paulbj2

1 hour ago, Arjen said:

 

Holland is not a country, it is a small part from a country called The Netherlands

I used to live in the Netherlands and I can tell you that quite a few Dutch people themselves refer to their own country as "Holland" and they find it rather amusing when foreigners are surprised by this.

2 hours ago, mduras01 said:

I buy from Amazon all the time.

 

If you buy from Amazon US and have it forwarded via a mail forwarding service, you will be charged duties. Happened to me over 10 times.

 

If you buy from Amazon Global, which tends to sell some of the same products, at a mark-up, then you will not be charged duty. I bought my Kindle through Global so as not to deal with all the customs crap.

I have just tried to order something from Amazon Global but they are charging an absolutely ridiculous amount of postage ($18) for something that weighs a few hundred grams and a massive sum for import tax ($17) for an item the costs $39.99. Amazon Global are just a sick joke! Not worth buying off them.

1 hour ago, tonyphinn said:

Suay maak have you tried lazada as they have most items and COD found there service to be v good

 

One item, a 9 way switchable, powered USB 3.0 hub, that I tried and failed to get Amazon UK to ship to me here is also available on Lazada at nearly three times the price!

I have had a couple of fairly low value items sent from Amazon UK  (one shipment = £10 and another around £50) there was no import tax charged and the items ordered arrived inside 3 days!

I have also tried to order electronic stuff from Amazon UK but in all cases so far, they will not ship to Thailand - damn it! 

7 minutes ago, IAMHERE said:

I wouldn't mistake justice for retribution.

To be considered "justice", I think it would have to universally implemented, without consideration for the nationality or social standing of any of the parties involved in an incident and my reading of the situation in Thailand is that that is by no means always the case. 

Having lived in France for several years and in a couple of its immediate neighbours for several more, I have always found the French attitude to politics a bit strange.

If you ask the French whether they want to keep their exemplary health and welfare provisions, they will, of course, say yes (wouldn't we all), if you then say well then taxes and Social Security contributions will have to rise you will then hear people screaming NON, NON, NON; mille fois NON!

If you ask if they think the government should take steps to increase job creation, naturally everyone says yes, but if you then say: in that case the government needs to reform the draconian employment laws so that employers they can shed some employees if market conditions dictate, you will then hear people screaming NON, NON, NON; mille fois NON!

If you propose raising the retirement age in France because the income from current contributions is insufficient to cover the number of people benefiting from a pension, you will then hear people screaming NON, NON, NON; mille fois NON! 

Essentially, the French don't just want their cake and eat it, they DEMAND their cake and eat it!

I don't envy any President to wants to undertake the sort of reforms Fillon is proposing; employment in the public sector in France has always been a "job for life" and the idea that he will drive a horse and cart through that concept is not going to go down well with public employees. The French have an absolute contempt for anything that smacks of  I can see trouble coming in France if he gets elected! Unfortunately for France, the choices are somewhat limited: a lame duck socialist in the shape of the detested Hollande or possibly another insipid socialist candidate, François Fillon with his Thatcherite ideas or the quasi-Fascist, anti-EU candidate Marine LePen; what a choice to have to make! 

HiSo -v- rather higher HiSo. This was never going to end well.

Bouncers beating seven kinds of crap out of anyone who ruffles their feathers does seem to be a Thai thing. I guess these guys are going to have a spot of bother talking their way out of this one!

6 hours ago, impulse said:

 

Similar statements:

I did not have sex with that woman.

The American people need to know that their President is not a crook.

The check is in the mail.

I'll still respect you in the morning.

My favourite was 

"There will be no whitewash at the White House". That was Tricky Dicky Nixon a few months later...

15 hours ago, ubonjoe said:

You will have to go to a embassy or consulate to apply for it.

Easy to get. Just your marriage certificate and copies of you wife's house book registry and ID card.

Vientiane or Savannakhet Laos will issue it with no financial proof. Penang you would need to show 200k baht in the bank or proof of income.

I recently applied for a non-O based on retirement at Vientiane and they did require proof of income and of bank deposit (I use part proof of income and part bank deposit). Also, a number of people on this forum have said in the past that Vientiane do not require a bank letter, only the pass book, but they did ask for the letter in my case; thankfully I had one with me.

Your case is not the same as mine as you are married to a Thai national but you might still want to take proof of income with you just in case.  

