CaptHaddock

I agree.

Do you have any opinion on when ลักษณนาม or สรรพนาม are required?

I don't quite understand your question.

I explained already in my first post in this thread which words call for the classifier. Is there something about that that is not clear? The pronoun is used instead of the noun not in conjunction with it, just as in English.

เก่า is not one of the words that calls for the classifier. However, with most nouns you may use the classifier + เก่า to give the meaning "former."

All forms can be downloaded at https://www.irs.gov/

Thank you for the prompt reply.

Being overseas with nothing to report is there a specific form to use? Since this is my first time overseas, I'm hoping for a simple fill in the basic and mail. I used to file 1040EZ through Turo tax.

If you are still eligible to file 1040EZ you can buy Turbotax, download it, and file your forms electronically. There is also an online version of TT.

Makes no sense at all even to consider buying property in a country where you don't have the right to live.

If agreement and rental was arranged through the condo management I can understand them wanting something from them.

Although they never have before.

Which immigration office?

Normally all that is needed is your rental agreement with copies of the owners house book and ID card. Some offices will also want a TM30 form.

Seems strange they would want something from the condo management.

Chaeng Wattana. This is my fourth renewal. I have always provided copies of the lease agreement and the owner's id card, but never the owner's tabian baan. They are asking for the tabian baan of the person who is representing the owner. Now, that might be the owner himself, but since we are in a condo the condo management normally represents the owner.

At my first extension of my Non-Immigrant O visa by marriage after the Rajprasong bombing, the immigration official came up with a first-time-ever required document: a letter from the agent of our landlord stating that my wife and I, both identified by name, have been living in the place since what date along with a copy of the tabian baan of the agent himself. So this is not the tabian baan of the condo apartment that we rent, but the tabian baan of some executive of the condo management company. I was a little shocked although I expected things to tighten up somehow after Rajaprasong.

What would happen if the executive of the condo declined to provide such a document? I am guessing I would be SOL.

Thailand’s Customs Department is preparing to make a 30% cut to import duties on luxury items in hopes of boosting tourist spending.

so I'm a tourist and when I come to Thailand, I am now going to buy luxury goods which even after the cut I could purchase in my own country much more cheaply and this is going to boost my spending as a tourist...

Gotta disagree with ol' ukrules (above), this makes no sense whatsoever... or at least the logic for the decision makes no sense...

That said, it'll make moving up to BMWs more affordable for all the locals around here with the orange kubota engine proudly displayed on the front of their current set of wheels...

Gotta disagree w/ you TBT.

ANY, and EVERYTHING that keeps money out of a corrupt government's (all are corrupt or at best inept) pocket, and leaves it with the guy who earned his money is a good thing.

I understand. And it is worthwhile to discuss the import duties and whether or not they are appropriate, have the intended effect, etc.

I'm just saying that this guy's argument is 100% disingenuous deflection... dropping the import duties on luxury goods in Thailand will certainly help the people in Thailand who consume luxury goods, but to claim that this will increase tourist spending seems to stretch the logic beyond reasonable limits...

Of course, the point is to give a further tax break to the rich who are the supporters of the junta. The tax break could easily be restricted to tourists by making it a refund like the VAT refund for which you have to show a foreign passport. This tax break will be for all customers, most of whom will be rich Thais.

Here's a follow-up. I looked up in the Australian and New Zealand Women's Group Bangkok Guide for carpet cleaners and called three of the recommended outfits. One is a general cleaner run by Thais. Their price was about $.160/sq. foot. They wanted to clean the rugs in my home. Not a good idea, however. I called two Indian carpet dealers who also do cleaning, but only of carpets. Their prices were quite close at about $2.09/sq. foot. So, I hired Oriental Carpets (Thailand) Co., Ltd. which is located on Sukhumwit soi 33. First I had them take just the two smallest rugs as a trial. They brought them back in a few days clean, dry, not puckered, and with no smell of chemicals. I then had them take the three larger carpets which they just brought back today. All pickups and deliveries were exactly on time. The price of $2.09/sq foot compares favorably with prices in the US for which I saw estimates of $2.50 to $5.00 per sq. foot. So, I think the price was in line with what I would expect.

