WaveHunter

LOL! Yes, the lobster is excellent in Maine, and cheap too ????. Maine is not as backward as you infer, but yeah, Fiber optics is not an option in that part of Maine. If it were, then maybe moving 4tB to the cloud might be an option, but on a regular connection, it's just not practical, and as I told the other poster who referred to sending the drive via FedEx as stupid and unnecessary since this is 2022 and not 2012, he really does not have a good grasp on reality, and instead is watching too many ads for DropBox and other cloud services.

Seems like a very uninformed (and rude) viewpoint from you (since you seem to want to be personal about this). There's a great deal of difference between the theoretical concept of moving 4tB of data to the cloud, and actually being able to do it practically. My 4tB hard drive is in the hands of a professional IT person in Maine with the fastest possible connection speed available to his company. If there was a way to practically move it to the cloud, he would have, but he informed me that he could NOT move 4tB into a cloud server without timeout issues, and repeated attempt starting from scratch. Personally I have a very fast and robust internet connection here in Thailand as well as the latest Mac with an M1 chip and have experienced the same issue he described. Here is my typical download / upload speed and reliability numbers: If you've ever actually tried to move over 1tB of data to the cloud, it is one of the most frustrating experiences to start the upload before you go to bed at night and then wake up to see that the connection timed out at some point during the upload or your computer froze from trying to buffer data, of whatever, and then have to start all over from scratch oly to have the same thign happen again. So, with all due respect, I think you are talking through your hat. I'm sure it can be done with enough patience and diligence, but it is just not practical.

Again, all I am saying is that it is cheap insurance to take a multivitamin and certain supplements, especially these days when many people can not always eat a well-balanced meal all of the time. I am VERY health conscious and try to have good nutritional habits but I also lead a busy and hectic lifestyle, travel a great deal and don't always have the luxury of preparing my own meals. A multivitamin, vitamin D, and ZInc Picolinate are my go-to supplements just to give me peace of mind. And, BTW, in our "post Covid" world today, vitamin D and Zinc picolinate have been scientifically proven to boost the immune system against potential infection (maybe just a little bit, but a little bit is better than nothing). And another BTW...Being out in the sun is not assurance you will get sufficient Vitamin-D. When I lived in the States I was an avid surfer, spending several hours a day out under the Florida sun catching waves, and a blood test revealed I was clinically deficient in Vitamin-D, which is when it became part of my daily supplementation. Peace ????

Sorry TEW, I try not to spend too much time on the forum. I don't really want to debate the merits or criticisms of Goldhammer. I admit, it is just my personal opinion I am expressing about him. You can call me prejudiced if you wish, but there is a big difference between an osteopath and a licensed MD. Legitimate MD's who promote the concept of water fasting are coming at it from an in-depth and credentialed understanding of human physiology and metabolic biochemistry. Osteopath are not. Fung is a nephrologist with a clinical history of treating metabolic syndromes and diseases such as Diabetes type 2. Osteopaths do not have such a clinical history AT ALL. I'm not saying that advice from people like Goldhammer and Berg are not informative or helpful, but they are not scientific authorities on such subjects anymore than you or I, or any well read individual.

BAD ADVICE! No unknown brand with cheap labelling is going to be higher quality than Bayer, which is what most local pharmacies sell here in the Kingdom. Bayer is reasonably priced and a LEGITIMATE global pharmaceutical company. While test is rarely faked, it can happen, and buying a completely unknown brand with cheap looking labelling is an invitation to compromising your health! No offense meant but I have seen many posts like this on Aseannow from poster with ZERO post history who do not have the best of intentions when posting links to unknown sites such as you have done. Just sayin'!

Yes, Tim's pharmacy. Best pharmacy I have found in Pattaya.

