PeterRS

Absolutely agree. Much of the information at the start of an event like an earthquake is often speculation rather than fact - if only because facts are usually difficult to obtain. We can tell from reports here that some felt the earthquake was centred in or near Bangkok. Perfectly understandable given the videos we were seeing and the shaking most were feeling, Yet the fact that Bangkok is not on an earthquake fault line, unlike Chiang Mai and the north, was rarely mentioned in the early hours. Where Bangkok is susceptible to earthquakes is from relatively near fault lines. After living in the city for over 23 years, I can only recall one other earthquake emergency - from the massive 9.2 earthquake off Indonesia's Aceh Province in December 2004. That was roughly 1,250 kms away, yet apart from tall buildings swaying and evacuations, I cannot recall any deaths or disasters in Bangkok. The epicentre of yesterday's quake in Myanmar was almost 1,000 ks away. Vitually the same distance. So one question that needs to be asked is: why did the Myanmar quake with a lesser magnitude of 7.7 compared to 9.2, the third most powerful the world had witnessed - greater even than the devastating 2011 quake off Japan, result in much greater damage in Bangkok? Perhaps it is partly the depths of the two quakes - Aceh being at a depth of approx, 30 kms underwater whereas yesterday's is estimated as a mere 10 kms below the surface. Eventually the experts will inform us of the exact reasons. One thing must surely be certain, though. If a quake 1,000 kms away on a recognised fault line can cause the damage and panic it did in Bangkok yesterday, building codes will need to be revised. How many of all the recent tall buildings constructed in the last 30 years or so are effectively earthquake proof? As we saw in Nepal in 2015, devastating earthquakes do not just happen years and decades apart. They can happen in consecutive months. Worrying! And thank you @reader for your personal comment. I apologise for my earlier comments which may have cast doubts over your original posting.

The gospel according to @Department_Of_Agriculture. What a load of utter garbage! According to him we can soon expect to see most of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Qingdao, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xi'an, Hangzhou and hundreds of other Chinese cities lying in ruins.

I'd go a little further. The concept of heaven and hell was an invention to keep the mass of the people in line. Do good on earth and your place in heaven is all but guaranteed. Do bad and you descend into the fire of hell. After all, was not life for the mass of the people on earth little more than miserable? And was this not the promise of Pope Urban II in 1095 when he persuaded all manner of thieves, vagabonds, adulterers and general riff raff to take part in the First Crusade to free Jerusalem from the Muslims who had invaded and taken it over. The leaderhip of the Crusade was mostly in the hands of noblemen, generally second sons with no rights to the lands of their fathers iin Europe who sought a new life with land they could own in the Levant. Urban told a tissue of lies about the acts of terror then in Jerusalem - a total fiction as the Muslims, Jews and Christians were all living side by side relatively peacefully - and basically promised all who took part a free ticket to heaven. Thus this rabble hoard looted and plundered its way across Europe and the Byzantine Empire in what turned out to be a successful, if temporary, result. Once in Jerusalem, as one commentator of the time put it, the streets ran with bood for days. Jews were hoarded into a large synagogue which was then burned to the ground. Muslims fared no better. So much for the all-loving Christian God! But it is also the concept of purgatory which conerns me about the Christian religion. Does this appear anwhere in any part of the Bible? No! According to the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, St. Patrick received divine guidance about purgatory from God in the 5th century. This state of being neither in heaven nor hell became increasingly popular. St. Augustine of Hippo had earlier argued that there are some "who have departed this life, not so bad as to be deemed unworthy of mercy, nor so good as to be entitled to immediate happiness." By the Middle Ages purgatory is found all over Christian writings and tradition. To me it seems clear it was yet another means of keeping order on earth and had nothing to do with the Christian religion!

Nitpicking? Curious word to choose. I'd have thought the simple act of checking would be more approprite. With less than two hours left in the day, I will enjoy it for sure. Thank you.

What i was trying to say is that there is so much about Christianity which - to me - remains questionable. We know the Old Testament is especially questionable. We know that what is in the New Testament was largely determined by a group of religious leaders three centuries after the death of Jesus. How much of what is included is the actual truth. Much was excluded. What? And why? GIven that, I fail to understand why western nations over 2,000 years have in general adopted Christianity, in some cases virtually as a state religion. Why not Zoroastrianism? Why not Buddhism? What makes Christianity more important? I hope that helps.

