Everyman

Paying 7% VAT on all purchases and 100% tax on alcohol is sufficient to satisfy the instinct to reward Thailand with tax money.

Immigrant rights campaigners in western countries say it’s racist.

I would like to know how you manage to do this, since all my transfers are rejected since they are not IAHA and no retail bank in the US does IAHA transfers.

you can cancel your debit card and do everything (QR code payments, ATM withdrawals) from the phone app. It will save you the 300 or so baht yearly debit card fee.

It’s a myth that organic produce is grown without pesticides. In fact they are grown with “organic” rather than synthetic pesticides, but that says nothing about the toxicity of the pesticides. Many “organic” pesticides are more toxic than synthetic pesticides. Certainly organic farming is much worse for the environment because crop yields are lower, requiring more land to grow the same amount of food.

Can Thai people get extensions of stay in Laos on top of their 30 days, similar to those on e-visas or visas on arrival?

I’m surprised they let you update your passport without the old one, at all. Bangkok Bank outright refused me on that point.

correct

time to start using cardless withdrawal

How and why do you have anti virus software on your phone? Is it a windows phone?

they will say you don’t need it, but then will block transfers over 50k.

I’ve been self studying Thai for about 20 years, and I would like to quantify my skill level with an official test or ranking system, similar to the N1-N5 ranking system in Japanese. Does such a test exist, or do learners of Thai forever have to self describe their own proficiency in subjective terms?

I like your idea, but since tourists can’t open Thai bank accounts anymore, they could assume that anyone with a Thai account is a tax resident. Then you would have to prove you are not in order to get your withholding back.

I can’t believe that Thai authorities will go through the trouble to avoid taking money transferred from a DTA country. Instead they will take everything and then make you prove you are from a DTA country and that you paid taxes at a rate equal to or higher than the Thai rate. Since capital gains taxes are going to be far less than the top Thai tax rate of 35%, the difference will have to be made up. Hopefully this will go the way of prior ridiculous announcements, like that Thailand will host the tour de France, or open nuclear power plants or buy F-18s from America or that everyone will get 10,000 baht.

As of about a year ago, no retail US banks had checking accounts that could international ACH transfers. Is that still the case?

“…such as a condo or retirement visa.” Or a Thai bank account. People are very concerned about this because in order to actually implement it they would have to do things like instruct Thai banks to withhold a certain percent of all transfers from outside the kingdom for the revenue department. You would then have to file and show that you are not a Thai tax resident, or prove that you have already paid taxes on the money abroad (in a DTA country) at a rate equal to or higher than the assessed rate in Thailand. Even in that case there is still likely to be money owed, since capital gains taxes are likely to be lower than the income tax rates assessed by Thailand. So the two ways out of this are that the government backs off or it is implemented in some ineffective manner. Both scenarios are quite likely, especially the former, so there is plenty of hope that the system doesht end up as I described.

What about a residential IP proxy? Either running on the VPS or on your local machine.

How? Is it because your IP address is associated with a data center? Otherwise I doubt they could penetrate the virtualization layer.

The biggest vulnerability in your devices is you, anyway, and that’s what hackers target through what they call “human engineering.”

Because Windows is an unsecured platform that easily picks up spyware, key loggers, etc. And nobody is going to be able to hack your stolen iphone unless they are the government and even then it will be hard. Report it stolen and Apple will brick it, then nobody is getting your data.

For Bangkok Bank: 1. No 2. N/A But it makes no difference if it does have a SIM or doesn’t. People read about some obscure vulnerability in ios or android and get the wrong idea about security on those platforms. The mobile banking apps are much more secure than on a PC running Windows.

You’re just introducing a colony of lactose eating bacteria to milk and then cultivating them. They eat lactose and produce lactic acid. When this has happened to enough of the lactose, it thickens up and you have yogurt. As someone else pointed out, you can strain it to produce greek yogurt. If you remove yet more wearer from it, you get something called labné. You can eat labné with homemade pita bread and sliced grilled chicken, tomatoes, cucumbers and tahini.

They can be quite easy to fix yourself

Why does Mastercard let them use the logo?

Some banks (Capital One) have no cards at all that charge the foreign transaction fee.