majhiggins

You cannot GET a WP to work for a foreign country remotely in-Thailand, unless that remote work is work performed in Thailand and has a physical work address. Work permits are intended to regulate foreigners' access to Thai jobs. Unless it is a Thai company or the foreign company for which you do business is in Thailand, a work permit is not only not required, it is un-obtainable. Of course, you'll  never be able to get a Non-O work visa through foreign employment like that either. 

All of us who have been here a while know the lay of the land. I've been here 16 years. But do you ever consider what a pickle Thailand would be in without the "back-hander"? There are literally whole sectors of the work force, cops, immigration and even teachers, who simply could not afford to live teir established lifestyle were they required to get by on just their official salary. Corruption is so embedded that if you ask the average Thai what is and is not a corrupt action, they are unlikely to spot even half of the corruption. Everybody gets the "you got stopped by the cops driving when you were drunk" so you paid 2000-3000 baht to them to let you go, but many don't realize that the envelope with 5000-10,000 baht that you present to the admissions official at a reputable public school for your child to get in is even a bribe. 

There are more varients emerging. Sinovac is about 50% effective against the original virus, if you have had two shots. But I have heard that the conferred immunity only last about 6-months for sinovac and 9 months for sinopharm. (also about 50%) effective. So there is a compound problem that new varients that the Chinese vacs are even less effective against are spreading and the originally vaccinated people will start coming out of that 6-9 month window. Kind of like the crew who scrapes the Eiffel tower works year round because by the time they have repainted the whole thing, it's time to start over and repaint what they did a year ago. 

 

Add onto that the very odd situation of Bangkok being so huge and densely populated, even if 50% of BKK residents had a Chinese shot which is 50% effective, that's only 25% with immunity. And since BKK is full of people from all over Thailand who come and go for work, BKK will continue to be a Petri dish of COVID and the transient workers will continue to carry it back to the far-flung corners of the country.

 

Even if 100% of the country (70-million) had the Chinese vaccine, it would still be a bad situation because 50% protected could only snuff out COVID if people didn't move about the country. This is going to be what we are looking at a year from now. People getting it and recovering with immunity may end up playing a larger role in the halting of COVID in Thailand than their feeble vaccination efforts.

I work for a Thai school and they have been trying to get all of their new teachers vaccinated for months. Suddenly this urgent notice came tht we would all be eligible for Sinopharm shots at a local mall on Friday. Yes, the shots were all sinovac or sinopharm, excepting those lucky few who were able to privately obtain Moderna or Pfizer on their own. So to me, this smacks of a sham "mass-vaccination" to create a headline. A much better piece of information might be "How many people will receive shots on Monday?".

I'm surprised they've never started charging us a fee to process our 90-day checkins!

Especially with all the retired expats spending their entire pension and savings right here in the kingdom. It's part of the love/hate thing they have with us. They need us for our money and skills but also find us to be handy scapegoats. I'm hardly someone to talk. As an American, this sounds like an idea from Donald Trump.

Police became suspicious when he was observed refusing a bribe.

"Sprawling" as if implying this is a recent and rapidly spreading outbreak? It is an aspect of Thai culture as ingrained and totally normal and accepted as tuk-tuks, temples and rice farms. It's not viewed as sinful or shameful or degrading to women. In fact, a large part of Issan's economy relies on working girls sending big money back to mom and dad on the farm. While it exists here to some small extent, Thai prostitution seldom involves enslavement, human trafficing or forced drug dependence. I't also is, for better or worse one of the key attractions of Thailand for eestern tourists.

Wrong on every point, it is regarded as shameful, it' s the money that's not, and it is not a mainstay of Issan economy however much the users of prostitutes like to fantasize that it is, thus justifying their paying for sex.

Where did I ever say mainstay of the Issan economy? I've luved here for 11 years so don't talk down to me like I'm a repeat tourist in Pattaya. As far as saying "it is regarded as shameful" consider the farmer in Roi Et with 2 grown daughters. One marries a farmer and together they have just enough money to get by. The other goes down to Pattaya and starts selling services. She sends 5000 a month back to mom and dad who, despite the fact that she told them she was a waitress have a pretty good idea what's really going on. In Thai culture which daughter is the hero of the family and making merir the most?

