mfd101

25 minutes ago, oldgent said:

its a no brainer really young thai female with nothing meets foreign man twice her age

who do you think comes out the best

That entirely depends on the couple and their circumstances. Are they a real couple, committed to each other for life? Or is he just a randy & cynical & selfish old so 'n so & she's just in it for the money? Or any combination of possibilities in between?

You can order on the internet direct from Ikea BKK. I propose to do so for some shelves in a couple of weeks ...

2 minutes ago, Happy enough said:

whereupon hordes of expats etc . what do you mean?

Reread my original quote to which you responded above!

4 minutes ago, Happy enough said:

so they couldn't have done better than that building then? looks like a lazy effort to me.

No doubt they could have done better, at twice the price ... whereupon hordes of expats etc

16 minutes ago, avander said:

You'd have thought they could have prettied it up a little by putting a little greenery in or maybe they couldn't afford "advanced" plantings.

Surely, security doesn't have to mean design it to look "ugly as....".   It looks so dated.

I am hoping the photo doesn't do it justice.......

No, but security does require (1) robust build with blast-proof independent spaces and (2) clear sight all around the building. So eventual gardens will be well away from the building.

And don't forget that too much prettying-up and hordes of expats on this site will be complaining on how their money has been wasted on all those useless bureaucrats who only think of themselves and never serve the hardworking old men who want to pay less taxes but want more service ...

We moved into our new place (2-storey, 365sq/m, on 2 rai) in late March this year, some 15 months after earthworks began. End result is good - robust build, some shoddy workmanship not too obvious, now almost leak-proof ...

But oh! the blood, sweat & tears to get there!

Good start for design would be smilehomes.com - lots of choice, prices, high-quality plans. We chose one, plans cost roughly 50000฿ but very good indeed with architect in BKK a phonecall away. When we took them to the government people here in Surin for approval to build, they were most impressed - never seen anything like it before in terms of detail & comprehensiveness. We modified the plan in various ways to suit ourselves (2 medium-sized bedrooms u/s & small (3rd) bathroom turned into my library etc) but all turned out fine.

Main problem was that we chose a succession of family 'n friends 'builders' who turned out to be (1) at best amateurs of varying capability, not suited to a big western-style house (2) at worst a bunch of thieving lying rogues. Went thru 3 lots of them before my partner took on the role of project manager & started supervising every moment of every day. End result was 50% over the planned cost & twice the expected time, but that's life. LESSON: You need professional builders with professional techos for the technical bits (electricity, water, pumps if any ...) - depending where you are, that generally means NOT locals. Having a falang project manager would be a great idea, providing he has relevant experience in Thailand.

Having said all that, there were some workers (3 painters for instance) who did an excellent job and helped out with other tasks cheerfully when they had to wait for others to finish before they could do their job ...

One major problem always to look out for is that most Thai 'builders', workers, techos etc have never actually LIVED in a western-style house, so they have no idea what all sorts of things are for or how to install them or problems to watch out for - from the trivial (toilet paper holders carefully placed so you need to have the agility of a 10-year-old to reach them) to the important (kitchen marble bench placed too high even for a falang let alone a little Thai to work at - why? because the Italian dishwasher was fairly tall & needed to fit underneath - didn't think it was important enough to dig out a little further & lower the d/washer). And on & on. Most things had to be done twice, thrice or even 4 times over before they were right. Sigh. But we got there ... One of my mistakes, as my b/f is not loath to point out, was that I was always cheerful, polite & smiling throughout, using the best of my Western management skills to cajole them along. Turns out that the only thing that works here is shouting & threats ...

12 minutes ago, KamnanT said:

A frequent traveller (64 page) adult passport issued in Bangkok now costs A$510 (including the A$103 "overseas surcharge").  But the staff get a nice new workplace, albeit not that attractive.

It's called 'user pays (full cost)'. A perfectly sensible capitalist principle.

12 hours ago, Becker said:

The intention of the labour market reform is to get employers to hire more workers, thus reducing unemployment. The rest of your post are just ramblings I can't comment on.

Yes. Of course, trade unions everywhere never care about the unemployed because they don't pay membership fees ...

2 hours ago, Barney R said:

I bet if there was half the staff they might become efficient, another waste of tax payers money with most of the staff more interested in the good life in thailand than actually helping their fellow countrymen. 

If you took the trouble to enlarge the photo you would notice that over half the staff are Thais. Why employ expensive Aussies to do the admin jobs when local employees will do it at 1/4 the price? All in YOUR interest as a tax payer!

28 minutes ago, iang said:

From the looks of it, I think it's simply designed to be a fortress! Not a bad thing is these days of terrorism, shootings & bombings!

