Kyoto Kyle

He will drop the news on a Friday and then disappear to play golf with Putin and Epstein over the weekend. BREAKING!!! BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!! Just spoke with our GREAT generals and military leaders. The operation in Iran was a COMPLETE AND TOTAL SUCCESS. The targets were OBLITERATED, absolutely OBLITERATED. Many people are saying it was one of the most tremendous, precise and powerful military operations ever conducted anywhere in the world. Maybe THE most powerful. The fake news will never report it that way but everybody knows it is a tremendous win. Iran’s leadership that was causing HUGE problems for the world is GONE. Completely. Their nuclear ambitions have been set back MANY YEARS. Decades. Maybe even forever. The damage is MASSIVE. Our incredible pilots, fighters, sailors, soldiers, everybody involved, did an AMAZING job. The best military anywhere in the world, by far. Nobody even comes close. ZERO comparison. TOTAL DOMINANCE. Because the mission was such a TREMENDOUS SUCCESS we are now bringing this phase of the operation to a close and our GREAT American warriors will be coming home. Peace through strength. We hit them HARD and they understand now. Thank you to our amazing military and to all the GREAT patriots who support them. GOD BLESS YOU, AND GOD BLESS AMERICA. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

The person you are addressing with your message has had at least 6-7 banned accounts AFAIK and now returned again.

Just ask them for "San-Witt Hemm Cheet". That will get you what you want. They have about 25 or 30 different toasty sandwiches now. And a lot of variations of the original ham cheese. Many are awful with cream and weird mystery meat fillings. But you just want the original one that says "ham and cheese sandwich". No double cheese, etc. You pay for it at the counter and then you wait about two minutes while they toast it for you. They will refer to it as "wabe" because nobody ever taught them the word toasty so they use the Thai word for microwave. But when they say that what they're really asking you is if you want it toasted or not: "wabe mai". Say yes. And don't worry, they'll never put it in the microwave when they ask that. If you go in the evening, they're often sold out because that's the most popular version. Maybe that's why you didn't strike gold. Go earlier in the day or go really late at night after they restock them. They normally get deliveries in the late evening. By 1-2 am they normally have every variety of toasty sandwich back in stock.

You are sick.

Another option for low-risk steady income, if you’re worried about bank CD interest rates in the US falling in the future, would be to put the money into a long-term corporate bond ETF. Something like the Vanguard VCLT, which yields around 5.5%. You could park the money there and forget about it, collecting 5.5% a year indefinitely. Non-US citizens residing in Thailand would be subject to a 15% withholding tax on the income, bringing the net yield to just over 4.5%.

The brokered CDs offered through Fidelity are different. They come directly from the issuing bank, so there are no fees. When you buy CDs on the secondary market there is always a trading fee. Another difference is timing. With the Fidelity CDs the settlement date is usually about a week after the purchase, which means the funds sit idle tied up in an open order and earn no interest during that period. With CDs purchased on the secondary market, interest begins accruing immediately. Yes, I can also get CDs directly from Chase Bank without any fees too, but their interest rates are about half of what they are on the brokered CDs. The point of my original post was not to compare the cost of using an agent with the opportunity cost of the investment. The point was simply that tying up money in a Thai bank account creates an opportunity cost, which means the visa is effectively a lot more expensive than it appears on the surface. If someone wants to run the numbers and compare the lost income with the cost of using an agent, they are free to do that. That was never the focus of my post, and it is not something I am interested in debating.

I buy and trade these brokered CDs on the Interactive Brokers trading platform. They charge about $10 to $15 per transaction when purchasing bank CDs on the secondary market, depending on how many CDs you buy in a single purchase. There are no fees when the CDs mature. You would only pay another fee if you decide to resell them before maturity. Each CD has a face value of $1,000. For example, if you want to invest $50,000 you would purchase 50 CDs, and the fee would probably be around $15. The quantity available for each CD varies. Some listings only have a few available, while others may offer more than 100. Since these are all resales on the secondary market, availability depends on what each seller is offering, and it can change from day to day and even throughout the day. There are also many US banks whose CDs are traded on the platform. I usually stick with the largest ones available, such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, which are large US banks with FDIC coverage. Yesterday I ended up buying two different Morgan Stanley CDs because the first seller did not have enough available to fill my entire order, so I had to place two separate purchases and pay two transaction fees. If you are asking about visa agents in Thailand, I know nothing about them.

