Good luck!  I tend to not follow visa offerings too closely since I've been in Bangkok for awhile but the STV restrictions seem to have been reduced lately, and the automatic extension of the TR visa from 30 days to 45.

I know a guy here who went on a volunteer visa in September, for a year as I understood, and there would probably be other options.  With a college degree teaching English is the way to go, getting a visa and work permit through an employer, then building up to a higher paying position if your starting point salary is on the low side.  Without any degree working in Thailand could be problematic.

On 12/11/2020 at 5:52 PM, mrfill said:

So Germany - current number of deaths = 21233, USA = 299692 - You need to multiply by 14, not 4.

Mortality rate (per 100,000) - Germany = 253, USA = 903 - not quite "about the same"

Figures from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

Please don't post such misleading information, it really doesn't help.

Maybe what I meant wasn't clear.  The US has a population of 330 million, Germany 83, so 4:1.  Current US daily deaths are at 2500, Germany at 600, so essentially 4:1.  Given that both are currently increasing, related to the general point, it doesn't make sense to compare a monthly or per-nine-months average, to instead consider a weekly average as the current rate.

Germany is holding steady at 25,000 new cases per day for the last 6 weeks.  The US has transitioned from a level of 100,000 (back at that same time-frame, beginning of November) to a recent daily maximum of 280,000, with a two-week average a bit over 200,000. Over two weeks prior to that the average was just over 150,000, but the post-Thanksgiving increase has been significant.  Daily case stats are still higher, double the per-population rate of Germany at this point, with a clear indication that will increase in the US, instead of leveling off.

Part of the point is that although US pandemic case and death stats are absurd one part of that apparent absurdity is from having four times the population of most other Western nations, or more.  What comes next in the US will be different than in Europe, for sure; the spike due to the Thanksgiving will happen again, related to Christmas.

That wasn't about singling out Germany. The UK has a current case average of 20,000 per day, and average daily deaths close to 500.  It sounds much lower than in the US, but the population is 66 million, one fifth that of the US.  Rate of deaths per population is roughly identical to the US, case rates only half.

I have no idea why the current deaths per population rates are nearly identical in all three countries but the US new case rate is double that of the other two.  It seems likely that error in keeping accurate stats might be more responsible than a factor of two difference in mortality rate.  US isn't testing broadly enough to show true case counts, but that should cause the known mortality rate to look too high, not lower.

4 minutes ago, natway09 said:

It really does show what Americans think of their elderly population,,,,,,,, disposable ?

Horrible

It's not fair to put that on all Americans.  If one fourth of all Americans really didn't care if there was a pandemic going on, and the real number may be one third, that would probably still be enough to cause continued exponential growth.  Far too many people made an exception to observe Thanksgiving by gathering, for sure.

If you multiply out Germany's case and mortality rates to match the population difference (80 million versus 330, so times 4) the stats are about the same.  Do Germans also not care about their elderly, or foolishly reject to take any precautions?  A close friend is German but he doesn't tend to break down his description of practices there as I would in the US, openly addressing perspective problems.  He was just in the process of booking a vacation trip when this spike occurred not so long ago, citing mental health as also of importance, needing to get out.

England isn't far off, or lots of other places, it's partly the population difference making the numbers stand out.  Not that I'm rejecting that many Americans are idiots; that's also a main cause.

conservative Americans' response:  muh freedoms!

As far as who would want to visit Thailand for two months or up to half a year, and do a quarantine, it's just whoever would happen to see that as reasonable and positive.  People who only have 2 to 3 weeks of vacation time wouldn't, but plenty of people in the US retire in their 50s, or plenty of people over 65 have all the time in the world.

As far as Thailand being closed down, and not a good place to travel now, that hasn't matched my experience.  In the last 3 to 4 months I've been to Pattaya twice, to Cha-am, Sriracha, Kanchanburi, Korat, and Chantaburi, and it's been a fantastic time to travel.  There are specials on everything and lots of extra space due to tourism being slow.  It's not even as if all those places have been ghostly quiet; Bangkok residents are taking advantage of government vouchers and subsidies, and business specials.

They are saying the right things, but they will be saying a slightly different thing next week.  People here recommending they open the country without quarantine restrictions make no sense; re-start the local experience of the pandemic for what?  Thailand doesn't need 2-3 week vacationers, and can't afford the impact of welcoming them.

Really marketing these programs to draw people interested in longer stays will require saying the same things two weeks in a row. 

It should have been a 60 day stay followed with the option to renew for two additional 60 day stays from the start.  Financially secure retirees can afford to be in Thailand instead of their own country, where they stand a much higher chance of dying.  By that I mean the middle class, not someone saving up for 11 months to visit one of the lowest cost of living destinations on the planet, to then live on the cheap there.

I visited my brother living in Germany awhile back and he would drive 125 mph / 200 kph on the autobahn there.  It was safe and practical, in a vehicle designed for it, but a bit faster than probably makes sense as a functional travel speed.  If traffic is any heavier on those roads now, as I would expect it might be, it would be hard to replicate that.

It wouldn't be safe traveling that speed on any road in any vehicle in Thailand.  Thais aren't expecting it; people could walk across the road without checking properly, or pull out from some turn-off.

That explains it then.  He's not doing much for volunteering, but that's part of another subtheme.

I'm not really an authority on Thai visas because I work here and HR takes care of that, but two people I know are staying here long term on education and volunteer visas.  The first would come up in discussions, how that works out, and of course getting some type of education would be a part of that.  Per typical hearsay studying Thai or training for muay thai would cover that, but I'm not certain of that myself.

The second case is really odd.  Per standard input, which people never fail to mention, you need a work permit to do volunteer work, but oddly he has the visa but not a work permit.  It doesn't completely add up.  A local private visa agency recommended it and did his paperwork, and off he went, stamped for a year.

