GroveHillWanderer

Having checked with a Thai speaker, it appears ปืนแก๊ป refers to an old-fashioned traditional kind of long-barrelled, home-made gun. Here's an example of one from a Thai website.

I was also puzzled by the reference to a "cap gun." Google Translate renders the original Thai phrase as "gas gun" but I'm still none the wiser. Anyone know what kind of gun they're really talking about?

No, it's a contraction of the word "Mussulman" which comes from the Persian adjective meaning "of or related to the Muslim faith."

No, just factual. The Soviet Union and Russia are two different things. Equating them is like saying for instance, that Croatia is the same thing as Yugoslavia - or that Bangladesh is the same thing as Pakistan. Just because a country was once part of a bigger entity, does not mean each component of the dissolved country is equivalent to the former whole.

I have no reason to believe the video is a fake but all it provides evidence of is one fire with one vehicle. It is not evidence of "tons" of vehicles catching fire. As the statement from the US National Fire Protection Association in the link from @Lacessitputs it, such fires, although possible, are "not a common occurrence." As the article also points out the person making the claim is someone with no expertise in firefighting. He's a restaurateur-turned-politician who, as the state's CFO, gets the title of state fire marshal only because the state's organisational structure puts the fire marshal office under the CFO.

How do you know it's not representative? Did you personally review the participants? Also, it is statistically significant because as any statistician will tell you, a properly conducted survey with a random selection of 1,000 people, gives a 95% chance of coming within about 3% of the true figure for the total population. There's not really that much point in going higher because it only reduces the margin of error very slightly. As the article below about sampling size error puts it: Margin of sampling error (MOSE)

The way the article reads, he was not sacked or dismissed from the police force, only dismissed, "from his post as spokesman."

Is that actually aimed at me? My post was not in any way critical of Biden. Perhaps you were meaning to reply to the post that implied this wasn't Biden's idea? That was @proton, not me

Yeah, I'm not saying it was a bad thing, just that it didn't actually free anyone who was still in prison.

Nobody was freed. The pardon only applied at the federal level and there was no-one in federal prison for simple marijuana possession at the time the pardon was issued. All it did was vacate some historical convictions.

If the BYD E3 were available in Thailand for 558,000 Baht, that would be quite something - I somehow doubt it is though.

It was released in 2002, so very possibly.

I agree with a lot of what people have said about the IO asking questions to establish the visitor's bona fides for entry but I'm struggling to see the relevance of having Thai friends, to a person's eligibility to enter the country. For instance, would having Thai friends be seen as a qualifying or disqualifying factor for entry?

Point of pedantry - it's not a high speed line, just a dual track line. Journeys will be slightly quicker because trains can pass each other anywhere, instead of only in stations but the speed of the trains themselves won't be any faster than what it is now.

Could you PM me the info for the Insurance company and policy you used? I'd be most grateful.

Not for someone playing in the 1960's - 70's (which is probably when he was playing, given his age). When Kevin Keegan signed for Liverpool in 1971 he was getting a basic wage of £50 a week. And that's for one of England's best players at one of England's top clubs. Somebody playing at Coventry and Shrewsbury would have been getting considerably less. The era of footballers earning more than the average worker didn't start till the 80's or 90's, with the influx of foreign players. And footballer's careers can be incredibly short - most are lucky to get as long as 15 years at the top level. Even if this guy played for that long (and we don't know that he did) he wouldn't have amassed much of a nest egg with the wages they got back then.

I don't think that's right. I came in on a non-immigrant O-A visa and after several years of doing retirement extensions, I switched to marriage extensions precisely because I didn't want to have to change my health insurance policy just to get outpatient cover (which I think is unnecessary and way over-expensive). In my experience, and as confirmed by multiple other posters on here (including UbonJoe) when doing an extension of stay based on marriage there is no requirement to show proof of health insurance, even if you originally had a non immigrant O-A visa.

Edit: There is also what's known as the"combination method" where you have some money on deposit and some in monthly income, adding up to the required yearly total. However that's often heavily discouraged by Immigration themselves and as far as I can tell, few people actually use it.

If you look at the actual printed (official) requirements on that paper, it clearly says: The scribblings below appear to be some kind of attempt to explain the monthly income method (although they do so almost completely wrongly) but in any event, as the printed text clearly states, the income method is just one of two alternatives. It's either the money on deposit OR a monthly income, but not both.

The article talks about, "20 baht banknotes with the Thai numeral not matching the Arabic one ..." This means the Thai numeral does not match the Arabic numeral. There is a difference between what we in the west call "Arabic numerals" and the numerals used in most Arabic-speaking countries nowadays. These are the numbers known as "Arabic numerals" in the west: 1234567890 They were called Arabic numerals to differentiate them from Roman numerals such as I, II, III, IV, V etc and were based on early versions of Arabic numerals such as the ones shown below from the 10th century. The numerals used in Arabic countries gradually changed under the influence of Hindi numerals into the ones used in Arabic countries today (which are the ones in the image you posted).

To use a foodbank, in virtually all cases, you need a referral from an authorized entity such as your local Citizens Advice centre, a social worker, your child's school or your local authority. After an interview process where they check your circumstances, you can be issued with a food voucher which will get you a food parcel sufficient for about 3 days. You can't just walk in and take food as and when you want, that's not how it works. See additional info below from Citizen's Advice UK. Using a food bank (Bolding added automatically by the site software, not me).

Yes, all the cases that reached court were dismissed by the judges hearing them, virtually all of them precisely because none of the complainants could produce even the slightest shred of evidence. When no evidence is offered to substantiate a complaint (and it wasn't) then a judge has no choice but to dismiss it. Only one of the election fraud cases reached the Supreme Court (the one where Texas was trying to invalidate results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and it was dismissed for lack of standing. As the Supreme Court ruling clearly stated:

Items bought outside of Thailand deteriorate in just the same way as those bought here. My computer, various containers, bags, suitcases, pairs of trainers etc that we have brought from outside Thailand have all suffered the same sort of deterioration mentioned by others above.

As is often the case it varied according to where you were. Here in Hua Hin we were able to register for vaccination in mid '21 (not sure if it was May or June but I got my first vaccination in June) just using your passport. They issued everyone with a dummy 13-digit ID number as part of the registration process. That number still appears on all my vaccination records.

One individual anecdote does not outweigh the statistics gathered from 10’s of thousands of people. Multiple studies have shown that the vaccinated, taken as an overall group (and not on an individual basis) are still less likely to contract Covid than the unvaccinated - even with Omicron. As stated in the FactCheck.org article below: Vaccinated People Not More Susceptible to COVID-19 Than Unvaccinated