PurpleNote

Before anybody starts to throw the rather unoriginal comments about not getting married . . . where's a good place to buy an engagement ring in Thailand? Nothing insane. Just a nice stone in a farang gold setting (Thai gold is way too soft to set a precious stone in . . . actually, it's too soft for a ring in general).

I only ask because I haven't spent too much time in Thai gold shops but from what I can see they tend to specialize in Thai gold. Necklaces, bracelets, etc. I want to know where one would go to get a decent quality diamond in a farang quality setting here in BKK.

Any suggestions?

First off, allow me to clarify and say that the video is not intended for tourism purposes. It has nothing to do with Thailand other than I happen to be here and finding attractive Thai models/actresses seems a lot easier than say Swedish bombshells in Bangkok. I'm not attempting to portray Thailand in any light positive or negative anymore than Cathrine Zeta Jones portrayed Wales positively/negatively in the Mask of Zorro.

I guess to be perfectly clear, the idea is to shoot these videos and host them on a website. People who want to learn about gambling could come and watch a few free videos but if they want access to the entire collection they would need to register. Currently there are tons of people who pay to watch some 150kg gambling expert teach them about the games. The idea was to basically teach the same exact thing except using eye-candy.

And since gambling isn't legal in Thailand the audience isn't people in Thailand and thus wouldn't be marketed here. In fact, it wouldn't be marketed in any jurisdiction where gambling isn't legal.

I'm thinking that it sounds like I could probably shoot this without any sort of government red tape as long as it never caught the eye of the Thai authorities. Because technically I don't think anyone would ever be able to prove where it was shot since it will be all interior scenes. Though for a few extra baht it might be worth flying someone over to Macau for a weekend and shooting it there.

Considering the trouble that the producers of Big Trouble in Tourist Thailand have recently gotten themselves into showing gun-toting jet-ski operators I was hoping someone might be able to shed some light for me on what things I need to be concerned about possibly shooting some video in Thailand.

My idea was to get some Thai models with decent English skills to do instructional videos for a very male dominated audience. The gals would be given a script and would only need to read the script and act flirty and sexy. No nudity. Nothing naughty. Just good old fashioned using attractive looking women acting seductively to help sell a product.

My first problem is what they would be giving instruction on is playing gambling games. Obviously gambling in Thailand is illegal but no gambling would be taking place in the videos. They would simply be describing how to play the games. And the audience would not be aimed at anyone living in Thailand. Rather it would be for people living in countries where gambling is legal.

So, I've got two initial issues:

1. Do I need any sort of special authorization to film such a thing in Thailand?

2. Would Thai actresses/models describing how to play gambling games be illegal?

From there, I would obviously need releases and such. Anybody have any advice on where to go for releases in Thai? Or do they even need to be in Thai is the actress/model speaks English? Are there any special clauses that should be included in a Thai release form?

I know that's a lot but perhaps someone has some experience in this area and can offer some insight.

Well actually I did my military stint in a war zone many years ago, so been there see that and got the T-shirt....oh so brave of you..."If I was 20 years younger".... , another keyboard warrior

It's actually not keyboard warrior at all. I'm past the max age to do a tour in the military (technically, I could have done my 20 years and be retired military by now) so employment prospects for me would be pretty slim. So all I can do is speculate what I might be willing to do. And at that age, at that time in my life, I would been all for it. Especially if I would have served a combat tour making peanuts and been offered to do the same thing as I had already done but for 3x the money.

To be honest, I'm not a macho guy at all. And I didn't say any of this to sound macho. But not everybody views serving in a war zone something that you should try to avoid at all costs. I was responding to those who saying that the chance of getting shot didn't make any amount of money worth it. I'm just trying to convey the mindset of a lot of other people who are still young enough to go do the job and the way I felt when I was their age.

Personally, I prefer Vonage. I've lived in Europe and now live in Thailand and have kept my US phone number. My friends from back home can call me regular US number and not pay a dime over normal charges to call me. I also got a virtual UK number so my contacts in Europe can call me and only pay the cost of calling London. Plus I got the Asia package for $10 a month so I can call several countries in Asia using the same phone for unlimited calls.

I think (too lazy to check) I pay $29.99 for the basic unlimited calling plan on Vonage, plus $10 a month for a UK phone number, and another $10 for the Asia package. I might drop the Asia package as now I'm living in Thailand and really have no need to call here from my Vonage account. So for $49 a month I have a US and UK phone number that my friends and business contacts can call me on without incurring long distance charges and I can call them and talk for as long as I want for free. Oh, and unlike Skype, I have a regular telephone handset (I know you can buy a Skype handset but I can use ANY handset). I've actually taken my Vonage box with me to hotels and just plugged everything in, unhooked the hotel's room phone and plugged it into the Skype box, and it's like being back home.

The general concensus seems to be that even if I let her crash the business and then I reacquire it, I will still have problems with her, even if I am not physically at the hotel, (and I would have to stay away because of my existing job and because if I was there, then she would make big problems for me!).

