WinnieTheKhwai

Eh, none of that matters. Once you're wanted then you're not going to be using any ID anywhere, and especially not at Immigration. You get a new name, new look, find a disposable bank account registered to a friend that funds can be wired into, etc. Then you hide in plain sight in Hua Hin, or some other wretched hive of scum and villainy. 😉

I'd much sooner have a beer with him than report him. Also: "serious drug charges". Worse than Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline you mean? 😅

LOL seriously? That's this one. With the beer bottle. Yeah, total baby face. 🤣 She then proceeds to actually drag the guy over towards some bar of the left. She clearly knows where she's going. I think she's 30-something at least and I'm being kind. BTW no argument on girls that are 15-16-17 should not be in bars, and police rightly take an interest in that. I wish they then didn't forcibly abduct those girls and place them in a program often against their will, but ok.

You'd think so, but the NDR/DW documentary did the same as all the others before them and mixed it right up. So a lot of pretty normal guys who agreed to be interviewed now find themselves mixed in with that German guy who took a 15 year old out of a bar. Anyway I just watched the thing and it's just terrible journalism with a nasty moralizing streak to it. Let me count the ways: 1. First up I see it mentioned everywhere that the documentary has been blocked in Thailand. It's not, and especially not by Thai authorities. You can readily find it on Youtube and other places, it's here; if you turn on captions in English, the translation is very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9m2qg1_-Vk This fake news suggests that Thailand is trying to cover it up, which would be nonsense. Some covering up does happen on the part of NDR/DW, who have disabled comments on the Youtube video. They're likely worried about people pointing out all the mistakes and misleading content. 2. They readily apply 'Pedophilia' to a sex act with a person under 18. That's potentially illegal in Thailand and in Germany but it's not pedophilia; look it up. They also cut in video of a person walking through Pattaya with a very short bargirl, heavily implying that she's a child and that this is rife. As we all know there's no shortage of short Thai women and unless you've asked her for ID then you can't just imply she's 12 years old. Similarly we get video of actual children who are selling stuff on the streets; that's sad but it's not evidence of child sex: it's child labor. Still bad, but if you cut that footage in with the rest then the audience can really only reach one conclusion: this is a city/country full of child sex slaves and pedophiles. 3. There was nothing really wrong with the storyline of the bar girl who lived in Germany and had a child with a German man who is refusing to pay child support. We also get the most coherent description of sex work from this lady. The makers didn't bother with the man's side of the story, there may well be more to it. From the video call with the kid he didn't look particularly half Western but who knows and the makers didn't really care so ok. 4. They did care to find the German guy who was arrested by Pattaya police for having sex with or planning to have sex with the underage girl from Cobra bar. Quite astonishingly the guy agreed to be interviewed AND in the interview readily admitted that he knew the girl was 15. Yet he feels unfairly treated. As a result German police have now arrested him.. not the brightest bulb in the tree clearly. Apparently he feels that as it was just a bar like any other and very out on the open he did not expect it to be illegal. Anyway it happens; some expats seem to think that tourist bars don't have underage girls when clearly they're around. 5. Now we get to the weird moralizing.. there's a Thai Youtube influencer chick who does videos in which she features bargirls dressed up as sexy French maids in a hotel in South Pattaya, plus some pool parties, etc. Now guess what they did.. they went to the site of a major German tourism operator and found that this hotel can be booked for a holiday. WHAT?! It's now the hotel's fault for one of their guests renting a couple rooms and shooting a youtube vid.. and not only that, this means that the German tourism company is promoting and sponsoring sex tourism.. As a result they got the hotel removed from their site.. Now, this is a totally normal hotel in South Pattaya, not on Walking Street or an obvious red light area and if you check the hotel reviews then you see many families stay there. 🤣 TUI should have told them to get stuffed. 6. The rest is kind of filler content of gullible idiots agreeing to be interviewed with the usual nonsense about Thai women being more female than German women, while the interviewer asks cringy questions about paying for sex/company and if they're taking advantage of poor Thai women's poverty and desperation. None of them state the bloody obvious and miss the opportunity to deflect it right back: go talk to those women and ask if they'd prefer foreign men to stay home, so they can go work on a farm or construction site. But they don't, so all the men in the video look like schmucks or creeps or both, or trying to cover up what Pattaya is. They basically look like creeps just for being in a place like that. Great work. :)

Probably some crack ho elephant mother. ;) Anyway the calf is in a very good place now.

