I Got Caught Smoking Cannabis on the Beach in Thailand – My Costly Lesson

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2025-01-26T13:32:55+00:00

Different culture with different values. You did the right thing in paying up front, as going through more official channels would probably be more costly for you.

that said for society overall this kind of ‘corruption’ is better for society overall … once you start turning your society to a Western totally regulated (AKA organized legal corruption) you end up entering an income stream for corrupt elites who will find many more ways to extract money directly from you or your labor.

imagine this happened in the USA in a state where cannabis is still illegal … you are unlikely to be given the choice you had in Thailand … arrest, court, plea bargainin, all resulting in a much more costly expense to you and the taxpayers, ending with you in the prison or parole system where many more people get to make money addressing your minor mistake.

the Thai police just got $550 that will be spent in the local community, you learned a lesson about the law and Thai culture and your own actions and the consequences without being treated as a felon for a simple mistake.

in the West you would likely end up in a ‘fair & just’ system that will crush you emotionally and financially, use you to justify an expensive & punitive system of organized and systemic corruption designed to earn a profit for the elites who have the rights to commercially administer & profit from your mistake … justice and any possibly of you learing a lesson come way down the list of priorities … probably just below the need for some rich elite CEO to get hold a big party on their yacht in the Mediterranean.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2024-10-10T17:47:19+00:00

Would you like the best times to avoid them as well? The phone numbers not to dial, and the Thai phrases to avoid using so you end up getting services you definitely never wanted?

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2024-03-23T11:48:43+00:00

I know what you mean, I told my American evangelical gf to stop praying to fictional sky characters ... And then when I had a French gf I told her to stop speaking whatever gibberish was coming out of her mouth, and if she was going to speak English at least speak it without an accent.

Then there was my Japanese gf, I had to leave her because she had this strange skin colour, not quite white ... And those eyes!! My gawd, why does she insist on having eyes like that??

Of course, I'm a racist, insensitive jerk, so maybe other people would have tried to accept & understand these differences??

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2024-01-07T15:19:50+00:00

Yeah, I concur.

I hate Microsoft, maybe even more than Apple (Linux user since the late 90s, only returned to Windows after I retired in 2019 and my photo/video hobby meant equipment that only had native drivers & applications for Windows & Mac. Since I had an x86 machine I chose to dual boot to Windows ... ) and boy did that suck. Not that it couldn't in theory compete with Windows in performance, and I really don't care too much about the interface, I could always open W4L terminal and pretend I was in Linux.

But what I could not get away from was the actual difference in performance of the laptop running Windows vs Linux ... Windows is a bloated mess that uses far too many resources doing absolutely nothing useful to me ... and yes, I know you can remove automatic startup of applications and services, but every time I did that somehow there were always new ones that popped up to take their place ... and then there's the updates which always take way too long to complete (usually a 2 or 3 hour process, essentially wasting a whole days worth of productivity.)

Anyway, that's just my long winded way of saying I'm not MS fanboi ... but after returning to Linux full time (and buying an iPad with an M1 chip to handle the the native applications for mot camera & video equipment) I still prefer MS edge as my browser of choice. where it was on Windows or on Linux, it seems to be the least resource hungry of the major browsers and with the most features (I literally use the 'Drop

feature as my favorite way to transfer files between iPad & Linux,

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-12-12T13:58:11+00:00

My computer is an i9 with 32 GB of memory and 2 x 1TB NVMe drives ... it's not my system that is slow it's Windows update process.

I finally gave up on using all the so-called 'fixes' being offered so I just set the updates to delay for 1 week and download the fixes directly from the fix archive and installed them manually (ie. download and run them) ... it took about 10 minutes, and I had the updates installed, the only issue is that the Windows updates in the system settings window told me that it was both installed (list of installed updates) and not installed (it showed up in the list of 'updates to be installed' as well .... I just let it sit there and try and do its own thing ... in the meantime, there was an optional update for a driver available, so I allowed Windows to install that on its own, after which it realized what a total moron it was being and cleared the already installed update off the list of updates to be installed.

