Dogmatix

I agree that non-smokers in general should not be troubled by weed or any other smoke.

The law is the Public Health Act which makes it a not terribly serious offence to smoke tobacco, weeds, herbs or anything else in public, if it causes a nuisance and someone complains. It is also illegal for restaurants to allow patrons to smoke anywhere that food is served whether inside or outside. The authorities try to make out there is a specific law against smoking weed in public to intimidate people and to satisfy the haters and non-partaking Chinese and Singaporean tourists but the truth it that they have not got around to passing any legislation specific to smoking cannabis in public.

A Darwin award for getting caught smuggling nearly half a kilo of cannabis into Thailand. He probably would have sold it at a loss and, if all that stuff had burst in his gut, he would have gone to the happy hunting grounds.

Anyway Thai government departments and courts can interpret things in ways they feel like and that are inconsistent from case to case. But on the face of it there is nothing to specify that a gift can only be made from income that has already been taxed in Thailand and, even, if it was made from after Thai tax income, it will still be taxable as a gift, if the gift to a spouse is over 20 million. Another thing you could look at is the device used by Ung Ing to avoid paying gift tax on transferring shares well over the gift tax limits to her family members. The transfers were not structured as gifts which would have been taxable over the limits but structured as sales of assets. The purchases were paid for using open ended promissory notes, callable at any time. Ung Ing got the DG of the RD to testify in parliament that that the transfers will only be deemed as taxable events when the promissory notes are cashed which will, of course, never happen. When Ung Ing's time in politics comes to an end the shares will be transferred back to her, either as foreclosures on the repayment of defaulted promissory notes or some other tax avoidance scheme will be set up. The unpaid promissory note tax avoidance scam has the advantage that the DG of the RD has testified in parliament that it is rock solid. However, that doesn't stop the RD or the Tax Court making a completely different ruling on the same scheme presented by a mere mortal. Nothing is rock solid apart from just declaring the transfers as income and pay Thai tax on them which will be gratefully received, even if the income was not strictly speaking assessable, or leaving the country, as your friend did. But IMHO, the gift to spouse window is fairly solid, although I would expect to see the limits reduced at some point. Parliamentarians would not want to see it eliminated completely because it is a handy way for them and their wealthy sponsors pass on chunks of their ill gotten gains to wife and kids whilst still alive tax free. I should add that the gifts I have made to the missus are from income earned overseas prior to 2024. So they wouldn't be taxable, even if I gifted them to myself. Eventually I hope this whole thing will become clearer and then I might gift income earned after 2024. Mrs Dog also has income and assets of her own which makes it more difficult to conclude I had benefit from the gifts.

If you want to go to a place that is similar to what Cowboy was in the 80s, go to Ban Chan.

The last time it and most other red light areas were fun was during the period at the end of COVID when bars were allowed to reopen, ostensibly as restaurants for a while (some put up price lists of hamburgers and hot dogs), but they were still not letting in tourists, except that many of the old haunts didn't survive and had closed down. When the tourists came back, it seemed they were determined to make up lost income by fleecing tourists and anyone else who walked into their cross hairs.

You are right except that your translation of 1471,3 translates more wording than is actually to be found in the original which says just 3) ที่ฝ่ายใดฝ่ายหนึ่งได้มาระหว่างสมรสโดยการรับมรดกหรือโดยการให้โดยเสน่หา or "Property acquired by either party during marriage through inheritance or given out of affection." However, in Section 1474.2 the giftor has the right to specify in writing that a gift to a married person is to form part of the conjugal property. When you think about it, the only person giving a gift out of affection to a married person with an interest in making that gift conjugal property is the other spouse. Therefore, in the unlikely event that you were, for example, accused of living in a house or driving a car bought with the proceeds of a spousal gift, or even perhaps having some of the gift gifted back to your personal account, you could easily produce a document retroactively that assigns the gift as conjugal property. So Section 1471.3 has the effect of protecting someone who receives a gift from a person other than their spouse, perhaps as an advance inheritance, from having to share it with their spouse, if they don't want to, or on divorce. But it doesn't prevent a gifting spouse from assigning it to be conjugal property under 1474.2.

