rickudon

And the perpetrator hated Islam.....

I'm not a city person, and Bangkok is the last place i would want to live, Crowded, traffic bad, air pollution and relatively expensive. Rural life just outside an urban centre best - can get into town in 15 minutes by car, hospitals and supermarkets the same. I have a Fair sized garden at the house, farm and fishponds 200 metres away. have internet and Netflix. Socialise once a week, too busy for more often!

I maintain 3 UK bank accounts with monthly transactions on all of them. I have 3 pensions paid into my UK bank accounts, pay income tax and maintain a UK address. So far not had any issues (apart from new cards going only to the UK address). I have my foreign SIM registered with them all. WISE not an option, have had problems with them. Not expecting any change in the near future.

So would you vaccinate your children against measles? Only kills about 100,000 people (mainly young children). And do you use a fluoridated toothpaste?

52% of Thais are self employed, mainly in majority cash flow businesses. Most are not registered for income tax, and Thailand would have to employ another million on the public sector payroll to be able to assess their incomes!

And i spend 2-3 times that in Thailand every year - but i am just a retiree.

All 5 of those statements are totally untrue. Hardly contagious - Only took a few months starting from the first cases in a country to spread nationwide. No Pandemic - definition "a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease over a whole country or the world at a particular time." Worldwide, nationwide in most countries. And nearly everybody eventually caught it, although some may have had it and were asymptomatic. Some caught it more than once. And no recent Flu epidemic has either killed as many or infected as many. PCR tests provide no diagnostic information about Covid-19 - Strange - for those who had to do regular tests (e.g. school children like my daughter), who only tested positive twice, and each time she was definitely sick. I didn't need to be tested most of the time, but when i caught it it was unlike any normal cold - and i tested positive. Masks are 100% ineffective at preventing transmission - A laughable claim. Maybe not 100% effective, but masks have been used for years with infectious disease, and numerous tests have been done that show you reduce aerosols of virus and bacterial particles to some degree. The social distancing rule was complete nonsense - How effective it was is open to question, but it is a fact - you need to have had some 'contact' with someone to catch it - either by touching a contaminated surface or breathing in air borne virus. Avoiding sick people was obvious. We were lucky that the virus mutated into a less virulent form fairly rapidly, so the death rate gradually fell; vaccinated people were statistically shown to have lower death rates. This decline in virulence is the normal progression for most infectious diseases. The only 'conspiracy theory' which has any any truth to it was the origin - yes a laboratory leak is quite possible. Just to much coincidence that the outbreak started in a city with a laboratory studying Corona viruses. Chinese secrecy makes proving this now difficult.

Got a reliable link for that? Seems dubious. End of 2023, there were approximately 28,441,000 households in the UK. 5,400,000 households were on Universal credit. So it would be nearly impossible for 51% of British families to be on Universal credit, unless there where more immigrant families than British people (and what is a 'British' family?) As to be expected, this thread is full of disinformation. https://www.ibisworld.com/uk/bed/number-of-households/44090/ https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/universal-credit-statistics-29-april-2013-to-11-january-2024/universal-credit-statistics-29-april-2013-to-11-january-2024#households-on-universal-credit

The cat is out of the bag. The black chin tilapia is now widespread, probably impossible to exterminate. Any realistic attempt to do so would mean poisoning all waterways where they are found - killing everything. Not really practical. Best they can do is promote harvesting them (electrofishing better than netting). They seem to thrive in polluted water, maybe cleaning up the pollution would help.

Pollution monitor?

Hmm yes, like a small derelict navy, and also a number of public buildings as well. If Israel was concerned about 'strategic' weapons, why did they never hit them before? Maybe because they were afraid it would weaken Assad too much? Israel didn't care about how many Syrians Assad killed. Likewise, they never targeted the rebels either. The last thing Israel wanted was an end to the Syrian civil war.

Israel is not attacking ISIS - they never have. They only care about weakening and destabilizing their neighbours, unless they do what Israel wants.

To be fair, a 2,8% rise means that with inflation at 2.6% they will end up worse off (yet again). At first thought you might think they are 0.2% better off - but remember personal allowances are frozen and the increase is taxed - so effectively the rise is worth one third less in real terms i.e. take home pay rises by only about 1.9% in nominal terms and about -0.9% in real terms (other deductions will also apply, like pension deductions). And - even less for higher rate tax payers. In 2024, average UK pay nominally increased by 6.0% and 2,9% in real terms. So Public sector pay gets robbed again. Then you wonder why staff retention is a problem.

Compared to UK, my housing costs are around 60% less. Can grow veg and fruit for most of the year. Have my own fish ponds. Younger wife. Car running costs about 50% cheaper. Can afford Cheese, which is actually only slightly more than the UK.

