northengr

does sort of fit for bunga bunga

Your friend needs to talk with an Australian Orthopaedic Surgeon about this.

Most(All?) stem cell treatments have been banned in Thailand.

There is very little or no evidence for this type of treatment especially for joints.

There are however Quacks to be found who will happily empty a wallet !

I looked into this and all other choices recently for failing knee. OA seems to be working there and neck first.

There is one clinic near soi cowboy and there is a big sounding one in the Phillipines. There are some offering in the USA. BUT and this is important -

They all seem to be at best riding a wave of hope, claiming to make stem cells from this or that and ready to empty your wallet. A few have gone to jail in the US. I would not trust the US govt any further than some on line web charlatan. But somehow a wallet emptier near soi cowboy does seem appropriate.

Top notch orthopeadic surgeon at Bumrungrad just winced and had a skeptical pencil line smile when i mentioned my researching all choices including that. He ended up doing Arthro on me, since USA hospitals are so customer unfriendly and so expensive.

Someday. stem cell may work, and there is a USa company working on a synthetic meniscus, but those are years away.

Move to Israel and maybe you could get into a trial on the USA company synthetic meniscus.

Still off the sports waiting for the first week post op to pass.

M

Accident? what Accident? Is it an "accident" when some drunk is driving at 160klicks in his old car? No this is a crime, or should we say a time when the crime of shoddy work and/or shoddy went bad enough all the safety factors were exceeded. This engineer would not call that an "accident"

The Chinese now behave as the Americans once did when the latter were ruling the world. Ditto the Russians. Visitors from the "Great Power" countries tend to behave like uncivilized boors in the countries they have conquered.

Used to be the British, the French and the Germans a few decades ago. But at least the Brits used to confine their shouting to when they were trying to make a foreigner understand English.

I thought that was American, not English. Gee, we got no claim to fame left anymore.

which group of crooked politicos should be in charge of ripping of the populous. Gee, lets fight for the right, the right to rule and rob. Sorry these hard working farmers were dupes enough to believe a govt support scheme that was probably never funded or set up properly.

Maybe they will all learn to not trust mafias whether yellow or red or rainbows.

Lets take to the street to fight for the right to be dictated to by someone different color.

Oh, and I figured this was a thread about american politicians

Having been half of two partnership in the US, Land of only honest people of course. and now running another business with pseudo partners in a professional business (Architecture and Engineering) I am pretty qualified to comment on you and gf plans for business. I also was and am in business relationships here with Thais.

In amongst all the sniping and negative comments there was a lot of real good comments here on TV. I hope you suffer through reading them all. I got burned out part way, but then i am not the one asking for advice.

Most new businesses seem good idea (elst why do it?) but the problems come later. How to break up (think divorce and separation agreement)? how to resolve differing values, like re-invest or take out money to spend? How cheap to be on the operation and facilities?

You should not need to invest YOUR money if the women are competent, and if they are not competent, then you should DEFINITELY not invest.

The advice on separate businesses sharing a space and some support staff, is the best answer here. DEFINITELY spot on. It is sort of the way my current NY business is running. Either that or let the dykes set up a business and contract in to use space and support and have gf run her biz enough on her own she could move it or close it as she sees fit after some contractual set time. So either three businesses sharing a space or two businesses sharing or with one dominant and the others provide startup monies and operate as separate businesses.

Me fears the "setting up business" is as much about status as about making money and when the newness wears off, what business and what friendship will they have and what differences.

M

As a Licensed Engineer having designed a few hundred of these systems for the regulatory environment in upstate NY, I could add a few things to the mostly good comments already here.

The normal design basis for water usage in a home is between 40 and 50 gallons per day per person. That is about 200 litres if my merican conversion is right. Where water is free, some numbers are really higher, few are lower, and americans take fewer than the 3 showers a day many thais take. In NY, we size the septic tank (anaerobic digestion and settling) for minimum of two days water flow. Here is it considerably warmer and would digest faster, but settling time would be similar so don't make it too much smaller.

Outflow from the tank is the non-standard part of any system. Depends so much on the soil depth and perc. Usually its shallow trenches or a leach bed with perforated pipe distribution and crushed stone with filter fabric on top to keep it separated from the 6 inches of topsoil over it. This crushed stone is doing two things distributing the fluids across the whole bottom ot the absorption area and also providing a medium for the aerobic microbes to reside and attack the passing smelly anaerobic effluent from the septic tank. A course uniform sand might also work, but it would clog more easily.

So if there is no outlet and no percolation into the ground you will be filling the tank pretty fast. Clay will not perc and in fact what little water it does absorb will expand the volume significantly from dry up to wet. Think of all the cracks you see in drying farm fields. This expansion could easily push a lot on the walls of the tank if you are soaking the area around that tank, just like freezing ground does in northern climates.

