Lacessit

It's not 60K in tax exemptions, it's 600K. For a single person over 70, IIRC it is about 300k. The first 150k of transfers is tax exempt. I have no idea where you got the 60K figure from.

The roads in Chiang Rai are fine. There is a very good government hospital, three or four private hospitals. Three shopping malls, a large day market. Perhaps you are living in the wrong part of Thailand. You use the term leftist as approbrium. Here's a news flash - leftist governments in Australia brought in universal healthcare, subsidized medicines, the Fair Work Commission, and the Austraiian Consumer and Competition Commission. It's nothing like the dog-eat-dog cluster###k that America has, where its citizens are conditioned from birth to regard "left" as inherently evil.

IMO you may not have the numbers right. Assuming, of course, you are transferring post 2023 income, and not savings. Over 70, married to a Thai, 600K baht of transferred money is tax exempt. If you transfer 800K per year, 200K is taxable at 15%. That's 30K baht/year, 2500 baht/month.

I still remember playing golf with three Thai guys. We all had caddies. Two of them looked very alike. So I asked which one was the younger sister, nong sow in Thai. Nong sow is also slang for the vagina. The guys and the caddies broke up laughing.

I've seen photos of your Thai wife, and your British wife. Less said about your British wife, the better. I can confirm your Thai wife was a stunner when you met her.

A quite sour OP. IMO the whole tax thing is overblown nonsense. I can have about 500K baht in exemptions, or choose to transfer pre-2024 savings for 5-6 years. Right wingers ( whingers? ) posting on this thread seem to think they have a patent on logic, intelligence and rationality. Leftists are woke and dumb. Patents expire in 15 years. It's going to be a lot faster than that in politics.

Thailand is not Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket. There's a lot more to it than those three tourist traps. In Australia, houses one could buy for about $400K are now about $1 million. Rents have skyrocketed. In Thailand, rent costs and house/condo prices have barely moved in 15 years. While imported food is expensive, local foodstuffs are cheap by Western standards A kilo of mangoes here costs the same as a single mango in Oz. If one puts in the effort, learning to speak and understand Thai gets anyone a lot further than insisting on English only. Even though I probably butcher the tones, most Thais can understand me. When I was researching where to retire to, I looked at Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand. Thailand won quite easily, IMO it still does. I'm not going anywhere else.

What I find interesting about his forthcoming second term is how many Trump voters he will throw under a bus, now that they have served their purpose.

Figure of speech, perhaps you are unfamiliar with the expression.

Mine cost 55 K baht per implant. That was with best quality Swiss bone graft material. Implants take 1-2 months for a decent job. Any dentist doing implants within 1-2 weeks will have a failure rate of 40-50%. False teeth are cheaper, but sometimes become ill-fitting due to receding gums. If the OP has enough teeth left, a partial denture is another option.

Some of us still like to chew @rses like yours.

The future for many Thai women is quite bleak. When they turn 30, many Thai men consider they are too old. In their 40's and 50's, all they can look forward to is the munificent age pension of 600 baht/month when they turn 60. So when a foreigner comes along either making a lot more than they do, or getting a pension which is 4-5 times what they can earn, it must look like manna from heaven. Of course, there are the predators, those who use their beauty to suck money until their quarry is dry. OTOH, there are plenty of women who just want support, and they don't care if the potential partner looks as ugly as a hatful of camel bums. IMO the good relationships happen when Thai women are willing to work hard to maintain them. Not so with Western women, who are buttressed by entitlement, and family law.

I was looking at the hose. A normal garden hose, a fire-fighting hose like the one I used to have is twice the diameter of that hose, and can throw water 80-100 feet, In any Australian bushfire involving property, the first thing the fire department does is cut power to the whole area, to protect fire crews from electrocution from downed power lines. That's why an independent pump and water supply is essential for anyone wanting to protect their property. I noticed he did have a pool, where he could take refuge. A hero, yes. Lucky, also.

Terms of imprisonment for arson in Australia range from a few months to life imprisonment. We have Total Fire Ban days. The mere act of lighting a fire on those days has on-the-spot fines of $2000. Court fines are $5000. Cause property damage, even steeper fines, or prison. Lightning is the most common cause of Australian bushfires.

Thank you. I don't disagree with your stance. However, I would say it is the function of governments to ensure people have good information. The CSIRO in Australia is our leading scientific organization. It does a lot of cutting edge work, including fire research. One of the studies it produced after Ash Wednesday said when people stayed behind to fight fires, they were 90% successful in defending their property. The study did have quite a few caveats in terms of preparedness, house construction, and fire-fighting methods. As regular as clockwork, leftist governments increase CSIRO's budget. When right wing governments get in, they set about slashing CSIRO's funding. It's currently in the right-wing opposition's bad books. Said opposition are taking a policy of small-size nuclear power plants to the next election. CSIRO have given the policy a raspberry. Nuclear power is the most expensive form of electricity on the planet, solar and wind are the cheapest. Australia has plenty of both. Who will win, facts or policy?