Do what you like, but let’s be clear: you’re changing the subject. I responded directly to your own words (below), reported back exactly what I actually make in practice rather than in theory, and now that the real numbers are on the table you’ve suddenly decided to pivot. If you were comfortable with the answer, you wouldn’t need to.

You’re stabbing in the dark and making false assumptions without a clue what’s actually possible. Just rolled over one of my brokered CDs on Interactive Brokers yesterday. I always go for CDs with around six months left on the duration. Picked up a couple from Morgan Stanley Private Bank yielding 3.9% for the next six months, which works out to tax-free money for me. Both mature in September with an interest payment later this month and a second one in September. Longer durations are available of course, but I’m keeping everything short term for now.

If you're not a US citizen, you can put US dollars into bank CDs in the US and all of the interest is tax free, so you would keep the full 4%. I wouldn't compare it to investing in stocks or any risk assets because if your money was in a Thai bank account, the principal wouldn't be at risk. Same as bank CDs in the US. I look at it that way. And if you bring the money into Thailand and convert it into baht at a time (like now) when the baht is quite strong, then you've also got a possible currency exchange risk/loss in the future.

I’m posting this in The Pub because it’s not really a visa question, more of an observation. I’ve been thinking about the retirement visa and the requirement to keep ฿800,000 in a Thai bank account, assuming you don’t have an overseas monthly pension to show. Simple enough if you don’t need to touch that money and can afford to have it tied up. But then I started thinking about the opportunity cost. The visa fee itself is extremely reasonable, no complaints there. But if that money were sitting overseas right now rather than being brought into Thailand, you could have it in a stable fixed income investment earning close to 4%. That works out to roughly $1,000 to $1,200 a year in income, depending on exchange rate fluctuations. Since it’s parked in a Thai bank account earning essentially nothing, that lost income has to be factored in as part of the real cost of the visa. So it’s not 1,900 Baht a year anymore. When you account for the foregone income on your money, it’s more than 15x that. Still manageable, but a meaningfully different number than it first appears. Curious if anyone else has done similar math.

I have found the solution. The need for purpose has been resolved. Energym.mp4

This topic isn't focused on the meaning of life. It is about whether life still has meaning for people who don't have a career and the sense of purpose that some people get from having one.

Many of those menial, low-paid jobs are not under threat. Many will remain, some out of pity. Good chance many of those people wont be beneficiaries of the great UBI dream. No utopia for them.

I think many people are missing a key issue when they imagine a future where AI takes care of everything for us and no one has to work. The concept of Universal Basic Income, or UBI, being provided by governments sounds great on the surface, but in reality people would likely receive only a minimal amount, just enough to get by rather than live comfortably. It is more like a worst case scenario than the great new world order that many people are imagining. If artificial intelligence eliminates large numbers of jobs and leaves society facing mass unemployment, people are unlikely to be content and governments are also unlikely to simply step back and let the world spiral into chaos and civil unrest. Instead, they are more likely to prepare to expand their authority and further militarize in order to suppress uprisings from people stepping up against a new system of civil society built around a world with no jobs. If much of the developed world ends up unemployed and dependent on UBI, that feels closer to dystopia than utopia. It resembles a machine driven system in which human labor and agency are no longer central. In that scenario, any serious resistance could be met not by human officers using the usual tear gas or rubber bullets of the past, but by drones, autonomous ground vehicles, and humanoid robots exerting lethal force. Within a decade or so, protests or uprisings could look very different, with machines enforcing order in the streets. If people are sustained by UBI because they are no longer needed to run society and they attempt to push back against that reality, it means modern society has failed and the response to any public displays of discontentment may not be humane or negotiable.