rudi49jr

5 hours ago, webfact said:

has once again been bigging up his own efforts

Classis symptom of the narcissist (a.k.a. Trump 101): always in desperate need of praise, and if you don’t get any from others, you just praise yourself! 

Hazardous haze. That’s some nice alliteration, well done. Unfortunately it’s not a haze; it’s called smog. 

That's just what Thailand needs, Anutin for PM. The generals must be laughing their heads off.

Very good idea! The Thai authorities will never use it, though, since they have shown zero interest so far in stopping fires and air pollution in general. Such a shame.

30 minutes ago, Sticky Rice Balls said:

Indeed =they can make an app and Im happy to click off some pics of my daily bicycle ride in city of those smoky offenders.....(cough)

First time I rode my bicycle up Doi Suthep was around 9.30 in the morning. Didn’t even make it halfway up because of all the songthaews and buses going up the mountain as well, almost all of them belching out so much black smoke, right in my face. 
So I started doing my rides around 7.30 or 8.00 in the morning, before the songthaews and buses started going up the mountain. That was always a good workout, with the reward of a super fast downhill ride afterward. Really loved doing that, overtaking cars and buses, seeing the look of surprise on the faces of the drivers as they were being passed by someone on a bike.

But that was years ago, before Chiang Mai was being almost continuously suffocated by smog for 4-6 months every winter.

1 hour ago, Jingthing said:

There is more to the definition of a real democracy than that. The U.S. democracy has objectively backslided, perhaps as argued here to a critical degree.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/how-civil-wars-start-barbara-walter-research/

 

If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own.

The thing is that when the sh*t really starts hitting the fan in the USA (like a civil war or something, which seems ever more likely, what with dozens of millions of deluded Americans still fully convinced that Trump won), the whole world is going to suffer, it will be a crisis of an unimaginable magnitude.

And the hypocrisy of it is that these people keep quoting the constitution, but support ‘democracy’ only when their guy wins, and have absolutely no qualms to lie and cheat and try to overturn an election when the other guy wins. 
Democracy is one man, one vote, by the way, not the convoluted, ridiculous and completely outdated system that is in place in the USA.

What an absolute boob! Every time this man opens his mouth, he puts his foot in it. It’s just incredible that an absolutely incompetent guy like that is trusted with such an important position. 

11 hours ago, webfact said:

the government has been negligent in preparing for air pollution control.

Understatement of the year. The government has been shockingly negligent in this respect for decades already, not just in Bangkok, but maybe even more so in the north as well. They are only in it for the money, and other than that they simply don’t have any interest at all in running the country in a somewhat decent manner, that’s just too hard, too much work, and more than probably also beyond their capabilities.

I remember talking to a Thai master sergeant around 1990. I think it was in Mae Sam Laep (near Mae Sariang) on the Salween river, but it could have been further north. This guy’s English was pretty good, and he told me some pretty unsettling stories about his time as a ranger doing border patrols during the 70’s and 80’s. 
While we were talking, I could hear artillery fire just a few miles away across the border and I had heard and read about shells landing on the wrong side of the border, in Thailand, so I didn’t feel 100% safe. It was hard to imagine that wars had been going on over there for more than 40 years already. And now, 30 years on, these wars are still going on, and apparently they sometimes still spill over into Thailand. Very sad. 

8 hours ago, Letseng said:

How do they so easily distinguish betw. Burmese and Mocambiquan rubies?

 

Simple: accessibility. It’s probably quite easy to get Burmese rubies, they’re from right across the border, whereas Mocambiquan rubies are probably quite a lot harder to come by.

I was in Guinéé, West-Africa, in 1998, traveling overland from Senegal to Ivory Coast. The road ran parallel to and was quite close to the borders of Sierra Leone and Liberia, two countries where armed conflicts had been going on for years at the time, resulting in many refugee camps on the Guinéé side of those borders.

More than once during that trip guys would come up to us and offered us diamonds, which came from Sierra Leone or Liberia, or so they claimed. They could have been so-called blood diamonds, or they could have just been pretty pieces of glass. I declined to buy them either way: I couldn’t tell anyway if they were real or not, and even if they were real, I didn’t much feel like sponsoring some local warlord so he could buy some more AK47’s, or a few cases of ammo or whatever. Besides, people could have died trying to find those diamonds, or slave labor could have been used, and I didn’t want that on my conscience.

8 hours ago, webfact said:

protest note,

A protest note. That’ll teach them.

19 hours ago, snoop1130 said:

to uncover the truth

????????????????????????????????????????????

Since when is anyone in Thailand interested in the truth, least of all the ‘authorities’?

Uh-oh, looks like someone forgot to pay their ‘protection fee’. Or maybe their monthly contribution to the police retirement fund.

2 hours ago, Berkshire said:

Amazing.  I can stand and watch traffic on any busy road and find one within 5 minutes. 

You could blindfold me and have me point in any random direction on a busy intersection and I’d find one within 5 seconds. 

“Thailand launches a campaign to collect garbage from the parks”

And then dump it just outside those parks.

And those (few) morons keep spoiling it for the rest of the decent tourists and expats and giving all of them a bad rep. Thanks guys! 

55 minutes ago, seedy said:

Hogwash - the roads here are fine

I agree, most roads are perfectly fine; it’s the road users that are the problem. Plus the RTP not doing their job. 

20 minutes ago, Longwood50 said:

Yes money is a motivating factor that is why the punishment needs to be so certain and severe as to deter those considering entering the drug trade to continue.

Money is the ONLY motivating factor. Billions and billions of dollars can be made in this industry, and in corrupt countries, such as Thailand, the big dogs will always get away with it. And in countries with a high rate of poverty, such as Thailand, there will always be enough people willing to risk everything to make a quick buck.

Besides, they’ve been waging this war on drugs for decades now, and it didn’t have any noticeable effect, did it? Even in countries with the most draconian measures and punishments, drugs are widely available.
You can never win this, because there is simply just too much money involved. In a small country like Holland, the ‘weed’ industry alone brings in about 10 billion euros. And that’s just weed, imagine how much is made selling coke and meth and xtc and such. And that is just Holland, imagine how much is being made in much bigger countries like the USA. Money is power, so the big players will almost always get away with it, and they will also always be able to find new ‘soldiers’ to traffick and sell the drugs for them, no matter how many you put in jail or execute.