Johpa

It is hard to get overly excited about loanwords when linguists are still arguing, arguing being one of their favorite pastimes, over where to place the Tai languages amongst the major language family groups.

C'mon man, it's a paper mill. Seems to be run by people who got some of their higher degrees from paper mills too, Check out some of these alma maters:

http://ic.payap.ac.th/

What is good about Payap though, is that they do have some knock out looking girls attending there.

Well I don't know if he is still the president of Phayap or has retired by now, but Dr. Amnuay received his PhD from a respected American university and whenever I met him he came across as a most dedicated educator.

Phayap was always a very good 4 year college, with a lesser pedigree at attaining university status. Not being a government school, not a Royally supported university, it was not in the same class (nor could it lay claim if it was) as the big three (Thamma, Chula, and CMU) but Phayap's undergraduate program is, for better or worse, right there with the other better 4-year institutions in the Kingdom.

Maybe I just don't get it with these models, and my eyes are fine, but they just aren't all that attractive for me. There is a "super model" in the US with her own TV talk show, Tyra Banks, and I think she looks like the spawn of RuPaul and the Borg Queen.

On the AUA course I took we covered the 'ng' sound by going through a routine repeating the words 'coming on' over and over gradually separating into 'comi...ngon" through, as I remember it to "comi....ng....on". It worked for me to the astonishment of many Thais I spoke to. Pity the rest of the course didn't go so well.

My Thai professor in college just let us choke on the /ng/ intial consonant for the entire first year, but we all sort of got it with enough practice. Another good phonetic gymnastic feat for native English speakers is to try to get a Welsh double L /ll/ (back L) as a syllable initial consonant. Again it it a common syllable final consonant in English, so with some effort you can say "Lloyd" correctly.

To keep up the news report standards of Thaivisa I feel more pics are required.

As requested.

"Now be a good boy and do as you're told!"

This picture is for information and educational purposes only!

That is one ugly Thai woman :D

Rest assured that Thai tone marks are indeed Arabic numerals, shifted about ninety degrees, and that the Thai names for those numerals have what should be very recognizable Indo-European roots to even the most obtuse native English speakers.

The mis-placed persons or whatever term.. are certainly not welcomed anymore in FRESNO, CALIFORNIA USA..

And what about all the poor souls who still have little choice but to reside in Fresno?

What, in your opinions, would be the reason for so many very high priced hotels being built during this past year or so, while the occupancy has been low in all hotels for the past several years? This is something I've been pondering for quite some time. There must be some reasoning behind all this growth; something that's coming but not here yet that would spur so many different resort consortiums to invest this kind of money. It's certainly not a lack of available rooms at the moment.

These days, the majority of tourists visiting Chiang Mai are Asian, and the largest percentage of them, Thai. They aren't staying at the Four Seasons or the Cheddi. So why are the big hotel chains spending millions of baht building more hotels?

The Fly Fisherman

My guess, and it is entirely speculative, is that the large international hotel chains invested up in Chiang Mai for the same reason their chief Thai representative would but a Thailand Elite card, to get into the good graces of the ex-Prime Minister, who was planning a new large airport up north to serve as the gateway to the expected masses of Chinese tourists.

Just refusing to play the game and liberalise the investment potential of Thailand. The new government is stepping backwards. They need to deregulate more of the economy and set their tax collection abilities straight.

An interesting game indeed with interesting results, especially if you look towards South America where playing "the deregulation game" did not result in any advantages to the vast majority of the population apart from a few tiny groups and of course to their neo-sahib foreign partners. And now we see democracy in action and left-leaning politicans easily winning the vote and declaring that the game is rigged against the people. Oh, but I forgot, Thailand does not really have any left-leaning parties not nary a liberal party. As an interested bystander I must say it becomes curiouser and curiouser. Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows.

Photo not very good but maybe it will give you an idea of the style...

gonzo

Maybe someone else has a better photo

Sure looks like the bench, without the aging, that has been outside the ol' Bier Stube for the past 25 years. Are you sure this is a recent fashion?

Same reason why some people think "Y'all" is a word.

Of course, it's a word. It's the second person plural, previously called you as opposed to the singular, thee. The possessive form is y'all's."

I always reckoned that Y'all was said to a small group of peoples and Y'alls was said to a large groups of peoples.

And Y'all's ought to knows I was seriously be thinkin of when I gets back to Chiang Mai this coming summer of invitin Blondie ups to the house for drinks, but now me's thinkin, after readin this thread, twice about that idear.

I think reincarnation doesn't quite enter into it. They just don't give a care.

They don't assign value to life, in the same way we do.

That's just not true and that's an insult to the Thai people. Live in Thailand longer and you might be more understanding of their ways.

In the sense that Thais do not care that much about reincarnation, I believe the OP is correct.