I am delighted with the results. My rugs look like new with vivid colors again. It is possible to get excellent service in Thailand. I recommend the company without reservation:

www.orientalcarpetsthailand.com

Looks like a giveaway to the rich. If it is just for the tourist business then why not make the price reduction available as a tax refund only for tourists showing foreign passport. If they simply reduce the import tax for businesses importing luxury goods then most of the tax benefit will go to rich Thai consumers, who are after all the base of support for the junta.

เก่า is used only with inanimate objects, while แก่ is used with people. I have never encountered the phrase เพื่อนเก่า, have you? If เก่า means "former" then the phrase เพื่อนเก่า would not mean "old friend" i.e. "friend of long standing," but "former friend." For "former friend" I would expect the phrase "อดีตเพื่อน."

One of the example sentences in the New Standard Thai-English Dictionary by Col Nit Tongsopit is

เธอเป็นเพื่อนเก่าของฉัน

She is an old friend of mine.

I didn't quote it before because I wasn't absolutely sure of the meaning of the sentence. I'm quite sure it doesn't mean 'former'. Literally, the word may be intended to convey that friendship was extant at an earlier time, in which case the likely deduction is that the friendship has lasted until now. I get the feeling that เก่า is just as ambiguous as in English.

That dictionary gives a whole slew of meanings for the compound เก่าแก่ - "old, classic, obsolete, elder, veteran, dateless, age-old, ancient, immemorial, long-standing, old-time, old-world, on the shelf".

I had a discussion of this topic with my teacher with the following results, which I regard as definitive. None of the online dictionaries with which I am familiar approach this degree of detail in usage. If anyone knows of text with this kind of coverage please post a reference.

เก่า may refer to either persons or objects. If we want to describe a person advanced in age, we use คนแก่ not เก่า but when เก่า refers to an object it means "old" in the simple sense of having been around for a long time. หนังสือเก่า is "the old book."

เพื่อนเก่า means "old friend" in the sense of long-standing friend. It doesn't mean "former friend." However, the word เพื่ิอน encompasses a wider range of relationships than the English word "friend." It includes mere acquaintances and so is not necessarily as positive as "friend." This explains the otherwise puzzling construction เพื่อนบ้าน for "neighbor" which does not imply actual friendship. Perhaps for this reason "former friend" doesn't completely make sense to Thai speakers in the way the "former acquaintance" would sound odd to us. "Former friend" would be เคยเป็นเพื่อน แต่ตอนนี้ไม่คบกัน

However, consider these examples.

แฟนเก่า former boyfriend/girlfriend

นักเรียนเก่า former student, but could be current student of long-standing also. Occurs for instance in สมาคมนักเรียนเก่า alumni association

ครูเก่า former teacher, no longer teaches at the school.

So, เก่า sometimes means "old" and sometimes "former." Now here is a particularly interesting point of usage. When used with the classifier เก่า means "former," but if used without a classifier it means "old," as follows:

บ้านเก่า - "an old house" or "The house is old."

บ้านหลังเก่า - "the former house"

My teacher explained that only เก่า has meanings that differ depending on the presence or absence of the classifier.

เก่าแก่ means particularly old and valuable because of its age. Does not refer to physical condition. So antique furniture is เก่าแก่. Or อาคารเก่าแก่ an historic building. ครุเก่าแก่ might refer to a teacher retired after long service. เพื่อนเก่าแก่ would be a particularly close friend of perhaps forty years or more.

Some related grammar.

บ้านหลังเล็ก - a small house. This is not a sentence.

บ้านเล็ก - The house is small. This is a complete sentence. เล็ก in this usage is considered a verb, specifically, คำกริยาแสดงสภาพ

เสื้อมันขาว - the shirt is white. A complete sentence. According to my teacher, มัน here may be considered to be the verb "to be" although it seems to me to be more readily considered a pronoun. This usage is very common and idiomatic.