Well done for citing that tax case. It is only case relevant to this issue, as far as I know, and I spent some time searching before sending some gifts. The September 2023 reinterpretation that foreign income was taxable has no bearing on gifts because remitted income will only be considered as remitted income, if you remit your offshore income to yourself in Thailand. So the only issue is whether a remittance to a spouse or unmarried partner is her income or a gift. A lot of the case study goes into details of whether unmarried partners can be treated the same as married couples under the gift tax law. There is no clear conclusion on this point. They say that on the face of it unmarried couples are, well, unmarried as far as gift tax is concerned but if you look at certain rulings to do with asset disclosures for politicians, you can argue that unmarried couples are in fact married. None of that matters in the case of married couples with a marriage certificate from any country to prove it. They are married which means that the Thai spouse may receive gifts up 20 million baht in any tax year free of gift tax and the gift is not subject to income tax either. Much has been made by farang "tax advisors", who usually can't read Thai and are unlicensed to advise on Thai tax, of conditions applicable to gift tax that they have largely invented to give themselves credibility and garner more clients. But the truth is that the only evidence for how the RD interprets gift tax for spouses is the case you cited. There is no evidence that a deed of gifting needs to be drawn up overseas and expensively notarised by a foreign lawyer for each gift made. There is no evidence that the RD will painstakingly examine the application of the gift to see if the giftor had any benefit from the gift or not. This is probably impractical anyway, given that the Civil and Commercial Code holds that all assets acquired by either spouse after marriage are deemed conjugal property. Thus the gift to the spouse immediately becomes conjugal property on receipt. Bottom line. Go ahead and make the gifts to the missus. Make sure you never remit more than 20 million in one year and keep records of your remittance and her receipt from the bank statements.

Quite a few of the bars have been saying a lady's drink is a double or "bern" for some time. You can argue with them that you only agreed to one drink before they pour them but it is exhausting. Easier just to say no and not buy them drinks at all, unless you are really smitten which is rarely the case.

I never saw the original bar or Mr Edwards but was there in the early 80s and it was a very quiet place with only osingle shophouse bars and music often provided by a jukebox. Drinks from 30 baht and very little pressure to buy lady drinks. Sometime in the mid 90s they started knocking bars together to make the double shophouse bars which justified higher prices than the single bars. Coyotes arrived in around 2010 charging more for less. In the noughties it was said that a shady Iranian character had bought several of the bars as a money laundry operation. Now it seems in transition to a makeover like Wanchai in HK had become by the mid 80s, i.e. a rip off place where local expats didn't go but visiting US sailors went to blow their wads and get nothing in return. There are now more thana few nasty rip off bars in Cowboy where they heavily pad your bill up to about 6,000 in under a half hour. Even some of the remaining single shophouse bars that were normal a few months earlier start to do that, so you are taken unawares. I guess there are enough Chinese tourists now that the whole street will be a no go area for local expats soon enough. Last time I went there the cannabis shop near the Asoke end had been turned into a massage parlour. Undercutting the bars I guess because there is no need to pay a bar fine, ladies drinks or a short time hotel.

I just looked into the PT-141 that is on offer as a nasal spray on Lazada and it seems to, indeed, be fake. The same stuff is available on Amazon US and the product description suggests the only PT-141 content is the misleading name. The credible reviews suggest it does nothing. No reviews on any of the Lazada pages selling it. So that just leaves the Thai clinics which to sell mainly the injectable form.

It seems to be available in Thailand now. Lot of ads for clinics offering it and some online sellers, including on Lazada which, of course, might be fake product. The cost seems to have come down a lot.

Was that the foreign woman in photo sitting down watching her two beaus jousting for the right to her hand in marriage or something? Plenty more fish in the ocean off Pattaya.

Glad I got my all of life driving licence when they were still available in 2003, if I remember correctly. Never took a test in Thailand, except colour blind test. Just showed my overseas licence and was given a one year licence. When that expired I got a 3 year licence. When that expired I got an all of life licence which was only available for Thais and PRs. About 2 years after that no more all of life licences were given but 5 year licences were issued in place of 3 year licences. I think the cost of the all of life one was 3,000 baht and a lot of people didn't apply because they felt it was too expensive. I suppose it depended on how much cash you had on hand and how long you estimated you might live.

While police chief Police General Somyot Pumpanmuang reportedly made billions on private placements of obscure small cap listed Thai companies that were performing badly but suddenly started doing better in private placements offered below market place. Most of these companies started performing much better soon after the placements and he exited. Soon afterwards the SEC changed the rules on private placements to prevent them from being offered below the market price which enabled outsiders to profit at the expense of existing minority shareholders who were diluted without the chance to buy into the placements themselves. However, while this private placement frenzy lasted it was incredible to see a serving police chief having the time, knowledge and experience to identify this hidden gems n the market which many professional investors were unable to do.

