Stoker58

“The idea is that the longer tourists can stay in Thailand, the more they will spend”. Some sound thinking at last. I can’t understand why so many people seem to hate “visa runners” and backpackers. They’re not doing any harm and not costing Thailand anything.

I had to do the Thai driving test recently to renew my licence. It was appalling. They learned nothing about road safety and competence. They need a much more rigorous way of training drivers. They also need real traffic police, but everyone knows that already.

Let’s pretend there really are tens of thousands of new internal cases in Thailand every day. <deleted> actual difference would it make if an occasional tourist arrived with a bad cold. None.

Things have changed in the source markets, the West, Russia and China. These are outside Thailand’s control and will greatly limit any bounce back. That said, they also badly need to replace the current bureaucratic maze with a proper welcome mat for farangs bearing cash.

I had to stop reading this bigoted rant after the first few paragraphs. Simplistic caricaturing of other people is no better than the people the writer imagines he is criticising. I suggest the person responsible takes a hard look at his prejudices.

Scaremongering raised to Level 4 again.

There is a mental health crisis, but it’s not caused by a harmless respiratory virus.

Works for me. I don’t want to be sharing space with crazy vaxxers and their germ fetish.

Two of my friends have just cancelled their planned holiday here in April. Who needs the risk? Thailand will learn that it’s a lot easier to kill a tourism industry than to rebuild it.

Losing the facenappies would be a good first step. These were always a psychological tactic to promote fear.

They’re f’ing obsessed with “wealthy foreigners”, aren’t they?

Not while this is the attitude of the traffic police.

Strangely enough, there has been an increase in the number of road accidents and deaths in the UK and Ireland over the past year too. Many people have reported deteriorating driving standards generally. I wonder what they might have in common with Thailand.

How come they all wear those parachute and wings badges? Anyone know what that’s about?

A detail that many overlook is that the Thai birth rate is now 1.5, way below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population. They’re facing the same demographic problem as many western countries. They can either make it easier for relatively well off westerners to live here or their country will fill up with Burmese and Cambodians. 1.5 is drastically low.

My wife has two young grandchildren. Although Buddhist, they attend what’s considered to be quite a good school run by Thai Christian nuns. Literally all they ever do is stare at their phone screens all day. No one apart from me sees this as being a problem. I doubt if they know what a book or a football looks like.

In my experience, school teachers in rural Thailand simply can not speak English. If they can’t speak it they can’t teach it. Before complaining about anything else they should put some effort into learning it themselves. English fluency is the key that opens the door to world wide knowledge.

“The mayor defended his entertainment programme of weekly music festivals, including the Pattaya Countdown, claiming none of the infections came from there”. . Thai thinking at its finest.

Is this the same police who can’t make teenagers wear crash helmets even when they die in droves on the road? Good to see the tome of comments in this forum shifting back towards realism.

“Trusted destination” in a country where a Norwegian family was slammed into expensive forced quarantine on the basis of a test that even the US CDC now admits is not fit for purpose. No amount of dancing elephants will fix that trust issue.

Vaxxers on holiday. They learned the hard way.

Mitigating symptoms makes them a therapy, not a vaccine. Several people I know who got ‘boosted’ then got covid shortly after.

“One factor, he said, is the drop in efficacy of the vaccines three months after inoculation…..”. . Three months is being generous, and they don’t stop you catching or transmitting covid at all, so they’re basically useless.

“The Thai Ministry of Public Health has unveiled bleak pictures of three worst case scenarios……”. . Scaremongering, that’s the problem right there. Any bug going around is no worse than all the other bugs that routinely circulate through society.

Spent two hours today by the side of a road watching the Thai traffic go past and found myself wondering how the “traffic police” can look themselves in the mirror while this continues.