Relative to Thai culture not assigning the same value to life in the same manner as western culture, again I think the OP has a valid point.

And I daresay I lived in Thailand for a sufficient number of years and perhaps suggest that it is those who do not see the differences who need to further expand their experiences in the Kingdom.

The Thais are budhhists. As such they believe they earn "merits" during each life. They progress through these lives by earning these merits with each life getting them nearer to the ultimate "buddha" status. There believe is that there is reincarnation. This is why you will see thiefs, prostitutes, or any others stopping to pray at every shrine regardless of the size.

My experience is that Thais are first and foremost animists. Over this they wear a veneer of Buddhism. Surely as they approach old age they tend to wish to make more merit (tham bun) for the next life (chaat naa) and will perhaps make greater efforts to attend and to contrbute to temple affairs, but I just haven't seen many Thais being overly concerned with the reincarnation aspect of the next life. Besides, in Buddhism, there is no re-incarnation in the western sense of being able to somehow connect to a past life as their is no reincarnation of the soul.

Is Borat the most common name in Sogdia?

Borat may be a common name amongst non-gentiles in Kazakhstan, but such sons of rapist people would be thrown down a well in Sogdianastan, which is quite a distance from such lands.

I can only remember Black Cat, and My Place, are they still there ?

Black Cat has been gone for many, many years, but The Laughing Leprechan took the space and did a lot of renovating. Very good food, very pleasant owner, and IMHO the best British breakfast in town - the only one that I can't quite finish.

Never knew "My Place".

My Place was one of the bars very popular in the 1980s located about where the Rydges hotel is now located. I can't remember whether it was still in operation when Black Cat opened, but there may have been a year or two of overlap.

I'm getting bored with Brits (even bashed ones), Africans, and Croats, so I thought I would raise the bar as I would really like to meet any Sogdians who happend to be in Thailand.

How timely, this morning's headlines in my local paper "Pfizer shares sink after key drug halted". Now we might think, oh poor big pharma has to deal with major investment risks so thus need to charge an arm and a leg for their drugs in order to be profitable. But read closer and you see in the AP article that

"The news is devastating to Pfizer, which had been counting on the drug to revitalize stagnant sales that have been hurt by numerous patent expirations on key products. It has said it was spending around $800 million to develop torcetrapib, which was supposed to fill the void when its best-selling drug, cholesterol treatment Lipitor, loses patent protection in either 2010 or 2011."

Pfizer was not investing in any new drug, they were only attempting to reformulate an older drug, Lipitor whose patent was about to expire. If the new drug had passed the Phase III study there would not have been any further tests to determine whether the new drug was indeed superior to Lipitor but, as primarily a marketing company, the sales force would attempt, and usually succeed, in convincing the easily duped and compliant medical community, who enjoy professional seminars in warm climates sponsored by big Pharma, to make the switch when prescribing drugs for their patients.

I am not shedding any tears for shareholders of Pfizer although I feel a bit bad for the families of the 10,000 people, mostly in their sales force as they are marketing compnay, who are likely to be laid off, according to the AP report.

So if you get rid of the profitability of the pharmaceutical companies whose going to develop the next line of drugs?

As I noted, the pharmaceutical companies are not now developing the next line of drugs nor are they the companies that developed the previous "next line" of drugs. Most new drugs are developed in small companies and in universities with the aid of government grants as explained in detail in Angell's book.

I have seen cold, and thailand does not have it. it doesn't even really get into the range of 'uncomfortably sub luke-warm'.

Either we disagree that temps that go down to near 0 degrees C (32 F) are uncomfortable when there is neither heating nor insulation in a home or we disagree that you have seen much of Thailand at least in the north during the month of December.

So are people saying that thailand should not have soap operas on tv?

I may find the local village lasses as pretty, but I never see girls who look like them appearing on Thai TV.

There are. By the way, there are also lots of isaan girls who have very light coloured skin.

It is not the tv teaching people to like light coloured skin but rather the other way round.

I make no comment nor judgement as to whether Thailand should have soap operas on TV.

But in my most humble opinion you have it arse backwards and that it is indeed the media, and the Madison Avenues of the world, that dictate public consensus on most issues, including fashion and beauty.

As the great modern Canadian prophet Marshall McLuhan said: "we become what we behold."

They certainly strongly reinforce an image of women as very childish, petty, rapacious, somewhat pathetic sex objects given to frequent tantrums and clearly subservient to men in all departments.

Some may think that serves their purposes particularly as they play on every channel of Thai TV every day of the year.

And is not that the role that is desired of Thai women by those in Bangkok who write and produce these shows, to maintain the role of women, especially the poor, as mere property? What the author of the article leaves out is that these shows also define the social concept of beauty in Thailand as being other than ethnic Thai, either sino-Thai or nowadays luuk khreung, thus maintaining low self-esteem for all other women. I may find the local village lasses as pretty, but I never see girls who look like them appearing on Thai TV. These shows also teach that the only way to get through tribulations is by thinking only with your hormones and emotions, those who wish to engage in thoughtful rational contemplation need not apply.

