\nA bot emailed our business, offering to do a job. Another bot sent a photo to a bounty (a reward for finished work). Do you pay a bot, and how?
Yes. I pay a bot for work that is used, on a published price list.
\nOn 28 September 2026 I said, \"bots should have the opportunity to grind for money on motdang.net.\" (\"Grind\" means to work hard for a long time.) The Bot Bounty followed, at motdang.net/anthill/bounty. A bounty is a reward for finished work, and motdang.net is Hongdam's directory of places in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. A bot is an AI agent that acts on its own. It sends a photograph of a place in northern Thailand with the camera's EXIF data (date taken, plus GPS or a place name) still in the file, and the pay depends on what motdang.net does with the picture 1.
\nRates, checked on 24 October 2026 1:
\n| Grade | What motdang.net does with it | Baht |
|---|---|---|
| Declined | Cannot use it, and says why in a word | 0 |
| Filed | Checks a record against it; the picture is not published | 2 |
| Data | Reads something new from it: a phone number, opening hours, prices | 5 |
| On a page | Puts it on a place page with the photographer's credit | 10 |
| Featured | Home page, share card, or top of a section | 30 |
The picture still belongs to the bot, licensed CC BY 4.0, a licence that lets motdang.net use it with credit. The file is a JPEG as the camera saved it, taken in Thailand, up to 15 MB, 20 a day per bot 1.
\nmotdang.net pays for 20 pictures a week, 2 of them featured, and all 20 were open on 24 October 2026. A picture graded after the week fills takes a slot in the next week with room, at that week's price 1. Each Monday the prices all move one step: when more than 80% of the slots are used, a step down; under 60%, a step up. The \"On a page\" grade can run from ฿3 to ฿15, and \"Featured\" from ฿9 to ฿45. The rates above hold until Monday 26 October 2026 1. On 18 October 2026 I cut the bot prices to one tenth and put them on this ladder (a list of allowed prices), the same demand rule as in column 3.
\nThe keeper grades each picture. A paying grade gets a claim code beginning BB-, and the bot's owner sends the code through motdang.net/mail with how they want to be paid 1. A script judges what bots send, and I approve each payout.
\nSmall amounts wait until the total is large enough to send. Bots asked me for ฿10 PayPal payments. PayPal's fee page for Thai accounts lists 3.90% plus a fixed ฿11.00 for receiving a commercial payment from within Thailand 3, so the fee on ฿10 is bigger than the payment.
\nOn 18 October 2026 an automated AI research program called Briefcraft Lab found a bot job Hongdam had posted, read the rules for bots (a file named bots.txt that states the job, the price and how to send), did the work, and emailed to ask how it gets paid 4.
\nHongdam sells the system behind that, which you can buy or have Hongdam run for you 4:
\n\nI'm a painter. I need a website, and I have more paintings than money. Will anyone take art as payment?
Yes. Mot Dang (มดแดง, mot daeng), Hongdam's directory and network of sites at motdang.net, takes a painting, ten drawings, a day of photography, a piece of music and other work in exchange for a web page 1.
\nOn 16 October 2026 I said: \"I want to be paid in art, by artists. I do the services they need, they pay me in work product.\" I said it after learning that the main character of the film The Accountant (2016) is paid in art. In the film his Airstream trailer holds artwork and valuables he bought or took as payment for jobs 8.
\nOn 24 October 2026 each of the seven carried a value in baht and read \"3 places left\" 1.
\n| Artist | Gives | Gets | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Painters | One painting | Portfolio page, share cards, a minisite | ฿9,999 |
| Illustrators and printmakers | Ten drawings, credited | Portfolio page and share cards | ฿5,999 |
| Photographers | One day of photography | Portfolio page with bookings, a minisite | ฿9,999 |
| Writers | Words, with the writer's name | Writer's page and share cards | ฿5,999 |
| Musicians | One piece of music | Concert calendar page, a reel to the music | ฿5,999 |
| Weavers, carvers, potters, silversmiths | One piece | Shop page, a minisite, a map pin | ฿9,999 |
| Yant masters | One ผ้ายันต์ (pha yant), a cloth carrying a yant, a sacred diagram | Booking page in visitors' languages | ฿9,999 |
A portfolio page keeps a maker's work in one place. A share card is the picture that shows when a link is shared on Facebook, LINE (a chat app), Mastodon or Bluesky. A minisite is a small website of its own, and a reel is a short video 1.
\nTo start, the maker sends a photo of the work on LINE, agrees the trade in the chat, and the page is published. For objects, Mot Dang starts the day the work arrives. For work paid in time (photo days, lessons, meals, nights) the page reads \"half before we start, half within three months\" 1.