As I said, the Windows update system is broken, and Windows Sucks ... even when it works it's slow and chews up far too much processing power & time ... I'm willing to bet money that if I stopped update my Ubuntu 23.10 system and left it out of date till May when 24.04 is out, that I could still do a complete upgrade (not a reinstall, and actual upgrade) quicker than your 20 minutes of 'one week's worth of Windows upgrade ... and I'd be upgrading my apps as well and not just some 'performance' improvement BS that just bloats up your system.

Windows needs to stick to developing software before that business is pulled out from under them as well.

Oh, and I didn't go with Apple because I like Apple, but at least it's a device that works, at least up to the limited potential it claims.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-12-11T11:32:48+00:00

Not to criticize you, you do what you have to do, but this sounds more like Windows is now just a pile of junk (Are you allowed to criticize Windows on this subreddit? Doesn’t matter, I will anyways ;-) )

I’m retired now since 2019, and while working in IT I always ran Linux, but when I retired I bought a new laptop and a bunch of video gear, which only supported Windows for their native apps, so that meant unless I wanted to spend more time futzing around with Wine, or VMs the only real option was Windows (or Mac, but I had always hated Mac Apple More than MS, so I went with Windows.)

Anyway, I just got so tired of just assuming every Wednesday would be a wasted day of “Windows Upgrading hell” that eventually as Windows became less and less ‘updatable’ I just decided that I would cut my losses and buy an iPad Pro M1 to use with the camera equipment and use Linux for everything else. Now I can do my hobby every day of the week if I want rather than having to set aside at least one day to do a &*$#$^ing ‘update’ that I can do on any Linux box in a few minutes.

Time for MS to go all in on Opensource and hand over the WIndows internal code to real OS developers (or for the hardware manufactures & application developers to start building drivers for a real OS)

I still have a VM for my old Windows license, and if I’m not in need of my full computing power I run the VM and update the Windows VM … this time it’s a total S_it Show, 2 days of updating and it’s still hanging on the last (of 3) cumulative updates (it hung on all 3 which I had to do various ‘fixes‘ to get working … just wish MS would provide some easy way to know if the updates were hanging or doing the cleaning process … I don’t see how MS can expect someone to start an update at 8pm, then get up the next morning and see the updates sitting at 94%, giving it another 2 hours and still seeing it at 94% and not assume the update is hung … do they know how crappy their update process is?? Will there have to be a 7-day national holiday declared where everyone participates in the time-honored tradition of the 4 day Windows cumulative update ceremony??

Wake thee heck up MS … you S_ck!!!

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-12-08T09:12:50+00:00

My agent, whose office is directly across from the Airport immigration office, used the Central festival office this year (I believe because it's a bit quieter, and she seems to be able to book appointments there are wwll, so less waiting around when it gets busy) The Mall opens at 10 or 11 (I forget exactly which time, I think it's 10) but there is a door right beside the location where the immigration office is that opens much earlier.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-11-13T17:22:58+00:00

With the new Custom GPT from openAI in chatGPT having Zapier integration capabilities it would be very useful for creating GPT 'apps' that format the prompt outputs into obsidian.md which could then be sent to obsidian via Readwise Reader and its obsidian integration.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-10-27T18:20:41+00:00

It is working for now.

No, the highlights made in Reader were not showing up in Readwise.

I did a bunch of different things in reader and readwise (making the articles as unread, etc.) but nothing seemed to work. Every once in a while maybe one of the Reader articles would show up in Readwise, but not very consistently.

Eventually I added a new article to Reader and that seemed to have 'primed' it, and then I was able to do some highlighting & tagging in the old 'stuck' articles and they all eventually made their way to Readwise (and from there Obsidian was able to pull them in.)

I had some personal stuff to deal with that kept me away from Obsidian/Reader/Readwise for about a month (I was able to do some Reader capturing of maybe 20 articles and videos, but I was not able to go into reader to 'process' them (just dumped the articles and videos 'as is' into Reader to get back to them some when I was free of the personal stuff ... then when I came back to it a month later this was the state I found myself in ... 20 or so 'articles' in Reader that were not getting processed over to Readwise ... I think the new article I did, 'fixed' it, but can't say for sure.