เสื้อขาว - "a white shirt" a phrase, or "The shirt is white," a complete sentence.

มัน is rude if used to refer to a person.

These people are welfare recipients who want more benefits from the govt which rents them federal land (our land, that is) at a loss.

If they were black they would already have been massacred like the Black Panthers. And everyone would agree it was terrorism.

The feds should do nothing and let the cold drive them out. They should take advantage of the event by arresting and trying Cliven Bundy in the meanwhile.

Plan B, Plan C...

I suspect this relates to some main extent to anticipation.

In most western cultures we strongly learn about anticipation by observation of our parents, wider society, education to anticipate things, 'what if' etc. I know my own parents emphasized this strongly, when my father taught me to drive he kept telling me 'be ready if ..... happens', 'what will you do if another car suddenly .....', etc., and it was an extension of the 'life lessons' I had experienced regularly as a child.

I grew up in a quite isolated area, 500 kilometres through close to desert to the next city, after I got my first car I wanted to drive the 500 kilometres to visit my grandfather. My father said 'OK but I want you to sit down and make a list of the things that could go wrong and what you need in the car if one of these things happen'. Deliberate anticipation.

I naturally took this same approach to life lessons in bringing up my Thai son. He was the captain of his university football team for a couple of years, and he often talked to the team about anticipation: on the field, planning for trips, etc. They thought he was crazy. Son now has a 10 yr old child, she regularly gets the same 'anticipation comments and lessons' from her dad. Example, we often have pizza at home nights, son's daughter is in charge of checking the pantry and making a list of what we need for pizza tomorrow night etc. In fact when we go to the supermarket she will often put things in the trolley because she's thinking about what's running low and what will be needed soon for pizza night. Anticipation.

My son met a girl at uni, now his wife, she asked me to teach her to drive. I copied how my father taught me to drive; 'be ready if ..... happens', 'what will you do if another car suddenly .....', etc. She was shocked when I did this - why, in all of her life she had never experienced this, from her parents, other older family members etc., anything which was anticipation. In fact she later shared with me she told her older brothers what I was teaching her, their comments were ' farang crazy', etc. But she quickly embraced the approach and realized it was valuable, and she has since used the same approach to teach 2 friends to drive.

Typical Thai government schools are another example, the teaching / learning process contains no anticipation whatever. Plan B, Plan C not in the picture, not at all.

I take this to be a cultural difference between rich people and poor people. In our rich, Westerner culture we expect to have choices and expect to be able to control events to a high degree. Poor people generally do not have such expectations. Poor culture emphasizes luck instead of planning. And there are degrees in this difference. So, it is an old saw among sociologists that, speaking of the West, one's position in life determines how much of the future one can expect to control. So, that the genuinely rich plan on passing wealth to future generations and focus on estate-planning tools like generation-skipping trusts. The middle class looks out only as far as planning careers and planning retirement on the whole. The poor live from hand to mouth. They have jobs, not careers, and they don't have savings. Instead of planning they have "manana" or "mai pen rai" that emphasize acceptance over control.

Choices and the resources necessary to make them are a kind of wealth. The culture of average Thais is a poor man's culture. Until only a little more than a hundred years ago, they were all slaves. A hundred years is not a long time.

So, we can say that เก่า can be used with persons when the meaning is "former," but when the meaning is "aged" persons take the word แก่. So เพื่อนเก่า is correct usage for "former friend." The English phrase "old friend" with the meaning of a friend of long standing would require something like เพื่อนกันมานานๆ.

Why would you bother when you can read the NY Times or the Washington Post online?

The เก่า means "old" in the sense of "aged," not in the sense of "for a long time." I would say เชาบอกว่าเป็นเพื่อนสนิดคุณมานานๆแล้ว Mistakes like this do not inspire confidence in the text you are using.

I think you are getting confused with แก่, to which the RID gives the primary meaning of มีอายูมาก.

