nkg

A cheap and easy to import vitamins is to order them mail order in the UK, have them sent to a friend, who can use regular post to Thailand.

A lot of UK companies like Lindens supply all their vitamins in flat, resealable packets that fit in the letterbox. Readily available on Amazon, ebay etc. It's easy to bundle several together and put them in a parcel.

If you're ordering a year's supply, keep them somewhere cool (the fridge?) - hot weather can destroy vitamins.

1 hour ago, Albert Zweistein said:

Is Patong Merlin a 300 baht/night hotel ?  During the Christmas holidays we were paing 7,000 bht per night/room so not realy dump. Obviously when talking about staff I mean the "workers" and not the general/financial manager. For your info : I always fly business class and stay in 4/5 star hotels where ever I am, I suppose your self are staying in dump places as you know the price.

I'd describe it as a budget family hotel. I strongly doubt that "most" of their employees are Burmese as you claimed.

Looking at a Thai job site, many hotels specify that they will only hire Thai nationals. You might have found a hotel where a proportion of the staff are Burmese, but claiming that most hotel employees in Phuket are from Myanmar is nonsense.

** All positions only Thai nationality **

2 minutes ago, DaveE13 said:

Me and Mrs went to one in Phuket few years back 4 star Beach resort   had a lot of Philippines working there because of the level of English spoken 

Interesting, I haven't experienced that myself in a Phuket hotel.

3 hours ago, Albert Zweistein said:

About 30 + times mostly 5/6 weeks up to 2 months, several times a year. Did you ever talk to the staff ? I did and I found out that kichen, roommaids and waiters are all Birmese.

You must have been staying at the worst hotel on the island! Was it a 300 baht/night special on Bangla Road? And didn't you say "most if not all" hotel staff are Burmese? Suddenly you've changed that to "kitchen, roommaids and waiters". No Burmese working in any of the other departments at the hotel, then? A Burmese GM, perhaps? ????

4 and 5 star resorts employ few or no Burmese. Whatever dump you've been staying in might be different.

9 hours ago, Albert Zweistein said:

In Patong pre Covid most of the staff if not all working in hotels, restaurants and on the beach were Birmese. Are they all replaced now by Thai ? I doubt it. Not to say they have no right to earn a living but it doesn't affect the Thai population on the island.

Besides the number of arrivals in July, 10,000 +, is peanuts compared to the workforce needed.

That's total rubbish. "Most if not all hotel staff are Burmese"?! Anyone with a passing knowledge of Phuket's hotel industry knows that this is ridiculous.

You think the Front Office, F&B, Finance, HR, GM, Spa, Kitchen roles are filled with people from Myanmar? Have you ever been to Phuket?

3 hours ago, RandolphGB said:

This is not true. The number of cases have fallen sharply over the last seven days. 
 

Thankfully politicians have realized that masks and lockdowns don’t work and we will have to learn to live with this particularly nasty seasonal virus.

Coincidentally, schools broke up for the summer last week. Kids were getting 2 tests a week at school, and none of them were vaccinated.

Now the same unvaccinated kids are getting zero tests a week. It doesn't take a genius to see that reported infections were guaranteed to fall this week.

_

3 minutes ago, Cake Monster said:

The Loan Companies will probably do everything within their power to prevent the Cars being repo,d, for that very reason.

Many people when they cannot afford to keep paying try to sell the Car to a person that is willing to undertake the repayments on the balance outstanding.

This is why so many cars seem to be very highly priced on the second hand Market.

The seller usually wants to sell the car at its value, plus the amount of outstanding finance, plus the " I put on Alloy Wheels Etc "value

From a farang perspective, there will probably some cheap second-hand cars available. When I was looking at second-hand car prices 5 years ago, the prices seemed ridiculously high.

To clarify, I would rather Thai people were able to keep their cars.

25 minutes ago, Cake Monster said:

It is very worrying that so much debt incurred by Thais is not related to Bricks and Mortar Debt. Only 34 % is related to actual Housing Debt ( Mortgages, Loan security Etc ).

Of course this means that 66 % of Household Debt is on things such as Credit Cards, and things like Car Loans ( a large slice of this debt me thinks )

In the UK, the people have the Salaries and potential to repay their Loans. This is also reinforced by stringent Credit checks and procedures before Loans are issues against anything at all.

Here it just seems so easy to get a 7 Year Loan on a Car or 3 Years on a TV

 

 

A lot of Thais I know are really struggling to make their car payments. Won't companies repossessing those cars find it difficult to get their money back? Who has the money to buy the repossessed cars?

4 hours ago, kynikoi said:

Well, they could force the robber banks to halve interest rates to 12%.

 

Force banks to reduce principal.

 

Nah...

I think Thailand will need to come up with some new rules regarding unpayable debts over the next few years. Large sums of money owed by people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by covid will never be paid back.

There needs to be some mechanisms by which those debts can be discharged, so that productive people whose lives have been wrecked by covid can get back to running businesses and paying taxes. I'm talking about small and medium sized business owners.

Also, I've had a second-hand laptop posted to me in Thailand from the UK by normal post. It got here in about 10 days. Obviously you risk it not arriving if you do this.

2 minutes ago, jacko45k said:

The sandboxes down south are a farcical sideshow in the midst of events central to Thailand.

Correct, they are irrelevant. But some would like to blame the Phuket Sandbox for the increased infections.

7 minutes ago, FarFlungFalang said:

They delivered money into their pockets which is the promise they made to their shareholders!Did you believe all the sales hype of the sales staff did you?When will people learn not to trust the sales hype?

Yeah, they were coining the profits at $3 a dose, mr clever.