I am not on Facebook but I would query Khun Paiboon's assertion. As a non-Thai, I sometimes attend a public hospital and I have to pay the same published rate as for Thais, even though most Thais will have enrolled in their vastly cheaper medical scheme. I cannot understand why Myanmar workers as well as those from other neighbouring countries would not have to pay for medical treatment the same as any other non-Thai. The point about Myanmar boys taking jobs away from Thais is patently nonsense, for the reasons outlined in the last sentence of the article.

Fair point. But where does it end?

We'll have to agree to differ, the more so when the title of that other article not only mentions earthquake in the title but also in the main text - and the post includes a vdo!

I knew virtually nothing about the religion other than the opening of the Richard Strauss tone poem "Also Sprach Zarathustra" where Zarathustra in Nietsche's epic poem is the prophet, Zoroaster. In Iranian history, Zoroaster founded the religion of Zoroastrianism of which the God of Creation and the Sky is Ahura Mazda, the wide-winged creature that is quite commonly known. All those who attended Bangkok gogo bars for decades will know the opening of the Strauss work as it preceded the start of almost all shows. The symbol of Ahura Mazda Goodness and Purity are key elements of the religion of which fire is the most important. In the Iranian city of Yazd the Zoroastrian temple has a fire which allegedly has been alight for 1,500 years. The fire of Zoroaster When I realised that Freddie Mercury's family were of the Zoroastrian faith, I investigated a little more. Most Iranians of the faith eventually moved to India where they were called Parsis. Now there are very few in Iran, most living in Yazd, although the religion is protected by the state. Entering Yazd you pass two 'Towers of Silence' on which the dead are placed left uncovered. During the era of the Shah, this practice was forbidden. Now families wishing bodies to be buried in this manner must send them to Mumbai. One of the Yazd 'Towers of Silence'

The question I always ask is: why not?

Surprisingly I felt absolutely nothing. As I wrote, I had just walked out of the building when i heard the bang from the electric substation. At that I turned around to see if there was a fire. There must have been some movement at ground level but I was not aware of it, perhaps because I was turning around and more concerned about the consequent lack of power in my condo. This is on the top floor of an 8-storey buiilding - not high. On my return I checked for things like plaster cracks. No problem at all. Had the building been much higher, I am certain there would have been some damage. I was very lucky.

Apologies - duplicating was perhaps an unfortunate choice of word. But I still think if there is a major actual event happening anywhere in Thailland, with many posters living or visiting Bangkok there has to be a very good chance that someione else will also have picked up the information and might - stress might - have posted it in one of the sections. I'm sure you will agree that a quick check would avoid what could become two threads dealing with the same issue.

I had literally just got out of the lift in my condo and walked outside when I heard a loud bang. It was the nearby elecricity transformer. I was on my way to do some shopping on SIlom and Sukhumvit. When I got a taxi, the driver was almost screamng at me - "Aftershock! Aftershock?" I stupidly did not understand what he was saying because I had actually felt nothing as I was walking. Then my partner started sending me X videos of water like a waterfall coming from a skyscraper swimming pool, and then another of a tall building under construction that was collapsing. I then realised there had been an earthquake. But that's odd, I thought, because Bangkok is not in an earthquake zone! The traffic was becoming bad and eventually my taxi driver dropped me on Saladaeng Soi 1 saying he had to get home. Not even having had breakfast, I was hungry. The Skytrain and MRT plus shopping malls were closed. Fortunately, market stalls were open, and then I found some guys drinking at a tiny Spanish restaurant on Saladaeng. They told me it was still serving food. I therefore enjoyed an excellent lunch. By this time the internet was working again and I could see that the quake did not occur in or near Bangkok. It was a major 7.7 quake situated close to the surface near Mandalay in Myanmar. That's a big one, bigger than the 6.9 shock I had experienced near San Jose in 1989. It was felt all over west Thailand and in China's Yunnan Province. The only other time I recall Bangkok ever experiencing such a shock from a quake was the one off Aceh Province in indonesia in December 2004. Shopping abandoned, getting home was the problem. Silom was choked with traffic for the most part not moving. Taxis and motorcy taxis were impossible to find. So i walked down Convent and eventually found one motorcy driver on Sathorn prepared to take me the 4 kms or so to my condo. He wanted Bt. 20 more than I offered which i was delighted to agree. Weaving through the enormous traffic jams on both Silom and Nanglingchee was sometimes scary but the driver knew what he was doing. I got back safely - only to find the lifts were still out of action! 8 floors later and an exhausted owner finally was home and ready for whatever water was left in the shower! But still no aftershocks, and I expect there will be none as they will usually be much closer to the quake's epicentre. We would certainly have felt a few by now if we were going to get any.

