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Corey Lewandowski, Trump's so-called campaign advisor, just went on Newsmax and clearly stated that Trump won't debate Harris again, not anywhere, not even on Fox News or Newsmax. Trump is clearly very scared. It is not about which network Trump would prefer for a debate anymore. He won't even do it on his beloved Fox News comedy channel. He's simply too afraid to face her again. Case closed.

Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign advisor, just went on Newsmax and said that Trump won't debate Harris at all, even on Fox News or Newsmax. Trump is scared. It is not about which network. He's simply too afraid to do it.

More reality TV:

It's crystal clear now that Trump is running scared of Harris. He's turned down CNN's free and fair offer to debate Harris in the CNN studio right after the upcoming VP debate. Harris has accepted CNN's offer and Trump said no. But why would Trump turn down a debate on CNN (which is where he won the debate against Biden) and after Trump had said that the CNN debate was very fair? Trump's excuse for not accepting this second debate with Harris is that it's too late in the election cycle, but that's literally not true. Historically, nearly all presidential candidates have had a final debate together after the vice presidential debate and right before the election. So Trump is breaking with tradition and he has no justifiable excuse for not accepting. Here is the real reason. Trump knows his first debate performance against Harris was a disastrous failure and cost him voters. Now he's too scared of losing another debate and falling behind even further. What a pity, I was hoping to hear more of his crazed rantings about crowd sizes and that "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets".

Yes, there is a fee. That's how they make money. They give you the bank to bank rate, known as the interbank rate, and then they take 0.54% from that rate as their fee. Using a Schwab ATM will avoid the transfer fee, and maybe even avoid an ATM withdrawal fee, but the exchange rate you will get will not be set by Schwab, it will be the exchange rate set by either MasterCard or Visa, which will likely be the interbank rate minus around 1%. What you can do as a test is withdraw ฿1000 from the ATM and then see how much is withdrawn from your Schwab account in dollars. Then you can figure out the exchange rate that you were given and how much you lost in fees. But right before you do the withdrawal, use the free Xe app on any smartphone to check the interbank rate at that moment so you can compare the interbank rate versus the rate you were given on the withdrawal to determine the percentage of the fee taken out.

Yes, a fee of 0.5% isn't bad. I guess the exchange fee they give you on converting from a USD acct to THB acct is the T/T rate and not the same higher rate normally given on cash exchanges, which is a fee closer to 1%. As a comparison, Wise is charging 0.54% right now on USD to Baht conversions. But when you deposit USD into your FCD account at BBL then you are still being charged an additional 0.25% on the incoming wire, so you need to add that to the 0.5% exchange fee and that's your actual total fee to go from USD to THB. Plus, you are often charged an outgoing wire fee of at least $25 (if not more) by most overseas banks. Thus, another possible added cost of getting the money into your Thai FCD account from overseas. I think some Thai banks like UOB will waive the incoming wire fees when you are a wealth banking customer. But I forget how much money you have to keep on deposit in order to get that privilege.

By the way, if you want the money to arrive in your Thai bank account within seconds you need to keep the transfer amounts below ฿50,000, say at ฿49,950. If you transfer an amount higher than that, then the transfer normally takes about three business days. The way to get around this would be to break the ฿300,000 transfer into six transfers of ฿49,950 each and do them in a row one after another and then you will receive all the money within seconds, but you will pay the ฿44.76 transfer fee six times. If you're not in a rush to get the money into your Thai Baht account then you can do it all as one transfer, wait 3 business days for the money to arrive, and pay the ฿44.76 transfer fee only once. Also, Wise is able to do transfers above ฿50,000 to only the three biggest Thai banks. Otherwise, the transfers are automatically limited to ฿49,999 per transfer by Wise anyway. So to be able to do a ฿300,000 transfer all at once you need to be sending the money to an account at either Bangkok Bank, Siam Commercial Bank, or Kasikorn Bank. Perhaps they've expanded that lists of banks now that they can do transfers to that are above ฿50,000 each, but the last time I checked transfers above ฿50,000 per transfer was still limited to those 3 Thai Banks.

