impulse

What day is it, and at which office?

They're idiots for holding it out as some kind of insurance. What it really is is a tax (a reasonable one in my mind). One of the objectives is to cover the hospital expenses of foreigners unable or unwilling to pay their unexpected hospital bills. There's been many threads about how much that is on an annual basis, and it's not insignificant. But they're going to go after payment from the foreigners, and anyone expecting that payment to be forgiven because they paid a $9 tax is in for a rude awakening. IT IS NOT INSURANCE.

If I'm not mistaken, they'll look at the actual amount you transfer into your Thai bank account. The US embassy (along with others) quit signing off on the affidavits of income a couple of years back, so it's down to how much you actually deposit every month, in combination with how much is in your account. If you SS is slightly inadequate, you can make up the shortfall with funds from somewhere else.

With Lazada, there's a chance that the goodies are coming from Thailand and you'll get them in a day or 2. With AliExpress, it's pretty much 100% they're coming from China and you'll be waiting- and waiting- and... It helps to use the Lazada Local delivery only option, but some companies are listed as local yet drop shipped from China. I'd say about 10% of my Lazada shipments were that way. Always Samut Prakan vendors for some reason.

Between China, Thailand and the USA, I have purchased almost a dozen big screen TVs and none of them have come with an HDMI cable in the box. Nor any RCA cables, nor any Cat5 cable, nor... The cost of including all the cable permutations would add significantly, with no benefit for everyone using a different input method. It isn't a scam...

I suspect that's because there are so few of them left in business after the last 2 years.

My ancestors were raising turnips in Eastern Europe for those years. What do I owe?

The diff, of course, being that hard drives are in the private sector. Hopewell, fire engines, electric buses, and BTS rolling stock (all of which have had payment issues) are in the public sector. The problem with doing business with a corrupt gub'ment is that the next batch to get elected or installed are going to want their cut, and all the bribes that you paid the old guys actually works against you.

Or perhaps they realize that pimping out the country's sons and daughters isn't a good model going forward. Look at what happened to Las Vegas when they cleaned it up. For every monger buck lost, they replaced it with 4 or 5 family dollars.

Maybe. But minimum wage in some places is less than $16K a year and millions of Americans have to survive on that, and many even less. $1400 a month doesn't buy too much "home" after paying for food and health care. Oops. 2000 hours at $7.25 is more than $10K. My bad. But that's if they work full time... Lots of employers don't like to pay full time benefits.

Staying in Galveston (Covid refugee), I meet a lot of people like that. Many sold their homes in favor of the nomad lifestyle. We also get a lot of transient workers who do refinery turnarounds. The projects last a year or so, and it's not worth it to buy a house only to sell it in a year. Some get apartments, some rent houses. But a lot of them live in an RV, then move it when they get their next project. And of course, we get a lot of Winter Texans. Most of them do it because they like it, as opposed to a financial imperative. Sadly, one of the darlings of the get rich seminars is how to buy mobile hole parks and jack up the rents because the tenants can't afford to move their trailers. It doesn't work as well on RV parks because it's generally cheap to move an RV. One more example of turning a basic necessity into a financial product.

Even more insidious was the way the gub'ment sold off the distressed properties in huge lots, preventing the general public from benefitting. If you didn't have access to millions and millions of dollars, you were locked out of the bidding. Happened during the S&L crisis in the 80's, then again after 2008. Another huge transfer of wealth upward. I understand the efficiency of selling in large tranches, but that neither benefitted the public's access to affordable homes, nor did it maximize the price they could have gotten selling them one at a time. It did, I'm sure, maximize donations to election campaigns.

The beauty of ICE's... You don't have to plan your trips around finding a filling station. That looks like a lot of charging stations but divide that by the number of EV's and it's not. Plus, look on your map all the holes in coverage.

And just how many of those commercial charging stations are in Thailand today?

Not all charging stations are created equal. If he's recharging at a hotel courtesy charger, it may take 8 hours. If he's recharging at his buddy's home along the way, it may take 8 hours. If he's recharging at a full bore commercial charging station, he'll get out in an hour or so. But it'll take his butt 7 hours to heal up from the ream job, paying 3-5x as much for the privilege. And that's assuming he can even find one.

Partly true, but there is going to be a painful period of "adjustment" as sanctioned countries that used to buy their crude from Russia look for other sources, and non-sanctioned countries buy the newly available Russian oil that used to go to sanctioned countries. That's a massive reset. Even if the total oil production is the same, there are a lot of pricing pressures due to localized shortages. And not all refineries can quickly adapt to different grades of crude from around the world. It may take months to reach a new normal. Add to that the uncertainty of the Ukraine War expanding in scope...

What does US energy independence have to do with the price of fuel in Thailand?

The issue being that commercial charging stations generally charge 3-5x the kw-hr rate as filling it up back home. That's how they pay off the investment and make their money.

There's a potential charging station really close to your home. Actually, it is your home. That's great until you want to get away to (for example) Koh Chang for the weekend.

If you do the math, they're not subsidizing diesel. They're just reducing the tax load on diesel compared to gasoline, for the benefit of commercial and farm users. With normal folks driving diesel private vehicles benefiting as an unintended consequence. There is no excess tax on electricity to reduce, so it would have to be a genuine subsidy. I don't see it happening. But I could be wrong. It happens. Edit: Not to mention that electric farm and commercial vehicles may be years and years in the future. Aside from buses and tuk-tuks.

Sadly, the solar systems work best during the day when you really want to be out running the car. At night when you want to charge it... Not so much. Of course, you can also add batteries to that "excess capacity", but ouch. Cha ching, cha ching. Years and years to payout.

Electric costs may lag, but they'll go up because most (65% +/-) of Thailand's electricity is fired from natural gas. If you think you're going to beat the high price of oil/gas with an electric car, you'll be sorely disappointed. Unless you can steal power from the local grid or your rich neighbor. In that case, go for it.

That 30 million baht was just to settle the civil side of the equation. The criminal side may dwarf that 30MM.

I think that's a lot of the problem. Housing codes that are meant to benefit the haves at the expense of the have nots. 400sq ft is perfectly livable for a single person or a couple. Quite tolerable for a small family (especially if the choice is nothing or choosing between food and rent.) But illegal in most places. Hence, the Tiny Home movement to change those laws. I'm not a big fan of Tiny Homes of 100-400sq ft, but I am a huge fan of reasonable sized homes on the smaller end. What I also haven't seen discussed is the massive purchases of entire neighborhoods by hedge funds. Turning a basic necessity (like housing) into a financial product. Just like they've been doing with health care. You'll own nothing and be happy... Or you can go pound sand. Up to you.

They're equally effective in both cases. Solving crime on one case, collecting brown envelopes in the other. I'll let you figure out which is which.