lounger

Sadly there is always another country area unaffected by disasters that will step up production to steal the business at rock bottom prices.

They want cheap they get cheap......

You do not enter reconciliation talks making demands - not if you want the reconciliation to work. If on the other hand you are merely grandstanding

Well said.

Truer words were never spoken.

. 'Red and Yellow ready to reconcile' The headline is nonsense, the article should be headed ' Red and Yellow stand off continues".

The only common ground these two have is that in each case they can say, to quote a minister earlier in the week: : we are on the same path, but going in different directions" ie We are right and you are wrong.

History is important but for those who have missed out on a relevant part of English history there was a King who tried to stop invasion by hostiles. he succeeded. In fact he won so many battles and became so important that, he said, even the sea would obey him. So he , King Canute, set up court on the beach and commanded the waves to retreat before his gaze.

Yingluk is doing the same in Thailand:

PM Orders Flooded Areas to Be Drained by New Year.

King Canute got his feet wet, Yingluk?

715,000 'tourists' from Laos.

The fact they have 'England' and not the 'UK' is enough to disregard those statistics posted above as nonsense IMO.

More than 10% of that entire wealthy nation known as the Lao People's Democratic Republic's population travelled "abroad" as tourists to Thailand.

.

yes and how much is the average daily expenditure? Western tourists spend 5,000baht per day ( I dont know how they get away with so little) and Asians spend 3,000baht per day. Statistics dam_n statistics. Its like saying USA has a relatively low population, maybe but they spend per head way over Asian people..........

I know that many will disagree, but the only real historical dent to the tourist trade came when the airports were occupied. Even at the height of the Bangkok Redshirt protests, key tourist areas in Chiang Mai and Phuket were humming along.

You are a waste of space.

Phuket airpiort has been occupied and hotel owners wondered why trade was down. As a general observation Phuket has not escaped intact. You are manipulating the truth...

I guess you own a hotel in Phuket and are sh1tting yourself as you cannot pay your staff.

Thailand does not go 4G!

Thailand does not even go 3G like most countries in Dark Africa or like Cambodia did over a decade ago.

As long as fossils in the TOT and CAT are allowed to form a government within a government and are able to frustrate government policy by staying corrupt and allowing only their CP friends to benefit grossly, Thailand is stuck in a hardly working GPRS environment. hardly working because lots of areas do not even have GPRS coverage.

The elite has kept Thailand back for at least half a century.

An idiot is born every day. Wud be good to back up a rant with hard facts..... If u cud

The new communications minister, a guy who actually wants to move forward as opposed to the former character who thought the internet was some evil monster, said pushing forward for progress was like playing on the horns of a bull. Whichever way you turn there is a horn waiting to gore you.

This is the problem besetting forward thinkers

Must be that they ran out of tricks to delay the 3G licenses and just take it the easy way.

We're going for 4G right away and will skip the 3G licenses

Actually that is quite clever. The arm twisting has about finished on 3G and progress has started to be made BUT if 4G raises its ugly head then its all back to the drawing board and the establishment TOT, TToT will survive a bit longer........

In five years someone will come up with a new idea 5G............pathetic

The government has reaffirmed that it will expedite the drainage and relieve locals' stress

.....................................................................

So the government suddenly can control the incredible volume of water still descending on Bangkok.

What nonsense. Its still rhetoric. They have been trying to expedite the drainage for months and now they make it sound like a new idea.

The government has recognised our plight and is going to solve all our problems. The chief baddy will be taken off to the tower and law and order will be restored.

Pathetic

Read the first two lines of the article. They ( No names mentioned ) hope to have Bangkok cleaned up for the Kings Birthday tomorrow !! However Ms Shinawatra said that the clean up will take all month. More BS from the goverment that never talks to each other.

and another part of the article says that in most areas the water should be receding by January. Yep, concentrate the media on the dry folks reporting that they are getting back to normal....

The Public Health Ministry reported that 2,020,000 people fell ill as a result of flooding and were treated by medical teams. It reported 7,431 flood victims as having severe stress, 9,548 as suffering from depression and 1,699 as being at risk of suicide.

Such precise numbers, and in such precise categories. It sounds as if there must be an army of well trained medics and psychiatrists knocking on every door and doing in depth interviews with every member of the household.

Truly unbelievable. Who makes this stuff up?

It sounds as if Thailand now belongs to some "far into the future super-state", where everyone enters their precise state of mind into their computer before going to bed each day.

Brave New World and 1984 rolled into one.

Definately not the Thailand I know and love.:jap:

Someone in the ministry is just tossing a dice.

I dont see why Grumpy Old Men are rejecting figures that could have been the result of hospital and clinic returns. After all the system collects data on every hotel guest so why not on everyone who who wants medical assistance.