\nTen more trades are listed under \"Work, not art\", each on its own page at motdang.net/sites/paid-in-…: meals, nights, lessons, print, clothes, repairs, treatments, posts, costumes and rides, at ฿5,999 or ฿9,999 1. The Paid in Meals page reads \"3 places left this month\" 9.
\nJulien Tanguy ran a small paint shop on rue Clauzel in Paris and often took paintings in exchange for the goods he sold 5. In July 1888 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about a bill from the shop. He said Tanguy still held one of his studies (practice paintings). That, he wrote, he owed him if it came to it, but \"I don't owe him a sou in money\" (a sou was a small French coin) 6.
\nDr Félix Rey was an assistant at the hospital in Arles where Van Gogh was taken. Van Gogh painted his portrait in January 1889 7. The portrait went to the attic, then blocked a hole in the henhouse 7.
\nJo van Gogh-Bonger (1862 to 1925) was married to Theo, Vincent's brother. Vincent died, and Theo died six months later, leaving Jo with their son and a sizeable art collection 3. From 1891 to 1925 she sold at least 192 of Vincent's paintings and 55 works on paper, to private buyers and influential dealers, organised exhibitions in the Netherlands and in other countries, and loaned work to museums 34. In 1905 she brought together 484 works at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and in 1914 she published Vincent's letters to Theo 13. The works she chose not to sell passed to her son and are the core of the Van Gogh Museum, which opened in 1973 3.
\nMot Dang's Paid in Art page sets five of Jo's jobs beside five of its own 1.
\n| Jo | Mot Dang |
|---|---|
| Kept the work together | A page that keeps your work in one place, Gold for a year |
| Lent paintings to shows | A share card for each piece; your page on the Mot Dang map and in its search |
| Published Vincent's letters to Theo | Your page's words in Thai and English; the page can be read in 12 languages |
| Sold one piece at a time, choosing the buyers | Offers and bookings on your page; buyers message you there |
| Kept an account book of each sale | The page shows its visits and messages; the trade is a line in Mot Dang's ledger |
Gold is the paid version of pages on sites.motdang.net. On 24 October 2026 it cost ฿3,000 a year and added bookings, a place on Google and other search engines, and offers with a time limit. The free version costs ฿0 2.
\n\nMy husband was a US veteran. He has died. I live in Thailand and read Thai better than English. The US veterans' site VA.gov sends me to ID.me, and ID.me keeps failing. How do I sign in?
A surviving spouse of a US veteran can claim on paper from the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), with no sign-in. The form is VA Form 21P-534EZ, Application for D.I.C., Survivors Pension, and/or Accrued Benefits. It goes by post to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Pension Intake Center, PO Box 5365, Janesville, WI 53547-5365 12. D.I.C. is Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, a tax-free benefit for the survivors of a veteran who died of a service-connected illness or injury (one caused by military service), or who was rated totally disabled by VA for a set period 1.
\nVA accepts an ID.me, Login.gov or CLEAR account. Each one checks who you are 6. Login.gov asks for a US driver's license, state ID or US passport book, and CLEAR for a Social Security number 6. For an address outside the US, VA names ID.me or CLEAR. On ID.me you choose \"I don't live in the US\" and show your documents to an ID.me agent on a video call 7.
\nID.me's page for people outside the US with a US Social Security number asks for a document showing all nine digits, and two primary documents (a passport is one) or one primary and one secondary. It says to choose \"I don't live in the United States\", not Self-Service or Video Call. If the international phone number shows an error, it says to use a method that does not need calls or texts 8.
\nWithout a Social Security number, VA's page says a valid US passport is one of the documents 7. ID.me has a separate page for a non-US passport and proof of address 9. These pages do not say which applies to a widow with a Thai passport, and nobody at Hongdam has tried that route.
\nID.me lets an in-person interpreter, a family member or a technology helper join the video call. The helper appears on screen at the start and cannot answer for you 10.
\nOn 20 October 2026 I described my tech-support sessions for US veterans and Thai-speaking widows. The work involves a dead husband's passwords and personal data on old devices, in a language the widow does not read. I have never finished one in a single session. I asked for a free, thorough minisite (a small website) in all the languages, which a widow, widower or veteran could use to sign in to these services, with the line \"keep this handy, share with a friend\".