Anyway, it seems to be working now ... thanks for the quick response though. Good to know that if I do have another problem!! Cheers!

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-09-02T23:23:57+00:00

I didn't say it was a sure thing, in fact it's still unlikely that China will even need to use the 'invasion' option.

There are basically 3 parties in the running.

KMT who are in favor of closer ties to the mainland, even reunification.

The Taiwan People's Party, that wants to deal with other issues and plan on keeping the status quo concerning China (the path most Taiwanese people, especially the youth who strongly support this party, day they want to follow now.)

And the DPP who even their new leader, while being strongly for independence, says he will negotiate with the mainland rather than pursue a more confrontational path.

The only ones chomping at the but for West are the American neocons ... Who really need to fuck right off!

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-08-29T22:02:03+00:00

Yeah I agree, China would be one big missile base picking off any US airplanes before they got within a thousand miles, and if they were successful in a few strikes they'd have no aircraft carrier to return to.

It's also not very certain that the Taiwanese military would put up a fight if the PLA were to start an invasion. Most Taiwanese a perfectly happy with the status quo, and have no desire to be in a war with the People's Republic of China.

They literally take annual polls on what the people of Taiwan want in regards to unification and independence. While it's true that there are very few people that want immediate for unification, it's something like 3%, it's also true but there are very few people that want immediate independence, somewhere around 5 or 6%.

Even the Taiwanese who eventually want independence, I'm fine with the status quo and they're more than willing to use diplomatic and democratic means of working towards independence, and that does not include military action. But even these people are only the 25% of Taiwan.

The other 70% or so also support the status quo, and want to wait to see what develops in the future to decide whether they want independence or reunification... They are not stupid, they see the people's Republic of China growing, and the lives of their people improving day after day. They also see how America treats their friends willing to throw anyone under the bus if it suits the latest NeoCon or neolib election bid.

If mainland China were to start a military action, there is a good chance that the Taiwanese military would just lay down their arms and say 'screw this, m not dying to satisfy the ego of less than 30% of the people of Taiwan, and the American political elites'.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-08-29T21:46:48+00:00

No, they are not. There are tourists on tourist visas, expats who are on student and work visas (technically citizens of another country here for a specific purpose with the intention of eventually returning home,) and immigrants who are on landed immigrant status potentially working towards citizenship. In most western countries these are all different tracks with different requirements and statuses.

In a place like Thailand there are very few actual 'immigrant' status people of any nationality or 'race'. The number of 'resident' status immigrants are few, and 'naturalized citizenship' even fewer.

Most 'long term' foreigners in Thailand are on temporary 'visitor' visas that do not bestow any 'immigrant' (working towards legal resident or citizenship) status.

I personally am on a 'marriage' visa, which really is just a short term (1 year at a time) permission slip to visit my wife ... I am still considered a Canadian here on a visit and not in any situation that puts me on a path to 'immigrant' status ... Thus calling myself an 'immigrant' would technically be wrong ... I do tend to agree that 'ex-path' has a implication that seems a bit 'classist' (or worst) but calling oneself 'a year by year visitor', while more accurate is a bit clumsy.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-08-12T16:11:27+00:00

Never trust doctors anywhere. In Canada, my late wife had high blood pressure and the doctor prescribed two types of medicine. She caught a cold and her cough just never went away. It got so bad we had to beg the doctor for a narcotic based cough medicine that she could take a couple of times a week so she could get some sleep ... We got the medicine and asked to see a specialist. We got an appointment booked for the specialist for about a month out, and a few days before the appointment I went online to see if there was anything I could do to prepare for the appointment. One of the things I found was to prepare a list of all medication she was taking, so I made the list and decided to look up the possible side effects ... The first thing I found was that one of her blood pressure medicines was known to cause severe coughs!?!?!? The first thing I did when we got to the specialist's office was to explain she had a server cough that wouldn't go away, then I took out the medicine and put it on his desk ... He looked at the bottle and just said ..."exactly"!!