It would be so nice if it worked as you say but I had a recent package arrive from Japan that was indeed under the 1500 baht allowance and even included the store's invoice inside the box. However, Customs seized it, placed an arbitrary value on the contents which was ten times the stated value. What's more, the items were obviously worth what the store invoice stated, and any moron would have known that. I had to document the actual value by taking snapshots of the store's online catalog, and send in a special form asking for re-assessment, which took over 30 days to be acted upon by Customs, and even then they charged me a special fee for re-assesment, which meant I had to take a 30 minute taxi ride back to the only post office in the area that handles Customs to pay my 150 THB fee, instead of just having the package delivered to my door, as should have been done in the first place. THIS KIND OF NONSENSE is why I am loathe to deal with Customs. I have lived in different countries and Thailand is without question the worst when it comes to how Customs treats customers.

Thanks for the relpy. Regarding your first sentence, very funny, but many locations in the US still have very slow internet connections. In my case, the client holding my disk is in the state of Maine, and said it would be impossible to transfer that much data to the cloud without encountering timesouts, and then being forced to re start the entire upload all over from scratch. The point you make about possible data corruption while in transit seems remote since I know business laptops are shipped all the time...but it's a fair question so I will look into just to be sure, and thanks for mentioning it...better to be safe than sorry ???? Regarding your last point...nobody uses CD's anymore; my MacBook Pro doesn't even have a slot for them, and can you imagine how many CD's it would take to burn 4tB of data? More than the weight and bulk of the hard drive, I imagine!

In a completely round-about way, I finally came to the same conclusion (more or less) ????. I want an invoice in with the drive just so Customs doesn't take liberties and assess it as new with full retail value, so a repair shop is doing a diagnostic test on the drive and including an invoice that shows it was presented to them "for repair". They are only charging me $10 for this. I also found out that FedEx is a RIPOFF if you approach them directly for shipping to Thailand. They quoted me close to $300 USD! That alone would have allowed Customs to assess a valuation of that amount plus whatever they declared the value of the drive to be. Instead I found a shipping consolidator that will ship for me by FedEx and based on the volume of shipping they do with Fedex, the price was only $50. BUT I want the total value including shipping to be low enough for it to enter duty free (1500 THB), so they said they could ship it by USPS for only $28 USD. Eureka!!! The repair shop invoice is only $10 since all he is going to do is make a snapshot of the main directory, just to be sure I have the correct disk, and that added to shipping will be under the duty-free limit, so it should be delivered to my door without the dreaded Thai Customs pirates getting their hands on it! Amazing that yu have to go through such acrobatics for such a simple thing as to get your work sent to you! If it were the other way around and I was shipping TO the US, it would just go through duty free with no hassles at all.

I disagree totally with your assessment of vitamin supplementation. It's true that a healthy and well balanced nutritional lifestyle is important BUT there are plenty of instances where vitamin supplementation is a good thing, and sometimes an essential thing. Take, for example, people who practice veganism or are strict vegetarians. They MUST supplement with B-12 since the main source is from meats. and If meats are absent from your diet you absolutely will become deficient in B-12 which will have a serious effect on your health. I know this for a fact because back in 2017 I was a strict Vegan, had issues, and the doctor had me start to supplement with B-12 shots that I self administered weekly. Another example: In the midst of the Covid pandemic, even though things are a lot better now than they were a year ago, Covid infection is still a serious threat, even here in Thailand where COvid has pretty much fallen from the news. Scientific studies by some of the top Covid researchers worldwide have found that both Vitamin D-3 supplementation along with ZInc Picolinate supplementation boost the type of immunity that greatly lessens the chance of infection, or if infected, greatly minimize the chances of it becoming life-threatening. I know there a lot of people (including some MD's) who downplay the importance of smart vitamin supplementation but IMO they are dead-wrong! Truth is, very few people (even those claiming to the contrary) eat a healthy diet, since we live in a world of fast foods, and heavily processed foods. You may think you are eating right, because manufacturers go to great lengths to make you believe that, but in reality, you are not. Vitamin supplementation is just good insurance that you will not have a deficiency, that's all. So, it is I, who am sorry to "burst your bubble", as you put it. Vitamin supplementation, no matter how healthy you eat, can be a VERY positive thing to do.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD LOL!!! Well my idea of having the data sent to me via the cloud won't work. It seems my client does not have a reliable high speed connection 
 But, I've come up with another idea that I think will circumvent any Customs nightmares and high cost of shipping, and would like some feedback. 
 Since I really only need around 500 gB of the pictures files on the drive, what if I had the client just transfer them to a large flash drive and send that to me by USPS? 
 Such a drive cost under what the free allowance is for Customs (1500 THB). 
 It would arrive here "duty-free" and even if Customs inspected it, it would appear brand new of course, still in the retail packaging even though ti had been opened, and would include the invoice for the drive. 
 In all likelihood, wouldn't it just be delivered to my door like any other duty-free purchase?

