’Tis the season
Re: “Thailand’s heat index reaches danger levels”, (BP, March 18).
So what?
It is that time of year. Moreover, the past few days have been relatively cool.
The general public doesn’t need nannying about how to live in such conditions which are only likely to get worse in the future.
What alarmist reporting!
Ellis O’Brien
Read the charter
Re: “SpaceX or Nasa”, (PostBag, March 20).
Dennis Fitzgerald asks, “what would happen if other places had multiple names and needed to be reached swiftly?”
Oh! That reminds me of the time I was on the way to Nakorn Ratchasima and forgot to stop in Korat.
He also wrote, “it’s great to see the Nasa brand” on TV.
Oh snap!
Nasa is an acronym, (not a brand), that stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a US government agency.
It is time for the US government to hand over much of Nasa’s mandate to the private sector, Dennis.
According to the Republic’s constitution, the US federal government is not meant to be in competition with private business as you suggest.
Michael Setter
Make tourism great again
Re: “Visa-free status in Thailand to be cut to 30 days”, (Business, March 17) and “Tourism mess”, (PostBag, March 16).
The mandarins in charge of tourism don’t run the industry too well.
Meanwhile, many Westerners feel that local labourers in the tourism business can’t speak much English.
Even Thai guides and operators in your groups are struggling to speak proper English.
Amid all these problems, the government has now mandated that the period of visa-free entry for people from eligible countries be reduced to only a month.
Incredible. One would think that Thai tourism officers would want as many foreigners, with their spending dollars, as possible here!
Hopefully, some kind of a compromise position can be reached where at least people from some of the original countries listed under the visa-free scheme can stay here for longer than a month, given that the list of visa-exempt countries has now expanded to over 50.
This has prompted concerns from various tourism operators that some foreigners are now running illegal businesses here.
Paul
Change is upon us
Re: “Visa folly”, (PostBag, March 22).
I agree with everything that Sara Palin said in her poignant letter, save only one thing: “Time is short [to save the economy]”.
My position is: it is far too late to save the Thai economy as we knew it. Rather than make suggestions which leaders won’t use anyway, I am going to make some predictions for Thailand.
This is with the sole caveat that these predictions don’t include the impact of a possible massive regional war in the Mideast or a nuclear catastrophe there, both of which are possible:
Bankrupt and angry about America’s huge trade deficit with Thailand, I predict that bankrupt Americans will use tariffs to force manufacturers in Thailand who export to America to return the factories we gave away back to America within 18 months — shuttering huge numbers of Thai manufacturing jobs.
Additionally, since US sanctions have now been announced against Thai policymakers and officials responsible for the repatriation leaders of Uyghurs to China, I suspect that a formal downgrade from the United States in American-Thai relations is also likely, along with significant tariffs.
I conclude by saying President Trump is about to “make Thailand an offer it cannot refuse”.
Events show that the days of running on a “tourism/export” economy — neither of which from Thailand are really necessary now that other Southeast Asian countries are developing — ended when President Trump took office.
The only real question in my eyes is who will have the strength to explain to Thais that, either we finally change, or we wind up standing before the world among the most failed state economies.
Jason A Jellison
One cloudy future
Re: “Reform needs more than just a chainsaw”, (Opinion, March 10).
The US Environmental Protection Agency is going to eradicate its own scientific research arm, with over 1,000 scientists going from working on protecting us and our environment to standing in an unemployment queue.
Removing scientists that are working on climate change won’t change the facts, nor will it remove it from the news. As a science teacher, I always promoted the value of science and research even if it wasn’t immediately obvious.
Science should be held high but now the voices of “fake” sciences are louder and worryingly they are being listened to. The appointment of R F Kennedy Jr to the management of the country’s health system does not improve the situation either. It looks like a cloudy future, obscuring the truth and letting the darkness destroy our hopes.
Dennis Fitzgerald
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