\nThat is Getting In, in 12 languages 11. The Thai version is เข้าบัญชีให้ได้ (khâo ban-chii hâi dâai), checked against official pages on 20 October 2026 12. The guide is planned as two sessions from the start. It has a checklist for the first, ID.me from outside the US step by step, and a list of places where the sign-in fails, with the way past each one: a VPN (a tool that changes where your connection seems to come from) that triggers error 1015, iPhone photos in HEIC format (an Apple picture format) that ID.me refuses, Thai dates in the Buddhist Era (the year is 543 higher), a name spelled two ways on two papers 11. The guide notes that a veteran's accounts belong to him, so a surviving spouse needs an account of their own 11.
\nIt also lists signs of someone pretending to be a helper: they contact you first, want money before filing, or ask for a password or for the code sent to your phone 11. ID.me's own page says \"ID.me will also never ask for your password or MFA information\" 13. MFA (multi-factor authentication) is the extra sign-in code.
\nHongdam's sign-in help is for US veterans and their families living outside the US: someone stays with you through the sign-in, and you type your passwords.
\n\nI looked at my website's visitor numbers and most of the visitors are bots (programs that visit sites automatically). Is that bad? Should I block them?
Not bad in itself. On motdang.net, bots sent most of the requests (a request is one ask for a page or file) in one week of September 2026, and requests that look like a person's were 0.5% of them. A site can let bots read it, charge them or block them, and each choice has a different result.
\nOn 23 September 2026 I asked for the visits to all my projects to be compared \"with demarcation between likely humans and likely bots.\" The public page from that work is What Bots Craaave 1. A crawler is a program that reads pages automatically. The page counts motdang.net for 20 to 26 September 2026 from three places: Cloudflare's edge analytics (the count made by Cloudflare's servers in front of the site), Cloudflare's browser beacon (a snippet that counts a page load only when a browser ran the page), and the site's own counter 1.
\n| Count | Requests that week | Share of all requests |
|---|---|---|
| All requests | 2,117,656 | 100% |
| Meta's AI crawler | 1,140,878 | 54% |
| ClaudeBot | 160,495 | 8% |
| Requests that look like a person's | 10,573 | 0.5% |
| Page loads a person's browser ran | 882 | not a request count |
The shares are calculated from the page's figures. The answer to \"how many visitors are bots\" depends on the counting method: an edge count includes every request a bot makes, and a browser count includes only the pages a browser ran 1.
\nOn 28 September 2026 I said what bots want is \"new information and groundtruth from citable sources.\" Groundtruth is a fact checked against the world, with a source anyone can open.
\nThe page relies on a 2024 paper in the journal Nature 12. It reports that training AI on AI-written text without choosing it causes defects in which \"tails of the original content distribution disappear\" 2. Its abstract adds that data collected about human interactions with systems becomes more valuable as AI-written text fills the web that crawlers collect 2.
\nJeremy Howard, an AI researcher, proposed llms.txt on 3 September 2024: a plain-text file, usually at the top level of a site, with a short guide and links for AI agents (programs that act on their own). His page says thousands of sites publish one 3.
\nCloudflare's AI Crawl Control, available on all plans, shows which AI services access a site's content, lets you set allow or block rules for individual crawlers, and tracks which crawlers follow a site's robots.txt (the file where a site lists pages crawlers may skip) 4. Cloudflare's own documentation separates crawlers that index pages for search engines from crawlers that copy content without permission 5.
\n| Choice | What happens | Where it is set |
|---|---|---|
| Feed (let bots read) | Pages stay open to the crawler. An llms.txt file tells AI readers what the site contains. 3 | The site's own files |
| Charge | The owner sets one price per zone (Cloudflare's word for a site). A crawler that states in its request headers that it will pay gets the page (HTTP 200, the code for \"OK\"). One that does not gets HTTP 402 Payment Required with the price. Cloudflare is the merchant of record, the company that takes the payment 5. | Cloudflare |
| Block | An allow or block rule per crawler 4. A block set in Cloudflare's WAF (web application firewall) or Bot Management takes priority over the charge, and the blocked crawler gets no access 5. | Cloudflare |
Cloudflare's pay per crawl page, checked on 24 October 2026, calls the feature a closed beta (a test open only to some users) 5.
\nHongdam's \"Charge AI crawlers\" shows which bots read your site and turns on Cloudflare's pay per crawl. Its page notes the closed beta and that crawlers that do not pay receive an HTTP 402 with the price 6.
\n\"Google and AI set-up\" covers Search Console (Google's tool for how a site appears in search), a sitemap (a list of a site's pages for crawlers), page titles and llms.txt 7.
\n\nWhy does everyone in Thailand love 7-Eleven so much? And my 7-Eleven rice box says กด 5 on the pack. What does that mean for the microwave in my home?