Thanks to everyone that provided me with thoughtful suggestions, and especially to RayWright who provided me with the "Eureka" solution and made my day by allowing me to completely circumvent any interactions with the dreaded Customs Man! ????

The drive only contains photographic image files. There are therefore no real concerns for data privacy. Initially I just figured the easiest and quickest way to get one of my libraries into my hands here in Thailand was to have FedEx deliver the hard drive they are on, until another member on the forum suggested sending files through the cloud! Eureka!!! Sometimes the simplest solutions allude me LOL! I'll be using Google Drive for the transfer.

I tried a bunch of different cloud servers and finally settled on Google Drive, once I got a little technical support from the Google team. Right out of the box, it's good (and they give you 15 gB of space for free, not just 2). When you tweak it though, it can be a pretty powerful tool. I am a professional photographer shooting with a camera that produces 154 mB files, and some of my multi-layer retouches can end up being well over 500 mB. Soon I will be transferring my entire library over to Google Drive. Why I didn't think of using Google drive to accomplish my goal with that 4tB drive is beyond me but I'm grateful to RayWright for making me see the light LOL! Having this 4tB sent over to me here in Thailand, and being able to download it all will be a perfect test, not to mention saving havig to spend hundreds of dollars to FedEx (they want $300 USD to send it insured ), which would have meant that Customs would have had a field day bilking me in Duty tax and VAT What I really like about Google Drive is it's consistent download/upload speed with almost no crashes. I can't say the same thing for almost all the other servers I tried. This will be the acid test for sure1

Do you agree that Dr Goldhammer is not similar to Dr Berg? No, I think they are essentially the same. Both are well meaning individuals, but both lack any sort of scientific credentials or time in a lab conducting fundamental (not case-basedl) research to be considered authorities. Chiropractic “science” is a form of alternative medicine with no firm scientific basis to it. It is a pseudo discipline, and perhaps I'm biased but I have a distaste for most of the chiropractic practicineers I've personally encountered. Both are very skilled businessmen and their prime motivation is profit. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but they are clearly not in the same league of genuine university based researchers. Even Dr. Jason Fung has a higher level of believability, being an MD with a specialty in nephrology. And do you agree that he is not selling supplements? I don't know if he is or is not. What I do know is he is highly profit-driven. ALl you have to do is look at his heavily scripted "interviews", and know he is faily disingenuous in how he promotes his clinic. Do you understand that he (and his team which includes MDs) has experience with safely leading many thousands of extended fasts over many years? Yes, I know that, but there is a big difference between overseeing a person's fasting experience, and truly understanding the underlying science, and the ramifications of it. Again, he is a chiropractor, not a credentialled doctor of medicine. What do you think of Dr Gil Carvalho? Who is a MD and research Phd? I'm pretty widely read in the metabolic sciences and his name sounds familiar but not in any way that left an impression on me, I'm sorry to say. I still feel that very few average people are qualified to understand the science because you need a high level of skill with statistics and a deep understanding of how the body works. I accept that you may disagree... smiling. Well I happen to agree that very few people are qualified to understand the metabolic sciences, most assuredly including me, but that is also true for the cutting edge researchers. That doesn't you should have no call to action though. It's your body. If you have the desire and motivation to learn as much as you can about it from knowledge that's available today, why shouldn;'t you try to implement some of it into your own lifestyle? There's a popular term for people who feel that way, and it's called being a bio-hacker. I'm proud to say that is what I think of myself as being. I love the metabolic sciences. I love learning of the latest breaking research that sometimes totally turns the world upside down, like Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi's groundbreaking research into autophagy that not only landed him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2016, but has dramatically changed the way researchers are studying diseases such as Diabetes type 2, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimers, and even possible underlying causes of cancer. It's true that the surface has barely been scratch about how the body truly works, and much of that may never be known, but for an individual like you or me to apply what IS known, or even what is highly probable to their own lives is often a worthwhile pursuit.

