khunjeff

If you entered in October, you were using a COE, not Thailand Pass. With COE, yes, your insurance document was inspected on arrival. Under Thailand Pass, it isn't - at the arrival airport, they only look at your QR code and pre-flight PCR test result.

I'm pretty sure it's been two years, but at this point time is just a blur.

Yes, having a cute mascot is always the first step ???? At the zebra crossings near me, there are literally hundreds of violations every hour, even with pedestrian-operated traffic lights. On the rare occasions that police happen to be nearby, they pay absolutely no attention.

Evidently the terms "wide open" and "quarantine-free" have different meanings here than what I'm used to.

"Scheduled to open", though it's still very unclear whether any airlines are actually interested in flying there. Betong has always been a notoriously difficult place to travel to, partially due to geography, and partially as a result of deliberate efforts by past governments to contain the communist insurgents who used to be based there. It's much easier to get there from Malaysia than from Thailand, which is why, pre-Covid, most of the tourists in the area were Malaysian. I'm certainly in favor of this new airport in principle. But it remains to be seen whether it will make any financial sense, absent government subsidies.

Using credit cards, they are protected against fraud and can be reimbursed by the card issuer in cases like this. Had they paid by bank transfer - which is the other common option here - they would probably lose everything, unless some funds could be clawed back from the criminals.

"He also said that the deployment of AI technology is intended to ease burden on traffic police, so they don’t have to be stationed at the intersection to remind motorists and motorcyclists of the need for road discipline." I've never seen traffic police at that intersection outside of the air-conditioned control booth, and I've certainly never seen them "reminding" anyone about "road discipline", so there doesn't appear to be much of a burden to be eased.

When my Air Asia flight was cancelled in March 2020 (leaving me stranded in Vietnam - luckily Thai Airways was still flying and had seats available), I filed a claim with Traveloka, which had sold me the ticket, and Air Asia denied it, falsely stating that I had cancelled the flight myself ???? I then initiated a dispute with my credit card company, which immediately refunded the money. Traveloka never responded to them, so the charge was officially reversed. Months later, Traveloka informed me that Air Asia had revised its decision and authorized a refund, but the amount was tiny - probably just the checked baggage fee. Since I had already been made whole by my credit card by that point, though, I no longer cared.

The figure you're referring to was from the 2018 statistics published online by Immigration, which said that they processed 79,107 retirement extensions during that year. The numbers were only for extensions, not visas, so they presumably undercounted the total number of retirees in country. The numbers in the interview came from Immigration, which doesn't issue visas overseas, so I'm guessing that they were really referring to extensions, which are often incorrectly referred to (even by Immigration officers...) as "visas". (Immigration does issue in-country Non-O visas for retirees, but pretty much all of those turn into retirement extensions within 90 days.) You're right, it was all very vague. As I mentioned above, my guess is that the number was really for retirement extensions only, since that's what Immigration normally counts, but that's just a guess.

In reality, they currently attract fines of zero baht. I have never seen or heard of anyone being fined for a zebra crossing violation, and the only fines for speeding and going through red lights come from automated cameras, not traffic police. That's true in many cases, but even when the crossings have traffic lights - and timers counting down to the red light that can be seen easily from over 100m away - drivers just ignore the lights, and even ignore the pedestrians who are in the crossing. They will just keep pushing their way through a crowd of people unless someone physically blocks the vehicle and bangs on the hood.

That happens to me even with True 4G, but fortunately not often and not for very long each time.

From the article: "The DLT said that motorists still need a physical license in order to be able to legally drive in Thailand but can use the digital version as a means of ID." So in other words, motorists can only leave the physical card at home if they don't plan to do any motoring... Thanks for the clickbait ????

Do these "cutting edge" "modern technologies" include observing thick black smoke belching from city buses and then removing those buses from service? Didn't think so.

Not sure I understand this. It's not a dangerous drug unless it's imported?

As long as we're making up numbers, let's say they're losing quadrillions instead.

If I recall, there were two different versions of the polymer 50 baht note back in the mid-90s. As @jacko45kmentioned, the first design tended to lose its printing after a while and start to become transparent in places. The second one was more stable, but we heard at the time that market ladies complained about the plastic bills because they stuck together when wet. In any case, they were withdrawn and replaced by new paper notes after a few years. I know that polymer notes are much more durable than paper ones, but I've never cared much for them personally: they don't fold nicely, and they do stick together far more than traditional bills.

Apparently it was originally developed as Country Marina City, and then there was an attempt to change the name to Marina Lagoon Suvarnabhumi just before the airport opened. Not totally clear exactly what went wrong other than the 1997 crash, though there's speculation online that the foundation may be unstable. There's some info in the links below - you can use the automatic translation in Chrome to read the Thai discussions. http://www.smc.co.th/projects-detail.php?ic=2&id=2 https://m.pantip.com/topic/30206968? https://m.pantip.com/topic/30510814

Suvarnabhumi was designed with an annual passenger capacity of 45 million. In 2019, before the pandemic, it handled 65 million. Don Muang was designed for a maximum of 36.5 million passengers per year, and handled 41 million in 2019. I'm not seeing any unused capacity at either place. SAT-1, the new midfield passenger concourse, wasn't completed until passenger numbers had crashed during the pandemic - technically, I don't think it's even been finally approved and certified to open even as of now - so they've delayed using it until traffic picks up. Bear in mind, though, that SAT-1 is just a concourse. It adds extra contact gates for boarding and alighting passengers, but doesn't provide any additional check-in, immigration, baggage claim, or ground transport facilities. That's some of what the expansion projects (which were foreseen when the airport was originally designed) will help with.

Oh, there will be RULES! Well, that should solve the problem ????

It's still surprisingly easy to find kits in the 50-70 baht range around Bangkok, but I haven't seen anything being sold as cheaply as these GPO kits. If they really wanted wide distribution, though, they would sell them individually or in the usual packs of 2-5 pieces that every other brand has, not boxes of 20 - those seem to be specifically engineered to be convenient to resellers.

If you could choose your preferred number from any vendor, that would work. But in most cases you'll only find the number that the fortune teller or two-headed calf told you would be lucky at one stand, so when you find it you'll probably pay whatever they ask. That would definitely work, BUT... - no one would like the optics of poor, handicapped vendors being stripped of their livelihoods, and - that would require enforcement, which would require actual work.

Heinecke definitely isn't a dumb man, and renouncing did let him avoid US taxes going forward, after paying what was probably a fairly substantial "exit tax". Ease of travel is great, but evidently not worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to him. "Renouncing American citizenship (also referred to as expatriation) is a final and irreversible way for Americans who have moved overseas permanently to stop filing U.S. federal taxes, and in 2020 a record number of Americans expatriated.... . . Renouncing does make sense for some Americans who have moved abroad permanently. This often depends on tax rules and rates (and passport power) of the country where they live, and their current and expected future financial circumstances. If detailed financial projections indicate they will save a lot of money in the long term by renouncing, then it may make sense." https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2021/11/03/when-might-renouncing-us-citizenship-make-sense-from-a-tax-point-of-view/

He renounced his US citizenship decades ago.

Google Pay? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.nbu.paisa.user