If the gures are low the GOM deride them as a cover up and if they are high they are impossible. Having lived in a province under water for three months I am amazed that conditions have not beaten more people. The Thai resilience must come from years of oppression ( by the elements ,weather, central corruption etc).

I am sorry to see some people cannot put up with the horror of having deep dirty water carrying dead animals, sh1t, food waste etc through their personal belongings. We need to stop rejecting these figures and have some pity for the many people broken by this disaster.

Doesn't seem to be affecting Pattaya. I was there recently and the place is packed with Iranian men ,Russian couples and thousands of old single European men sitting at tables looking at Isan girls.

why the disgusted face ?

if you don't like it why do you still go there ?

i spent years and years in the pattaya style and tourist places of Thailand. I'm full and sick of it. I now prefer unspoilt natural and quiet beauty by the beach. There are no tourists where I am now ... bliss. Natural genuine bliss with honesty and no harrassments

a few more mosquitos and intruding insects though ... but I've trained the wall lizards to attack them ...

you sound really adapted to the Thai way of life, you still talk like a tourist. Dont you know the thai word for the wall lizard?

If you behave yourself how can you get sick of it.

Old men escaping from the arthritis inducing north finding the perfect place to spend their autumn years. nothing wrong with that, and if you think the old geezer I saw being helped along by two leather clad beauties is wrong then you are no better than the Chin chook ( wall lizard) and deserve to spend your end days with a dried out, dusty, useless but nalak (lovely), old woman.

Amazing. Happy to see that the Army accepts responsibility for its error and that they will pay compensation. This is far better that most politicians or government agencies would have done. A big pat on the back for them. Hope the other government agencies will learn form this.

er nooo, its not as easy as that. The system is that the money is paid but held up somewhere and for a generous donation the name of the person duty bound to pay will be released. With the rice compensation ( mortgage scheme) the farmer gets a small % of the guaranteed rate as middle men wont hand anything over until gratuities are paid.

I guess the army general will collar 250,000 of this money and lesser ranks most of the rest.

" Where is my money?"

Ah yes your money, 255,000 was it now accommodation charges are 1,000 per day, security while in custody..say 2000pd, then there is the food, oh and the kitchen staff, electricity and provision of a lamp bulb, supervised visiting hours........... well its about 200,000 cost all told; so you get 50,000 ok?

You will have to add an estimated 30% kickback to the estimated 25.2 Billion Dollars.

yes and the infrastructure that doesnt need repairing 30% on that too.

The Don Mueang crowd say that after a few weeks in water all the buildings have gone rotten and need replacing. Wow amazing how concrete can form harbours but not building foundations. And if the concreteTerminals are rotten what does that say for the 5,000 baht being offered to the people in lesser buildings blockwork or wooden houses

An individual that is convinced of their sexuality can undergo a sex change in varying degrees with confidence without self recrimination or doubt.

I believe the difficulty arises when an individual is insecure and has to make a series of deliberate decisions starting with 'coming out'. The psychological difficulty, of overcoming apparant opposition, then becomes imbedded in their psyche as an impossible barrier that has been conquered. Thereafter other, lesser decisions relating to crime, violence, drugs become by comparison easy.

This is clearly an excellent illustration of "the gang that couldn't shoot straight." The government water expert is telling the newspaper that he knew about this surge all along but didn't want to say anything for fear of scaring foreign investors away. And then the newspaper goes on aimless diatribe. Does The Nation know the meaning of 'investigative journalism?" Honestly, it's time that readers started questioning the professionalism of the newspaper. Shouldn't the reporter be questioning and verifying sources?

How could Phisit, an official of the irrigation dept in Samut Sakhon, be making a claim that "news about the surge had been kept under wraps' so as not to scare away foreign investors without it being challenged? Other than the most amateur newspapers, this is inexcusable. Not challenging an obvious admission and outright lying to foreign investors so as to falsely represent the soundness of investment in the region is preposterous. Foreign investors should run, run as fast as they can and keep running faster.

Mr Phisitsan what else not telling us? You want us come with our rebuilt factories on the strength of your discreet answers..... No Mr Phsitsan you put big nail in the coffin of Japanese investment. We not trust anything you say......

Announced by: TAT News

Date of published: November 23, 2011

Other Provinces in Thailand

Most provinces in Thailand were not affected by the flood. No provinces in the south, north, and northeast of Thailand are affected by the flood. The flooding has subsided in most of the central provinces including Ang Thong, and Chai Nat. Cleanup operations are underway.