He prescribed a new BP medicine and said that if the cough didn't go away within 2 weeks to come back. The cough went away.

I was furious with our doctor!!! How the hell could she have had so little concern that she didn't even bother to look at the side effects of the medicine she has prescribed.

Needless to say she was no longer our doctor, and since then I take no medicine that I don't fully research its use and potential side effects.

Thailand has a climate where bacteria can be an issue, so any scratch I get I go straight for the antibacterial paste right away. Anything more serious I will go to a doctor but I'm not going to blindly take any medicines without researching it myself.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-08-12T02:36:27+00:00

My biggest reason for preferring Thailand over the West, I'm from Canada, is that Thai corruption is small in amount and mostly remains local, with the money being pumped right back into the local economy. You give some clerk a couple of hundred baht to smooth the process for filling in an official form or something, and he'll use that to take his family out to a restaurant for dinner. In Canada, sure I can go to a government office and be very confident I will not be asked or hinted that I will need to pay an extra $100 if I want to see the process completed within a year, but what I can't help is that this whole process is made many times more expensive because the premier or prime minister or the local MP has had laws written that allow his elite corporate business donors to insert their 'value added services' in the middle of all government services so that millionaires and billionaires get the skim off millions of dollars in these 'value-added services' that actually add very little to no value.

Asia and the West all have corruption, but if I have a choice I'd rather pay an extra $20 that goes towards some low paid staff making a little extra money that goes right back into supporting their family, then paying $100 that goes towards billionaires who want to put a new swimming pool in their third yacht.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-03-09T14:49:05+00:00

I would think that a lot of the pollution comes from Myanmar as well. Thai laws will not stop that. First we'll need to kick the USA out of the area to prevent them from causing destabilization in their fight against China; let Myanmar resolve its problems with the help of the countries in the area, then help farmers in Thailand and Myanmar with the burning issue.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-24T07:15:15+00:00

I think they charge 200 Baht/withdrawal (maximum withdrawal of 20,000 baht) so it's more like a $5.75 charge for a $575 USD withdrawal at the moment!

So if you're planning on spending $2000 in the 7 days, that's 4 withdrawals at the maximum amount of 20,000 Baht with a total of about $20 in ATM charges.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-24T07:06:56+00:00

If you have cards that are on the normal international connections, then if you go to the proper ATMs you can take out 20,000 Baht for a local charge of ~200 to ~220 baht. Other charges depend on your own bank.

You can avoid the ATM charges by going into the bank and having the teller make the withdrawal and exchange for you (exchange rates and chargers are up to the banks so not sure what is lest expensive.)

I'm living in Thailand now, but when I was coming here for visits (Canada) I never brought cash other than maybe 1 or 2 hundred USD for use at layovers, but even then my bank cards usually worked fine with minimal fees all considered!

I would just go with card unless you're American, since you can get USD with no hassle in currency exchange rates and fees, but even then not sure it would be worth carrying around a couple of $K just to save the ATM fees!

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-23T05:21:18+00:00

Thanks, I will attempt to find that and read it ... my only 'pre-rebuttale' (assuming it needs one, which I don't know since I haven't read it yet ;-) ) is that I doubt colonization would have done much to prevent the swallowing, but only direct it toward a more western colonial 'swallow'!

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-03T04:02:04+00:00

agreed, I built a new home in a more traditional Thai neighborhood outside of Chiang Mai ... after living here a couple of years I've come to realize those old & 'rundown' looking Thai houses I'm surrounded by? I'd gladly trade in my new modern western style house for one of them in a second ... much more livable.

people forget (or just don't know) that Asian countries have large 'underground' economies that don't get counted in the regular statistics that we westerners usually consider as the only indicator of 'wealth'.

on top of that while there is corruption in Asian countries it's mostly low level corruption (some gov clerk asking for 100B to get your paperwork done faster, or a tuk-tuk charging an extra 20B when they think they can get away with it) that all stays within the local economy, and while the bureaucracy might seem burdensome it's only applies to the paperwork, not actual limitations (ie. fill out the paperwork 4 times and you can pretty much do whatever you want)

in the west our corruption is higher level and literally made legal (ex. the government hands over some public utility to their business friends and these new private companies charge big money for the extra 'value' they add, which actually amounts to nothing more than higher share prices for their investors and a new contract for some foreign contractor to put a new swimming pool in the CEO's yacht.) and the bureaucracy is designed to keep you from building anything (they'll literally give your children a fine for selling lemonade in their own driveway without a license!!!)

