newnative

Yawn

True about the Chinese and number 4. If you notice, in Pattaya, there are highrises View Talay 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 5C, 5D, 6, 7, and 8. But no View Talay 4 highrise. The first and last condos my spouse and I owned did have floor 13s--we lived on floor 13 in the first one. Likely some of the others also had floor 13s, too, but I can't remember.

A number of countries use mail-in voting, including Canada, the UK, South Korea, Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, and others. Idiot Trump, fortunately, loudly opposed mail-in voting in 2020, citing all sorts of completely false claims regarding it. His opposition to it, and urging his supporters to wait until Election Day to vote, possibly cost him the election. Yaa! Dems, alas, will not be so fortunate this year. Trump, apparently finding some heretofor deeply hidden and never-used brain cells, has done a complete flip-flop regarding mail-in voting. Guess what? All those lies he told regarding mail-in voting? Never mind. Just lies. Mail-in voting, according to Trump, is now hunky-dory and he is urging his supporters to use it. Boo! Why couldn't those damn, lazy brain cells of his have just remained inactive until after Election Day?

Terrible decision.

Seems like Thailand is getting along just fine without a submarine. Find a better use for the money--and that would be just about anything.

555 You have to hand it to them--they can spin anything.

Horrible. Men, too.

I think you need to distinguish between tourists, who visit once for maybe a week or two, and others who visit frequently and/or live here for extended periods or year-round. My four sisters visited Thailand in 2017 for 10 days and they had a wonderful time. Everything was new, interesting, exotic, and so different from where they live in the US. They still talk about their trip and the fun they had and the new experiences. One of my sisters even had a little travel book made for everyone with lots of photos and descriptions from their trip. That's a typical tourist. If you think back to your first visit, it was probably something like that, too--as was my first visit in December 2009.

Around 80,000 baht a month.

I liked the first sentence of your second paragraph. There are definitely Thais with money to buy homes. The other day my spouse and I were on the Motorway from Bangkok back to Pattaya. I think I counted at least 10 billboards advertising new housing estates with prices ranging from 30MB to 50MB and more. Plus a number of other housing projects with more normal prices. My Thai brother-in-law is house hunting in the BKK suburbs. He looked at one new small 3-bedroom 2-story on a tiny land plot for about 7MB. No air-con, no finished kitchen, no furniture, no appliances, no built-ins. Not even shower glass in the bathrooms. Left to think about it. Went back a few days later. It was sold. Most of the project is sold and the developer didn't want to reduce the price much on the few remaining homes--and, apparently doesn't need to.

A number of the desirable condo projects in Pattaya have reached the 49% limit. But, you are right, in most other areas, without high concentrations of expats, it's not a big factor with condos and the proposed increase in foregn ownership will have little or no impact on prices.

Luckily, trying to overthrow the government and election tampering do not fall under official duties.

Hello. I looked into Cigna Close Care when it was mentioned some weeks ago on another thread. I am male and 72, close to your age. The quote I got for Close Care, with coverage in Thailand, was $397 a month with $3000 deductible, 10% cost share, and $2000 out of pocket max. If I remember correctly, there are several options to change the deductible to reduce the monthly cost. At that point in the application process, which is as far as I got, they did not ask for any of my medical conditions. I currently have hospitalization insurance with April International insurance, out of Paris, and I am paying considerably more than the Cigna quote, although with no deductible, which is not available with my plan. The Close Care was tempting but I decided to stick with April, mainly because I have been with them since around 2011. One thing possibly of interest, when I did not immediately sign up for Cigna, a few days later they sent me an email offering a 10% lifetime discount if I signed up befoe the end of June. Should you decide to go with them, you might wait a few days and see if you get the same 10% dicount offer. Good luck with your health care search.

Unbelievable.

Once again, hold the ridiculous hype in headlines and reporting.

