suzannegoh

26 minutes ago, DrDave said:

To be fair, the $11M is the cost to "prepare for construction" (probably the customary studies, land acquisition and lining the pockets of local influential people). The total budget is projected to be $44M, which I agree doesn't come close to being able to compete with Western medical centers on that scale.

It still doesn’t add up.  To put the costs in context, consider that in 2014 Bangkok Hospital budgeted 6 billion baht (US$190M) for an expansion of their facilities.  The expansion involved adding 4 new buildings with a total of 200 beds.  So it doesn’t add up that this $11M investment is going to allow them to “attract around 50,000 tourists in 2023, with the number projected to double within a year and possibly reach one million in 2026”.

https://www.nationthailand.com/business/30243514

6 hours ago, DrDave said:

The aim is that the medical tourism complex will initially attract around 50,000 tourists in 2023...

 

I doubt that the complex would be complete any time in 2023 even if they started construction today.

Even if they did build it that rapidly, the budget suggests a small scale project, not something that would attract tens of thousands of patients. These guys with their $11M budget for a "medical complex" are going to be competing with places i the west that spend more than that on a single machine.

With a budget of $11M?  That's enough to buy about ten MRI machines.

If you’re single or you are married to a Thai who hasn’t ever lived in the US then there’s a greater chance that the math would support taking SS at age 62.  If married to a US citizen the math is different because your spouse will be able to collect your SS if you die before them.

My last SS statement showed that I would get 42% more if I took SS at age 67 instead of 62.  With the right assumptions about by how much the government will under-report inflation and about how long you will live might make taking it at age 62 work out.  If you’re expecting to die at age 70 and you’re single then definitely taking it at 62 would be the thing to do. 
 

35 minutes ago, Lomsakboy said:

Where have I written THB 1 million. Should have said up to 350% to some destination. couple of sample on increase to United States is to port Seattle, WA. on a 20ft. the sea freight increase has gone up by THB 120,000 in approx. 1 year and to Terminal Atlanta GA. the same.  But all depending on destination address in United States, it could cost around THB 500,000 door to door and with everything included with todays freight rates. Hopefully this stop soon and the rates will get back to more normal prices. But I doubt it. 

Apologies, you didn’t say a million baht, I extrapolated that from your estimate of a 350% increase.  US$10K was a ballpark figure for a shipment like that a few years ago, using professional movers who pack and unpack everything for you.  3.5 times that would put it over the million baht mark, which would be prohibitively expensive in most cases. 

On 4/3/2021 at 10:08 PM, khunpeer said:

yes, I got 1 bottle of this and a bottle of that in the Witch shop in the road on the way to SanKampaeng. ask in the street for directions, just say  "MaeMot" and they know where to point you...

I'm not there now, holiday in the South, otherwise I would send you a Google location

Is that Witch place still there and still operational?

6 hours ago, Lomsakboy said:

Right now price on any shipments has gone sky high to to the pandemic and shortage of container. Depend on where too, then the increase has gone up by 350% on a container. Especially to some destination in Europe and United States are very high these days. But all destinations has gone up. It might go down to something like normal again in Q3. But I will see that before I believe this. 

 

350% increase?  So then about a million baht to sent a 20ft container of household goods from Thailand to the US?

On 3/26/2021 at 10:11 AM, Freddy42OZ said:

You can now buy and sell crypto with PayPal.  That might be an option for you   

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto

 

Be careful with that option.  Paypal is notorious for locking people out of their accounts and you can't transfer cryptos that you purchase from Paypal out of your Paypal account.  Presently Paypal will only sell cryptos to you if you are a US resident and if they figure out that you're not you might have problems.

On 3/25/2021 at 4:49 PM, Bigz said:

Sorry if it's a dumb question (i have 0 experience with btc) Can I purchase btc from other countries using a vpn? Or you stuck with the Thai exchanges while in Thailand?

You might be able to but there's some risk that if the exchange figures out that you aren't a resident of the country in which they operate that they might lock you out of your account.

That's still cheap insurance if it really covers everything.  Price out an unsubsidized Obamacare policy if you want to see expensive.

Are Thai hospitals legally obligated to give you copies of your case records, including handwritten doctor’s notes, if you ask for them? 

1 hour ago, Yellowtail said:

 

Why would I look to a report on hate crimes for information about all violent crimes?

 

I never said the DOJ had changed how they defined hate crimes. 

 

Do you even read what you respond to?

The “hate crime” designation does seem a little arbitrary and like it has potential to shift focus onto a minority of cases rather than on the majority.   A Korean grocer shot by a poor kid during a robbery is just as dead as a Chinese masseuse shot by a deranged redneck but the “hate crime” designation makes the former less important even if those cases are more numerous. 