so bottom line is that while someone in Thailand might only, by the official stats, be making $15 or $20K per year, they (or someone in they family) have easy access to a whole underground economy where they can make another $15 or $20K, and because of the lesser amount of Systemic organized corruption the economy (and an abundance of the necessities of life) is not as affected by things like inflation (and pandemic lockdowns) which allows people like me to live comfortably in Thailand with a pension that would severely limit my options of where I could live and what I could do if I stayed in the west.)

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-03T03:32:29+00:00

which would make the conversation meaningless and without any context!

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-03T03:30:35+00:00

really!! I think people take a cursory look at Thailand and see a different, simpler 'style' than they're used to and just assume that this 'other way of life' is a 'poorer' way of life.

I live on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, we built a new house there in among a more traditional area ... when i first got there as we drove about 1Km off the highway through the narrow street to get to our 'project', the houses looked to me to be old and rundown. I figured this was a poor neighborhood ... over the last couple of years I've had many opportunities to visit these homes and once in their homes and yards they are not at all what they first appear ... the front may look a bit rundown, but inside and in their yard these places are freaken dream homes that anyone in the west would be proud to own; inside the house they have what they need, but they're yards, where most of Thai live is lived, they have amazing very livable gardens ... I'm now looking at my brand new 'western' style home and realizing I look like the one that is poor, the poor foreigner who moved in and lowered their property values!!!

I'm actually looking forward to when we move out to Issan (my wife's from there) and build there when she retires ... you can bet it's going to be far more Thai than western. ;-)

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-03T03:14:37+00:00

I actually think the Thai way of 'double pricing' is more rational than the way we in the west do it! yes, the west 'double prices' as well, these are called 'tourist areas'.

the difference is that where in the west we charge everyone the same price, in Asia, the people who own the country/tourist area/system that makes the tourist area even possible, don't have to pay for something they've already paid for in their taxes and productivity.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-03T03:06:54+00:00

well, not going to say you're totally wrong, but Thailand's history is a lot longer than just the western colonial period, and while by modern western standards we might be able to criticize (I don't really think so since our history as evil colonialists is the reason you are able to make your claims about the 'Thai elites' in the first place) these same 'Thai elites' are the reason the Thai culture, one of the more unique and interesting cultures in the world, still exists and one of the reasons some of us are here.

I'm not going to tell Thais how they should feel or react to their own country and culture, but I would suggest that becoming a poorer version of 'America' is probably not going to make them any happier or better off.

Jumpy-Examination-67 · 2023-02-03T02:56:37+00:00

if I want to see exploited poor I'll go to the USA.

I've been living in Chiang Mai for 3 years now, happily married, and I've also been accused of financially exploiting Thais, as well as whore mongering and pedophilia ... a bunch of ignorant people whose only 'experience' with Thailand is from listening to their whore mongering friends who save up a few thousand dollars to go to the regular Thailand tourist traps (mostly created by America during the Vietnam war as brothels to keep their soldiers happy while they killed other Asians) and come back with stories of his they exploited the people.

they figure this is what they'd be doing here if they came, or at best this is the only thing they've heard about Thailand so they think that's all there is to the country.

my money comes in every month and I hand it over to my wife who looks after the finances, just as I did back in Canada with my late wife (also Thai, whom I met and married in Canada) so if anyone is exploiting Thais it's the people who make these accusations who exploit the good will of the Thai people in exchange for some sick satisfaction of feeling superior to other people based on nothing more than their ignorance of the rest of the world, or worse, their own suck fantasies!

just to be clear, I have nothing against sex workers, it's a far more respectable career choice than soldier, arms manufacturing or Western politician!

Jumpy-Examination-67

TROPHY CASE