Drumbuie

Mate. Look at the map of US military bases around the world, especially in Europe, Japan and S Korea: Russia has been ringed by missiles, some of them nuclear, since WW2 ended. Not to mention ICBMs (InterContinental Ballistic Missiles) in underground silos on the other side of the world. Now death can be delivered by drones as well.

Two words: Long COVID.

Zero benefits? Are there no street lights where you live? no roads? no airports? no railways? If you're living in a country you benefit from its national infrastructure, which is paid for by taxes. Even if you don't directly benefit from all of it, the people who serve you in shops, bars and restaurants or drive you in a taxi or otherwise make your life more comfortable in all kinds of ways, big and small, do. So it may be indirect benefits but it's *not* zero benefits. PS I hate to tell you but you're already paying tax here. VAT.

In a lifetime of travelling around the world, working with people of a huge variety of nationalities and races, I've found that 99% of people are lovely. My Thai neighbours insist on helping me with my gardening, pump up my bicycle tyres for me and occasionally bring me fruit from their gardens. Have you never realised that people respond to your expectations of them? And have you ever tried being nicer to them? Dismissing an entire nation as "lowlifes" says more about you than about them.

Easier to get the stamps transferred, then go and do the 90 day report in the same visit. (The first one after a passport update must be done in person).

Hmm. No need for another world war with the inherent danger of going nuclear - the oligarchs know war is good for business but nuclear war is absolutely not. Meanwhile the rise of neo- fascism and totalitarianism is coming along very nicely, assisted by the use of social media combined with the abuse of its vast datasets, plus a captured mainstream media which prevents proper discussion of the accelerating erosion of freedoms in what *used* to be liberal democracies.

I used to use Sage for my business because my accountants wanted me to. When I handed the business to an agent, I built a personal finance spreadsheet on Open Office. (Including a cashflow forecast, because how does anyone ever manage their finances without one? It must be both exhausting and nerve wracking. ) I tweaked it when I moved here to allow for extra bank accounts in different currencies. It produces a rough tax return which I double check before submitting. Never being surprised by a bank balance makes life so much more pleasant. If I hadn't started out using VisiCalc in the 80s, I might have used an off the peg programme - but it wouldn't fit as well.

Mr DIY doesn't target tourists - and nor does our little mall, it's there for local residents. Even our weekend street market has Christmas stuff! PS We live in Bangkok, but in what you might call the suburbs. Not touristy at all.

Yes. Our small local mall put theirs up in November, before Loy Krathong which, like Diwali, is a festival of light (as was the pagan festival Christmas was grafted on to). Mr DIY got the Christmas stock out at the same time Do you not go out much?

Once the TM30 is successfully registered online, it is accessible online. You can screenshot it and print it out. PS When I first applied for my visa extension on the grounds of retirement, it turned out my landlady hadn't done a TM30. ( I'd asked her for one, she sent copies of some papers, at the time I didn't know what one looked like...I do now. ) I was in Immigration at CW so I messaged her agent, he applied for it online, messaged a screenshot, printed it downstairs and everyone was happy. Took about half an hour.

How do they catch them? Simple. Biometrics, databases and facial recognition software. Deportees deserve to be caught if they haven't bothered to keep up with the technology, because Thailand's Immigration Dept certainly has.

Scotland in *November* ?? Is he insane????

Set up a crime scene in the middle of the Chao Praya river?? You're joking, yes? Surely the first thing any police force would do is retrieve the body and take it to a morgue for a post mortem.

Have you never heard of " taking a gap year"? It's normal for graduates in European countries ( and even the UK, before it tumbled down the charts) to go travelling before they settle into lifelong careers. That travel usually involves temporary jobs - bar work, au pair, etc. Employers like it as it adds useful life skills to their portfolios.

"Smarter than the average pier, Booboo"

From UK, to Thailand Wise's reasons for transfer are: Sending money home to family General monthly living expenses Rent or other property expenses Tuition fees or studying expenses Travel expenses Medical expenses Charitable donations Property purchase Pay for goods Pay for services Funds for long term stay in Thailand. Nothing about visas. Usually if I tick the last option, the transfer is marked as a foreign funds transfer but before I went for the extension ( based on 800k) I printed all my bank statements for the year, took them to the bank, asked them for a letter verifying that all the transfers came from overseas. Which they did. And that went down well at CW, possibly because it made their job just a little easier. Can't remember if they charged for that but if they did it was only 100 baht. Btw, it helps if you treat the bank people as fellow humans. One of them told me I was the first farang who'd ever been nice to her. All I did was commiserate over the previous customer who'd been petulant and rude.

At least train travel here is cheap. In the UK it's phenomenally expensive but equally unreliable. The Eurostar service has been truncated by Brexit, and the appallingly expensive and destructive HS2 that was supposed to connect London and 'the North' now, er, won't.

"...falsely declaring the product as frozen food". Maybe my brain isn't firing on all cylinders today - if frozen pork isn't frozen food, what is it?

That'll really help to reduce CO2 emissions. Not.

If I'd died at 60, I'd have missed the absolute joy of grandchildren. Now I want to live as long as I'm able (in both senses of the word) in order to see how they turn out.

Get a maid. Cheaper than a gadget in the long run and more environmentally friendly 🙂

Floors get dirty during the *day* - every day. Clean it when it needs it and if you're cooking and eating in a place it gets dirty surprisingly fast. Plus people shed small amounts of hair and skin cells as they move around, dust falls out of the air 24/7 and if you have a pet....😱

Live and study in Ayutthaya, take the train into Bangkok for entertainment at weekends.

They weren't condemning our European neighbours, they were satirising the peculiarly English arrogance that Farage later amplified (for his own benefit). Judging by the responses to this thread, it is still thriving. If you were still in the UK and a load of economic migrants ( for that is what many farangs are) fetched up in your home town and started strutting around like they owned it, complaining about the way you did everything, getting drunk and sh*gging your female relatives whenever they could...how would you feel about them? As Burns wrote, "Oh would some god the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us"

There is a growing ( ha!) problem of obesity in Asia. Even ten years ago it was rare to see an Asian who was more than plump. Now there are a noticeable number who are definitely clinically obese. And all airlines are doing this because there are so many people who weigh much more than the average ( 70kg). Having sat next to people who were so fat they took up half my seat as well as their own on both legs of the last long haul flight I took, it can't happen too soon. They should have to pay extra for wider seats.