NorthernRyland

people are coming to live in Thailand because it's cheap. If they take 20% of the money you bring in maybe you can't afford it now. So it's 20k + X% of your income is the real cost.

No mention of taxes yet which is considering the visa is made exactly so you become a tax resident. Once you stay the 180 days they may ask for your tax bill on your money they know you earned in Thailand. It's a trap! 🙂

No taxation without representation.

They wanted like 80k USD/year or something like that. That's an impossible requirement except for people employed by larger companies which don't allow remote work anyways. I think European tech salaries are even under that so it disqualifies most of Europe even. It's a really stupid visa if you ask me and it failed for good reason.

Is it a coincide that the country which gives brides gold and pays off the parents with cash also has world famous infidelity rates? Thai men are notorious mommy's boys too, maybe another connection there?

Thailand makes no sense. They want to ban kids from vaping but they'll let 12 years speed around on motorbikes with no helmet and every other kind of stupid driving behavior. That British guy in Pai may get deported but he made rude comments on social media but this guy can stay after a full assault on a Thai.

I'm 41 and I remember using ICQ, modems and gopher in the 90s. Doesn't feel like that long ago really...

she's for the Indians Arabs and Africans

this is a very bleak assessment but probably more or less correct. If you have good relations with the few people in your immediate life that's more than enough for me. I don't see why anyone would want to be included deeply into the Thai social order. Sounds like endless headaches navigating their face nonsense and social status rankings. In fact NOT doing those things anymore is a big appeal to living in Thailand in the first place. I for one really appreciate my anonymous position I hold here.

What's likely is they want to remove the Arabs and export them to Europe, America, Canada etc... They risk serious backlash at this point and could themselves kicked out of those countries. I don't see any reason why what happened before in many countries can't happen again.

You said this before but surely you're joking right? How come foreigners can date women 30 years younger than them if they're so low on the scale? Can a Burmese construction worker marry a 30 year old when they're 60? I don't see those people can date ANY Thai women. Thai people are money obsessed and guess who has money? that's right, foreigners. Women aside, how do we do against Thai men? More money, taller, lighter skin is generally true. Are we really viewed that poorly here?

Oct 7th war was a huge mistake for Israel. The amount of out and out anti-Jewish and full blown Nazi propaganda out in the open on X (previously Twitter) is astounding. Musk is letting them post it and it's not looking good for Israel. The best one I saw was an AI generated video (about 10 minutes) with a translation of Mein Kampf and simulated voice of Hitler complete with images. Really impressive actually and they captured the tone of his voice from his speeches in German. Anyways before Oct 7th I never heard anything from Mein Kampf but now I have. Same theme with BLM in 2020. I didn't now much about crime at all before that but once they issue was breached I learned about the absurd levels of violent crime committed by blacks in America. Dancing Israelis was forgotten to most the public but it's being brought up again due to the conflict in Israel. Bad move for the Jews as they seem to be losing public favor.

I don't know what the scam was exactly but COVID was a scam. I could talk for hours on this but my 3 points are this: 1) If you didn't tell me there was a pandemic I would never have known. The was my position from March 2020 and remains to be so. I saw nothing in my real life that indicated anything was out of the ordinary except people wearing masks, which they did because they were lied too also. 2) Following COVID they started making drastic changes to the money and dropped mortgage interest rates to historic lows. Of course now we have an inflation and housing affordability "crisis". I'm sure they planned this and had some greater reason for it but I'm not sure why. 3) Trump radicalized the American political class in a way I never saw before (ever?). It was DEFCON 3, all hands on deck panic to get rid of this guy. I don't believe it was a coincidence COVID happened right at the end of his term. #2 is the potential conspiracy. They were maybe trying to cover something up. The fact the Ukraine war started following this event is interesting too.

I get your point but this is being too precise. If you can pass for Thai I think that's good enough. How much farang blood can a Thai have before they start looking different? 50/50 sticks out to me. I think you need two generations of Thai parents to blend back in. Having said that a Thai who never lived in the country would probably be less Thai then a mixed race Thai who grew up in the country. Not sure you need to ask them though.

For any self respecting European person the idea of "face" should be a deal breaker. I'll live here speak the language and get along but I keep it shallow so I don't get too deep in their system. Doing any actual work or integrating socially with these people is totally off the table because of this face thing. It's basically like a society built around protecting man-babies ego. It's pathetic honestly. Don't try to fit it, I repeat, do not fit in. Just keep on the outside, make smalltalk and be friendly and generous. That's the best you can hope for.

But Thai people haven't been brainwashed with multicultural BS since birth like everyone in the West. Thai nationality means having Thai parents, not a piece of government issued paper. This is why you can't fit in to their thing, it's an ethnic group, basically one big extended family.

You can't fit in and you shouldn't aspire to either. Just dress well and be polite is about all you can do. They don't care about things like your past accomplishments, just how nice you look and how much money you're perceived to have. All very shallow anyways so I keep my distance from their culture in this regard and don't worry about fitting in.

My wife let her old dog die a slow painful death from kidney disease. They refuse to put them down and it's so cruel. Not letting them happen again with our current dog. Even if you have to travel I would do that because it's probably hard to find a vet who will do it.

Think how screwed you'd be if you saved money and were planning on living on that for retirement. Day labor has more than doubled in 25 years and food has at least doubled. The only thing stable here seems to be rent. I came in summer of 2005 which appeared to be the start of a sharp drop in the value of the dollar which never recovered even 20 years after. Fried rice was reliably 20 baht/plate and now I'm seeing many Thai restaurants charge in the 50-60 baht range for simple common dishes. Food could be close to tripling in the next couple years. Serious inflation I would say.

When discussing inflation we're referencing nominal baht amounts.

Clearly you either never were in Thailand before 2020 or haven't ever bought Thai food in Thailand.

Thai food that cost 40 baht/plate per COVID is now often 60. I find this shocking given it happened in only a few years. Not sure how people are getting by.

yeah right not even close. Besides the criminal lowlifes basically every white person has higher social status and is richer. Those guys earn what like 8,000/month? it's not even close.

this is because average IQ in Thailand is ~90. The people in that range always have little intellectual curiosity regardless of where they're from. If you start from a low IQ you can only increase it so much through mental training and even the curiosity won't be there so people won't pursue it unless forced.

this is wrong, at least 50% is genetic so it matters most who your parents are. Lots of research on this but of course it's toxic so the information tends to get repressed.