Meanwhile, Israel is taking advantage of this collapse, carrying out over 250 air attacks on Syrian targets and has seized even more of the Golan hights. They are, they claim, destroying arms stockpiles etc. Reality is Israel wants to see Syria as weak as possible, also use divide and rule - will probably try to provoke more sectarian violence. Last thing they want is a strong, unified Syria.

we have a few Yabba addicts in our village, but not much crime. Alcohol is a bigger problem, half the men in the village have liver problems before they are 60. reason - Yabba and alcohol relatively cheap, other forms of entertainment are too expensive for a villager. Not just Thailand - USA, drug capital of the world - Heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, American culture is so destructive.

Best thing - i was able to retire at 55 - after that only worked part time and when i wanted. Had time for all those hobbies i neglected. To be honest, i didn't enjoy life much until my 30's - certainly the sex life until then was pretty awful. Age 55-60 was the best (in Thailand). 70's now and slowing down, diseases beginning to pile up. Oh well, many friends died much younger.

I use contactless in some locations that are more trustworthy and do not charge a fee for using a card. But mainly use cash - which i get direct from a human in a bank here in Thailand once a month. Pay by phone? Phone apps are too flaky (rely on wifi or phone signal, not always good). I reckon at least 10% of actions on my phone fail - have to repeat and sometimes more than once. If just browsing it is just annoying, but for paying for stuff or internet communications it can be VERY annoying. And what happens if your phone breaks down, runs out of battery or gets stolen? Too many ifs. In the UK 3 months ago, was on holiday and needed to use a car park for overnight parking - only accepted coins - and you needed a lot! There was a phone option but it rarely worked. Spent half an hour every morning making single purchases with bank notes (from an ATM) to raise the coin cash! Have on 3 occasions (over many years) not been able to get money from an ATM because internet link not working - Once had no cash and had to find someone to borrow money as needed for travel needs. Also had ATM out of funds, and wonder where the next ATM was. I live in a village - cash is main means of payment

Well in 14 years i have only spent 2 days in Pattaya (family holiday). But those women who i knew of who worked bars and the hotels/restaurants in Udon, plus the girls i know about in the village, 90% left when they got a man. They either left to live in the man's country, or brought him back to the village. I am one of about 5 farang in the village with a Thai partner, but about 10 other girls from the village live in Europe or the USA. Only the hardest (and most damaged?) stay in Pattaya.

Mitigation will probably not work either. Ok you can do managed retreat against sea level rise, but still expensive, give everyone an air conditioner, but that causes more energy to be released, aggravating temperatures. As temperatures go up, so will the problems multiply - and tipping points will be more likely to be reached - worst case scenario, Permian style mass extinction. Actually trying to resolve the causes will be much better in the long run. You talk about Cancer, well what is best, eliminating the causes, or trying to cure it?

The batteries will probably last more than 10 years. Then they could be recycled. The problem with recycling them is because very few have expired, there are not enough to make running a recycling plant worthwhile - give it another 5 years or maybe more..

The tiny increments of temperature caused by CO2 are not what does the damage, but what they have an effect on. Think tipping points. Warming causes more ice in Greenland to melt, this weakens AMOC. Nobody knows exactly when it will fail, but estimates are as soon as 15 years, but maybe 300.One positive is that if AMOC fails, Greenland will get colder, and the rate at which ice melts declines. BUY what about other effects? European Agriculture declines. Maybe it will effect the West African monsoon, which could either make West Africa, wetter, or dryer. It might also accelerate the collapse of the Amazon rain forest, which could happen in 50 years. If it changes to Savanah, hard to change back. There are at least 14 tipping points which have been identified as possible due to the current warming, some have only a regional impact, others Global. The worst impacts could trigger mass extinctions (especially if masses of methane are released from frozen tundra and methane clathrates). Oh, and one little point about water vapour for ThaiBeachlover - it might be a significant greenhouse gas, but its presence is purely a temperature response - warmer air can hold more water vapour. So nothing you can do about it directly.

Millions of non-EU 'legal' migrants came into the UK after Brexit - these people are not just those taking working class jobs but loads of Asians with degrees who are taking middle class jobs, Hence why British University graduates struggle to find decent well paid work. Outer London suburbs are being taken over by Indians - where my brother lives, it has changed from a 90% white British community to 50/50 with Asians in the last 10 years. They are even turning up in rural Hampshire. Everywhere, more pressure on housing.

What changed the narrative was the Wests complacency after Russia's partial withdrawal in late 2022 - and they didn't increase military spending or manufacture a lot more munitions, then the republications held up weapon supplies for months. Also diverting weapons to Israel didn't help. If pressure had been racked up on Russia, Putin would have caved in.

Trump is obviously mentioned because he doesn't believe in Climate change and says he will withdraw from all the global climate deals. Drill baby drill will not help. Co2 levels are higher than they have been in a million years, and physics indisputably proves that CO2 warms the atmosphere. Methane also does (fracking doesn't help here). There are too many variables affecting climate to model it completely, so exactly how much warmer it will get and how long it takes are not fully known, hence the range of computer models looking at the variables. But all of them say ....Temperature up. In some ways the collapse of AMOC would be good for some - it will cool the Northern temperate regions - but - the tropics will get hotter - maybe enough for a good cull of humanity.