Drumbuie

A very quick search online brought up half a dozen websites which explain clearly exactly what qualifications you need on top of your bachelor's degree in order to teach in Thailand. That you yourself didn't manage to do that but instead chose to ask in these forums does not exactly speak of great competence in the skillsets required by teachers these days. And no, I'm not going to list those websites. As my old French teacher used to say to the class, "you just want to be spoon-fed!"

If you keep scrolling down the linked article past the ads that punctuate it, you'll find two more paragraphs with a little more info which begins to justify the headline, a bit.

No. Not on the street. Not here, not anywhere other than on a beach, by a pool or in your own garden. (The same goes for shorts, imho, but judging by the number of unlovely middle-aged farang legs on the streets, even in the hi-so areas of BK, that battle is already lost). Too hot? Wear loose clothes made of lightweight natural fibres. Want to be treated with respect by the people you meet? Ditto.

This reminds me of the summer one of my sons rode a pedicab in Edinburgh during the Festivals. He was hailed outside the Pleasance - a venue which is on one of Edinburgh's many hills - and his passengers turned out to be Phill Jupitus, Johnny Vegas and a third guy who was less famous but not less of a heavyweight. After pedalling frantically for a few minutes, the pedicab had barely moved an inch, the passengers ( and all the onlookers) were crying with laughter, so Phill and co got out of the pedicab, gave him a tenner and sent him on his way. The pedicab itself survived but only just.

I visited a friend in the UK earlier this year who's now bedridden. His care home (in Leicester) is costing his sons £1400 a week - it's clean, the food is edible, and the staff are very nice but it's a soulless existence. If I ever get too doddery to manage independent life in Thailand, my son will be able to pay for 24 hour care, laundry, cleaning and top quality food for a *lot* less than £200 a day. ( Also, it was impossible not to notice that after 13 years of spectacularly inept Tory government, the UK is falling apart, the NHS in particular - so best not to plan on getting free medical care there). PS Meanwhile, keep active! The best predictor of a good quality of life in later years is the level of physical activity in youth and mid-life, but it's never too late to start.

And if - hypothetical scenario, obviously - he had killed his wife in the house and removed her body in the Mitsubishi pickup...any forensic evidence against him has now been destroyed.

*Please* don't trip over your sense of entitlement as you pass all those delivery folk working their way through college and/or supporting their families, on the way out of that restaurant whose staff and owner are grateful for the enhanced catchment area that helps them survive..

Further reading for anybody actually interested in the topic ( as opposed to a Daily Mail intern 'journalist' desperate for clicks to avoid getting sacked) :- Iona & Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

It's not just Thailand. Sadly, this sort of conduct, and worse, is a too-frequent occurrence in the Metropolitan Police area, London, where corruption and abuse have been rife for decades. Sarah Everard 's brutal rape and murder by a policeman whose prior behaviour should - more than once - have seen him weeded out, especially when he was vetted for royal protection duty, is a case in point.

Coutts has always had various financial thresholds for its accounts. I once had a current account with them (a *long* time ago!) but closed it when my income dropped below the threshold, their charges kicked in and it was too expensive to keep banking there. Mr Farrago is a hypocritical publicity-seeking little windbag (imho) who's managed to deflect attention from the fact that he's either moved his money out of the UK (he and his family rushed to apply for EU passports the day after the Brexit vote, remember) or he's not as rich as he wants people to think. Or both. Nothing to do with politics; he breached the terms of the account. End of story. Rose's mistake was not to keep silent on the matter: such a breach of confidentiality is purely unprofessional.

I have a Bangkok Bank account and always transfer funds to it from my Wise account, citing "long term stay in Thailand". Sometimes this gets tagged as IFT, sometimes as from another bank. ( I suspect they're still manually keying in the info at some stage and it depends on who does the keying.) Before applying for my visa extension due to retirement, I printed out my bank statement, highlighted the mismarked transfers, went into my branch and explained the problem. The cashier went away for a while (as they do)....and came back with a standard printed letter of confirmation of foreign funds transfer for each mismarked transfer, stamped and signed by the branch manager. And I got my extension.

Surely it makes sense to go to at least a pharmacist, ideally a doctor, rather than ask on these forums?