"Sprawling" as if implying this is a recent and rapidly spreading outbreak? It is an aspect of Thai culture as ingrained and totally normal and accepted as tuk-tuks, temples and rice farms. It's not viewed as sinful or shameful or degrading to women. In fact, a large part of Issan's economy relies on working girls sending big money back to mom and dad on the farm. While it exists here to some small extent, Thai prostitution seldom involves enslavement, human trafficing or forced drug dependence. I't also is, for better or worse one of the key attractions of Thailand for eestern tourists.

Contrast this with the earlier story of a little girl savagely bitten on head and face by somebody's pet and the police can do nothing towards the dog or owner because he made a paltry cash payment to the desparate father, a payment less than 1/3 of her medical bills, yet we throw out the dragnet for the taxi driver even though the video doesn't immediately indicate that he was either trying to hurt the dog or that the dog was seriously injured. God, people. Get your priorities straight!

Not nearly as horrific or obviously cruel as the headline leads one to believe.

The radio signal itself couldn't cause the fire. That urban legend was debunked 10-15 years ago. Hinkey batteries have been known to catch on fire in phones but to cause a gasoline fire the phone would have to be in a confined space saturated with fumes, like inside the motorbike. This is just an amazing confluence of circumstances that has caused a scare about a nearly non-existent risk being flagged as a serious problem as a guise to make some government department seem proactive about safety. Thais, particularly in the hot weather, seldom turn off their engines while refueling since it means loss of A/C and music. A running engine is a heck of a lot more potential risk for starting a fire. Unless you are surrounded by clouds of gas fumes so strong your eyes are running, you are not in a concentration strong enough to ignite. Also, while the spark and flame from a lighter can cause sufficiently high gas fume concentrations to ignite, the ember on a cigar or cigarette cannot light gasoline. You can put out burning cigarettes in a bucket of gasoline all day with no fire. That urban myth of lighting gas with a cigarette ember is alive and well thanks to movies and TV.

Wait until the property bubble bursts here. Currently more than 35% of residential property is vacant, yet prices keep going up and up and they keep building completely un-needed properties that people buy as investments, despite the fact that very few Thais could afford to actually buy these over-inflated homes to live in. The banks, meanwhile list the property loans at full loan value as assetts. In the USA, a housing crisis is generally defined as 6% of housing vacant for over 6 months. Here houses sometimes take years to sell. What happens when this inconvenient truth comes to light? Well, most of the banks fail and literally millions if Thais whose income it directly or indirectly tied to the construction industry are suddenly unemployed and unemployable. Nothing makes an economic climate go from fat dumb and happy to near violent panic like a huge swathe of the workforce suddenly becoming unemployed. If you don't think such a radical turnaround could happen in the land of smiles, just study-up a bit on our closest, both geographically and culturally, neighboring countries, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. This place is a powder keg!

Gonna take a hell of a lot more than nasal inhalers to get this populace to wake-up.

The posts mostly miss the main point. You can "arm-chair-quarterback", as we Americans say about ambiguous decisions, but at the root of it all, how uncertain was this verdict? Not a doubt in my mind since this case was broken. And that should strike fear into all of us living here. If the verdict 'needs' to be X, you can rest assured that that is what the verdict will be. We weren't there and didn't participate in the trial but I really don't think there is anyone who is shocked or surprised by the outcome. Time to retire the phrase "Amazing Thailand". If you've lived here for more than a year or two and these actions still "amaze" you, you probably haven't been paying much attention! I made a conscious decision at about my 4-year mark to try and avoid prefacing any observations I have with the phrase "I can't believe that......". I've been here 10 yrs. I'de believe just about anything.

If America is the capital of cold blooded murder then Thailand is the capital of hot blooded murder. Thais are remarkably thin skinned and the culture is geared toward supressing conflict so that even minor slights to image or masculinity can rapidly escallate to murderous rage with no regard to consequences. Just look at all of the road rage videos on youtube. Be wary. Many Thais can go from "I don't like what you said/did." to "I must kill you for what you said/did." in very short order. I wish the culture could learn to voice complaints openly and early in order to blow off steam instead of holding everything in untill explosion is the result. I've even seen this in grade school kids over the 10 years I've lived here.