But the exchange rate they give you always has a fee built into it. That means the exchange rate is often about 1% lower than the interbank rate. That's the fee. They will also normally charge you a fee whenever you deposit any physical USD in cash into the account. They call it a fee in lieu of exchange. And if one day you want to transfer all the money back out in USD to an overseas account then they will charge you a very steep wire fee, which will also include a fee in lieu of exchange. The point is that all of these accounts that are FCD accounts in Thailand are designed to charge you a fee in lieu of exchange anytime you transfer the money in or the money out of the account in USD. This is because they're not making a foreign currency exchange fee as they normally would if it was a dollar to baht exchange so they add on an extra fee that they call "in lieu of exchange". As an example, if you wanted to wire $1,000 overseas from your Thai Baht account you would first have to convert the Thai Baht to USD in which case they would make money on the exchange first and then they would charge you the wire fee. But if you already have the $1,000 in your FCD account then they don't make any money on a Baht to dollars exchange, so they charge you an extra fee in lieu of exchange.

The transfer fee is always the same to transfer Thai Baht from a Wise account to a Thai bank account in Thailand. It doesn't matter how much you are transferring. The fixed fee currently stands at ฿44.76.

I can't quite work this out. Is this a win or not for cannabis users in Thailand? Will people still be able to use cannabis quietly in their home or do they need to fear that the police will come crashing through their door to arrest and/or fine them? I also wonder if there will be some unwritten line in the sand where if you have less than a certain amount in your possession then it will be overlooked, but above a certain amount and things get ugly? The other question is if you are a medical cannabis user who intends to follow the law, then how will you be permitted to get your cannabis legally? Will you be able to get a doctor's report from any medical clinic and then just buy from any local cannabis shop of your choice or will you need to see a doctor at a government hospital and then buy your stuff from a government outlet only? Maybe I'm missing something here, but, to me, all of the actual intent of this legislation is as clear as mud.

If you are looking to avoid the F/X fees, I think it’s impossible to get the interbank exchange rate from any F/X service provider AFAIK. If you actively trade currencies as a trader on Oanda then I think you can avoid the F/X fees, but years ago Oanda stopped allowing customers to use their services in order to purely just exchange and transfer money without actively trading.

You can send money directly from Interactive Brokers to a Wise account. I think you’re permitted one free transfer a month from IABK. And then from Wise, you can convert it into Baht first at a very good exchange rate and then transfer it in Baht on to your Bangkok Bank account for a fee of around ฿40. Doing it like this is two hops, but you will pay next to nothing on transfer fees and you will get the best exchange rate possible.

In the past I’ve had FCD accounts with both SCB and UOB. They were OK at the time for what I wanted them for, but too many inconveniences and restrictions. So eventually I closed them. IMHO, not worth it. Better to open one with UOB in Singapore or Lloyds in IOM. So much more account flexibility. Another option would be to open a Wise or a Revolut account and keep the money there. Much easier and faster to open an account with either of those online. And tremendous flexibility and easy access to the money. Also, if you open an FCD account in Thailand and bring a large sum of money in now then I believe you will be paying personal income tax in Thailand on that money too. Personally, I wouldn’t even consider an FCD account in Thailand at this point. But that’s just me.