It seems @reader merely duplicated what @bkkmfj2648 wrote 90 minutes earlier in the Bangkok section. Since there are many more comments there, I have moved my post to that thread.

deleted

With all respect to your Mum, I totally fail to understand why wait staff should not be paid a proper working wage. Tips should be tips for good service - not to pay the wages of a waiter or waitress. Japan has it exactly right. No tipping! On my first ever visit to Tokyo in 1981, I tried to tip the cute and excellent bellboy. He shrank back almost in horror. He had only been doing his job to the best of his ability which is what he was paid to do.

Quite a number of aircraft are certified for automatic computer landings. If there is a problem it is that the ground systems must work flawlessly to provide 100% accurate info to the on board computer. Few airports I believe are certified for automatic landings.

I will probably never get used to the American style of tipping, even though I have visited more than 35 times. Those in the service industry should get paid for doing their jobs, not be dependent on tips. To a certain extent I can understand tipping waiters who go out of their way to offer very good service. But 20%?? Leave 10% and everyone glares at you as you exit! Just because the restaurant owner won't pay them a living wage? But when it comes to room maids, why should I have to pay any tip to them? What extra service do I get for a tip?

I can see that this thread will almost certainly throw up some major differences of opinion - which is great as isn't that what discussions are all about? As for the Bible. I have never believed the Old Testament. How can we believe the truth of what was basically merely an oral history for thousands of years before someone comitted it to written form? We all knoow that when telling a factual incident to friends, it may start out as, let's say, 90% fact. When those friends then relate it to their friends, it becomes 80% . . . and so on, with the result that often it ends up somewhere as virtually a totally different incident. I also think we must remember that during the period of which the Old Testament writes, that world was simply a series of smallish tribes living in a tiny part of our world. The future of the tribe was important, perhaps even its growth in order to defend itself against other tribes. Hence, perhaps, the prohibitions against any form of sex other than for actual procreation. I have more faith in the New Testament in that i believe much of it probably did take place, if only becuase it is much nearer in time. But then my doubts arise when I recall that it was the still pagan Constantine who summoned the Council Nicea to determine what constitutes certain key elements of the Christian doctrine and eventually what would be included in- and as importantly what would be excluded from - the New Testament. Where are the Gospels of Judas, Peter, Philip, Thomas and the Nazarenes, for example, the last actually written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus? So why should we believe in that what was effectively decided for us by a group of clerics and others who lived three hundred years after Jesus' death? I therefore question what makes the Christian religion more important in our western thinking than, for example, the older Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, or even the more recently founded islam?

Do you know how many Tesla cars have had to be recalled? More than 700,000! The Model S tops the list with 38 separate recall orders. This is followed by the Model X with 37 recalls. Even the Cybertruck introduced as recently as November 2023 has been the subject to 8 recalls. My view is that airlines will never take a risk with pilotless passenger carrying passengers. Never! The passengers will never stand/fly for it! LOL https://www.brclegal.com/tesla-recall-statistics/