Exactly. If you own it she will feel connected to it. It's one thing if it goes under and some stranger buys it. Even a crazy person understands that their ass will be thrown in jail for messing with the business. But if her ex-husband owns the place then it's an open invite to try to assert some control over you and the hotel. She knows you'll give her some leeway because of your past relationship and when she wears that out she knows the coppers will treat her gently because she'll try to frame it as a domestic dispute rather than the blatant trespassing that it actually is.

First off, there aren't that many SF and SAS guys to go around so prior military experience (preferably sometime recent) would open up a lot of possibilities. Plus you have to look at the alternatives. Sure, some oil rig monkey who clears $100K a year to work in Saudi Arabia isn't going to get out of bed for that kind of money but think about some twenty-something year old kid who just served two tours in Iraq, has seen shitloads of combat, and got is sorry butt out of the army and is back home in the US with 9.5% unemployment staring down the barrel of a $30,000 a year job. hel_l, even that's a step up for him since he was only making $22,000 when he was in the service. But it don't pay the bills and put food on the table. What exactly is your marketable skill when you took the huge signup bonus and went infantry? You're qualified for construction work or some other form of physical labor . . . oh, except the housing boom is kaput and nobody is building houses anymore.

Plus not everybody is a complete pussy. :-) Sorry for being so blunt there but shave 20 years off my current age and I might do it. I did a military tour in my teens and volunteered for several hot (high potential for combat) assignments. When you train to be a soldier it's like brainwashing. For some people it turns them into adrenaline junkies. You go do a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan and then go home and you feel totally disconnected. People don't understand what you've been through. They can't comprehend what you've seen. So you feel like nobody really understands you . . . except for your old army buddies and other vets. So the chance to make $85K a year and be back around people who "get it" might have some allure.

And as has been pointed out, there are tons of other jobs too. Everything from cooks to PX store employees. When you say "military contractor" everybody conjures up these images of Black Water dudes but the vast, vast majority are sitting way behind the walls of the green zone and seldom see anything even close to resembling danger.

Any idea what an unlocked 3GS iPhone will cost in Bangkok? I'm in Germany right now and I've heard that Italy sells fully unlocked phones so I might pick it up here depending on how much they cost in BKK.

Not sure what it will set you back price-wise but I just bought a 3G at MBK about 2 months ago and all the instruction manuals and such were in Italian. I asked for a Hong Kong unlocked and when I saw the manuals I asked the guy about it and he said it was same-same since both countries have to sell them unlocked. So, no matter how you look at it, I'm pretty sure buying it in Italy is going to be much cheaper than having someone send one from Italy to Bangkok with who know's how many middle-men making a small cut.

As for the side debate going on about whether or not the phone is as good as other phones . . . I agree that it comes down to interface and ease of use. Personally I rarely use a phone for taking pictures unless absolutely necessary. I'm not going to be snapping off photos of a friend's wedding on any phone. I have a dSLR or 7MP point and shoot for that kind of stuff. Everything else on the iPhone though seems to be on par with other phones (I also don't use MMS so that's not even a consideration).

And as someone else said, I now use my phone far more often than I ever used any other phone. I never played a game on my Nokia or Blackberry other than something simple like Tetris. Before my iPhone I hated SMS because I had to triple or quadruple click keys on my other phone (except, of course, my Blackberry). I've gotten so used to the keyboard I can crank out emails just as quickly as I used to on my Blackberry and I almost never find myself leaving home without my digital leash.

In other words, I not only get more utility out of the iPhone than I have out of other phones but I use it more often which makes me more (and sometimes less) productive. So for me the iPhone is a win. Others who want a high-quality camera or other features that iPhone doesn't excel at might not feel the same way but it works for me.

That is the same way it was for me when I first purchased a Mac. I had been either a Windows or Linux user for many, many years. But when I went to go buy a new laptop I ended up forking out the extra cash for a Mac just to give OS X a try (I had worked on previous versions of the Mac OS and was not impressed). Two years later when I found that my MacBook wasn't fast enough anymore I went with a MacBook Pro rather than a PC. Again, same as the iPhone it just seems so much more intuitive. Especially the *nix foundation as I've been around Unix and Linux for years.

I'm not one of those people who gets into religious wars between Mac and PC but I have to say that since I've started using Apple products I do find the interface to my technology to be much more simple. And once I got over the hurdle of wanting to control the machine instead of using it for the task at hand I have been much happier.

Some people will love the iPhone. Some will hate it. I'm no fan-boy of any platform but for the day to day stuff in my life, Apple got this product just right.

I hate these kinds of threads because the end up getting dragged down into a lot of side debate rather than discussing the real issue. I applaud those who have posted some researched facts rather than the absurd claims of the OP.

I like what one of the posters said (sorry it was a few pages back and I'm lazy) about asking a girl if she's willing to go sans condom and running if she suggest she is. I've asked that question jokingly to several women and have yet to receive a single positive response. Maybe I'm the exception and certainly my datapoint here is anecdotal but unless you're picking up the yabba heads in Nana parking lot or off Sukhumvit at 5am most of the girls I've run into don't fly that way. In fact, a lot of the gals I know carry their own supply of condoms just in case they get back to the room with some guy who pulls the "Oh, I don't have any condoms" scam on them. Again anecdotal but I can't see how you can justify those numbers simply by guesstimating them.