One childhood lesson they definitely don't teach in Thailand, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.". In fact, you're less likely to be jailed for assault and battery than for saying something defamatory against a Thai govt. employee.

Since almost all the video games here are pirated off the internet directly or burned onto illegal DVDs and sold in markets, how is anybody going to even know this system exists?

Guess something can be done about this. Thai girls have good teeth

So why do they need those awful braces?

No.1 Braces are expensive so they are flashing wealth with their smile.

No. 2 Thais never question what doctors or dentists tell them to do. So getting yiu or your kids into braces is like a license to print money. Ask any Thai with braces when they will get them off and you will almost surely hear "I don't know.". That is infiomation the dentist would not volunteer and the Thai patient would never ask.

In America, kids get braces around age 14 and they usually have them off in 2 or 3 years. Here I see people who gave their braces 8-10 years. I also teach in an upper crust all-girl public high school (big envelope reqd.for admission) and almost half my students have braces, including many with perfectly straight and un-gapped teeth.

If you're a farang teacher and you have a 4-inch dick can you get a waiver for a teacher's license? (I'm asking for a friend.)

On the bright side, no matter what the books are being altered to say, it's still just a subject that will be taught in the Thai schools and any farang English teacher who has ever had an honest talk with a Thai teacher around exam time would know that the kids' grades in Thai history, and almost all other subjects, are just as poor as their English grades. The average Thai student is no more likely to learn or retain this creative history than they are English! Highest GDP % spent on education but lowest aptitude scores. Do you know any Thais who can tell you much at all about history or government right now?

Pity the rest of the expat population don't have the cojones to do the same. It might make the Thais buck up their ideas of service. Buddha help them when Asean comes into force and the Phillipino's join the workforce.

ASEAN won't happen, the Thais will revolt at the mass flight of jobs to the Filipinos. I really don't think they realise what they've been signed up for.

It's nothing like the EU as the countries were initially on the same economic level as each other. ASEAN has in contrast has massive economic disparity.

I agree. ASEAN started in 1969 in an effort to prevent SE Asian countries from becoming the Mexican sweat shops for the Japanese and Americans, and eventually the Koreans and the Chinese. They could only negotiate like a big country if they negotiated with the world collectively. The dynamics of the region have changed greatly since then. Brunei certainly doesn't need ASEAN, with its oil wealth and religious extremism. Burma is kind of a poisoned pill for the other countries, who generally enjoy good relations with the west and Thailand would have to actually drop the act that they are complying with the English language requirements and admit that they are far far from being in-line with ASEAN guidelines. Thailand certainly hires a lot of foreign experts in fields ranging from medicine to engineering to teaching English but it has been my experience that just because they have hired outside expertise, they refuse to take expert advice from a non-Thai. How are they going to accept trade and labor policies that come from a governing body where Thailand is only 1 out of 9 nations developing those policies? Worst of all, they would have to drop their super-protectionist policies and openly compete on a level playing field. I see either a rolling string of ASEAN implementation delays or an outright re-think of the whole treaty and possible abandonment.

I know it's all 'rumors' and 'allegations' now but that's how it began for Lance Armstrong as well. Wouldn't want to see anybody go down for a false molestation charge but on the other hand, I'd love Cliff Richard to get arrested for something!

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Bravo Karen! You hit the nail right on the head. I've got an MBA and I have been shaking my head for the last 8 years that none of the 'laws' of free market economics seem to apply here. I've read estimates that over 30% of all residential housing is vacant. Probably higher now because there is a huge building boom now for houses that will never be lived in and apartments that will never be rented. In America, a vacancy rate over 6% equates to a collapse in the housing market and values. The average house here is so expensive compared to the average Thai wage that housing costs are proportionally higher for Thais than for people living in Manhattan or London. Yet house after house sits vacant. 8 year old used cars sit unsold on car lots with price tags that are over 80% of what those vehicles cost new. It is an amazing place!