This herd-immunity strategy theme applied to Sweden never really matched what they were doing.  Their shut-down wasn't as complete as in other places, while their case numbers and deaths were also higher than in others.  As far as even potentially reaching 75-80% having had the disease that's just absurd.  They've had 231,000 confirmed cases now, and the population is just over 10 million.  That one guy's ideas (Tegnell) and acceptance of a seemingly flawed model of how many people had it there earlier on seem to have spread into inaccurate press, from May:

https://www.ft.com/content/a2b4c18c-a5e8-4edc-8047-ade4a82a548d

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist who devised the no-lockdown approach, estimated that 40 per cent of people in the capital, Stockholm, would be immune to Covid-19 by the end of May, giving the country an advantage against a virus that “we’re going to have to live with for a very long time”...

...Primary and secondary schools, restaurants, cafés and shops are mostly open as normal in Sweden, with health authorities relying on voluntary social distancing and people opting to work from home. Schools for over-16s and universities are closed and gatherings of more than 50 people are banned, but it is still the most relaxed approach of any EU country...

About a quarter of people in Stockholm had the virus at the start of May, according to a mathematical model by Sweden’s public health agency...

If their real mortality rate is 1% then 260,000 people in Stockholm, or about a fourth of the total population of Stockholm, have had it now, months later, most of the pandemic later, and 650,000 have had it country-wide.  They really don't know the actual total infected number or mortality rate (every country would only be estimating that), but even if they were "going for" herd immunity they never got close.

It's interesting how according to the main theme here Thailand isn't being praised for stopping the pandemic because it's really raging on untracked and untested inside the country.  No one knows anyone who has died of it, and the hospitals certainly aren't full, but many Thai Visa members never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

It would be a more natural criticism that TV members and people in other circumstances might be critical of the Thai government for not resolving the problems stemming from isolating the country (the key to stopping the pandemic exposure).  Foreign tourism is shut down, a high price to pay.  Resort areas are in economic free-fall.  It probably was possible to put something like the long-stay visitation plans into effect, which Thailand hasn't been able to do, and at this rate never will.  Vaccine development may offset this problem, maybe by the middle of 2021.

I didn't read every comment, so this may have already come up, but part of the problem is the wife in that couple pointing the gun at people with her finger on the trigger.  That's not a safe practice. 

Of course more conservative Americans would support what they were doing, in general, but people familiar with gun safety and use of guns don't do that.  And if they do it's likely to violate a local law, because you risk someone else's life by not knowing how to handle your own weapon.  She's lucky that she didn't shoot her husband.  If she had taken firearm training courses and just forgot that part in the heat of the moment that's not really ok.  For everyone here not familiar with basics, I was taught these things as a child, so that by the age of 7 or 8 I could handle a handgun more responsibly than her:

1.  treat every gun as if it's loaded, even when you know it's not

2. don't point a gun at anyone or anything you don't intend to shoot (which does not include acting threatening; mimicking Hollywood movies isn't ok, I guess up until you are actually in a Mexican standoff, then what can you do)

3.  don't put your finger on the trigger until you are going to fire the weapon

It makes him an easier target to impersonate for having a lot of bad plastic surgery.  Replicating the exact same mistakes might be tricky, but if a nose job comes out looking good that's still a step in the right direction towards botching it in stages.

It's a little known fact that tea in China was originally prepared in a ground form, before it ever even went to Japan.  It was compressed earlier in it's history too, not stored as loose leaves, and treated more as a medicine than a drink as we experience it now. 

The health claim in this that matcha has 10 times the nutrients of green tea sounds way off.  Shading during growth does increase the amounts of some compounds, and extraction rates are high for brewing tea but not as high as just eating the leaves (how matcha works out).  But I've seen research on tea compounds present tied to health claims and that's the wrong order of magnitude.  Matcha is also harder on your stomach than most other kinds of teas, as conventional green tea also is, just probably slightly more so.

It becomes impossible to sort out if it all could make sense in any theoretical universe, because they keep changing the rules of time travel and how time-streams work to make the next movie possible.  In the original movie you kind of can change the future, which is why the machines sent back a Terminator to kill Sarah Conor, but you kind of couldn't, because it failed and the original events happened anyway.  Then that kept changing over the next movies.

A deeper critique is that they keep re-hashing essentially the same movie plot over and over.  I guess if someone loved seeing it the first two or three times they might just keep on watching, or younger audiences grow up who may have missed some of it.  As long as they keep making money they'll keep producing versions.

It's interesting that the Rotten Tomatoes critics' score is 28% and the audience score is 84%. 

That kind of split happened with Chappele's last special, except that audience score was at 99%.  In that case the critics seemed too left-leaning to appreciate it.  One would expect this to be a really shallow, dumb action movie, lacking both a plausible plot and any character development, but then that's what the series has been about for awhile, what audiences are there to see.

My wife and I did swim at Chula based on arranging some sort of use privileges awhile back (11 years ago; the time just flies).  It may not be possible without having a connection to there, and that may have been a special case, since my wife is a Chula alumni.  It cost relatively little, but that is how that would go.  They've since removed the pool we used most often but there always had been another.  I doubt that's easy to turn up information about but clicking through websites and sending messages enough would do it.  I'm not aware of other pools open for public use in the same area.

The relatively new park near there isn't bad, Centennial park, close to the small I'm Park shopping area.  Running wouldn't be for everyone, and it's not as if there's a good track for that there, just the usual for sidewalk type walkways.  They had designed in stationary bikes, which provided resistance by churning the water in a pool / pond section there, which seemed a great idea.  It didn't take long for almost all of them to break though, not well-designed enough to be up to that form of use.

Thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families