เก่า can mean 'former' or 'ex-', and the RID gives it the primary meaning of ก่อน.

เก่า is used only with inanimate objects, while แก่ is used with people. I have never encountered the phrase เพื่อนเก่า, have you? If เก่า means "former" then the phrase เพื่อนเก่า would not mean "old friend" i.e. "friend of long standing," but "former friend." For "former friend" I would expect the phrase "อดีตเพื่อน."

The order of things seem "flexible" to me. Maybe because I just dont know the rules.

noun-clf-adj

หนังสือ-เล่ม-ใหม่

noun-adj-quantifier-clf

หลายคนครับ ผมได้ เพื่อน-ใหม่-หลาย-คน อ๋อ ผมพบคนไทยคนหนึ่ง เขาบอกว่าเป็นเพื่อนเก่าคุณ

"A lot of people. I made a lot of new friends. Oh, I ran into a Thai. He said he was an old friend of yours."

http://i.imgur.com/EXIo2uH.png

Yes, there is flexibility in the word order.

เก่า means "old" in the sense of "aged," not in the sense of "for a long time." I would say เชาบอกว่าเป็นเพื่อนสนิดคุณมานานๆแล้ว Mistakes like this do not inspire confidence in the text you are using.

You need a good teacher, among other reasons, to teach you how to say especially the tones, but also the long and short vowels, etc. and then correct you when you get it wrong again and again. While you are learning the tones you will pay more attention to the way the Thais pronounce them which will help both your pronunciation and your comprehension. I think it is all but impossible for a Westerner to learn the tones correctly without a competent Thai teacher.

I will not get many likes for this but I write it anyway

After 7 years of Chinese studies in China I am completely fluent.

I say tones are not so important. I am poor with tones but almost all Westerners are. Just say the words as well as you can. (A very rough guess is that there are more consonants in Thai than Chinese making tones even less important.)

If you just read the phonetic Thai out of a dictionary (and maybe listen to audio) there is a good chance a Thai speaker will understand what you say.

Even though I have an accent in Chinese a person from Beijing will understand me 100% but he will understand 0% if a Chinese speaks Hong Kong dialect. So the Chinese are pragmatic and consider the foreigners' accent just one of many.

So I am a little irreverent to the tonal complexity of at least Chinese. Naturally it would be better to speak perfectly, one should try, but one has to prioritize when learning an Asian language.

I will not push this question. For some reason people get irritated when I say it. (Even others than the teachers earning money on, and showing how complex Chinese is by, stalling students by emphasizing tones. Tones are really hard for Westerners, that I admit, I have seen in Chinese schools. Vietnamese students learn the quickest, Japanese also learn quickly even though their language is non-tonal, but so much else is similar. Korean, Thai also learn fast.)

You couldn't be more wrong. Getting the tones right is very important. If you don't get the tone right the Thai won't understand you. While tones are difficult for us, we can definitely learn them. I can pronounce the tones correctly now although I still make mistakes sometimes. If you have a competent Thai teacher who corrects you when you get the tones (or anything else) wrong, you will learn them.

Your attitude on tones is indeed irritating because it is stupid. You are setting yourself up to fail in Thai. Moreover, the tones are part of the beauty and the fun of the Thai language. Tones are important because in Thai the vowels carry the information unlike English where the consonants mostly carry the information. If you delete the vowels from a page of English text you'll find that you can still read it without any problem. You cannot even perform the experiment in Thai since you can't really delete all the vowels. The function of consonants in Thai is mainly to cut off the vowel sound, which is why there are so few terminal consonants. According to Marvin Brown English has 35 vowel sounds while Thai has 105.

So, a completely wrong-headed approach.

