Shaunduhpostman

I don't get it. How could he be put in jail for simply arriving in Thailand without a visa? It's pretty routine that most people don't have one when they arrive. Seeing as Vietnam doesn't border Thailand at any point, I don't see why they wouldn't have sent him to Laos which is closer, and where they probably wouldn't have hesitated to give him a month entry or so to get a new passport. If he'd get put in jail or detention for simply trying to go back to Thailand, why would immigration send him there? It's as though someone at Vietnam Immigration took a very strong disliking to this guy and made sure he got railroaded. Still this all doesn't seem to make any sense, seems there was something else going on here or there are some pretty hostile people at both the Vietnamese and Thai immigration.

Often they feel they need to have foreign faces for show and to create what they think is a better impression. That is what I would guess it all boils down to, that and just the usual authoritarian control freak style of many managers, admin higher ups etc. that you will find in most teaching jobs. They probably feel that you get up to no good if given too much time away from them and that you become a lost and confused foregner who would either go out womanizing, drinking or worse yet, start teaching your own lessons or work a second job for someone else. In most cases they would actually prefer it if you would live with them as well and maybe do housework and babysitting for their children, but I think they know thats taking it too far, but they will probably ask you if you would like to live at the school and perhaps rent a converted classroom, just say no, it ruins it for all of and they will start in with "Well. our last teacher Billy lived in the birdcage on the top of our classroom building and he just loved it! Why don't you want to stay in there?

If you have a VPN you'll for sure be able to catch BBC 3 hour selected events programs. Looks as tho they are archiving what they show. So far this seems to be the best option if you are in Thailand and want English language coverage:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07nmccf

I had a look at NBC's American site. After futzing around on the site for a half hour, Difficult to make use of it. There were a couple of outakes from the ceremony you could watch. Apparently, Gisele Bundachen dancing in the crowd and Gisele Bundachen on the catwalk were the only two things worth airing. By clicking on the video you are force fed a zip file download of some other videos of other models. 

As for sports they display all the events in a nice clickable schedule (with wrong times listed when compared with the official Olympics schedule, NBC's schedule is 14 hours ahead) but once you click on an event you are asked to log on via your cable provider. So if NBC can't get rid of you by giving you the wrong times for events, apparently you are welcome to use their site to access what you already have elsewhere. You'd think the whole idea of having NBC carry the games would be to make it available to all, but apparently, no cable provider, no access. I've read reports somewhere on the net that the live streaming for London was plagued by huge buffer times and other problems. Doesn't look good, but if you want basketball or other events that are not a priority for UK viewers, might still be worth seeing if they don't throw us a few crusts and crumbs from those events.

 I'm a huge basketball fan, so I really want to see France square off against Australia tonight around midnight Thai time. Hopefully Australia's networks will have tonight's France-Australia basketball matchup, as BBC doesn't appear to be covering it. Both countries have very good teams, this year France looks vaguely terrifying and could upset teams like Spain for a silver, it is not out of the question, they have a lot of raw young talent plus an excellent squad of NBA veteran stars. Australia looks good enough to be at least a thorn in the side of many of the best teams and will definitely be a solid threat to France.  Both teams have top NBA level players, France with NBA all star and veteran perennial world champion with the San Antonio Spurs in captain Tony Parker, an amazing player to watch and catch before he gets too old, up and coming star Rudy Gobert with his tremendously long reach, agility and 7 foot height, Boris Diaw combines good power forward toughness, versatility and all around smart play to go with NBA star Nicolas Batum, also a solid scoring threat and rebounder, and Australia with the feisty Australian rules football influenced play of Matthew Dellavadova and the brilliant passing, shot blocking and all around intelligence of big man Andrew Bogut, also deadly outside shooting guard Paddy Mills a long time team mate of France's Diaw and Parker on one of the NBA's top teams the San Antonio Spurs. Australia also has it's share of top level NBA team players, Bogut was the starting center for the 2014-15 NBA Champion Golden State Warriors and also for the 2015-16 Warrior's record breaking 73 win 9 loss season in which they lost the championship to Matthew Dellavadova's squad the Cleveland Cavaliers headed by LeBron James (who has declined to play in the Olympics) arguably the best still active basketball player on earth and Kyrie Irving (who will be playing for USA) also one of the world's best players.