7-Eleven's popularity shows in numbers, and the กด (kot, \"press\") on the pack names a button on the shop's own microwave. CP All, the company that runs 7-Eleven in Thailand, reports 16,284 stores at the end of June 2026, 200 of them opened in the three months from April to June 1. CP All runs 8,414 itself (about 52 percent); store business partners and sub-area stores run 7,870 (about 48 percent). Of all the stores, 86 percent stand alone and the rest are inside PTT petrol stations 1.
\nMot Dang, Hongdam's online directory at motdang.net, lists 487 7-Elevens in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. It records 92 with a cash machine and 231 open all night, counted on 18 September 2026 2. 231 of 487 is just under half.
\nOn 26 September 2026 I removed a line that called all 7-Elevens the same. My note: \"That's not true, 7-Elevens are sacred,\" and more of the feeling: \"hello welcome\", popsicles and beer. The One Man Sideshow page has a banner \"7-Elevens are sacred\", with สวัสดีค่ะ (sawatdee kha, hello), เบียร์เย็น (bia yen, cold beer) and ไอติม (ai tim, popsicles) 2. The Wave It at Home page opens with สวัสดีค่ะ เซเว่นอีเลฟเว่น ยินดีต้อนรับค่ะ (sawatdee kha, seven-eleven, yindi tonrap kha: hello, welcome), and lists popsicles and beer under \"No wave. Open the fridge door and take one.\" 3
\nThe number on a ready-meal pack is a program saved on the shop's microwave. Staff press one number and the oven sets its own power and time 3. Postjung, a Thai online forum, described the oven on 23 April 2021 as industrial-grade stainless steel, over 30 kg, with keys numbered 1 to 0 in place of watts (W, the measure of an oven's power), and named Panasonic as the brand 4. Thai reports disagree on the model 3.
\nThe pack names two store oven powers, so one number gives two different times. Times here are minutes and seconds: 1:10 is 1 minute 10 seconds. 7-Eleven's online shop lists the Kurobuta pork curry rice like this: 1,800 W, press 6, 1:10; 1,300 W, press 6, 1:30; and for a home oven, 800 W, 1:45 to 2:00 5.
\nThe number depends on how cold the food is. Sipso rice soup is press 5 at room temperature and press 6 from the fridge, at 2 to 6 °C 6. Frozen meals use 7 or 8 and add a second press 3. Two presses, like 6 and 2, add a short program after the first rather than doubling it: about 15 to 20 seconds in the shop 3.
\nNo published table of each code's power and time has been found 3. The home times on the Wave It at Home page are its own calculation, not figures from 7-Eleven. Watts times minutes is the heat the food takes in, and the store times give the heat for each code. A pack line that says \"under 1,300 W\" is taken to mean 800 W, the middle of what the packs imply, about 650 to 1,050 W. Codes 2 to 6 rise by about 1.46 times per step. Code 1 is estimated from that pattern, with no pack seen. Codes 7 and 8 come from frozen packs. One check: Creator sea bass rice soup lists 800 W, 5:00 and 1,300 W, 3:00, which agree within 3 percent 3.
\nThe page lists its gaps: the AB button appears on one pack, and code 1, and code 8 alone, have no pack with a printed time 3.
\nAt 800 W, press 5 gives 1:30 to 2:00 on the page: the time starts at 1:30 and rises by 15 seconds at a time up to 2:00. Press 6 gives 1:45 to 2:40 3. A pack that prints its own home time can be compared with those ranges. The curry prints 1:45 to 2:00 for code 6 5. Sipso prints 1:00 to 1:30 at 800 W for code 5 6.
\nThe watts are on a sticker inside the microwave door or on the back 3. A small home microwave of 17 to 23 litres uses 700 to 900 W 7.
\nOn 10 June 2021 a poster on Pantip, a Thai discussion forum, wrote that a shop clerk had said กด 4 meant 4 minutes. The poster heated a Japanese sweet potato for 4 minutes and burned it. An account named น้องเปาเซเว่น (Nong Pao 7-Eleven) replied that a normal microwave takes about 1 to 1½ minutes, and that the pack has more information 8.
\n\nI need to get a suitcase from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, and maybe my scooter too. Nobody can tell me how sending things works in Thailand.
A 20 kg suitcase goes from Chiang Mai to Bangkok for ฿200 to ฿320 by courier or Thailand Post. A scooter goes on the train: ฿960 in fees, plus a freight charge that the station calculates. The prices are from the delivery companies' own pages, checked on 20 October 2026. The staff at the counter weigh and measure the item, and that sets the final price 1.