Provinces in the central area not affected by the floods:

Chanthaburi

Ratchaburi

Chachoengsao

Rayong

Chon Buri (Pattaya)

Samut Prakan

Kanchanaburi

Samut Songkhram

Lop Buri

Sa Kaeo

Nakhon Nayok

Saraburi

Phetchaburi (Cha Am)

Suphanburi

Prachuap Khiri Khan (Hua Hin)

Singburi

Prachin Buri

Trat (Ko Chang)

So why in Singburi and Lopburi are displaced people living on the main roads. I assume other provinces are similarly misrepresented.

I guess what the report is trying to say is that if you stick to main roads you have a good chance of arriving at main road destinations. The locals? Maibenrai. They dont count.

I do not blame these people at all. They should have already demanded the gates be opened. These people deserve all they can get from the government. For years, each government has had flood problems and no one did anything. Now, the big one came that the government was warned about and still did nothing. It's now time to pay the piper. TIT, but it's up to the people if they want change that they deserve. The whole world is laughing at Thailand and rightly so with the politics and problems as they are

its amazing compartmentalising. Half the announcements declare with pride that inner Bangkok has escaped flooding. What disinformation. Inner Bangkok hasnt escaped flooding in the nicest interpretation of the word. It has survived by browbeating the communities outside the barriers. It has survived by condemning others to immersion. Finally it has survived by empty promises to other people. The headline should be

Inner Bangkok survives through deceit and self concern.

An interesting observation by Shizuyo Sata in the above article that out of 34 million workers in Thailand only 9 million are registered, most lacking both TU representation and protection.

And the authorities target farangs without work permits. But of course faranges can afford the fines.

Sounds more Freudian to me.

Thats quite funny.

I suspect that Yingluk's US education permitted her to learn deliberate substitutions ( nasturtium for aspersion, what can I do you for?, etc). Switching 'overcome' for 'welcome' could well be a calling card for an attractive woman!

As with the red shirt protests, I wish the Western media would <deleted> and stop scaring away tourists with their panic-style journalism. It wasn't the protests or the floods themselves that made tourist numbers drop, it was the Western media's style of reporting events that had and have no effect on tourism. The TAT should contact the British foreign office and get them to slap a D-notice on the desk of every national newspaper, or at least dull-down their scare-mongering.

Sounds like you have a business interest that relies on tourists. Most other farangs would like to see the tourists stay away as there will be more of Thailand life for us.

Its a bit late to try and change the basic underlying philosophy of the media.Gossip and bad news sells newspapers. Maybe the original poster supports the government and Governor of BKK in their denials and obfustications.

Most of the flood-related deaths have been a result of drowning or electrocution, according to relief agencies, and there are no epidemic-related warnings to date.

http://blogs.wsj.com...the-floods-yet/

No epidemic related warnings yet...........So it really is potentially serious. The Thai governments have notoriously denied things until forced to confirm them.

Well a bottle of Leo has gone up 3 baht in the last weeek, hows that for stqrters, and I am in Chom Bury.

The market forces normally apply so that prices rise until someone comes in and undercuts. Once price deflation starts then things stabilise. Unfortunately the Thai system is mainly to copy and thereby ring the market. Many small businesses (!) price to match their needs so if the customer base falls away they put up the prices to ensure a consistent income. Again this can only continue until someone breaks the trend and cuts prices. If the market can support the prices then they will not come down.

People who complain about prices should be the ones who should try running a business and see if they can survive on the absurdly low profit margins. In restaurants near me the beer mark up is 10 baht per bottle. They need to sell 30 bottles just to pay one member of staff. A business unit in Phuket cost 60,000baht, one rollerdoor, per month last time I asked.

But i thought we were told it would all be over by the beginning of november,not long ago ?

The BMA reported that 494,893 people in 12 Bangkok districts have been affected by the floods caused by northern runoff.

Why does he say northern runoff. The alternative is rising sea levels so his language is subtly trying to attribute blame to the northern provinces thereby deflecting management incompetence.

On another thaivisa blog today Bhumipol Dam is releasing another 12 million tons of water to keep river levels up for the imminent boat racing festivals!!!! I guess that is northern runoff.

We are also told the water levels in Bangkok will recede if northern runoff stops. Has he said this in full knowledge of the Bhumipol dam boat race scenario?

Only in Thailand

The good Pol General knows where the overcharging is taking place (from complaints??) and has obviously reacted accordingly. No charges laid, but a fair percentage of the profits appropriated.

Next we wil have the pattaya jet ski crowd coming in....

"violation of the Prices of Goods and Services Act, BE 2542, for overcharging face sentences of seven years in jail and/or fines of up to Bt140,000, Piya said."

Oh yea protect Thai people shopping. What about protecting the tourists. Apply this Goods and services act to the Pattaya jetski scams in Pattaya