39 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

You are correct, the Constitution of the United States forbids the US Government and all its agencies from restricting speech, though there are a handful

of exceptions.

 

What you missed is, Federal and State laws make it a criminal offense to physically attack people and there are specific Federal and State laws that make it a criminal offense to attack people on the basis of their perceived race or nationality.

 

The statement to which he was replying was "all comments and actions against China and Chinese people are wrong".  Maybe comments like that are wrong, and maybe the woke will find a way to outlaw them, but it's patently absurd to say that it's off limits to criticize China and the Chinese.

On 3/17/2021 at 3:24 PM, shy coconut said:

I'm curious, are you in the Atlanta area and is you wife of Asian appearance?

I was wondering if there is a general prejudice against women of certain ethnicity in Georgia .

I'd say "no", what's more common is the "smart Asian" stereotype and the assumption that you went to Georgia Tech.

1 hour ago, Gumballl said:

Say you had a "setup" ordained by God himself. You are still at the mercy of the server doling out data.

 

That server could also have been ordained, but if it is hit with millions of queries at one time, then you may experience latency on receiving data.

 

The internet, err network, is full of uncertainties. I would rather spend my day measuring pleasures of life than measuring the speed of my network at home.

If you're not interested in the subject matter why bother to comment?  Just to let us know that you are more enlightened than the rest of us?

With ISPs providing connections to the internet as fast as they are now it's often then case that the WiFi within a user's house is the limiting factor in the speeds that can be obtained.  I can see your point that ISPs should probably highlight that fact but, on the other hand, to be surprised by that suggests technical illiteracy far beyond the norm.

9 hours ago, Pro1Expat said:

And it must not be forgotten, the speed and latency will depend on what switches you go through and how heavily congested they are at the time

Normally speedtest connects you to the server in your areas that has the lowest ping time.  That's another thing that could make their data misleading.

However, overall I find their conclusions to be plausible.  My internet in Thailand is even faster than what they report and I don't subscribe to the fastest package that's available in my area.  While there are people popping up in this thread to say that they have all sorts of problems with their ISP or complaining about the 5GHz band of their router not being good "5G", that might just mean that ISPs have problems on a certain number of installations and/or that a certain number of users don't understand the technology well enough to know whether their problems are due to something on the ISPs end or on their end.

3 hours ago, Pro1Expat said:

It is all to do with the infrastructure to a large extent. They can throttle the speed by reducing the bandwidth which they are very likely doing

Yes, but I don't think that the data on SpeedTest directly reflects the capabilities of the infrastructure because (as you pointed out before) the client equipment is variable.  I think that all that they are doing is recording speedtest results that users initiate and filtering them.  They could still be correct that Thailand has the fastest connections but I'd take their 308 Mbps figure with a grain of salt.

8 minutes ago, Pro1Expat said:

It is being promoted as a game changer. It wont be unless mobile speed are increased significantly. That is why it doesnt make sense.

I was interpreting that data to reflect the speeds that current users are getting, not the capability if the infrastructure.  However I can't find anywhere on speedtest.net in which they describe their methodology in detail.  They must be filtering the data somehow, otherwise in the case of "Fixed" internet connections they would wind up reporting the average speeds of people's wifi rather than the average speed of the fibre internet coming into people's houses.

11 minutes ago, Pro1Expat said:

Mobile data is slow yet they are pushing 5G. Doesnt make a lot of sense really

Why doesn't it make sense?  Not so many people have 5G-capable phones yet so not so many people get 5G speeds on their Mobile devices.

2 hours ago, Pro1Expat said:

Check this out for internet speed: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index In this for Fixed Broadband Thailand is 1st

 

For Mobile Thailand ranks as 33rd

Yes, that's the data on which the article at the top of this thread is based.

4 hours ago, 2530Ubon said:

260ms is his ping (latency - both of these terms are used to measure round trips for packets of information) time, - he correctly measured ping in ms.  260ms means that he's either using a VPN, or he has a problem somewhere because that's an extremely slow ping time, and a very annoying lag if you're a gamer.

But if one is going to compared the speed of internet in various countries it wouldn't be valid to use the ping time alone  to do that.  Of course the ping time between Bangkok and New York is going to be long, at the speed of light it would take 93 milliseconds to go from Bangkok to New York and back if the most direct route is taken.  That 93ms might be important if you're a gamer but you can't blame it on your ISP.

4 hours ago, Pro1Expat said:

What was the configuration used for the test? Be useful to know as it will affect the result significantly.

It's a summary of results of people who run the speed test at Speedtest.net.