Indeed. That site didn't have data for Chiang Mai last year, (not sure how they lost that but ok) but here's for 2020 which was quite a bad year. But even that year those rainy season months look plenty green. Which was your argument right, that it should be green in the rainy season; well it is: And increasingly so: By the way... Hua Hin in Prachuap right now.. yeah that's just great air right.. ???? (Hua Hin finally has a government PCD station since the second half of last year, so going forward it'll be much easier to compare Hua Hin with other places in Thailand. )

2016 seems a little arbitrary.. Covid had a big impact but Chiang Mai came back stronger now that it's finally over, specifically more varied tourist nightlife; in 2016 it was a bit of a drag of the usual bars along Loi Kroh; there is more variety now, and more spread out. Night Bazaar seems to have died, but there are more markets than ever, including in unexpected places. (e.g. Ba Pao 'Coconut' market, the Muslim market, Kad Manee market and several others. The Night Bazaar needs a serious makeover, to be honest I always though it touristy and nasty, with a lot of counterfeit items, mass produced junk, etc. And of course the old city is getting nicer and nicer every year, the Covid hiccup notwithstanding. This is pretty easy to see just with Google Streetview's feature to show previous years. e.g. Now: 2016: Now: (Unsightly cables gone) 2016: Now: 2016: Now: 2014 (in 2016 construction had started but it was a mess) : So basically the Old City is looking better every year... with one caveat that the residential use of the old city is being lost in favor of boutiques, cafes, hotels, restaurants, etc. That reversed temporarily during Covid but it's picking up again already.

You do of course realize that Nan has worse pollution than Chiang Mai so far this year, right? ???? See this is what happens when people believe and parrot everything they see on forums or social media, that Chiang Mai has an air pollution problem and other places don't. (And no, Nan ALSO isn't somehow worse than most other places in the North and North East.) Basically that would be Phuket, or other places very far South. Most other places you're not going to have better air than Chiang Mai over the entire year. (And sometimes without the relative benefit of having a bad period so concentrated around March, making it easier to avoid with a holiday.) Ehm, no. Pollution levels are improving in the North. Slowly. If you're not in Phuket or the very far South then over the year you're not going to have better air than Chiang Mai. And especially not if you take a holiday in March. AQI under 50 (green zone) is extremely rare anywhere in Thailand and Asia. It used to very rarely happen in Chiang Mai in the rainy season that a whole month would be in the green on average, but it happens more and more in recent years.

A quick response to the more outlandish (or otherwise interesting) posts: This seems to imply that Chiang Mai has a problem and other places don't. If it's December or January, and you leave Chiang Mai to go to Pattaya or Hua Hin, you will have WORSE air than Chiang Mai. The reality is that in December, January, most of February and May, the air in Chiang Mai is no worse (and often better) than most other places in Thailand. You can ban residential and agricultural burning, AND police it successfully. Because these are areas that are reasonably accessible, and you can see a fire miles away. In these areas a ban is effective. However you are not ever going to catch a guy hiking into a forest at night as setting a fire with a timed fuse, so he's long gone by the time the fire gets going. Also, setting fires in forest areas is illegal all of the time, it is not in any way influenced by having a ban or not; they're committing arson and they know it. Could you catch these people... maybe with a draconian effort and a military budget. Particulate matter is not measured in ppm. And not only is Chiang Mai not ever worst in the world, it's not worst in Thailand. That list by IQAir/ AirVisual that you're looking at is an interesting infographic, but you do need to understand what it is. People who misunderstand it can actually end up harming themselves making wrong decisions. They'd think hey, Pai is not in the Top 10, let's go there. Which would be a mistake, to put it mildly. It's a little tedious to go through the same nonsense every year. On the plus side, there is so much more data now that the really silly nonsense fell by the wayside. (For example that Chiang Mai or the North is the only area with a pollution problem, or that the government is covering things up, and even weirder conspiracies. Hello, the government is the reason we even have data going back more than a quarter century. ) This makes sense, and yes it's 25 years that we can say for sure, but likely going back a lot further. There is anecdotal evidence from decades prior about thick haze in the North. This is important to understand because when people were falsely claiming that 'it' started in <some arbitrary year>, that gave people the impression that it was a recent problem that can therefore be solved pretty quickly... yeah.. no. Very slowly improvements can be made and are being made but it's going far too slowly. I think the Wikipedia page on Chiang Mai to this day claims that air pollution started in 2007. ???? (Which was bad year admittedly, but hardly the start of anything). Well define bad, and compared to where exactly? Over a 12 month period the air in Chiang Mai is very similar to Pattaya for example. Last year you had 4 entire months in the green zone on the US AQI scale, with Chiang Mai ranking among the best in the world on that same IQAir ranking that people like. So.. apparently even green is 'bad'. You are hard to please. Some islands in the pacific have green level air year round. Very few places on Earth do.