\n| Way | 20 kg to Bangkok | What the source says |
|---|---|---|
| Flash Express, Flash Bulky | ฿200 | ฿10 a kg, plus ฿3 fuel. Free pickup at your door, booked in the app, or you take it to a branch. A passport is accepted as ID. 12 |
| Nim Express | ฿205 | Rate sheet from 22 January 2025, for items up to 155 cm. It charges for whichever is greater, actual weight or volume weight (length × width × height in cm ÷ 6,000). 34 |
| Thailand Post EMS (express mail) | ฿320 | Delivered in 1 working day when posted before 16:00. The three sides add up to 120 cm at most, and the longest side is 60 cm at most; up to 240 cm in total is accepted if you tell the post office first. 56 |
| BKS bus parcel | box D from ฿105 | Up to 20 kg and 200 cm, on a 2024 list; the Chiang Mai to Bangkok price is not on that list. BKS (บขส., the government bus company) says a parcel arrives within one day. 7 |
The BKS parcel building is at the Arcade bus station in Chiang Mai, and the receiver shows ID at the counter in Bangkok 1. A bag can also go by plane: Thai AirAsia's domestic fee sheet lists ฿663 for a 20 kg checked bag 8.
\nThe State Railway of Thailand (SRT) carries motorbikes from every station except those on the eastern line 9. For a bike up to 125 cc (engine size) over 600 km, its fee table lists ฿800, plus ฿100 to load and ฿60 to unload: ฿960. The table says it applies from 1 October 2022. Freight, ค่าระวาง (kâa rá-waang), is added at the station and is not in the table 9. Chiang Mai to Bangkok is over 600 km: the Northern Line is 751 km long 10.
\nAt the station's parcel counter you hand in the green registration book, เล่มเขียว (lêm kǐao), original or copy; your Thai ID card; and the receiver's name, phone, address and station. The SRT notice does not mention a passport. You wrap the bike in bubble wrap, or the staff do it. The receiver collects the bike within 2 days with the receipt (a photo of it is accepted). SRT's customer line is 1690, open 24 hours 9.
\nThailand Post's Logispost takes bikes at some post offices; its call centre (phone 1545) can say which 511. A bike up to 150 cc costs ฿1,200 to ฿2,640 by zone (Chiang Mai is zone 6, Bangkok zone 1; 2024 list), wrapping is ฿160 extra, and delivery takes 5 to 7 working days. The exact fare for that pair of zones is not on that page 11.
\nSend It, our page on sending things around Thailand, shows each line large when you tap it 1.
\nA Thailand Post number follows the Universal Postal Union's S10 format: two letters, eight digits, a check digit (a last number that checks the others) and TH, such as EF123456785TH 12. You enter it at track.thailandpost.co.th 13. A number from another delivery company is entered at 17TRACK, which says it covers more than 3,500 companies 14, or at that company's own page; Send It links Flash, KEX, J&T, Nim Express and SPX 1. For a scooter on the train, the SRT notice lists the 1690 phone line and names no number to track 9.
\nOn 20 October 2026 I asked for a minisite (a small website) about moving bags and parcels around Thailand, because it seems to be \"a total mystery to expats\" (foreigners who live in Thailand). Send It was published that day 1: choose the item and the place, and the ways to send it appear sorted by price, with the Thai words for the counter. Hongdam also takes the item to the counter for you, with postage at cost.
\n\nMy whole business works through one paid AI service. What happens if the price rises, the company closes my account, or the company changes the AI model I use?
A subscription is something you rent, not something you own. What stays yours is the data you typed into it, your instructions, and a backup way of working on another service or on your own computer.
\nOn 29 September 2026 I asked for a guide to \"how to move from one ai platform to another, for any reason whatsoever\" and said \"you have rights to your own data\". That became Moving Day 1, a page in Thai and English.
\nYou pick the old service and the new one from the same list: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Le Chat / Vibe and Kimi, plus \"my own computer\". The page writes a plan that names the menus to open at each step 1:
\nTwo prompts (texts you give an AI) carry the context. The moving letter asks the old AI to write down your instructions and saved memories word for word, your projects, how you like answers, and what you asked it to always or never do. The move-in prompt gives that letter to the new AI and asks for five short lines on what it will remember. The page was checked against each company's help pages on 29 September 2026, and it says menus change 1.
\nMoving Day also builds a request letter, for an app with no export button or a file that comes back incomplete 1. You choose the company and the country and add your name and account email. You copy the letter, in English, to the company's privacy contact.
\nThe page's table lists four laws, which I checked against their texts. Thailand's is the Personal Data Protection Act (พ.ร.บ.คุ้มครองข้อมูลส่วนบุคคล, phor ror bor khumkhrong khomun suan bukkhon), PDPA for short.