Almost no mention of the games in the media and where to watch them in Thailand, at least in English. A week ago there was a statement made by CAT in the Thai business section of the English newspapers that CAT would have access to direct HD feeds of all events and that all the major Thai networks would be showing every single event live. Sounded a bit too good to be true and  checking around last night during kick off time for the Denmark-Iraq football match and cannot check what games they will show. 

As mentioned by another poster, they probably cannot easily access who is who with the current registration system, so they now want a way to tell who is foreign and who isn't at a glance. There would be something built into the new sims that would show up on their tracking systems. Of course it's easy to see the flaws in it and why it won't work very well, if at all, but there are perhaps a few people who may be able to sell what data they do get to local marketing companies wanting to know where tourists go. That said, they are not demonstrating a level of acumen, perspicacity or resourcefulness that suggest they would be very good at collecting or interpreting the data, but perhaps there is some planned collaboration with businesses wanting to know where we go who would handle all that. Nor do I see very many western tourists cooperating and going along with this, they would need to have something to offer tourists such as increased English language functionality say with their phone services, special apps like dial-o-English-speaking-taxi-driver, instant-McDonald's-to-room food delivery button or hotel room discounts, but one does have the sneaking suspicion that that is really out of their ballpark. Enough people researching their holiday to Thailand will check out the deal with this foreigners sim card stuff and probably turn their noses up at it and just simply do without a phone for their two week holiday if they aren't put off coming here altogether. I would imagine Chinese tourists would be used to these kinds of things, from what I have observed and heard they seem to have a less developed sense of their entitlement to privacy so probably wouldn't mind as much, so perhaps it would work with them. I can't see even Koreans or Japanese tourists accepting this either, it flies in the face of taking safety precautions that you would allow people you don't know to have access to the info on your whereabouts 24/7. Mobile services usually don't even work where we are, so seems they ought to fix the system first, they cannot track me via phone 95 percent of the time due to the systems not working where I stay. I am sure there are many other areas where track would be poor or sporadic, such as national parks or other places away from the tourist meccas that many like to explore. Personally, I don't need and rarely use a mobile. If it gets down to this, why bother? Their internet tracking they do is much more of worry as some sources have said the Thai govt. already uses de-encryption software to read emails and likely force ISPs to store data on what we say and do online. Seeing as anything you say at all can be grounds for arrest, that is much more of a worry than a half baked attempt to cow chip me with a blinking foreign tourist bleeper. But as far as the new idea for sim cards goes, I don't see how they are going to sort out foreigners who live here from tourists, 7-11 staff can hardly be asked to start looking at people's visas and determining who is a tourist and who is resident, they are already asked to do a myriad other tasks from making people sandwiches, working out their bill payments to booking their airline tickets and I am sure there are many more things they have to do. What now, they are now part time immigration officials as well? Of course most are hardly bothered with the difference, neither tourists or long time residents are Thai and we are all supposed to be leaving very soon anyway in the minds of many. I have noticed that the assumption that I am soon leaving seems to be a feature in the misconceptions and assumptions  of many a xenophobic Thai I have encountered over the years, such as the evidenced by the  racist and xenophobic overtones of the statements made by these guys trying to implement this new surveillance attempt. Seems in all practicality, all foreigners would be forced onto these sim cards for tourism purposes if we don't just get friends and family to get our sims for us which of course is the biggest gaping flaw in all of this. But you could see all kinds of problems with a tourist sim card, seems very likely they would only last a month, so who would go for that? I'm sure there are many other corners it would make sense to cut with a mere tourist sim card that would make it quite a pain for foreign residents and workers to use. If they are really serious about actually tracking us in our movements from kitchen to bathroom, to garden to corner shop to office  and back home day in and day out, they will have to work out a way to stop people from using sim cards registered to other people. My money is on this dying another death on the great shining pile of brilliant ideas the Thai government has come up with. I am sure they can soon buy the rights to use some kind of nano-technology where by the whole country is crop dusted with trillions of microscopic gizmos that will give them a look at what everyone is doing everywhere. Such gizmos would get into people's digestive tracts and they could even have a gander in there, they should just be a bit more patient, seems that day will soon be upon us if it isn't already.