The order of things seem "flexible" to me. Maybe because I just dont know the rules.

noun-clf-adj
หนังสือ-เล่ม-ใหม่

noun-adj-quantifier-clf
หลายคนครับ ผมได้ เพื่อน-ใหม่-หลาย-คน อ๋อ ผมพบคนไทยคนหนึ่ง เขาบอกว่าเป็นเพื่อนเก่าคุณ
"A lot of people. I made a lot of new friends. Oh, I ran into a Thai. He said he was an old friend of yours."
http://i.imgur.com/EXIo2uH.png

Yes, there is flexibility in the word order.

เก่า means "old" in the sense of "aged," not in the sense of "for a long time." I would say เชาบอกว่าเป็นเพื่อนสนิดคุณมานานๆแล้ว Mistakes like this do not inspire confidence in the text you are using.

You need a good teacher, among other reasons, to teach you how to say especially the tones, but also the long and short vowels, etc. and then correct you when you get it wrong again and again. While you are learning the tones you will pay more attention to the way the Thais pronounce them which will help both your pronunciation and your comprehension. I think it is all but impossible for a Westerner to learn the tones correctly without a competent Thai teacher.

So "new books are expensive" is
หนังสือเล่มใหม่ที่มีราคาแพง

http://i.imgur.com/63tV5Sy.png

Why they need a ที่ in the sentence I dont understand. Google also translates "a beautiful day" to วันที่สวยงาม.
I know ที่ can be a relative pronoun, but I dont understand why they use it here.

I would translate that sentence as "new books which are expensive." ที่ is the relative pronoun.

... "a different book/another book" ought to be
หนังสือ เล่ม ต่าง(-กัน)
etc.

หนังสีือเล่มอื่น หรือ หนังสืออีกหนึ่งเล่ม

Many words to express time, like วัน, seem to be used mostly as classifiers (and not nouns) since I think they usually appear only once, after the quantifier. When I pay one more night in a guesthouse I say
จ่าย ค่า ห้อง อีก 1 วัน (or คืน) ครับ
But I don't know if it is correct.

วัน is not a classifier. It's a unit of time. Like baht is a unit of currency, not a classifier.

But another example from a dictionary seems to have the clf. before the quantifier, instead!
อีก อัน หนึ่ง - "another one"

This is a special case of the numeral หนึ่ง which can appear following the classifier. Only หนึ่ง acts this way, but it can appear before the classifier also.

In spoken Thai the classifier is also often dropped as I understand.
http://i.imgur.com/G6mNw0H.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Cu3h9Ax.jpg
The second example is from the Lonely Planet Phrasebook. (LP is mostly correct but here I think they mix up plane and plate. Usually a good sign though - the passage was probably written by native Thai speaker

Dropping the classifier is an intrusion into contemporary Thai from English usage. Don't think it is yet accepted as correct, but you do hear it.

This is all pretty new to me so I have to digest it a little. I have just memorized words as I travel and I lack hearing the language. My listening comprehension is very poor so far.

You need to be studying with a competent Thai teacher from whom you can get clarification for the many questions of this kind that will naturally arise. You will not succeed at becoming fluent by teaching yourself from books although many of us started that way.

Listening comprehension is the most difficult skill to develop. If you keep studying you will get to a point where you can express yourself fairly well and Thais will understand you, but yet understanding them will still be hit or miss. Even with only a few hundred words in our vocabulary we can usually find a way to express our meaning, if not natural or idiomatic to Thai. But the Thai speaker may choose from his vocabulary of maybe 20,000 words for which your meager vocabulary is not sufficient to understand them. Add to that the fact that Thais are not used to speaking their language with foreigners. It doesn't occur to them to speak more slowly and clearly while limiting themselves to the kind of formal language foreigners would learn in a school. They may not even know how to speak more slowly if we ask them to. So, they don't help us out in that way.

Therefore we have to expect that adequate comprehension takes longer to develop.

I was reluctant to say หลาย because It means มาก the opposite to น้อย.

What about นานาร้าน that means ร้านต่าง ๆ ?

Or just say สองร้าน which answers the question on classifiers nicely.

I have it mind that repeating nouns makes them plural, I must have got it from somewhere, I will research it.