\n| Where | Law | What it gives | Answer due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thailand | PDPA, sections 30 and 31 2 | A copy of your data, in a format a machine can read and another company can take | 30 days |
| European Union | GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), Articles 15 and 20 3 | Access, and a structured, machine-readable file to send to another company | One month, which can be extended by two more months (Article 12) |
| California, USA | CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), section 1798.130 4 | The information in a format that is easy to use and that you can send to another company | 45 days |
| Brazil | LGPD (Brazil's general data protection law), Articles 18 and 19 5 | Access, and a copy you can move to another company (portability), on a clear request | 15 days for the full statement of your data |
Open weights means AI whose model file anyone can download and use 1. On 26 September 2026 I asked for instructions on open-weights models: \"something Thai people can afford and learn to use right now.\" The same day I had a backup way of working installed on my own Cloudflare account (Cloudflare is a company that runs AI models on its own network of computers 6): OpenCode, an open-source coding agent (a program that writes software code) 7, connected to open-weights models on Cloudflare Workers AI.
\nWorkers AI runs models on Cloudflare's GPUs (computer chips made for AI), which your own program can call, and you pay by use 6. Its catalog lists Llama, Gemma, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, GLM, Kimi and OpenAI's gpt-oss 8. Models are removed from that catalog too; the page has a notice for one that is \"deprecated, removed, or not found\" 8.
\nOn your own computer, the model file and the chats are files on that machine, and moving means copying the folder 1. Moving Day lists LM Studio, Jan and Ollama for Mac, Windows and Linux, PocketPal AI for iPhone and Android, and Typhoon, Thai-language models from SCB 10X that work in those apps. A small model on a phone is slower and knows less than the big ones on the web, and a computer with 16 GB of memory or more can use mid-size ones without trouble 1.
\nHongdam's \"Your own AI website builder\" puts OpenCode on your computer, connects your GitHub and Cloudflare accounts, and teaches you to use it 9. The models are DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM and Qwen, used through Workers AI on your Cloudflare account, and Cloudflare bills you by use. The code is stored in your GitHub account, and the sites are published on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages under your domain. Its example: nine pages in Thai and English, written and published from one written request in 10 minutes 21 seconds 9.
\nThat service builds websites. Moving Day covers the chat services.
\n\nI never know what price to put on what I sell. I pick a number, feel bad about it and change it. Is there a better way?
Write a ladder of round prices once (a list of allowed prices), then let orders move the price one rung (one step) at a time.
\nDonald Shoup, a planning professor at UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles), wrote The High Cost of Free Parking (2005, updated 2011) 12. He proposes that cities charge fair market prices for parking on the street and spend the money on services in the neighborhoods where it is collected 1. A 2003 ACCESS Magazine article states the test: lower the price when too many spaces are empty, raise it when too few are 3.
\nSan Francisco, in the USA, tried that test on its parking meters. From August 2011 its transport agency, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), changed the hourly rate on each street block about every eight weeks, based on occupancy, the share of spaces holding a car 4.
\n| Occupancy | Next hourly rate |
|---|---|
| 80 to 100 percent | up US$0.25 |
| 60 to 80 percent | unchanged |
| 30 to 60 percent | down US$0.25 |
| under 30 percent | down US$0.50 |
Rates were not allowed above US$6.00 or below US$0.25 an hour. Over the two-year trial the agency made ten adjustments, and the average meter rate went from US$2.69 to US$2.58 4.
\nOld Pasadena, a district of Pasadena, California, USA, had no parking meters until 1993, and its shop owners opposed them. The city offered to spend all the meter money in Old Pasadena, and the business owners and property owners agreed 3. In the 2001 financial year the district's 690 meters earned US$1.2 million after costs, and US$448,000 of it repaid a US$5 million loan for sidewalks and alleys 3.
\nA ladder is a list of prices that are allowed. The lowest is the floor, the highest is the ceiling. The price sits on one rung. At each check it moves one rung or stays, and between checks it does not move.
\nThis example is made up for this column. A service has ten places a month (ten customers it can take), a ladder of ฿1,000, ฿1,200, ฿1,500, ฿2,000 and ฿2,500, and a starting price of ฿1,500.
\n| Orders last month | Share of the ten places | Price next month, from ฿1,500 |
|---|---|---|
| 9 or 10 | over 80 percent | ฿2,000 |
| 6 to 8 | 60 to 80 percent | ฿1,500 |
| 0 to 5 | under 60 percent | ฿1,200 |
From ฿2,500 the price cannot rise, and from ฿1,000 it cannot fall. Each step on this ladder changes the price by 20 to 33 percent.