32 minutes ago, laislica said:

 

 

Same here but when the "Expert" installed the Safe-T-Cut, he point blank refused to install an earth rod!

He actually said it was not needed as Thai electricity is different to that in my home country!

In my house in the UK the same applied; there was no earth rod. In the past, the incoming metal water supply pipe was traditionally used as an earth but these days much of the underground water supply network is piped in non-conductive plastic so that is no longer a valid solution and earth rods simply driven into the ground are of extremely variable quality to say the very least, with the resistance to earth varying widely depending, amongst other factors, on whether the weather and thus the soil, is wet or dry.  

To address these earthing problems, in the UK, they have therefore introduced a system called "protective multiple earthing" where the "earth" cable in an installation is connected to the neutral cable at the fuse box. As the "neutral" is in fact, no more than a very carefully maintained earth (at the generating station and at every transformer substation along the way), it works perfectly well as an earth; in fact it is the system in which ELCBs (earth leakage circuit breakers) work best.

In summary, your expert may well have been perfectly right. He was probably implementing a PME installation which is bang up to date whereas earth spikes are a bit "early 20th century"

18 hours ago, monkey4u said:

If the government subsidise rice farmers, what about every other business venture that fails to make a profit

Does every one get a hand out

You seem to forget what a catastrophe it would be for the country and its people if the rice growing industry failed. The real world does not revolve around profit - you can't eat $ bills.

So if Coca-Cola, GM, Apple or any other manufacturer of non-essential goods goes bust - so what. If food production stops for whatever reason, people starve. 

4 hours ago, berybert said:

You are a Brit living in Thailand ? Why would you worry about American Politics.

Maybe short sighted I know, but who ever gets in over there is going to be a war monger and make the world just a tad more unstable than it already is.

Errrr, well let's see - maybe because Trump has said he would renege on the NATO mutual defense treaty which would probably result in WWIII so, what's to worry about, as you say! 

My logic was this:

If Trump gets the job of POTUS, I believe the US$ will take a massive hit. If that is the case the GB£ will almost certainly rise against the Thai Baht.

If Hillary gets the job I don't think there will any great change so you won't be any worse off.

If you can delay longer then the Thai Central Bank may stop its "crisis" support for the Baht (assuming that the rumours of that support are true), in which case the value of the Baht may "readjust" to a slightly lower level.

I had a conversation on this subject in a bar the other night. The north American pundits were saying that the £ sterling had dropped as far as it was going to go whereas I was predicting that it would drop much further; eventually to parity against the Euro and maybe even parity against the US$. Maybe I should explain that the bulk of my pension is paid in Euros so they are more relevant to me than £s sterling however if the £ sterling drops against the Euro, it usually drops against the Thai Baht as well although the Baht tends to follow the US$ exchange rate more than the £ sterling or Euro, as you would expect.

The north Americans were wrong. When Theresa May announced her intention to invoke article 50, the £ sterling plummeted to new lows against the US$ and against the Euro, with the £ -v- Baht rate tagging along with the trend.

Trying to figure out what will happen next is fraught with difficulty right now. I have read, in a number of places, that the Thai Central Bank have been buying Baht to support the currency as they thought the King's death could cause a run on the Baht due to fears of instability in the country and the Baht therefore rose in value following the announcement of the death of the King. Assuming the rumours of Central bank support are true, presumably they will stop supporting it at some stage as continuing to do so for a protracted period can drain currency reserves pretty drastically and now that the succession has been formally announced, there is less of a risk of instability in the Thai economy.

The wild card in the immediate future is the US election. If Trump takes the White House, is the US$ going to soar or crash? My assumption is that it will crash if Trump is elected. If that is correct, then the £ Sterling (and the Euro) will probably rise significantly against the Thai Baht after the US election. 

Here is the £ -v- US$ chart

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD&view=1Y

and here the £ -v- Baht

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=THB&view=1Y

As you can see they follow each other very closely. 

Me, myself, I would wait until after the US elections and make your decision after that but I could be wrong...

55 minutes ago, SgtRock said:

 

I think the FBI are way ahead of you on that one.

 

 

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/clinton-s-charity-under-investigation-for-a-year-36jkqhsd7

It looks to me like this is a blatant attempt by extreme right wingers in the FBI to rig the election. 