Also when you take the HIV/AIDS rate for the entire populace and try to extrapolate anything from there you're going to run into a lot of problems. First of which is that as others have pointed out - yes, many infants are infected. So are many children under 13. The most egregious oversight though is that there is not attempt made at segregating farang/Thai prostitution and Thai/Thai prostitution. Based on all sorts of speculative numbers from NGOs to official government agencies the number of sex workers in Thailand is roughly 2 million. Meanwhile the number of sex workers servicing farang customers is estimated to be between 100,000 - 200,000. While this doesn't change the overall math of your chances of becoming infected it again proves you can't take the stats for the entire population and extrapolate them any way you see fit.

Also worthy of note is that HIV infection is especially high in Thai men who frequent prositutes and have unprotected sex which would actually suggest that the problem is more prone to Thai/Thai prostitution where Thai men may insist on not using a condom. If farang men were contracting HIV infections at the rate that Thai men are I'm sure with our small representation here in the LOS it would be viewed an a mini-epidemic.

And has also been pointed out the OP gets a big fat F in statistics/probability by compounding the risk factor. If you flip a coin 100 times and it comes up heads 100 times it's still 50/50 to come up tails on the 101'st flip.

Lastly, and I don't mean this to make light of anything but, NGOs and many of the people who report these numbers only get more funding if they can make the problem they've set out to resolve sound scary. There was an article on the Stickman site about a guy who actually did some investigation into child prostitution in Cambodia. The NGOs claim it is a massive problem (and it is) and have billboards in English up all over warning of the penalties of having sex with underage boys/girls. I've seen it myself there too. It's even in the tourist map you get at every hotel and in the airport. A pair of handcuffs warning that it's a serious crime. Well, the only problem is that when he asked the police how big of a problem it was with westerners they told him that had very few complaints and only a handful of arrests each year. The vast majority of people arrested for having sex with underage boys/girls were Cambodian.

But what gets donars to fork over cash; Cambodia on Cambodian/Laos/Vietnamese underage sex or dirty, evil westerners coming over and defiling Cambodia? It's obvious it's the later. So that's the angle they push to keep getting funded and that's why they market so heavily at westerners while the problem gets almost no funding to stop the majority of the underage sex.

That's why I said I hate posts like this. I'm not defending unprotected sex. I'm not defending child prostitution. But you can't simply let people lie and make up numbers because the ends justify the means. If someone took 100 baht for every post in this thread and gave it to a charity that was doing outreach to Thai/Thai prostitutes they would be achieving far more than worrying about whether or not some girl from the Tilac Bar is going to spring a hemorage and rub her blood on an open wound and give you HIV.

Posts like this, while well intended, ultimately end up doing more harm than good. The supposed facts are shot down for being flimsy, made up, or mind-numblingly poorly constructed and it has the potential to lead some to believe that the chances of catching HIV are sufficiently low enough that they can party without a hat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But instead of real facts and figures this entire thread has become about tearing down the well intention though fateally flawed assertions of the OP.

And since I just helped tear down some of his assertions I'm as guilty as anyone else. That's why I hate these threads. :-)

I've recently moved to Thailand and will soon begin looking for either employment or to get involved in some sort of business venture. My background is in software development management and online marketing.

I've been involved in the online space since the early 1990's. In the past I've built websites for Fortune 500 clients and was the Director of Software Development at a dotcom company that went from 30 to 1200 employees and $700K to $180 million in turn over in a span of only two years.

While my career in technology has always involved senior level positions heading up development teams, I do have a good mind for business. In fact, before getting into technology I worked in the marketing of financial services so in many ways the business mentality is in my genes but technology is something I enjoy.

On the tech side I have all the usual certifications. Project Management Professional, Six Sigma Greenbelt, SCRUM Project Owner, etc.

During the last four or five years I specialized in online gaming in an extremely competitive vertical (gambling). In the online gaming sector my responsibilities shifted from the tech side to the marketing and operational side. I ran the company's largest product which generated approx $250 - $300 million a year in revenue.

I have a top-notch reputation in both the technology and online gaming industries. For anyone who is serious about a joint venture or has an exciting job opportunity PM me and I'll send you my personal info which you can Google to confirm.

I guess the question that begs to be answered is why did I move to Thailand? I think it's the typical story of boy comes to Thailand to scuba dive, boy falls in love with the place, boy starts coming to Thailand 3 or 4 times a year on holiday, boy finally gets up the nerve to move here.

I have no illusions about Thailand being a mystical place where everything is perfect. I've visited here enough times to have a realistic view of what Thailand has (or doesn't have) to offer and I still prefer it to the West.

On the employment side, ideally I would like to find a position that involves growing the company and driving revenues. Something on the product development or online marketing side would be a good fit.

On the joint venture side, well, that's sort of the beauty of the online realm, it could be just about anything.

Again, if that sounds like it fits with what someone is looking for, please feel free to PM me so we can discuss in more detail.