Thanks for the reply, but that was not what my question was. I was asking for a specific alternative brand and product name for a multivitamin that is similar in composition to the NOW Foods, ADAM, Superior Men's Multi 180 Softgels that is readily available in Thailand

Sorry, it's my fault for making my post too wordy, and of course on AseanNow there is no way to edit the post. I was asking for a specific alternative brand and product name for a multivitamin that is similar in composition to the NOW Foods, ADAM, Superior Men's Multi 180 Softgels that is readily available in Thailand. No problem with availability of NOW but I am no longer a fan of NOW foods for personal reasons, and the price listed on Lazada for them is is DOUBLE what it is in the States

But, as I said in my possibly too wordy post, I am not asking for a store's name, I am asking for a specific alternative brand and product name for a multivitamin that is similar in composition to the NOW Foods, ADAM, Superior Men's Multi 180 Softgels.

In most cases I would agree, but I take use them just as insurance because I often do not eat a well rounded diet, i don't mean unhealthy, but just not well rounded. So it's more as insurance.

Sorry for posting this because I'm sure there are already posts concerning it, but the Asean Now search function seems as useful as a screen door on a submarine...and BTW, the search engine on Lazada is not much better for English searches, which is what leads me to making this post. I wonder if there are any decent quality multi-vitamins on the market (through local stores or Lazada) that are similar in quality to the American "Now" brand. I usually buy NOW Foods, ADAM, Superior Men's Multi 180 Softgels, but the markup is outrageous and most of it comes from China which is suspect. I can buy it from iHerb but it requires payment of Customs Duty since the bottle along with shipping exceeds 1500 THB, and again the markup is just way too much for a basic multivitamin that in the States I would spend half as much. Not that I care so much about the added tax, but where I live here, requires a trip to a special post office that handles Customs Duty payment, which is so far away that a half of one day is killed just getting to/from that post office. There MUST be a good brand you can just buy at a brick and mortor store. Anyone have a recommendation of a particular brand and version? Please don't just post the store name without mentioning the name of the product, and please only tell me about ones that are similar to the "Adam" product from NOW. Here is the breakdown: Sorry for posting this because I'm sure there are already posts concerning it, but the Asean Now search function seems as useful as a screen door on a submarine...and BTW, the search engine on Lazada is not much better for English searches, which is what leads me to making this post.

I have to ask (to nobody in particular) why do so many member of this forum use the "ha ha" emoticon as a response to a reply like this, where nothing amusing or funny was said. Is that emoticon just supposed to be an affirmation of the poster's state of mind? Just curious ????

I have to say that everything related to customs duties in Thailand is ridiculous, pure nonsense, and sets a new standard for the definition of "corrupt".

Nice post. It's always going to happen that people will have varying opinions since everybody is different and what works well for one may not work so well for another. That's why I think the best approach is to take in as much raw information as you can from very well vetted sources BUT then to decide for yourself what YOU feel is the proper course action for YOURSELF, rather than to adopt someone else's opinion.

Outstanding idea! Why didn't I think of that? I only need perhaps 30% of what is on that drive. I'll call the client and tell them to just transfer the folders I need to my Google Drive cloud server. That's what I love about this forum; there always seem to be some smart person who thinks a little bit out of the box replying to queries like this. Thanks for the suggestion!

So do you happen to know the tax rate for hard drives? I thought computers were exempt from being taxed here in Thailand. I was going to purchase a computer from the USA last year and was told that from several sources.