are talking about. By contrast, virtually all the foreigners posting on Thai visa will fail ever to become fluent in Thai. Nevertheless, they have their opinions.
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I appreciate all your comments and agree that learning to write (or at least type) and read Thai from the start is the best idea.
Unfortunately, our text (here in Japan) does not include any Thai script at this stage, so for the time being I wanted to make a list of the words in the text, for easy reference. I finished the list yesterday and copied and pasted the Thai script for each word as well.
There must be many books that teach the Thai writing system adequately. These are the ones I used:
the important one:
a workbook:
You can't teach yourself Thai, but you can certainly teach yourself Thai writing. Get these books or other good texts, buckle down, and two months from now you will know the Thai writing system for the rest of your life. In fact, learning the writing system is one of the easiest tasks in learning Thai. Tones will take you a lot longer than two months. Then if you use a flashcard system like Anki for memorization and always type the response, in another month you will be able to touch-type Thai without ever have studied typing separately.
Thai pronunciation rules are a little complex, but they make sense in a way that phonetics never will. Also, you see the history of Thai language and culture in the language. For example, the word for zero is ศูนย์ ("soon" with rising tone.) ศูนย์ comes from the Sanskrit "shunya" which some of us may have encountered in reading about Buddhism where it is the base of the world "shunyata" meaning "emptiness," a fundamental concept in Buddhism. The word "zero" came from the Arabic "sifr." It is not by chance that zero is not a Latin or Greek word since Greek mathematics had no concept of or way of writing zero and the Romans had no mathematicians at all. In fact, the Greeks hated zero because division by zero blows up arithmetic with an undefined result. The Hindus were far more comfortable with emptiness and indeed, with blowing up worlds in their cyclic view of history. So, here's this fundamental difference in concept between the cultures with its history embedded in the words that we use just to repeat a telephone number. The phonetic version of the word doesn't begin to recapitulate the history in the same way.
It's also easier to remember vocabularly in the new language if you can see the relationship of derivative and compound words which you can only see in the original Thai version.
But, in any case, good luck with your Thai study.
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Dear CaptHaddock,
I wish I could type Thai, but I have just more or less started to learn Thai and we have not yet started learning how to read.
I wanted to make a list of all the words we are using, so that I could refer to them easily. I have decided to use a simpler system (I was having trouble with the IPA system on my Mac) and I am also pasting the Thai script, for later, when I can read.
Thanks for your comments.
I taught myself the Thai writing system in two months. Later I learned to touch-type Thai just by practicing spelling using the Anki flashcard system which is easy if you know how to touch-type English. Better to bite the bullet and just learn the fundamentals than waste time and energy making lists with phonetic spellings which you will have to redo eventually in Thai script anyway.
The Thai writing system is also a lot more fun than phonetics.
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Much easier to type Thai than IPA. Why waste time on IPA?
For those who've learnt IPA for its general utility. Also, normal Thai spelling doesn't unambiguously specify how words sound, and Thai script phonetics are still ambiguous, though much less ambiguous than the normal spelling. Try sounding out เพลา.
Which is relevant if you are doing research in linguistics. If you are merely trying to learn Thai in order to use it, the preferred method of 65 million Thai people is Thai script. Otherwise, you are just wasting time and making learning Thai more difficult.
English also has ambiguities in writing. Try sounding out "through", "thorough", "fought", and "rough." Yet, we don't resort to IPA.
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Much easier to type Thai than IPA. Why waste time on IPA?
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Not counterfeits, merely unauthorized copies. A counterfeit only has value if it fools someone into thinking it is the real thing. The purchasers of knock-off products like those listed do not believe they are genuine. Overwhelmingly, they are not people who would pony up to buy genuine if the copy were not available. Therefore, the holder of the trademark suffers no loss at all from the sale of unauthorized copies and it should not be illegal. Louis Vuitton once admitted that unauthorized copies do not result in lost sales for them.
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Which is why it is too risky to keep passwords in anybody's cloud.
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I think it's foolish to come here and expect to buy a home and a car and carry on just like back in the old country. By doing so you expose yourself to risks that are peculiar to Thailand, including the corrupt police. More realistic to rent a place to live and install Uber on your phone. If ownership is important to you, Thailand is not the right country.
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It could be that people (and of course big investors; "smart money") start pulling their money out of the Thai banking system and start hoarding cash (or transfer it from public debt into private foreign assets: private debt and stocks; "smart money") as the trust in the government (they can never ever repay their debt: raising taxes, winding down of public services, "hair cut" and "restructuring" of public debt come to mind) and Thai banks (wait for reduced limits on cash withdrawals, bank runs) is in decline.
For people interested in what is going on in the financial markets, globally, the "Economic Confidence Model" (ECM) could be a starting point. Martin Armstrong is always an intersting read, as is "Austrian Economics".
Buckle up for the many bumpy rides to come, already intensifying everywhere. Let's see, what October 1st (2015.75) has in store for all of us.
Oh, sure. Austrian economics. For the truly and permanently clueless. They have been predicting US inflation and the decline of the dollar ever since 2008. The fact that what happened was just the opposite never put a dent in their wooly-mindedness.
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The writer is an economic illiterate. Japan has unsustainable debt? The 10 year Japanese Treasury bond currenty pays 0.53% interest, which means that bond buyers are quite happy to buy Japanese govt bonds. What does unsustainable debt look like? Looks like Greek debt, for example. The current interest rate on the 10 year Greek Treasury is 10.91%.
The current global slowdown is an effect of the financial crisis of 2008 which was a crisis of private debt, not government debt, with the exception of small countries like Greece. Competitive devaluations are the order of the day, lately including the Thai baht. Governments, including the Thai govt, should increase, rather than decrease, borrowing to invest in infrastructure and the development of human capital and to replace lost economic activity.
It is true that disbursements from the Thai govt are not timely enough, but that is because the military "government" is incompetent.
Thai economists are in agreement that deflation is not deflation because the military says it isn't.
Economy: Shifting Thailand into the 'third wave'
in Thailand News
Posted
In the 2012 PISA scores Thailand scored number 50 out of 65.. The only participating Asian country that scored lower was Malaysia at 52. The top seven countries are all Asian.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-country-best-reading-maths-science
The owners of the manufacturing companies get the profits while the workers just get (low) wages. The S. Koreans insisted on technology transfer when they allowed Japanese auto companies to open plants there. Now they export their own competitive brands internationally. When China hired Siemens to build their first bullet train in Shanghai they insisted on technology transfer and recently they provided the low bid against Siemens to build a bullet train in California. Thailand has not only failed to develop any new technology, but they have failed even to transfer existing technology so that they can build Thai-owned companies for high-value added export. The reason is that Thai companies do not want to compete internationally. They are content to export food products and rent out cheap labor.
The idea that Thailand will compete in new technologies like nanotech is laughable.