There was an article that was posted on the KSE website about 3 weeks ago titled "Expert Urges Government To Raise Tax For Foreign Condo Buyers". The concerning part is the following info from that article: If any of these 4 proposed taxes get imposed then it will bring about a screeching halt to foreigner condo purchases in Thailand. It could also be another reason to cause a mass exodus of foreigners already living in Thailand. Thailand has seen a recent uptick in condo sales to Chinese and Russian buyers over the last two years, people who might not care so much about the taxes because many of those buyers were just trying to escape their own country. But that is likely to have already largely stopped. The number of Russians flooding into Thailand to buy property and avoid the war in Russia has probably steeply declined already. And the Chinese economy is in trouble, so the number of new Chinese condo buyers has presumably also plummeted. The problem with all this new taxation on property is that it would also affect all the foreigners who have already bought condos in Thailand in the past. This would be largely unfair. They should be grandfathered under the old laws because they bought prior to any of the newly proposed property tax laws on foreigners. Who knows how realistic any of this is. But if they start taxing foreigners on their worldwide income, and then on condo ownership, it's going to be devastating to the local economy as all that foreign money finds much greener pastures elsewhere.

Only 5 of the people in the photo are customers. The rest are Apple Store staff.

Did they happen to have something called humor in your country?

Since you only update when your phone dies, and if you decide you'd like to update sooner than five or six years, just place your phone on the roof of a taxi when you get out and then let him drive off. Then you should be able to replace your phone right away without waiting so long.

Sounds like you really splurged, maybe even went a bit overboard. Didn't they have any other models available that are more reasonably priced?

The biggest update this year is actually the rollout of Apple Intelligence and all of the generative AI features that Apple will add to the functionality of the phone. The irony is that the phone is out, but none of the AI functionality is available yet and won't be until next month, and with the more major AI functions to actually come out early next year through additional software operating system updates. It seems that the iPhone 15 Pro models will be able to support running Apple Intelligence, but all iPhone models prior to that will not be able to. This means that anyone who wants access to Apple Intelligence, and who hadn't bought last year's pro model, will be forced to buy this year's model iPhone in order to get access to that functionality. Apple is hoping that this new technology will be a driver to get many more people to upgrade this year than usual. It remains to be seen though how excited people are about having some new AI functionality built into their iPhone. Normally, camera improvements have been the big driver in the past to get people to upgrade, year after year, but last year's iPhone camera updates were so spectacular that it's going to be much harder for Apple to get people to update their phones in the future based on camera specs alone.

It depends on which of the four models you are referring to and how much memory you choose. AIS is advertising the basic model on their website for around ฿23,000. The pro models will be about ฿10-฿20,000 more for the standard memory models. They probably go as high as around ฿65-฿70,000 for the pro models with the highest storage memory.

Give it about a week and then go onto the official Apple flagship store on Lazada and order one and have it delivered. No stress.

I think being impressed by what model phone you're using is a thing of the past. They all look so similar now, and all have such high specs, that nobody really cares anymore. I can't even remember the last time somebody asked me which phone I'm using. I remember when it was still the days of the iPhone 6, 7, and 8 and people were more interested in the models because the specs could vary significantly. But now, as an example, the difference between an iPhone 14 and an iPhone 16 are just a few incremental, but non-critical hardware updates. I also think most people who use iPhones are on a 3 to 4 year update cycle. Thus, it is very unlikely that anyone who bought a new iPhone within the last couple of years would be interested in the newest model that just came out. Having said that though, there are an estimated 300 million iPhones still in use, of the total 1.5 billion iPhones in use, which haven't been updated in the last 4+ years. This is the largest number of old iPhones still in use to date. Apple normally sells about 230 million new iPhones every year. So this year could prove to be one of the biggest phone update cycles for the iPhone thus far. Of course that remains to be seen as to whether people will continue on with their older iPhones and not upgrade. But, presumably, many of those people seen lining up for the new iPhone are ones who are using an iPhone now that is at least 3 to 4 years old.

Sounds like the clock to expulsion may have already started. What's the average longevity of a PM once that happens? 60 days?

As I already explained, I have no interest and don't look at childish AI fictional garbage like that, but clearly you do. That's why I suggested you go on YouTube where you can find endless amounts of that junk for you to laugh yourself to eternity. You should start with all the Trump AI parodies since he is your deity. There are a mass of those clips and they will surely keep you infinitely entertained since this sort of thing strongly appeals to you.