JonnyF

The whole thing is a joke. Leaders taking private jets thousands of miles to get into huge gas guzzling motorcades to make virtue signalling speeches about making the little people make sacrifices to meet their targets by 2070 or whatever. 

I'd love to see the carbon footprint of this silly conference, it's beyond parody. Frankly, I'm sick of the hypocrisy. The doomsday cultists can do one as well.

Why would they want it to be profitable?

Currently the well connected bleed it dry with free first class flights, well paid positions for retired Generals that do nothing and have absolutely no experience running an airline, backhanders from ridiculously overpriced purchasing contracts etc. and then every few years the tax payer pays off the massive debts that have accumulated from such malpractice.

It's a vehicle to transfer money from the tax payer into the pockets of the well connected. It's serving it's purpose the way it is. As long as they can continue to repackage the tax payer funded bailouts as bankruptcy protected "restructuring" then they're good to go for a few more years.

It's definitely not what it was. But where is?

Australia was always my plan B but that appears to be a complete police state now with nutters like Daniel Andrews interfering with everyone's lives. It's also not what it was when I lived there in the mid 90's.

If I returned to the UK I'd enjoy it for a few months but I couldn't stay there long term.

So I'll probably stick it out here and hope that somehow the Junta that is destroying the country will leave or be removed.

Most people arriving now will be Thais and expats who have been waiting to get back into the country. This will last a couple of weeks, maybe a month until most of them are back in.

By that time, pictures of deserted entertainment areas, stories of being refused a beer because the restaurant isn't SHA approved etc. will have hit social media. If they're unlucky, someone will go to the press after being put into 2 weeks quarantine because they sat next to someone positive on the plane over.

Covid really is the perfect storm for Thai tourism. So many Westerners came here for the relaxed entertainment venues and the flesh trade. Both are impossible with social distancing. Take those things away and you're really just left with average beaches, soi dogs, dangerous roads, overpriced goods, silly laws and double pricing/scams. Then you've got the Chinese tourists who aren't even allowed to leave China.

At least immigration can stop having to quiz people "why you come Thailand too much?".

Great news. The puritans and the virtue signallers will no doubt be wringing their hands and hiding under the bed sheets but let's face it, nobody takes them seriously anyway ????.

This weekend will be my last weekend drinking bottled beer from a cheap mug. Hallelujah!!!

Thainess.

Announce first. Think later.

I'm SO glad I don't have any plans to travel in the next 6 months.

I hated all the jumped up little Nazis in uniform at the airports before Covid, I can only imagine the treatment of the 'infected' now. Officials armed with their nasal swabs to ram especially hard 3 inches up the nose of anyone they don't like the look of.

I wonder if they can be bothered to employ extra staff to manage all this, or will it be like the old days when there were only 2 immigration booths open (and the scowling officers manning them were in no rush) with queues all the way back to the moving walkways. 

Happy holidays everyone! It will all be worth it when you sit down for your first ice cold beer at your favourite restaurant.... oh wait a minute.. ????????

4 hours ago, kiwikeith said:

So if you want to pay $12 per can in a hotel bar or 1000BHT for a glass of wine it's fine.

But I like the sitting on a beach with a nice cold one in a paper cup better, a good one is poor vodka over a sliced up watermelon , freeze it then put it in a chilly bin and off to the beech.

You can put a bottle of Sangsom in a brown paper bag and drink it on a park bench for all I care. I like to have a decent, cold draught beer or a chilled glass of white wine with my meal, as do most tourists.

Hiding Vodka in a bottle of mineral water and looking over my shoulder for corrupt cops before necking it on the beach is not my idea of a great holiday, even if it saves me a few quid.

2 hours ago, Karma80 said:

The misunderstanding being, what do we get out of this personally? I mean, you can't just expect us to take free vaccines and give them away!!

Exactly. No kickbacks on a donation so the government views processing this as unpaid work. The more they get for free, the less they have to buy and hence the less money they can cream off the top of the various purchasing contracts with the likes of the CCP.

Of course it would save the lives of some Thai people but nobody in government really cares about that.  

Good to see OGS still in charge, I thought he'd be gone by now but maybe today is the day, they often wait until the Tuesday after a bad result to sack the manager. Let's hope not - this is too funny. ????

3 years of Ole and they still look like a bunch of expensive players hastily thrown together and told to go out on the pitch and wing it. No style of play, no identity, no leadership. They're lucky Liverpool backed off in the second half or it could have been approaching double figures. A tough run of games coming up now, let's hope OGS can do his normal trick of pulling one or two results out of the bag just when he needs them, I'd hate to see him replaced with someone competent like Conte.

Why anyone thought that someone who relegated Cardiff and only had limited success with Molde was capable of managing one of the biggest sides in the world against the likes of Klopp, Guardiola. Tuchel etc. is beyond me. Totally out of his depth.

That sounds like a sensible approach to get things moving. It's time to acknowledge that not everyone who enjoys a beer or a glass of wine with their meal ends up acting like a beligerent, arrogant fool spraying saliva over anyone within 5 metres. 

Far too sensible an approach for the clowns in charge no doubt. 

13 minutes ago, webfact said:

It was not the government but it was a bunch of crooks, the commerce minister said on Monday.

Same Same.

I guess this is an improvement for people who need to see family, do business trips etc.

But I don't see many genuine tourists coming when they could go somewhere closer to home with less restrictions, where the bars and nightlife are open, and it's cheaper.

I'm not really sure what Thailand has to offer at this point.

A Thai pimp blaming "Farang" for the sex culture in Thailand. How surprising.

Obviously there was no prostitution in Thailand before the Vietnam war, and these white devils lured and tricked these innocent Thai damsels into giving up their body for money ????.

It's never their fault, is it?

40 minutes ago, Gandtee said:

Thaksins ex wife for Prime Minister? Just a cotton picking minute! Wasn't it her and her Prime Minister husband Thaksin who were embroiled in buying government land on the cheap.? Just how crooked do you have to be to not be accepted as a government minister? Amazing Thailand. 

Buying land on the cheap is child's play in Thai politics. A bit like the head of a Mexican drug cartel getting a speeding ticket. The current mob have much better credentials - they have a convicted drug trafficker in their ranks, and no doubt that's the tip of the iceberg in terms of activities they've never been convicted of.

The only reason that guy was convicted is that he was caught in Australia. Had he been caught in Thailand it would have all been a big misunderstanding, the lawyers and judges would be driving red plated S series Benz and it would have been brushed under the carpet.

Nice work if you can get it. 

Big Salary, nice pension, hobnobbing with local dignitaries, attending functions, doing sweet FA for UK citizens in Thailand whose tax pays for his lifestyle. Lovely jubbly.

2 hours ago, Petey11 said:

Also amazing that the more they relax measures, the lower the positive numbers get.

Not really, when you consider that people are getting vaccinated on a fairly large scale now, and that easing restrictions has really been little more than lip service to placate the masses. The "relaxing of measures" has made very little difference to people's behaviour in real terms (a curfew that most people ignore changing from 10pm to 11pm, or malls staying open an extra hour is hardly going to make significant difference to the number of cases compared to millions of vaccinations per week).

Vaccinations are causing the number of cases to decline. The easing of restrictions wouldn't have negated the positive effects of that. They should really expedite the further reduction of these restrictions to people's freedoms now.