If I pay the stratospheric prices, will the effect be actually enjoyable? I'm mostly getting negative effects from smoking weed. (Severe disorientation, anxiety, mood swings and physical effects like discomfort of inhaling smoke directly into my lungs and then weirdness in my heartbeat.) We're sure this is just a harmless and healthy plant right?

I'm frankly appalled at the 'answers' you got.. I'd almost apologize on behalf of what this forum has become. Let's take a step back and make some sense out of the random chatter and general cluelessness. * For monthly fees of this type, the first piece of key information that literally nobody noticed [edit: one exception above] is the difference between a house in a gated community, versus a house just in a regular village or city street. * For a house in the village, garbage collection fees are negligible. HOWEVER, for a gated community, garbage collection is done by a privately contracted company, and the fee for this tends to be worked into the monthly 'common fees' (ค่าส่วนกลาง - Kha suan klang) that also cover street maintenance and public lighting, gardening of any trees/hedges/garden areas, the security dudes at the entrance, the swimming pool, gym and sauna and whatever other costs the community has to make for upkeep and keeping things tidy. * This fee can be quite substantial, it tends to be an amount per square wa of land that the house occupies. We have three houses in gated communities, in one of them in the suburbs of Hang Dong the fee is 10 Baht per sq. wa per month which works out to 1000 Baht per month for a large house on 100 sq wa. The others are in a gated community in the city which charges 35 Baht per sq. wa per month; as our houses there are much smaller (townhouses) the fee there is 700 Baht per house per month. So as you can see from the above, all the people who wrote 'oh I just pay 50 baht' without showing any realization that not every situation is like theirs, you can ignore those posts IF the house you're renting is in a gated community. In summary: * If the house you're renting is not in a gated community then the 500 Baht fee is ridiculous and you should walk. * If the house is in a gated community then 500 Baht is very likely the landlord's actual cost for common fees. The only topic remaining is if you can reasonably expect those fees to be included in the rental fee already: if I rent out a house I definitely already include them and I do mention that it's included, along with all the other things we include like WiFi and cable TV. So if your rent is already very reasonable and it's just a case of the landlord forgetting about the common fees and now trying to correct their oversight, then you can accept it or negotiate something else. But if the rent is already 25K Baht or some other high amount then you can reasonably expect the common fees to be included.

Ok boomer

Guys.. don't use Numbeo for anything, and especially not things that have actual hard data. You're risking becoming a laughing stock.

I bet it was The Curve bar. And sounds very typical for the owner person. The bar is fairly new worth this name/owner.

I skimmed through the posts from the last month or two and a couple things may be good to note. But first up the current conditions, which are pretty bad everywhere in the region. (If people "left Chiang Mai because of the smog" and went to Pattaya or Hua Hin by the sea, then they will have had worse air this year than Chiang Mai. So if relocating, make it Phuket, Samui and all those places very far South.) It's a regional problem, not a Chiang Mai problem specifically. This is only now becoming apparent because Chiang Mai has had better awareness of the issue and many more measuring stations, going back many years. For locations in the North East they only got scientific air quality stations 1-2 years ago, so we're only just collecting data. Another question: where does this come from.. it's a little puzzling; the North currently has very few major fires. The new governor of Chiang Mai has done a fantastic job to bring the burning ban forward to start already in January; I think that contributed a lot to the fantastic January and February we had. (Having the best March in the past decade is also/mostly due to climatic conditions.) Maybe in summary on burning bans: they work very well to control residential and agricultural burning, as farmland is mostly flat and feasible to police. For forest fires in the mountains: not so much. And setting fries in (mostly protected) forests is already illegal year round of course. But anyway, right now the fire map looks like this: Note the almost complete absence of major fires in Northern Thailand. While Laos seems to be busy setting their whole country on fire. Very fine dust (PM2.5) can travel long distances so with a change of weather it's possible that all that <deleted> now covers Thailand. And speaking of weather, this week we've again seen that having a lot of rain doesn't by itself clear the air. The current smog conditions started immediately after a very major period of rain. It seems this way because rain often accompanies a change in wind direction, and that will definitely impact pollution levels. Overall, let's not lose sight of the good news; also with a current spell into the red (daily value, old city), this has been the best dry season in a decade, by some distance. In green below we see the current year. The gray line is the 10 year average. Numbers are the actual PM2.5 data in micrograms per cubic meter, so it's not an AQI number. Data is for the old city area in Chiang Mai.