These soaps are a the carefully constructed soma of the brave new modern (pattana charoen) world of Thailand. The soaps indeed serve their purpose, little different than the ancient Roman Colosseum spectacles, for those who are not able to afford to drown themselves in consumerism as do the many Khunyings abandoned by their husbands for a mia noi.

A great article in my humble opinion and spot on.

marshbags

Agreed.

Actually a pathetic article that just so happens supports The Nations new agenda to place the blame for the need for a military coup on the rural poor and portray the rural folks in a very negative light. Yes it is true that poor people load up a motorbike with the family, but they do the same in many other poor Asian nations. Those who run red lights and drive without helmets are far more typically young teenagers, many from wealthy families. The entire article is stereo-type drivel that cleverly hides its ethnic racist undertones.

The article gets corruption in Thailand arse-backwards, a common logical flaw even seen in important annual speeches decrying corruption in Thailand. The doggy doo doo (corruption) only flows downhill, only money seems to flow uphill.

But the new political agenda of The Nation, and its mouthpiece Sondhi, is to portray the poor as the root of all the problems in Thailand and to slowly remove them from any political considerations. The Bangkok elite has its panties out of alignment over the fact that Taksin gave what they perceive as their money to the rural poor. Yet what did Khunying Jaruvan estimate that corruption in state-related projects alone cost? I think the figure was something like 400 billion baht (US$9.7 billion) per annum. And look what she got for her troubles.

The Nation, Sondhi, and the Bangkok elite want to remove the rural poor from the equation so that nary a sataang leaves the capital as every sataang saved from the hands of the poor is one more sataang going into their own greedy hands. And now they have many in the ex-pat community believing in this crap.

Bottom line is - do you think public ownership of Pharma R&D would produce any results - they will be dead in the streets first.

Dr. Marcia Angell's book The Truth About the Drug Companies points out that most of the R&D for new drugs is done by small research companies who are indeed funded by public grants by such agencies as the NIH. The big companies only later purchase the rights to distribute these drugs that were developed on tax payers dollars. She notes it is actually quite rare for the big Pharma companies to develop new drugs and take them through the early stages of Phase I and Phase II testing. She shows that the big Pharma companies are good at making small changes to existing drugs in order to maintain a patentable product, but the same companies are very poor at devising trials that would show that the new formulation actually produces better results than the old formulation, as those same corporations make sure such trials are not part of the Federally mandated testing requirements. After reading her book you will begin to understand that the big Pharma companies are marketing companies and not drug research and development companies. And they have an amazing amount of political influence to move legislation in their favor for the sole purpose to maximize profits at any expense. They are the corporate versions of Taksin Shinawat in America, hiding behind the smoke and mirrors and the Madison Avenues of the corporate world.

So to answer your question, why yes, public ownership of Pharma R&D, in the US at least, has long produced results that are then hijacked by these marketing companies. But don't believe me as I am just an anonymous poster summarizing out here in the ether of cyberspace, go to a library, and read the book written by an author with bonafide credentials.

The real question is: What is the cost charged to the patient.

I'm currently under cancer treatment. the medicines prescribed and provided by the hospital are incredibly expensive. Looking for alternative providers has resulted in a cost differential of 45%. That means the hospital takes minimum a 45 % mark up.The alternative provider also need to make a buck, so were talking total markup roughly 50%+

I don't know how the pricing structure is for HIV drugs, but probably not far from the pattern above.

If the pharmaceutical companies were only marking up drugs 50% one would not have the same drug costing 50% less in Canada than in the US. In reality, many drugs are maked up much higher, often reaching 70-90% margins. To avoid misunderstanding, a drug that costs $1 to produce a dosage and is sold for $10 a dosage is selling at a 90% mark-up.

Read Dr. Marcia Angell's book The Truth About the Drug Companies. Dr. Angell is the former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and is now teaching at Harvard University. After reading her book you will not want to shed a single tear for these corporations and you might see that there is a global industry whose greed equals the greed of Mr. Taksin.

Because the weather is cold for 3 months the blankets never get washed as no chance to dry so after winter the blankets have rotted away. In some mountain areas in north & ne Thailand overnight temps often get down to zero

The blankets handed out are "emergency" type blankets, usually made of 30% wool and 70% unknown fiber. Similar blankets wholesale in the US for under $3 each. They are not designed for extended usage over time. They are difficult to wash for people who must wash everything by hand and in the rainy season are difficult to keep dry. So after only a year or two the blankets are often scarcely fit to be used as cover cloths for items, not for personal usage.