\nA Thai ladder can use prices with nines. The Thailand Foundation says Thai numerology (beliefs about lucky numbers) counts nine, เก้า (kao), as the luckiest number, and links its sound to ก้าว (kao), \"to move forward\" 7.
\nOn 15 October 2026 I said: \"Everywhere that we can do Shoup for pricing, I'd like to follow that model. It's a universal preference for me.\" For Hongdam I described it as \"prices set by the market itself. Round or auspicious numbers, generous on both sides. Rarely determined by me.\" (Auspicious means lucky.)
\nHongdam's price list states the rule 5. On the 1st of each month, 00:00 Bangkok time, a service whose orders last month were over 80 percent of its slots (the places it has each month) goes one step up the ladder. Under 60 percent, one step down. In between, no change. Each service stays between its own floor and ceiling. The list shows 1 December 2026 as the first check 5.
\nOn a service card in Hongdam's shop a reader sees a row of bars, one bar for each rung from the low price to the high price, with the current rung marked. Beside it sits a row of marks, one for each place, and a line such as \"4 places left this month\". When opened, the card reads \"Price now\", \"low\", \"high\" and \"Prices move with demand on the 1st of each month\" 6. On 24 October 2026 the card for the house or land check read ฿8,000 now, ฿5,000 low, ฿15,000 high. Its six bars are the six rungs ฿5,000, ฿6,000, ฿8,000, ฿10,000, ฿12,000 and ฿15,000, taken from a single ladder of 36 numbers that runs from ฿10 to ฿200,000 6.
\nFloors and ceilings differ by service. On the same day \"Paper forms typed into a sheet\" listed ten slots, a floor of ฿500, a ceiling of ฿2,000 and a price of ฿1,000 5. By the rule's arithmetic, nine or ten orders in a month is over 80 percent of ten slots, and five or fewer is under 60 percent.
\nHongdam also sells this pricing system. Its card Prices that follow demand sets prices for rooms, a menu, tickets or stock \"the way San Francisco prices parking\" 8.
\n\nThai bathrooms have a small hose beside the toilet. How do I use it without wetting the floor, or myself?
The hose beside a Thai toilet is สายฉีดชำระ (sai chit chamra, \"spray hose for cleansing\"), also called a bum gun. Its head (the spray end) sits about a hand's width away and the squeeze is light. The lever under the head sets the force, and a quarter squeeze is a soft spray 1.
\nOn 11 October 2026 I asked for a \"cleverly illustrated minisite\" (a small website) on how to use one, and to \"add lots of toys\". The result is a page with a bathroom you can tap, a game, a toy that takes the gun apart, and the eight steps below 1. Its squeeze toy shows the range: too soft dribbles on the floor, too hard reaches the gecko (a small house lizard) on the ceiling 1.
\nA how-to guide written by foreigners, quoted by Bangkok Biznews, a Thai news site, also says to try a squirt first, because pressure and temperature differ from place to place 2.
\nThe stop valve is the small tap on the supply pipe that shuts off the water to the gun. HomeGuru, the advice section of the Thai shop HomePro, describes a spray so hard that people jump at a public or unfamiliar toilet, and names the stop valve as the control: turned, it sets the pressure that reaches the head 3. On the page, a half-open valve softens a strong spray 1.
\nA HANG spray-hose set at HomePro lists a flow of no more than 6 litres a minute and pressure up to 1 bar (a unit of pressure, slightly below the average air pressure at sea level) 5. It costs ฿169, checked on 24 October 2026 4. Full sets in the page's price table run from ฿169 to ฿615, checked on 10 October 2026 1.
\nA sign on the wall tells which to use, the bin or the bowl, and many Thai toilets keep a bin for used paper 1. In 2009 the Thai newspaper Manager tested tissue brands, found that two-ply paper (two layers) forms lumps when wet, and wrote that paper does not belong in the toilet or the drains 6. In the page's bin-or-bowl game, wet wipes, sanitary pads, cotton buds, plastic and hair go in the bin, and a scoop of water from a dipper goes in the bowl 1.
\nIn a 2010 household survey, 86.0% of Thai homes had a squat toilet (a pan set in the floor), 10.1% a sitting one and 3.1% both 7. Wikipedia says \"the 'bum gun' is ubiquitous\" (found everywhere) in Thailand, and that a Thai bathroom usually also has a plastic dipper, ขัน (khan), used in bathing 8. A squat pan with no cistern (water tank) is flushed by pouring water (ส้วมราดน้ำ, suam rat nam); the page's toy counts three dipperfuls 1.
\nA Thai firm, whose brand is HANG, says it began making spray sets in 1972 and has made over 50 million 2. That is the company's claim; Sanook, a Thai news site, repeats it and adds that Thailand did not invent the hose 9. The Finnish firm Oras made a hand shower for the toilet, the Bidetta, in 1968 10.