Undoubtedly that was a major part of the design brief. You'ld look pretty silly these days with an all-glass lovely light & beautiful building for an embassy.

The usual learning curve of the fresh-faced young things. Unfortunately, the lesson they mostly learn is: Keep your head down; do nothing likely to be useful or controversial (cf Hollande).

Sarkosy had a different reaction: Run round and round in circles extremely energetically. He still ended up in the same place.

Perhaps my circumstances are different because I'm not on an Old Age pension (but a CSS pension - for retired federal public servants) BUT: when I left Oz permanently in late 2015 my financial advisor advised me to nominate to remain a resident for tax purposes (which is not the same as being a resident for any other purpose). It was entirely up to me which I preferred (no issue arose about where I actually live) but I would be better off remaining a tax resident and paying tax on my sole incomes which are from Oz, but with a Medicare Levy Exemption certificate. And no tax payable in Thailand because of the Oz/Thai tax agreement.

I'm guessing that the issue of house and where you actually live arises only in the case of the OA pension and its supplements?

Let's keep things in proportion. Think of Thailand, culturally & educationally, as moving gently through the 1960s ...

I can remember life at Hamilton Boys' High School in NZ in the mid-1960s. A pretty good school I think BUT:

- It was the time when the fashionable length of hair for young gentlemen was beginning to lengthen and the Headmaster used to jump up & down for 5 minutes at morning assembly most days yelling at those boys whose hair showed over the collar of their uniform

- Each year we had a week of "military drill" where we put on army uniforms and marched up & down while one of the more thuggish boys dressed up as a sergeant got to scream at us, learned how to dismantle a machine gun (I never learned to remantle one) and then went off to Army camp for a couple of hours to fire a Lee Enfield 303 (mine dated from 1903) in the general direction of a target.

Don't worry. Things can only get better.

3 minutes ago, Aussieroaming said:

I personally would never chose to live there again unless something happened that i cant foresee. Ridiculously expensive, sterile and boring. I rarely go there except to visit family for very brief periods of time and i see nothing there that would entice me to return, but each to their own.

I spent 41 years of my life in Canberra ?... so now I live at the end of the world and am mostly quite happy (though the chaos, inefficiency & inability to plan of my family get me down ?).

7 minutes ago, johnmcc6 said:

I complain and earned every zack I ever had.

Fine. My point is that politicians everywhere are confronted daily with people who want more and more out of government services and want to pay less and less in tax. Theoretically it could be done if government administration could be made more efficient (ie sack thousands upon thousands of public servants, which of course costs huge amounts of money to do) but no politicians will ever do that because the voters (of whom the public servants are a large slab) will punish them. I was a Defence bureaucrat and I know of what I speak.

The voters get what they vote for.

As always (and everywhere in the world, I guess), the people who complain about the high level of taxes and the high cost of living are the same people who are always expecting and demanding ever higher levels of government services and interventions to improve the world ...

3 hours ago, darksidedog said:

He would be far better served focusing on the interests of the whole nation, rather than coming out with a very backward and basically dumb policy, that just keeps a bunch of homophobic retards happy. Absolutely no good reason whatsoever to introduce this policy, that I note is being criticised by the very people Donalds tweets told us he had discussed it with, which is now being shown to be yet another lie.

As Keynes might have said: When I lose my mind, the facts change.

My boss used to say: Bums promote bums.

" ... getting the poor to live within their means would help a lot ... ". Right, so um from near starvation to total starvation?

The article is amusingly well-written: so delicately put to avoid annoying those it is obviously criticizing.

Good for you. The visa/residency process is long-drawn-out (as in all countries) but you get there if you're strong, sensible & determined.

59 minutes ago, Ricardo said:

I'd also hope that with experience, Thai voters will become slightly-more cynical, when politicians  (of any party)  come making extravagant promises pre-election, about how much they will give away  ...  as those promises are not-often delivered-upon after the election.

 

Current experience in The West (Usofa, UK, Poland, Hungary ... ) doesn't give much cause for optimism. Why should Thai peasants be more rational & better informed than their Western 'superiors'?

I must try it with my b/f next time I come in to Suwana. Wonder whether THAT will work!

terrabul thoz ffrench peepul. KaRNT EEVN rite inglish propa!

I hesitate to offer comment in the presence of so much expert medical advice, but my understanding - from the 1980s when Oz scientists in Perth discovered the causal factor being H. pylori and the acidic environment in which it thrives - was that eating a couple of spoonfuls of yoghurt each day with live bacteria of the 'good' variety (Lactobacillus & Bifido) both alters the balance in the stomach so that H. pylori cannot thrive and repopulates your gut with more useful bacteria.

I regularly take yoghurt with the live bacteria (not the sugar-laden rubbish) and I've never had a problem. Cheap too.

But what would I know?