canopy

In some cases, you may have to go deeper than what appears on the surface. For a long time after I moved to the village I didn't think the women drank. But as time went on I discovered many women drink in secret, often together and hit the cheap, hard stuff frequently which is concealed. One in her 60's was once caught by her husband and beaten badly; I saw her face after the tongue lashing which shocked me. Almost none of the women in my village worked in the bars. One who had drinks in the open as do the men of course. A few women don't appear to drink at all along with a very few men. So for my village I would say the title matches even though it is not socially accepted. This is just a small data point and seems to vary village to village.

A lot of the mosquito problem is new to our generation believe it or not. In the 1980's, there was an epidemic of complaints in rural Thailand about how terrible the mosquitoes had become. This was coincidentally the same time water catchment jars you see everywhere today had become widespread thanks to the introduction of the ferrocement process. A study in Khon Kaen was performed and found mosquito larvae in 100% of the jars tested. That's right, every single one of them. Fast forward to today and nothing seems to have changed. Loose fitting lids are found on jars strewn around most houses. The people selling the jars do not offer tight fitting lids. Mosquitoes come out of them every day of the year. Hello?

Right, but these things can be better defined by the persons involved just like writing a will.

But it is not that simple.

Yes it can be that simple and in fact some people choose this alternative already. They sanctify their marriage with a ceremony of their choosing but never enter into a legal contract with the government. I am not the only one who advocates that marriages should have no government contract, no have special privileges, no have tax deductions, and have absolutely nothing to do with the government.

Marriage is none of the governments business. Get rid of the government defining, sanctifying, and tracking marriages. People should be free to define a marriage as whatever they want it to be. I think it would be nice if the government stayed out of peoples lives, but the will of the people in our generation is to take away freedoms and be more regulated. Gay marriage may have a chance of becoming legal, but what about polygamy and others. It's not fair to discriminate like this. Remember someone in Thailand married a snake and had a ceremony which was big news and became a movie.

I have looked many places as well and only have have seen them at True Value in Bangkok, but I think they are over 2000 baht. Handles sold at hardware stores in Thailand are cheap, but junk. As many broken handles as I have dealt with in Thailand, it is nice to have high quality handles fitted from the factory that are also designed for the tool they are going on.

How long is the run?

It's getting there due to lower manufacturing costs along with more efficient cells and also the ever increasing cost of power.

I brought that up to several Thai companies. They seemed to think it was a rude thing to say in light of the fact they raise their prices periodically.

Still a good few years off though.

Oh you mean the days of cheap, green power is just around the corner? After hearing this in the 80's, 90's, 00's and now 10's there is no longer credibility.

makes me think along the lines of,-- If we sell plastic or powder coated then it will last too long and we won't sell anymore for a long time-- or , is it just that I've been here too long?

No, the consumer is to blame. Consumer sees two types of fence at the store. Asks which is cheaper. Buys it. Doesn't ask or care why. Cheaper is always considered better in Thailand. I find the chicken wire available in Thailand to be worthless; gauge is too small and rusts out too quickly in this climate. I also see a green painted chicken wire, but they cleverly reduce the gauge of steel making it pitifully weak even though it looks as thick as the regular due to the thick coat of paint on it.

An expensive option to add to the mix is various small shops around China town sell rolls of stainless steel mesh of all sizes. 500-1000 baht / square meter.

Deep rains seems to be a trigger to bringing them out. The birds absolutely go nuts when a bloom begins. I love watching the giant feeding frenzy with birds diving and swooping like there's no tomorrow. So for a natural solution, if you provide habitat for birds in your area they can do an amazing job on them by day. I imagine bats at night in sufficient numbers would also decimate them. Otherwise you learn real quickly: when the first one appears, light's off and house closed.

There was a time I was optimistic about solar power, but that was before I researched it and became aware of the realities. I am not being negative or bringing doom and gloom, just honesty and factual data. Unless you are kilometers away from power poles, the reality is the solar system you describe will cost more than being on the grid, have no payoff down the line, and heavily pollute the environment. All you need to understand this clearly is to just see the price and longevity of the batteries. Such a system could be a negative to anyone wanting to buy the house. The first thing many will think of is how much it will cost to scrap it and get cheap, unlimited power from the power company.

There are plenty of companies in Thailand that specialize in solar and you can even find products at various home stores. For instance, homemart offers a 2 kilowatt hour off-grid system with everything for 970,000 baht. Leonics specializes in solar products and has a bigger 12KwH system suitable for a small house, but now you are talking 7 digits of price. Keep in mind this is the startup cost. Operating costs replacing batteries and maintenance will add significant cost on a regular basis. And both companies I mention have raised the prices of their products over the years, not lowered them.

