Spilornis

Brings back memories of the long threads on various types of farming. Learnt a lot from the pork thread but my favourite was the thread on rubber tree farming. Hope those guys and their families are doing well. It was certainly a tough market in which to make money

Nothing new in these stats. For the first time in modern history the world's population birth rate went negative (below 2 per woman) during the last few years. (India went negative. The few positive countries are mainly in Africa) The world population numbers increased due to people living longer but this is just a blip in the sense that the temporary bulge will disappear in around 30 years. In simple terms within the space of 70 years world population figures will halve. Without immigration Western countries and developed Asian economies will drop by even more. Is this a good or bad thing... well it's both but the 22nd century will certainly be different to the twentieth century

The self check in systems are great if they work and the airport is designed for the process. If you just stick kiosks into the check in area and leave the old counter structures it's a recipe for chaos if KLIA2 in KL is any example

Is this just a stop en route to another country or does it include the right to pick up new passengers in say Bangkok and proceed to a third country. The latter would be a big change

Yes ... very easy but not much capital appreciation and hard to sell

This is the old scheme that was scrapped in 2020. Now the visa is minimum US$150k deposit plus you have to buy a property https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2024/06/19/new-three-tier-category-for-mm2h-here-to-stay Needless to say it's not proving too popular. They had another scheme between 2020 and 2024 which was even worse. It had less than 100 applicants as I recall

Here's a video on the automated baggage storage system allowing early check in at Changi airport https://www.channelnewsasia.com/watch/changi-airport-terminal-2-introduces-fully-automated-baggage-storage-facility-early-check-ins-video-3999491 My old favourite used to be city check in facilities. Very few of those left these days

It's all about the ability of the automated baggage systems to store and automatically process the luggage in the 24 hour period. Judging from its operation in Singapore it's not cheap and is often only available to business class passengers. In the past this was done manually for transit passengers with long layovers but now there are automated holding cages.

There's presently 24 F1 races. The market is relatively saturated. Singapore is by miles the go to South East Asia event. I could see India hosting a race. Don't forget Sochi has been "off the calendar" for a few years. Not sure what happened to Vietnam who were "on track" pre-pandemic. Formula E already has four races in the region out of its 11 race season so that's probably not an option. Out of interest how does the MotoGP in Thailand go? The one in Malaysia doesn't get much local coverage

Malaysia has had a lot of tech investment over the years by the big players but it's never been the cutting edge stuff (think hard drive assembly etc). The new arbitrage is in data centres. An AI search takes around four times the processing power of a typical Google search and thus the need for new data centres is exploding. The catch is when built they require almost zero labour to operate and are electricity hungry (thus the attraction of countries with low cost power). Better than nothing perhaps but the ideal is to get a seat at the "real" hi tech table. https://www.straitstimes.com/business/south-east-asia-emerges-as-global-data-centre-hot-spot-as-ai-usage-rises

Hong Kong dropped its paper form in the last few days citing a possible tourism boost as one of the reasons for doing so. I don't mind the electronic forms but it would be nice if they were relatively standard between countries allowing automatic pre-fill. Singapore's form is relatively painless whereas Malaysia's is a bit more cumbersome. Indonesia with its separate customs declaration is over the top

Many e visa approvals are computer generated these days. It's only if an answer to a particular question raises a flag that a human looks at your application. If these visa approvals are computer generated I'd expect approval within 24 hours. Will be interesting to see how it plays out

Correct The "tax clearance" issue for travel has been around for many years but in the last few weeks they have revived it. Not sure about Thailand but in Malaysia the tradition is that things like tax, speeding fines etc are not paid until the authority offers a discount month. As an aside Malaysia has just started to track Singaporean vehicles with outstanding traffic fines. It seems that those law abiding Singaporeans aren't as squeaky clean when it comes to paying Malaysian fines

Gaya is only a few miles from Bodh Gaya one of the holiest sites in Bhuddism. It has the "descendant" of the tree under which the Bhudda sat and derived his "wisdom". Not a Bhuddist myself but very peaceful and well worth a visit

At it's simplest it's all riding on new battery technology. Unfortunately while there have been a lot of promising developments the massive breakthroughs predicted about ten years ago are yet to be produced in marketable quantities.