Is a semi-auto pistol. So the caliber must be .38 super, a souped up 9mm cartridge for shooting sports, if really a .38. Odd choice for an illegal weapon because there are not many compared to bog standard 9mm and hard to come by in Thailand. The powerful ammo would blow a home made pistol apart. I think more likely a .380 ACP which is short, lower powered 9mm cartridge, commonly used in converted blank guns in Thailand like the gun used to murder people in Siam Paragon. The shorter size fits the blank guns and the lower power makes them less likely to blow apart. But still quite hard to find ammo.

I mean who cares? These garbage stories about people being outraged by shirtless ladyboys or girls in spaggetti straps come out every year and will no doubt continue into the future. Grow up and get used to it. The people who go to these aggressive drunken water throwing fests don't care. It is only the old biddies who stay at home and see the vaselined clips that really care.

My son's head teacher at an international school recommended families to have phone free meals. Put them all in a box, if people have problems not looking that them during meal time. It's bad for digestion too. She also recommended no phones for kids till they are 14. In this case only the 20 year old should have a phone. There is plenty of academic research that says children, who spend too much time in the virtual world and not enough time in the real world, are much more likely to get depressed. Sadly, suicide rates have also risen in this younger generation.

It's obviously irrelevant that he was in the army like nearly all Israeli men and women and a significant percentage of Thai men too. Media don't mention whether every Thai criminal they write about had been in the army or not. Why not just describe him as an Israeli citizen? But, even if we think the reserved occupations that have been around for nearly 100 years are silly, it is still Thai law which people violate at their peril, even though they may be offering a useful service not provided by any Thais. Presumably he has also been charged with working without WP.

Playing Russian roulette in a reasonably well lit room you can do a quick sneak peak down the the barrel and see there is a round loaded. Alternatively those with a slightly higher IQ can just look the cylinder which is easier to see but requires powers of deduction that may not be working under nitrous oxide. If you don't see any rounds in the cylinder but know that one round was loaded into the chamber, it is a logical assumption that that round is in position to fire behind the forcing cone. In this case make an excuse of needing to rush to the hong nam after eating som tam poo pralah and forfeit your turn to the next contender.

Nitrous oxide is a very dangerous drug which I remember from my young days. Tried it once and passed out. When I woke up I had blood pouring into my mouth and found some guy in a white coat had ripped a tooth out.

If the casino is really only 10% of the entertainment complex which will make such a huge contribution to GDP growth even without the casino, why not go ahead without the casino which is causing so much trouble?

While 31 March was the last day for filing PND 90 or 91 in hard copy, yesterday was the last day for filing online. Now you can still file for 2024 late and pay the fine but only in hard copy which is more of a hassle because the RD online system nowadays has a lot of your data already loaded, e.g. deductions for family and your insurance premiums, charitable donations and tax deductible consumer purchases. It also calculates the tax for you. I filed my own PND90 last week but filed for Mrs Dog, who is a Thai accountant but lets me do her tax, because tax is not her specialty or interest. As always her information that was not yet pre-loaded by the RD arrived at the last minute. After doing both PND90s with different types of income, I can confirm that absolutely nothing has changed in the system since last year, despite widespread speculation that the RD would update forms to allow for DTA claims. There is a box to tick, if you have stock dividends from overseas but that has been there for years. I have never declared any but I assume it is just there because there are no tax credits on foreign dividends, so the form for them excludes that calculation. It would be interesting to see reports of people who have filed PND90s for foreign income remitted to Thailand last year. It seems the only way to do this and claim DTA benefits if by filing in person at an RD office, assuming they know how to do, which seems doubtful in most locations.

The obvious problem is that, despite the fact the UK state pension had long been in existence when the UK DTA was negotiated, the British negotiators, unlike the Americans, didn't insist on the sole rights to tax state pensions. The fact that they did insist on the sole right to tax civil servant pensions made clear that was all they cared about. Now Brits are left scrabbling to establish some sort of equivalency based on the DTA that specifically excluded their pensions.

Yes, it is ridiculous. Trump is not terribly bright and doesn't understand economics and the people around him, except for those like Navarro who are as unhinged as he is, are playing an Emperor's New Clothes pantomime just to hold on to power and make money from using their inside knowledge of the next mad announcement to short markets. Goods are imported from countries that can produce them at the low prices that American consumers are willing to pay. It is not the producing countries fault that they are able to satisfy US commercial demands.