In my observations living in the mountains, sad to say hill tribes are not living in harmony with the land, nor are the Thai's. In my years here, I have never encountered a native who did a nature walk or appreciates the natural beauty and sounds of the forests. They'd rather turn on their own music at max volume, surely everyone has noticed that one somewhere or another. Protected forests are simply places to dump garbage as advised to me by the authorities as we have no garbage service, cut down down trees and plants, especially all orchids and things of beauty, slash down forest, poison it, and burn it to make illegal farms, and hunt down everything from the smallest ant egg to the biggest most endangered animals. No one sees anything wrong with this picture. It's just the thing you do.

Funny story, a neighbor went out of his way to go on my land and cut down a stringer of bananas and put them on my porch. He said they were ripe and the birds were eating them. Bless his heart, I smiled and said thank you. Little did he know I like attracting birds to the area and giving some bananas back to the soil on occasion.

The government should do a 30 year case study of turning one village into a caretaker of the forest. Realistically, I don't think such a modest endeavor can be successful. In time, it will succumb to the reality of the area.

I tried some of these typing tutors. It is disappointing to find how primitive they are compared to (english) typing tutors for the PC 30 years ago. Back then the tutor monitored your speed and accuracy. You automatically advanced to the next lesson only when you became competent enough. The new one everyone seems to be raving about here is surprisingly primitive and feature deplete. All you do is type back what you see. No encouragement, no real tests, no way to know whether you are done or should move on to the next lesson. I am amazed 3 decades later this is the best we can do? Feels like trading in the ferarri for a yugo. I've looked in software stores for real typing tutors to no avail.

where can u c aggression???

Pay attention to the video sir. For me, aggression started when the young whipper snapper chained and padlocked the high ranking official out of their premises and from behind the fence gave him a tongue lashing to go get a search warrant if he wanted to further pursue the irregularities. Big mistake.

I think you need to brush up on animal protection "laws" in Thailand - there aren't any.

I don't understand why you would post a false statement like this. Is it a joke because I don't get it. Responses like this casts more doubt on the genuineness and credibility of this organization.

Next you might want to come up to speed on how "things get done" in Thailand - as it is mostly graft, nepotism etc

I am in disbelief how a group claiming to help wildlife so easily justifies blatant disregard for Thai wildlife laws intended to protect such precious things as forests and elephants. Intentionally stealing land from a national forest instead of buying land for a legal sanctuary, who would have believed someone could stoop this low. Thailand has no tolerance for foreigners coming to their country and breaking their laws and this is just one more example of that. No need to make up some grand conspiracy theory. Thailand doesn't need organizations like this.

Synopsis: the wildlife sanctuary claims they don't need to be legal because other people aren't and they themselves are doing good. The government's position is they do need to be legal, especially them.

About 20 mins into the above video a bombshell is disclosed. There is evidence this group has occupied conservation forest land without permission. Yet again their defense is other people do it. They are starting to sound despicable, destroying forest land and in clear violation of elephant laws and yet their response is aggression at being challenged for doing the very things they seem to condemn. I hope in the future they can see the error in their ways and get on board with Thai laws protecting elephants and forests.

I've lost several routers and a motherboard due to lightning strikes through the phone line. Lightning also made the phone line protection built on my UPS inoperable. I've noticed the phone line does not appear to have any sort of protection--it is strung across the street and goes straight to my router. Are there some ways to improve lightning protection?

The only thing that has been done is that the environmental department installed a bunch of sprinklers around the measuring equipment.

I hope you are not serious. If you are, is it possible to post a picture of this?

According to the PCD, each cubic metre of air should contain no more than 120 micrograms of PM10 matter for safety reasons.

A goal of reducing PM to 119 and declaring it safe and worthy of a pat on the back is scary. Instead, why shouldn't the people of the north have the right to blue skies, beautiful views, and clean, fresh air to breathe and make that the goal? The air quality should match what makes sense for a beautiful countryside, not just an acceptable level of a giant metropolis.

Tile floors leak and this is normal and understood by developed countries. That is why in developed countries, such showers always have 2 drains: one inlet above the tile and one inlet below the tile. If you want to build a water tight shower it is just a matter of following the design that has been worked out to perfection by our ancestors. See diagram. You could also go the Thai way and just make up something with typically dubious results.

I know they are uneducated farmers, but come on. In the 1000+ years they have been burning, have they not thought that there is too much smoke if everyone burns at the same time?