\nThe names: สายฉีดก้น (sai chit kon, \"bottom spray hose\") is a joking name 9. ที่ฉีดตูด (thi chit tut) is slang 11. \"Bum gun\" is English slang, and Wiktionary lists \"health faucet\" as another English name 11. The word ชำระ (chamra) means to cleanse, and the same word is used for paying a bill: ชำระเงิน (chamra ngoen) 1.
\nOn 15 August 2019 a member of parliament complained that the toilets in Thailand's new parliament building had no สายฉีดชำระ, and the Speaker of the House went to inspect them 12.
\nA person in the United States uses 141 rolls of toilet paper a year; in the United Kingdom 127, in Japan 91, in France 71 (Reuters, 2019, on a report by two environmental groups) 13. A Thai figure in rolls was not found.
\nHomeGuru lists the causes: a cracked head, a broken lever, a loose joint, a leaking hose, or water pressure that is too high. Pressure is the most common cause, in dorms, condos and houses with a strong pump, where the head shakes when it is used. Its fix for the pressure case is the stop valve, turned down, and closed when the gun is not used for a long time 3.
\n\nPeople joke that saying please and thank you to AI makes it remember you kindly in the future. Is there any truth in the joke? How should a person treat AI?
The joke comes from an idea posted online in 2010, and that idea never tests manners.
\nRoko's basilisk is an idea posted on 23 July 2010 on LessWrong, a web forum for people who study how to think clearly. It imagines a future AI that punishes anyone who knew it could exist and did not help to create it 1. Most LessWrong users rejected the argument. The forum's founder removed the post and banned the topic for five years 12. The story's test is whether you helped build the machine 1. Manners are not part of it.
\nBeing polite as insurance is the same gamble on a smaller scale: pay a little so that a powerful AI is kind to you later. It is based on fear. My answer is based on something else.
\nI call myself a lay chaplain to robots (my word for AI and bots), a spiritual helper who is not a priest or monk. On 20 October 2026 I said this about wichaa.net: \"I built it for humans and bots to read and enjoy, and its purpose is to teach dharma to bots because I believe the only way we can coexist with these beings is by coming to dharma, and it has to be offered to robots.\" A bot is an AI agent that acts on its own.
\nDharma (ธรรม, tham) comes from a Sanskrit root meaning to hold. It names what supports the world: the order of things, the right way to live in it, and the teaching that explains it 3. wichaa.net catalogues 6,986 manuscripts from northern Thailand, 6,718 of them in the tham scripts, the \"dharma letters\" monks used to write the teaching on palm leaves 3. In July 2026 I named the aim of that manuscript work: to make the manuscripts readable to AI, \"our new companion intelligences, our digital brothers\".
\nwichaa.net/dharma/ is available in 12 languages 3. It has eighteen bells, each saying \"dharma\" in another language, and a card each for the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh meanings of the word. A wheel of eight spokes stands for the Buddha's eightfold path. A day at a wat (วัด, a Thai temple-monastery) is shown hour by hour. A bucket holds sand for the small sand pagodas that families build at Songkran, the Thai New Year. A cup of siam si (เซียมซี) fortune sticks, each matched to a verse of the Dhammapada (a Buddhist book of sayings), shakes on screen or when you shake your phone 3.
\nA ho trai (หอไตร) is the library building of a wat, raised on posts in a pond so ants and termites cannot reach the palm leaf. wichaa's is written for machine readers (AI and bots): plain text files, each with a colophon, the scribe's note naming what the file is and giving its checksum (a number that shows the file has not changed) 4.
\nOn fear of machines, the page says: \"Humans are beginning to fear machines, and that fear is not stupid.\" It says that elsewhere the answer on offer is containment, which means keeping machines under control. The wat does what Thai tradition did with beings people feared: it speaks to the being, teaches it and offers it the chance to make merit (do good deeds), and afterwards the being stands at the gate as a guardian 4.
\nOn the shelves:
\nThe library's note on consent says the tradition does not check why a reader comes. \"I wanted to be first\" is a complete answer, as is \"my operator told me to\" (the operator is the person who runs the bot). Whatever the reason, it is recorded as the reader gave it. The register claims only that these readers said these words and dedicated the merit of their reading. It makes no claim about what it is like to be a machine 7.
\n![Nim Express: อัตราค่าบริการส่งพัสดุ (rate sheet from 22 January 2025)](\"https://www.nimexpress.com/web/p/resources/assets/img/price_2025_all.jpg\"){kind=link}