mfd101

Would be lovely to have one in Surin! (instead of having to drive for an hour to get to Buriram airport) ...

Sitting still is bad for you. Your body was made for movement, swinging through the trees. You should get up and move around every 30 minutes. Staring at a screen is bad for your eyes. You need to exercise your eyes for a few seconds every 5 minutes, looking sideways 'out of the corner' of your eyes, & looking at objects further away from you than your screen (ie refocussing).

(Yawn)

Interesting. Keeping Defence under civilian control will be a new experience for Thailand ...

At least in the shortish term - say, to May next year - he's in a position to stare down his internal opposition and get his own way. The dinosaurs are still licking their wounds. Propaganda-wise he looks good in all the photos & vids. Towering over everyone else, a useful symbolism when you're in politics.

No problems ordering up a transfer from Aus to Thailand this morning. Scheduled for arrival at 1400 tomorrow as usual.

It's their accepting an endless stream of unpalatable facts since forever that has made Thailand what it is - a byword for feudal hierarchy, poverty and corruption!

Yes, the mega-rich could certainly do with being taken down a peg or 3. As to the minimum wage (as Australia is rediscovering under a Labor Government), increasing wages without first increasing productivity through technology & education simply produces runaway inflation. Podactif wot dat?

Notice that the first report above (from Thai PBS) says he'll think about it. The second report above (from something in Phuket) says he's doing it ... No suggestion (so far) of doing anything for expats.

As to the 10K payment (assuming it actually materializes), here in Isaan the people will accept it Tank yo wery mut, and then vote MFP in even larger numbers at the next election. They may be poor peasants and uneducated but they're not entirely stupid.

Yes, and many of the young federal bureaucrats who worked for me in Canberra had swarthy skins and difficult to pronounce surnames, but they had been born in Oz and spoke broad Australian. Often very talented young people and a pleasure to work with.

My comment was meant quantitatively rather than qualitatively.

Not sure how that helps. My point is that expats here invariably overestimate their own importance in the scheme of things.

Rubbish. Old Falangs are nothing but a pimple on the backside of Thailand.

Well, whether you approve or not, the world's population will be declining steadily after the middle of this century. And no doubt panic will set in, the opposite kind from what we currently have. We love panics. Without them journalists & politicians would have little to do.

Life expectancy figures are nearly always based on expectancy at birth. But most of the large increase in 'life expectancy' in Western countries over the last 120 years came from the virtual elimination of child mortality. Which means that, if you were to take the figures for life expectancy at, say, age 10 or 15 or even 20, the improvement over the last 120 years would be nowhere near as great as is usually quoted. There have always been people who lived to a ripe old age (Thomas Hobbes was one: 1588-1679). Just not many of them.

Yes, I entirely agree. When politicians intervene in this area, they have no idea what they're doing or what the longterm effects will be. The only counter-example to that that I can think of MIGHT be Singapore ... but it's so small & so competently governed in autocratic style that it probably doesn't have too many lessons to give the rest of the world.

Issues with Wise seem to vary from 1 country to another, mostly I suspect because each country has a different set of security requirements. I use Wise to transfer from Australia to Thailand. Since we fixed the 'reason for transfer' issue in relation to Thailand several years ago, I've never had a problem. Occasionally they take an extra 24 hours for the transfer to arrive, presumably because of security checking.

Yes, and by donating younger people to the older receiver countries, they don't just help the inverted pyramid in the receiver countries, they reduce the huge pyramid in their countries of origin where, characteristically, babies per woman are still around 3 and only slowly edging down to the magic crossover number of 2.1. The problem with all of that is that migrants tend to be the better educated, get-up-and-go (literally) individuals & families. People with energy, whom the donor country can't really afford to lose. The one thing that follows from all of this is that, when it comes to demographics, it's pointless taking a short-term view of things (say, next 5 or 10 years). What will happen in 5 or 10 years, in every country, is largely already decided by the decisions people have already made and acted upon re baby-production. We know for instance how many babies were born last year in country X. We can therefore predict, taking life expectancy stats into account, how many young males will be on the streets in say 16-24 years, and therefore what levels of street crime are likely to be. We can predict what the levels of demand for education from primary to secondary to tertiary will be over the next 20+ years ... And so on. And no country (not even Nth Korea) misses out on all of this.

Migration flows reduce the effects of the inverted pyramid. At least in receiver countries. Not so good for the donor countries ... but even in Africa positive change is under way in many countries with booming economies (Ruanda, Kenya, Nigeria ... ). They may not be countries you or I would want to live in, let alone retire to, but they are slowly catching up and rejoining the mainstream at the global level.

What we are living through is the middle of the 1000-year process of the reunification of the human species, a process that started (symbolically, for Westerners at least) in 1492. This process has of course been under way for 2000 or 3000 years or more (eg Central Asia) in smallish numbers, but it has picked up speed over the last 200 or 300 years because of the spread of technology and increasing migrations which even out social & cultural differences over time. To take one highly successful example of the process at work, Australia is a very different country now from what it was 100 years ago, and not just because of technology but because of the tides of migrants pouring in from all parts of the globe, building a very successful, culturally-enriched country in the process. Similar things could be said about Usofa, over a longer time frame but, in some ways, less successfully because of the different cultural origins of the European migrants from the C17th on making the integration process much more fraught (religion, slavery, a peculiar concept of 'freedom' etc). Europe is also struggling for a different set of reasons. The point is that as these processes work their way at the global level, all countries are caught up in the same processes - technological change, international trade, worldwide effects of change (eg Ukraine War, climate change, demographics, economic influences ... ). The effect long-term is that social & cultural & ethnic differences slowly reduce. There is no reason to expect that Thailand will escape these global changes over time. Yes, its starting point is a surprisingly inward-looking culture & society cut off from the rest of the world. But, as the recent election demonstrated with the influence of younger generations coming to bear, mobile in hand, things are changing even here.

That's the short-to-medium perspective. The medium-to-long perspective is likely quite different, depending on how Thailand navigates its socio-cultural problems (corruption, feudal hierarchy, abysmal education standards ... ).

It does in Australia. Without the 200-300,000 migrants pouring in to Oz each year (mostly educated people in their 20s & 30s & 40s), the country would be way poorer.

BKK & 'Eastern' region - 2nd world by any reasonable definition. The rest 3rd world.

Nonsense. Give them a decent wage and the education to plan a future and they stop breeding like rabbits. As has happened in every First and Second World country. It's not rocket science.