Annual field burning is not ancient, it's a new method of farming. Today Thai farmers see a waste product in their field and burn it up; either in place or in heaps, then add chemicals and other things to increase yields. The ancient way was organic where today's 'waste product' was prized and used for soil enrichment, not burned away. Today Thai's could just as well till their fields instead of burn them, but they have no incentive to because burning is so cheap and easy. I agree you start fining them and they will stop and the skies will clear real quickly.

I guess I don't understand the notion of spreading the burning versus burning at once. Won't the cumulative effect over a 24 hour period be the same? Sounds like advising people that smoking is fine as long as you do a pack spread it out over a day instead of concentrating it in a short time.

'...repeated again next year' - I don't hope so.

Don't be silly. Of course it will be repeated again next year. It's the same fire bugs burning everything down year after year and even though simple solutions exist, the problem is not taken seriously.

This year it's worse than ever

Just two years ago Chiang Rai had a PM10 of 260 (20% higher than now) and Mae Hong Son had a PM10 over 500 which is off the scale of the danger level. It's bad every year, some worse than others.

Hard to believe tourism is only taking a 20% hit

Maybe the other 80% don't have access to the weather situation. I can't imagine anyone wanting to vacation in brown, bad smelling air that makes people sick.

The fire map above clearly shows that it appears most of North Thailand is on fire. So trying to blame Burma is just making the government look silly.

Very true.

Not being a farmer, why do the farmers burn? To prepare for the next planting? Does burning what's left add nutrients to the ground? What are the alternatives?

The slash and burn method of farming is like this in my observations. In preparation for the planting season that starts in late spring, the weeds and stalks from last year are first eradicated. They prepare for this by poisoning the fields and/or slashing any growth down so it becomes very dry. Then they burn the field. The advantage of this method is it is easy and cheap. The disadvantage is it depletes soil quality, resulting in more chemicals needed for farming the next year which reduces profit. The ash in the air with these poisons that go airborne (not to mention the untold destruction of the runoff into waterways) creates the smog that casts a brown haze limiting visibility, sometimes enough to blot out the sun. During the burning time that lasts several months of each year there may never be one day of clear skies. Millions of people in Thailand are told to stay inside with doors and windows closed and avoid all strenuous activity. Hundreds of thousands end up in the hospital. For me the symptoms are a sting in the eyes and a dry throat, others have it much worse.

There are several alternatives to burning. Tilling is one, but costs thousands of baht to rent a tractor. Weeds can also be removed by hand, something I used to do happily as a kid back in my country for minimum wage.

A common misconception is the practice of field burning is ancient. It isn't. Before the chemical era farming was organic and soil enrichment was very important. Even buffaloes were prized because each time they defecated working in the fields it was helping the crops and the farmers knew that. Organic farming became very efficient but the know-how is mostly gone and with the soil in such dire shape there is no going back.

In our village everyone burns so you can’t really arrest everyone. It somehow wouldn’t be fair to fine only the ones you can catch in the act and let the others get away with it.

My village too, but enforcement would work. Just like hunting in the national forests. If you want to be nice, first post a warning there is going to be 0 tolerance. Then you arrest a hunter and put him in jail. Next year people think twice about hunting there. Then you arrest another hunter. And before long the good people stop doing it and the criminals are in jail. Burning would be just so easy to enforce. Not only does smoke/fire send a perfect beacon to who is doing it at day/night respectively, but with today's technology satellite imagery can be used to detect every fire being set anywhere in the country instantly. But as I mentioned before, the will is not there. Right or wrong, burning is an accepted cultural practice seen as the most ideal way to deal with waste of all sorts. Getting people to the point that they could correlate that what they are doing puts people in the hospital because of their laziness would be "thinking too much".

I think the future is bleak at least for our lifetimes based on the sentiment of the Thai people who are indifferent and the government who does little year after year.

It's interesting that rather than eliminate the problem at its source since apparently a lot of the burning is totally illegal, the government dabbles with mitigating the side effects. Cloud seeding is one thing they trumpet, but when you meddle with the environment like that it makes me wonder if it's just robbing peter to pay paul. So while they may be able to reduce the smog in chiang mai somewhat, it then seems to go to horrific levels over in bone dry mae hong song. I see cloud seeding as a waste of money, probably harmful to the environment overall, and even in a best case scenario the air is still bad, just not as bad. Suggestion: cancel the cloud seeding and other such programs and use the money to have tractors come over to till land for free so farmers have a competitive alternative to lighting their fields ablaze.