I have worked in Japan - albeit more than a few years ago and I accept things have changed a bit since then - and also in China. But I absolutely cannot accept that the Japanese economy is so advanced because their people have the capacity to think out of the box. I was in the offices of so many Japanese businesses with dozens of Japanese sitting at identical small desk spaces overseen by managers or supervisors who usually had small individual offices with glass panels. I saw a great deal of paper pushing and very little actual thinking - and certainly not thinking out of the box. It was not the job of the average Japanese to think out of the box but to fulfil meticulously the mandates of their managers and ultimately their companies. That was certainly the situation in the company I worked for! Japan succeeded partly because of a host of visionary business leaders like Soichiro Honda, Konosuke Matsushita of Panasonic, Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota, Masayushi Son of Softbank, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka who founded Sony, Satoru Iwata of Nintendo, and a host of younger leaders at the head of e-ommerce and video gaming industries, for example. Leadership within companies was and is top down with little if any room for thinking out of the box by those lower down the ladder. Secondly, the unique Japanese concept of the keiretsu. These are huge business groupings that link banks, trading companies and industrialists through ownership, cross stock holdings and long-standing exclusive relationships. There is no doubt that in the west these would be regarded as cartels and broken up. In Japan they are both permitted and encouraged by the government. It was their very size that gave them the financial strength and the connections to grow quickly, aggressively gaining market share. This resulted in great competitiveness both nationally and internationally. Thirdly, businesses had access to a huge pool of domestic household savings, far greater than in the EU or the USA. On the other hand, from virtully the first time I visited China and started looking seriously at businesses, I saw there was a much greater level of individual responsibility in many offices. I quickly came to the conclusion that partly because of this, China would surely grow faster than Japan. And that proved true, at least in the 1990s/2000s when Japan entered into a major economic recession which no attempts enabled the country to start growing again. China in those years, admittedly with assitance from a welcoming west, grew at a staggeringly high rate. Today I would have no hesitation in putting money into China rather than Japan, if only because Chinese generally have a greater entrepreneurial spirit than their Japanese counterparts. I have not worked in Korea but from various visits over the years I believe it is much more in tune with the Japanese way of business than China. All that said, having to devote oneself to a company and its company-think, individual Japanese obviously have greater freedom to make up their own minds outisde of work. But as in Korea, for the vast majority of the citizens societal and historical forces still render this difficult for most.

I do think the dining example is one that does not really illustrate the true sense of collectivism to which I was referring. As we all know, in many Asian cuisines (in fact almost all) it is tradition that several dishes are served during one meal, usually but not necessarily always all at once. Each individual at the table then chooses which dish they wish to sample first - and so on. There is no first course, pause, main course, pause, dessert etc. This is a time immemorial tradition. I suggest, though, this is not the reason that, for example, the Japanese and Koreans have an ingrained sense that the group is more important than the individual. That is a much larger societal/historical issue and not even related to the point I was trying to make earlier!

And you are happy that the computer flies the plane without a pilot? Rather you than me. In fact I wouldn't go near a plane without a pilot AND a computer!

There are certainly major differences. I have spent 46 years now living in Asia, mostly in three specific countries but for part of that time with an Asia-wide remit for two relatively major companies. I made my remarks in respect of those visiting Thailand specifically for some form of nighttime entertainment and why gogo bars are generally not an Asian thing in comparison to spas, saunas and discos. And by collectivism I certainly do not in any way refer to entire countries. Merely 2 or more guys from one country visiting Thailand for a vacation.

To take the topic as its original meaning, I wonder what God actually means for priests and those preaching other faiths. I have yet to have any "man of God" explain to me various questions. As a fairly practical person, the Big Bang has always thrown up questions. I can understand that somewhere a gazillion years ago, our universe started with the Big Bang. Yet when I think of this I wonder: into what did our universe expand? To my thinking you cannot expand into nothing. Just as a balloon expands into the air around it, so the universe must have started expanding massively quickly into something! Did God create nothingness? Was God there at the Big Bang? DId God create it? Then we are told the universe is still expanding into realms of space our minds simply cannot comprehend. Two years ago we were informed the diameter of the universe is likely to be 93 billion light years and still expanding. Is God responsible for this? Where is he/she/it? If God in all 'his' manifestations is merely an idea thought up by various men at various times in what is, let's face it, very recent history, why do we not own up to the fact that God is a fiction? Why do we not accept that we really have no clue what God is? Why are we stuck with concepts of God which accept the appalling treatment of children in Canada, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere, World Wars, genocide, natural disasters and so on - and yet we are told week-in week-out about a God of love? Is it any wonder that in many countries, church attendance is falling rapidly?