The Trump Foundation have been barred from fund raising in the city of New York because of systematic abuse of charity funds. The Clinton Foundation on the other hand have always had a clean bill of health. I think we are witnessing a coup by the extreme right wing in the US!

I haven't tried to do this here in Thailand but I did have this issue when I was in Luxembourg. My bank there said "Yes, we can do it BUT it will be very slow and very expensive. Can you not persuade the person sending you the money to transfer it to you by digital transfer directly into your bank account here?". Thjat would be my advice to you, therefore, contact the Inland Revenue and ask them to transfer it directly into your bank account!

1 hour ago, Truscott said:

So was the relative who borrowed the car correctly insured to drive it?

Oh, you must be from a country where anyone actually gives a shit about insurance.

On 25/09/2016 at 7:57 PM, paulbj2 said:

I am somewhat confused by the reference to the microwave. Microwave ovens are often used to prepare "crack cocaine" from the standard powdered product (cocaine hydrochloride) but Ketamine? I guess if the source was Ketamine Hydrochloride injection purloined from a medical environment, you could need to heat it to drive off the water, but the dose in the standard medical preparation is so small (even the strongest prepared injection only contains 100mg/ml so you'd need 10ml of the injection to get back 1g of Ketamine powder. If it was street Ketamine I guess it could have impurities from the synthesis or have been cut with something that made it hygroscopic and thus in need of drying before it could be snorted.

The wonders of Google! A simple search revealed detailed instructions on how to turn injectable medical or veterinary ketamine hydrchloride into a snortable powder The microwave is a possible method although not a recommended one. 

Yes, I have to prove my "living" status once a year to continue to receive the pittance that is my UK pension.

I am somewhat confused by the reference to the microwave. Microwave ovens are often used to prepare "crack cocaine" from the standard powdered product (cocaine hydrochloride) but Ketamine? I guess if the source was Ketamine Hydrochloride injection purloined from a medical environment, you could need to heat it to drive off the water, but the dose in the standard medical preparation is so small (even the strongest prepared injection only contains 100mg/ml so you'd need 10ml of the injection to get back 1g of Ketamine powder. If it was street Ketamine I guess it could have impurities from the synthesis or have been cut with something that made it hygroscopic and thus in need of drying before it could be snorted.

All this talk of drugs reminds me of a report I read the other day on the relative dangers and social harm done by the various drugs people take. The outright "winner" and by far the most dangerous street drug in the world, by a substantial margin, was alcohol. That report was specific to Britain and was authored, if I remember correctly, by Prof. Nutt. A similar report prepared by the European agency charged with surveying drug abuse reached the same conclusion regarding alcohol. I have noticed in the past, that many of the harshest critics of drug use are, themselves, inveterate drinkers and smokers. The reality is that alcohol and tobacco account for many hundreds of times more deaths every year than all illegal drugs put together.

My brother was a consultant in Acute Medicine at one of Britain't largest hospitals. He said that 75 - 80% of his admissions were alcohol related. Naturally, the cost to the NHS of alcohol abuse is astronomical. I have seen far, far more lives destroyed by alcohol than by any illegal drugs.

Hang on...the Police busted a party because someone had tipped them off and they found a bag of ketamine and only one single person who tested positive for anything. Last time I checked "making out" was not a criminal offence so I'd say that compared to most countries in the west, these "kids" were downright saintly.

Given that only one person tested positive, it might not be too difficult to deduce who the Ketamine belonged to.

If you are planning to see a bit of SE Asia, come in on a 30 day exemption (optionally extend it at immigration for a further 30 days fee 1900 Baht) then take a trip to Vientiane in Laos to get a 60 day tourist visa (can also be extended for a further 30 days at 1900 Baht). You can repeat the visa runs to Laos up to three times if you need to. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam are also possibilities along with many other places in SE. Asia but some have a bad reputation for refusing visas; Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia is one of those, I believe Singapore also.

1 hour ago, ChrisKC said:

Of course, trying to drink three litres of anything would be difficult, throwing up or otherwise.

except beer. Three litres of beer is dead easy.

I went to Vientiane a few days back for Non-O visa. On a Friday morning at around 09h30, I was the only person actually waiting to apply for a visa. On a Monday morning, when I have been there in the past, there have been literally 100s of people waiting.