I have often wondered what a tested perc rate for soil here might be where it appears fairly clayey. In the extreme it will perc zero. A normal leach field of 5 rows of 2 foot wide (60cm) trenches each 60 feet long (almost 20m) seems large, but in poor soil it is often required. In great soil it might be a small leach bed of 3m by 6m. all stome and pipe headers.

All of the above costs money and takes space and now you know why the sewage runs down the gutter here.

End of sXitty subject

Assuming this was love and not some attempt to smuggle in cheap help for his restaurant, I feel for them both.

I too considered how to get my wife around the gestapo. I did not want to marry for a number of years due to her age and my previous divorce-caution.

After my not being able to live in my home country much for 7 years, we finally got her a legal tourist visa and after a couple seasons in NY we did make it all legal with marriage and then we had to deal with the A-holes again. If one was marginally respectful of laws and regulators before, you wouldd not be after dealing with them

one item I did not see anyone address here.

It is loss of face and almost impossible to "backup". that means what you are giving now, cannot be cut back. Its a real big deal. Maybe you not loving her so much. You will always be pushed by the needs of the poor to pay more and more and you must learn to dig in or like socialism you will all become equal and poor. You are marrying into the whole family, unlike in western societies. So starting high because you are enthused or madly in love is a bad start, because the costs will need to go up over time.

I love my wife and I am sure she loves me, but family is number one for her and for 10 years now it is normal to have to dig in my heals several times per year on bigger requests and to deduct little requests from my normal fixed monthly support.

I plan to have enough of my savings left as I age out of earning to be able to support us for the next 30 years, but her time horizon is about 6 months,

Its my understanding from Thais of a middle class that it is reserved only for close close friends. You know you are REALLY in if certain Thais with less western living experience invite you to their home (this is true if you are Thai or more so if Farang). Seems to me homes are often the domain of the wife and her relatives or maid and kids and the men pay for it and live there, but are more on show in their mercedes and their office. They may not want to not be careful what they say at home also, since many will have a mia noi or wish they did.

As to us Farang's, well, there are lots of misfits here (not me of course). And i am sure there is also a full range of reasons like you say, also the spaces, especially in condo, tend to be small enough and the furniture just tight enough to not be so comfortable. In the US, my Thai wife and I have people over ALL the time, her food is better than any of the hi-so restaurants, drinks and coffee are cheaper and we live in 200sm with another 180sm of garage and workshop and 5 acres for parking . Here we fit into 85 sm (i don't count balconies) with all her clothes and my bicycle and golf stuff, office and tools, So less room for comfortable guests and no banquet tables for 12.

I do not understand the educated people and especially foreigners who think Yingluck has done something deserving snap elections or a coup. I do understand the Bangkok elite who want at any cost a return to rule by the elite. What is the big deal of two failed bills? Amnesty for all including the airport blockade criminals was a poor idea, but not very "un-Thai". And it did not pass. As to Senate bill, a party does not get its way and wants to change a structure set up by the military, hardly seems surprising. FDR tried to stack the supreme court when they had blocked some of his socialism, and no one impeached him.

These were failed bills, not slight of hand passing like Obamacare or a dictator imposed decision like the post coup set up. All the govt clowns on both sides are arrogant and trying for power and money grabs, why do farang so passionately take one side or the other? Why does anyone with open eyes passionately support or oppose?

always seemed pretty over the top. As an owner of a small engineering company, I did find the lesson of a engineering/construction company setting the thing up and being primary developer to be exciting. Client instead of consultant,but JEEZ, its a lot of money. Maybe they had government promises that have proven as good as Obama's word?

Better luck next time, but 10 year projects don't seem to survive the flux of changes in governments and economic cycles.

Thanks for the care and bother of answering. Its exactly the quadband type issue i am worried about. Why would a manuf. bother making a quad band for the locked up USA market? We are looking at buying a phone just to take back and the ones we look at were from what I think is a compatible carrier system like T-mobile or ATT. In the US we live in the Catskill Mountains and service generally is spotty and only the verizon system is worth owning, which is clearly not a compatible system. So, we look to buy on online (saving $100 or 200) over a high end phone in Thailand. Used Iphone4 for instance and they are advertised as factory unlocked. So, would seem to work, but lots of concern that I will miss something.

Leaving the US for our annual winter in Thailand. The Thai wife wants to get a high end phone here purchased online as unlocked to take back there. She has looked at Lumia925, but here she loves her Iphone 4S. Me, I prefer to get calls on my cell and compute on a computer, so I have never learned that stuff. I understand there was a USA problem about CDMA and GSM or such, so I worried about buying something here and taking it there.

1) Is this issue now gone? are smartphones all now just smart phones or is there still a protocol problem.

2) Any knowledgeable recommendations appreciated on models and purchase locations