Could have been worse. I have no recollection, as I was just a baby at the time, but I remember my 3 older sisters talking a number of times about a train trip to Pennsylvania to visit the grandparents when we lived in Oregon. Dad was on an extended overseas assignment with the military and Mom decided to make the trip on her own with the kids even though she was short on money. Apparently, they ate peanut butter crackers the entire train trip there and back. I think to this day none of them can look at peanut butter.

Also liked Ripley.

Forgot Lessons in Chemistry. Terrific.

TV: Bridgerton Melancholia Slow Horses Sex and the City New Amsterdam Glamorous Moon Embracing the Sun Queen Charlotte Outlander Misty Queenmaker Yellowstone Schitts Creek Business Proposal King the Land Shogun The Glory Something in the Rain Hacks A Gentleman in Moscow The Penthouse Start-Up Masters of the Air All the Light We Cannot See My Love from the Star Movies: Jason Bourne The Post Miss Sloane Narvik Leave the World Behind The Monuments Men Luther: The Fallen Sun Red Eye The Resistance Banker

All good news.

Luckily, I'm in the same boat of several earlier posters in that the people I associate with and those who are my friends don't fit the OP's post.

It's always newsworthy with Asean Now--especially if the flooding is in Pattaya.

Realtors would likely not maintain a list but they would be a good source to contact if you are interested in a condo in an older, well-maintained project. Any of the big, established agencies would be able to point you to possible choices once you told them the area you are interested in living in and your price range, condo size, etc. For example, if you tell them you want to live in Wong Amat, they might list Saranchol, Park Beach, Silver Beach, Sky Beach, Garden Cliff, Ananya, Nova Mirage, and Pingpha, among others. If you don't want to be 'riding for days', I think starting with a realtor would help you narrow your choices.

Just caught the latter part of the debate. From what I saw, if you liken the debate to a fencing match, Biden dutifully followed the rules and showed up with a sword. Trump, who never follows the rules, used an AK-47. Biden's handlers should never have agreed to the debate, knowing that Trump would not debate at all but use the high-profile, high interest event to spew his campaign stump speach, no matter what question he was asked. What will Trump do about the problem of child care? Who knows? He was asked twice to answer the question but, instead, as with most of the questions he was asked, we got his campaign laundry list of everything bad about Biden. The moderators should have muted his mic every time he began to not address the question asked. Don't get me wrong--the tactic was great. With the added benefit of lazy Trump not having to learn anything. If you have no intention of answering the question what is 1 plus 1?, you don't need to learn 2. While Biden was mostly adhering to the debate format and sparring with his sword, struggling to throw statistics out here and there to support his arguments, Trump was mowing every question down left and right with his assault rifle, debate be damned, and talking about what he wanted to talk about, regardless of the question. Sad but true, statistics can be boring, especially in prime time. Do I care what was the exact number of historians who said Trump was the worst president in history? No--just that they said he was. Keep my interest, and earn my vote, with anything but boring statistics. Somebody, I don't care who, should have given Biden a strong and simple closing statement, not the awful muddle he tried to deliver. It was the one thing he could absolutely control in the debate and he failed miserably. To wit, something like this: If you're a billionaire, Trump's your man. Vote for him. He'll look out for you--heck, he wants to be you. We saw that in his horrible, lying term as the worst president in history. And, now not only the worst president, but a convicted felon. If you're not a billionaire, I'm your man. I'll look out for you, to protect everything important to you that a billionaire doesn't have to worry about--but the rest of us do. It's that simple, folks. Thank you.

Maybe I'm missing something but I'm filing this in my 'Duh' folder. Anybody with health insurance and monetary assets available is already doing both. Although I don't have a pile of cash earmarked 'health self-insurance', I have money I can easily get to if I ever have a health expense that is not covered by my insurance. Ditto if my car is totaled in an accident and my car insurance only pays half. No 'car self-insurance' fund but the money is there to make up the difference, if needed. SOP.