You mean they actually want you to *pay* to spend three years on a glorified coach tour? Uh, no thanks.

Or the UK where crops have been rotting in the fields, because British people don't want to do the backbreaking work of harvesting and, post-Brexit, farmers can't use seasonal workers from the EU.

Another example of what is possible once you transfer mountains of paper records into databases - like the sweeps of visa overstayers. Thailand is late to the game but seems to be catching up fast.

Climate change is seriously affecting the long-established weather patterns that formed the basis for weather forecasting and the algorithms used by modern forecasters. No wonder the forecasters can't get it right as much as they used to.

As usual , the truth is rather more complex than that. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/marijuana/marijuana-gateway-drug

I am currently in the UK visiting relatives and I can tell you that whatever that article says, the economy is NOT thriving post Brexit. Food is unbelievably expensive, most households are struggling to get by. My son who earns a very good salary says he can no longer save any of it due to mortgage interest increases and skyrocjeting fuel and food bills. Inflation is outstripping wage increases ( if any) and anyone who isn't a millionaire is finding life increasingly challenging. Brexit is a continuing disaster - hundreds of small businesses closing as they can't export to our nearest and biggest market due to the paperwork involved and the increased cost and duration of transport, others because they can't get workers from the EU any more. Meanwhile the number of immigrants has actually *increased* - so much for the much vaunted "controlling our borders" slogan.

I'd question how much less a scale corruption in the Met is than in Thailand. I suspect they're just more skilful at hiding it. The granting of liquor licences to restaurants and bars, for example, has been hugely lucrative for London police stations for decades. In 1980 or thereabouts I was lunching with a restaurant-owning chum when a bloke came through the door in a beautifully cut camel hair coat, diamond discreetly winking from his signet ring, Rolex on his wrist, and everyone started bowing and scraping to him. (The Pope himself could not have had a greater effect on the St Peter Square throng). "Who on earth is that?" I asked. "Shhhh" my host whispered, looking tense. When the door had closed on the departing eminence, he breathed out and added, " That's the Head of Licensing at H------ CID" - and all became clear.

My experience of Thai visas is limited but my experience of businesses and national organisations changing from paper-based records to computerised systems covers over four decades - and from my relatively brief exposure to it, it's clear that the immigration service in Thailand is finally making that transition. The times they are a-changing. It's not the Wild West (or East) any more. Get a proper visa.

I've only lived in Thailand since last year. Are these immigration swoops a regular thing or have Immigration stepped them up since they started switching from paper-based records to a computerised system which can be checked in seconds?

A long time ago, I had to wait on a trolley for an urgent operation and the kind attendant topped up the pre-op medication every time I complained of the pain. After the (entirely successful) operation, I had night sweats, extreme fatigue and my bones ached constantly, so I went to see my GP. He looked at my notes and said, " I'm not surprised". Then he explained that the pre-op stuff was almost pure morphine and what I was suffering was morphine withdrawal. Be prepared!

The answer is to make them elected by and accountable to local people. The first layer of government in Sweden is the kommun which is around 10,000 (rural) to 30,000 ( Stockholm etc). Small enough that you may meet a good percentage of them as you go about your daily life. Your kids may know their kids. Your parents may know theirs. You maybe went to school with them, or your cousin's did... it's small enough that you can't get away with things so easily. Small enough that it's not a huge responsibility. Small enough that it's a good training and a way of both you and the electors finding out if you'd make a good politician. The kommuns in a region share local taxes; they also share experience and best practice with each other; as do the regions. There are over 200 regions (for a population of under 10 million). So most of what a centralised government has to deal with is devolved and the national government only has to deal with national stuff. It's called a distributed network ( like the internet itself) and is considerably more resilient than a centralised top-down system. Very hard to mount a coup against a distributed network, too. It's not perfect, but it is on the whole better. Hope he succeeds. Changing systems is heartbreakingly hard work.

"The implementation of a new database played a crucial role in the success of this initiative" is perhaps the most significant sentence here.

https://sealevel.nasa.gov/ipcc-ar6-sea-level-projection-tool If you're really interested in the subject, this might be useful.