 Like actually doing your job and actually applying the law is so amazing and calls for headline news.

I have been through much worse and many of my students even worse still. JUst say no to these creeps, don't work for them, they are corrupt crooks like the cops and the government. Stay away from them, many countries will treat you much better, Thailand is a cesspool.

Both parties have been proven to do it, so I guess it'll be a contest to see who rigs things better. Neither of them deserve anyone's vote.

It is not surprising in the least. Good to see at least some evidence and reports being published. I'm sure the problem with toxic chemicals is everywhere as there are no restrictions on chemicals banned in many countries decades ago. Add to the fact there is little or no awareness about what these chemicals can do to people and to nature and they will be used with enthusiasm and without even adhering to instructions on proper use while the Ministry Health keeps banging on about cigarette smoking causing cancer as though that is the only cause.

I would not continue with them. In most cases other providers will be better. TOT just up and cut all service to our tambon up in Isaan one day about 5 months ago without notice. They strung us along for 6 weeks telling us it would all be fixed tomorrow though it never was before the government workers at the Tambon office told us that they had the same problems and that we shouldn't wait for them to fix things that at the Tambon office they had just recently switched to another provider. We had TOT for 4 years and it was mostly pretty good but you would get a week here and week there of no internet and many times unusuably slow, though mostly good speeds, but why they suddenly switched our area off we have never learned.

Anyway, 3BB is much more responsive, they have an English call center in Bangkok that is mostly pretty good about relaying your message to the local center. I don't know why we put up with the difficulty of trying to get TOT to fix problems, as you mention, and it doesn't matter if you speak Thai or not, they will have you talk to a different person everytime you call and nobody seems to communicate with anyone else in their offices, my wife says she will never forget how badly they treated her. If you don't call them several times a day they think the problem has solved itself and then apparently there are people who work there who think nothing of cutting a whole area's interent and demanding people continue to pay for no service. 3BB speeds are very consistent as well and you  get the speed they advertise. TOT seems to more and more just think they are entitled to neglect everyone and money will roll in just the same.

Recently our water in Isaan often smells like burning rubber and plastic. To bathe in it irritates your skin and makes your hair very dry and bristly, its bad enough that we bathe in it, drinking it, especially when the water red-lines and also smells like paint thinner, and I am sure you would end up in hospital. Our dogs and plants get rainwater and we have to drink bottled water. RO filters are also not good for the environment, the filter residue is highly toxic.

A new water tower was built in our village last year, a huge towering structure, easily the tallest thing for miles around, to help with water shortages and water pressure, we endured many days of water cuts during the hottest days of the year while village volunteers tried to connect pipe and make the connection to the storage towerr only to have the whole project run out of money. We were told no money would be forthcoming in the foreseeble future and that we would have to make do on whatever we could improvise. If I am not mistaken, the old water cisterns and set up has been cleared away and now the new one won't be functioning, there's worse than nothing left. We will be installing our rainwater collection and filtration system at I'm sure a great expense, those without money to do that will be suffering for years with unacceptably polluted and erratic water. Drink up!

The World Health Organization is knocking on people's doors?

Really, in most cases, they are helping foreigners by not allowing them to invest here.

From what I understood they cannot have a functioning internet and a single gateway, it isn't feasible. I would assume they have dropped that part of the computer crimes act unless they just want to go ahead and have the first country on earth with no internet, I think even North Korea has something going, so that would be pretty extreme.

Most of Thailand is heavily dependent on internet signal going out of the country, including the banks and financial institutions and many pretty huge businesses that make the country work, so it isn't like you'd just be taking away people's facebook and Thaivisa by setting up the single gateway. But who knows what they really mean by single gateway, one for the banks and one one for us? I would guess that's what's in the cards if they are serious about single gateway. It doesn't seem it would be out of the question that they'd try and basically cancel the internet and cancel the 21st century in Thailand.