You could equally say the argument ad vericundiam, or appeal to authority, is also a logical fallacy. You'd be right in both cases. The 900 pound gorilla in the room is still the data coming out of Greenland and Antarctica, plus the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. They are inescapable facts. The Larsen Ice Shelf is like Humpty Dumpty. All the king's men won't put it together again. Subsequent to one of my posts, you did answer my question. No need to repeat yourself.

I don't question the laws of thermodynamics. My reason? Ever since they were formulated, better minds than mine have been trying to circumvent them, and have failed dismally. Gravity is just a theory. It becomes real enough when someone steps off the fourteenth floor of condo , converting themselves to strawberry jam. Gravity explains the phenomenon very well, No-one has come up with a viable alternative to gravity either. Anti-gravity devices still belong in science fiction. My point is there are some facts and theories where it is a waste of time and energy trying to invalidate them. OTOH, I do question whether climate change sceptics are sticking their heads in the sand, or are so ignorant they prefer believing any charlatan on YouTube who tells them what they want to hear. I question if Trump is just a scientific troglodyte, or whether his climate denialism is motivated by money from the fossil fuel industry. I question the Catholic belief in original sin. To me, that's as daft a proposition as anything I have seen. Purgatory comes a close second. Then there's Islam's belief the Koran is the last word of Allah. Don't worry, I question many things. My question to you is, do you think America will learn from the fires? You do have previous form, in ignoring the result of Australia banning semi-automatic weapons. The response to a school shooting is an uptick in firearm sales. I am reminded of Churchill's observation: " Americans usually get it right, after they have tried everything else".

Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin in 1974. That led to a big revamp of building codes. Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday have also led to many changes. My son lives in a very fire-prone area, among 40 metre tall eucalypts. He clears leaf and stick litter every spring. He has a house of brick veneer, cement tile roof. He has a fire-fighting pump, capacity 490 litres/minute. He has an independent water supply, capacity 70,000 litres. It has never been lower than 30,000 litres. The house has a sprinkler system which covers the entire roof, and also windows facing the most vulnerable fire direction. He was a member of the local volunteer fire brigade for about 10 years. Comparing that level of preparation with Mr Carr and his garden hose, I still think he was a lucky idiot. The question is, if/when Pacific Palisades rebuilds, will the houses be prepared like my son is? Or will it still be wooden houses and shingle roofs?

Climate change is not a belief. It's a fact, 95% of scientists agree on that fact. Including people like me who are not even working in climate science. That fact is based on observation, such as ocean temperatures, sea level rise, heat cells, Greenland ice cap, Larsen ice shelf etc. etc. etc. I don't disagree there should be questioning of beliefs. However, when the arguments of plant food, natural cycle, volcanic activity and cherry-picked data are part of said questions, I say whoa. I especially detest the dishonesty of those who claim scientists are trying to milk money for grants. No use asking me to teach, I would probably be a disaster in a classroom. I don't have the patience.

I am confident there will be multiple inquiries. Whether they achieve anything is a different question. There is the combination of fuel, wind, and dryness. As someone who has lived in a fire-prone region, and taken appropriate precautions, I can tell you radiant heat can ignite fires in trees from hundreds of metres away. There are also wind driven embers, which can start fires several kilometres away. Under those circumstances, the only thing firefighters can do is stay out of the way. How much fire-fighting capacity they have available becomes irrelevant. Under those circumstances, building wooden houses with shingle roofs in the path of said risk borders on insanity. What I find really nasty is the attempt to score cheap political points, as the response to a massive tragedy.

Nearly spilled my coffee on the keyboard. The human race seems determined to dumb itself down.

The mass extinction of dinosaurs was 66 million years ago, and they thrived happily for 165 million years. Humanity is a flyspeck in comparison. How did the "prominent chemist" explain dinosaurs?

And 50% of Americans still believe in angels. Is that 10,300 years Creationism, or something else?

Point taken, IMO answered in my previous post ( and yours )

The laws of thermodynamics were operating back in the Ice Ages. The answer to your question lies in two main factors, the earth's orbit around the sun, and albedo. During what are called Milankovitch cycles, the planet moves further away from the sun, and receives less solar radiation, It cools down so that snow and ice that would normally melt during summer in the high latitudes stays on the ground. Albedo is reflectivity of radiation. Earth and rock absorb radiation, ice and snow reflect it back into space. Earth cools in a positive feedback loop. There are other factors, such as volcanic eruptions contributing putting ash and dust into the atmosphere to add to cooling, and atmospheric CO2 concentration. The basic point is the time frame. Ice Ages take millennia to form and disappear. We might even have been heading into one now, but three hundred years of mankind burning fossil fuels has well and truly upset the applecart. If I get combative with posters, it's because I get frustrated with an inability to acknowledge basic science. Sometimes, it is a wilful inability.