I have lived my whole life in warm-hot climates (54 years) and Daikin is the only air conditioner for me. You can use them all the time and there are rarely issues. Seems to me whether it is in an office, hotel or rented apartment the LG, Samsung, Mitsubishis are the ones that I've noticed not working well.

The only problem we had out here in Isaan when we switched to 3bb 3 months ago was 3BB gave us our new account and we immediately went through 6 weeks of 12-24 hour service outages every 2-3 days. It was better than what TOT had become which was no connection at all for two months and which caused us to switch, the confused looks on their faces at the TOT offices when we went in to cancel the account were almost a consolation. "Cancel the account? Are you sure? We should be getting the problems fixed very soon!"

But It took 6 weeks of quite intensive nagging to get 3BB to fix the problem with our new 20 meg/sec. account Perhaps it was simply a case of the usual post-Songkran dysfunction many Thai organizations seem to go through, however, during this time that 3BB could not or would not fix the problem with our connection, we received several rather mercenary pushes to upgrade our account. In one case a serviceman actually came all the way out to our place and did nothing towards fixing the problem other than to say what had to be done to solve our connection problems was an upgrade to the 40 meg/sec1000 baht/mo. account, that with 20 megabytes/sec. it wasn't enough to even connect to their server if we wanted to access foreign websites. Never mind that we could not access any websites at all, it was all due to problems with foreign websites he told my wife. He refused to have me show him what we were seeing on the computer as to the source of the problem which was, according to our computer's trouble-shooting indicators, with their servers not sending any requests for connections onward, he refused to look at the problem saying he didn't speak English, never mind that my Thai was clearly fluent. We reported the incident and to 3BB's credit that seemed to open their ears a bit more, and an upper management type gave us his personal phone number to call if we had similar problems again, tho he stopped answering his phone after one call to complain about continuing failures to fix the extended connection drop outs. Perhaps just seeing that it was us calling again was enough to alert him that nothing was being done by his staff but it took about another two weeks before they fixed the connection. During those two weeks we heard two more times that we might want to consider upgrading as a solution to the problem, including one time when staff told my wife that not only did we need to upgrade but they needed to confirm the identity of the foreigner using the connection, that if they did not have id info and a face to face meeting with me as confirmation of my identity, they were not interested in fixing our connection. Of course, it was no matter that we live an 4 hours drive from their offices in Khon Kaen and of course I refused to drive to Khon Kaen to prove my identity and hear them tell me again I didn't have a powerful enough download connection at 20 meg/sec. However one day a month ago, the constant disconnects stopped and we've had a solid 20-22 megabyte connection everyday since. For the last month, for the first time ever in Thailand, I can easily say slow or glitchy connections seem to clearly be with the foreign websites such as Major League Baseball which is often unwatchable if you want to watch live games.

To quote another Thaivisa poster on a different thread, I'm "quacking (sic) in my boots!"

Why not a link to an article very soon please on the horrors of what swimming in chlorinated swimming pools does to people, where only the most intrepid flesh eating monster 20 centimeter underwater centipedes would dare go!

To quote another Thaivisa poster on a different thread, I'm "quacking (sic) in my boots!"

Why not a link to an article very soon please on the horrors of what swimming in chlorinated swimming pools does to people, where only the most intrepid flesh eating monster 20 centimeter underwater centipedes would dare go.

I would think the Dutch authorities would see that they have played enough of a role in creating the situation that they would do what ever is needed to secure this guy's release. This story surfaced a long time ago and now that it has resurfaced it is plain nothing is being done other than the petition circulating. Horrific.

I don't know much of anything about the situation in the UK, but my guess is that the transnational reality of economies and business won't go away, it will just get more complicated for the UK now. Many of the business relationships back and forth across the channel will continue despite the Brexit. Time will tell whether Brexit will have much more than effect than a symbolic gesture, tho I suppose even that is not anything to sneeze at.

People who voted for Brexit seem to think they won't have any more immigrants to deal with now that Brexit has passed, I'd be surprised if that situation changed much as well. Whoever the parties are that have wanted immigration to the UK over the decades aren't going to suddenly go away because Brexit has passed and I'm sure they have their needs and that by hook or by crook they will not go unmet.

Who knows tho, we'll see, this world just gets weirder and weirder. If it all doesn't work out too well, perhaps the UK could get back into the EU at a later date via the back door of an independent Scotland that decides to join EU . Or perhaps the EU would also miss the UK's membership and be all too glad to have them back.

If it were hiso kids it wouldn't surprise me that there'd be a world of trouble for those responsible, even if in fact they weren't responsible, they'd be in trouble. Once again the message is your life isn't worth any more thought than some bothersome annoyance to be quickly done with.

What is sad is that as far as safety precautions the cultural norm that nothing be said about these things or complain is so strong that people learn to block out their awareness to the point that they don't seem to notice when they or others are endangered. Often times, pointing out safety or health concerns is one way to get people quite annoyed with you in this society.

I can well imagine that even if anyone at the school had noticed problems before hand and said something or tried to set things right, they would be seen as a trouble maker and likely their objections would be perceived more as an excuse to attack someone than a legitimate concern for the students' well-being. That anyone would actually care about someone's life is just completely off the radar in Thai public life, your concern for others safety would be met with incomprehension: you should care about your family members at most, not other people's kids, it is not your problem and it is OK if your business or organzations' practices result in someone else's children's deaths. So, it is almost as though the statement that there's nothing that could be done to prevent the childresn's deaths refers to how given that we only need be concerned with our own children's welfare, there was nothing that the 17 children's parents could have done about the locked doors and the bad electrician's work and the decision of the school to not have staff looking out for the kids.

I'll repost a potentially useful TV post from a few years ago.

I was having problems with TOT a few months ago not providing internet service, billing me and stringing me along for 6 weeks with, "Will fix tomorrow!"or "Yes! So sorry! Many people complain, so sorry! Server is broken, will fix this week!"

So, I was considering going the rout of complaining to a government office, some on Thaivisa have claimed they have gotten prompt action as soon as an official from one of these agencies gives the offending party a phone call. I haven't tried it, in the end I decided it was easier to to just suck it in, pay the extortion and cancel with TOT, luckily their unfairness ended there and we are not continuing to be billed with no service. If I lived in Bangkok I may have gone through with a complaint but since the offices are quite far away I decided not to risk going through yet another difficult ordeal with the govt. office concerned

You can try these, though I think the links are not working now. I was able to find their new websites however via our friend Google:

"National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission. http://www.nbtc.go.t.../portal/NTC/eng

This agency deals with any problems related to your phone or internet or cable provider.

This includes, wrong billing, no service, warranty on phones sold by telco and everything else related.

Again, all companies are aware of this agency,but most people are not. Hence all the problems.

Personal experience just to illustrate: My business phone bill was always 2 weeks late and each time Telco would disconnect the phone for non payment.

After contacting NBTC, while on hold, they contacted Telco, my phone was switched back on in less than 3 mins and has never been disconnected again, even if i was late to pay the bills.

NCPO Thai government. 24 hour Call Center 1111 http://www.1111.go.th/

They deal with any and all complaints related to anything and everything.

Noise, schools, retailers, builders, police or anything else.

Call to this agency and call from them to the other party solves problems within 24 hours"

As if Ban Ki Moon from the Japanese/US totalitarian colony of South Korea would have any notion of democracy.

When it comes to veggies, like many areas of life in Thailand, your health and life are put at risk because Thais don't care about you or themselves, generally speaking. Health and life have no value to most Thais. People don't care whether they are eating properly or not, so mai aroi veggies are not in high demand, many just don't eat vegetables at all. The only sensible thing, if you live in the countryside, is to grow your own, or if you are in Bangkok or Chang Mai seek out specialty shops that sell decent vegetables.

Many posting that e-cigs are indeed harmfull. OK, maybe so. So then the solution is to put people in prison for 5-10 years for smoking them?