หลาย means "several." I find it used with countable things rather than aggregates for which you will see มาก. Don't know about นานาร้าน. Haven't encountered it in that usage. The only examples I have of นานา are นานาชาติ and นานาชนิด. I think its use is much more restricted than หลาย.

No need to research repeating nouns as plural. I discussed this very issue with my teacher recently. What I explained is correct 100%. The only other examples that I could come up with in addition to those above is:

เพื่อนๆ ป้าๆ ลุงๆ ลูกๆ

This is now either the complete list of such nouns or very close to it.

For the sake of discussion, why not consider this?

I bought them in different shops.

You would be saying this to explain; if you had bought a computer and a cabbage you wouldn't be saying it.

'Different shops' when someone believes 'same shop': ร้านไม่ใช่ที่เดียวกัน . ไม่ใช่ร้านเดียวกัน .

A simple statement:

ผม-ซื้อ-นังสือ-สองเล่มนี้-ที่ร้านร้าน

ที่ is the preposition ร้าน is the place where the verb took place, not an adverb, repeating the place ร้าน ๆ makes the noun plural so presumably the verb has to happen more than once.

ร้านสองร้าน, I agree says 'two shops' but if the objects are A and B ร้านร้าน means two shops also.

Let's see if that is acceptable!

Not acceptable. Only a very few nouns can be made plural by repeating them. For instance, เด็กๆ พ่อๆ แม่ๆ. There may be a few other that don't come to mind now, but there are very few in all. ร้าน is definitely not one of them. You could say ซื้อสองเล่มนี้ที่หลายร้าน.

Also, Captain, he is hypothesizing a given language shaping thought, not penis size.

I like Richard Dawkins. However, he is much more entertaining when he lectures about Christianity, rather than penises.

Are you trying to enumerate the ways in which it is possible to misunderstand the subject?

The hypothesis on which this post was made is not based on what we know of linguistics.

Looking at the way language can influence thought or perception, it is possible to have thought affect ones color perception, as in color words can affect color perceived.

However, you are going down the wrong road if you think that language changes thought.

Language is a tool which evolved for the sole purpose of allowing humans to think.

We think what we think, what we want to think, using languages which are extremely similar to one another.

Oh, there are many theories about why human evolved speech. My favorite theory is that it evolve for men to sweet talk chicks. Seriously.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mating-Mind-Sexual-Evolution/dp/038549517X?tag=duckduckgo-ffsb-20

Amazon.com Review

Evolutionary psychology has been called the "new black" of science fashion, though at its most controversial, it more resembles the emperor's new clothes. Geoffrey Miller is one of the Young Turks trying to give the phenomenon a better spin. In The Mating Mind, he takes Darwin's "other" evolutionary theory--of sexual rather than natural selection--and uses it to build a theory about how the human mind has developed the sophistication of a peacock's tail to encourage sexual choice and the refining of art, morality, music, and literature.

Where many evolutionary psychologists see the mind as a Swiss army knife, and cognitive science sees it as a computer, Miller compares it to an entertainment system, evolved to stimulate other brains. Taking up the baton from studies such as Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it's a dizzyingly ambitious project, which would be impossibly vague without the ingenuity and irreverence that Miller brings to bear on it. Steeped in popular culture, the book mixes theories of runaway selection, fitness indicators, and sensory bias with explanations of why men tip more than women and how female choice shaped (quite literally) the penis. It also extols the sagacity of Mary Poppins. Indeed, Miller allows ideas to cascade at such a torrent that the steam given off can run the risk of being mistaken for hot air).

That large personalities can be as sexually enticing as oversize breasts or biceps may indeed prove comforting, but denuding sexual chemistry can be a curiously unsexy business, akin to analyzing humor. As a courting display of Miller's intellectual plumage, though, The Mating Mind is formidable, its agent-provocateur chest swelled with ideas and articulate conjecture. While occasionally his magpie instinct may loot fool's gold, overall it provides an accessible and attractive insight into modern Darwinism and the survival of the sexiest. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Please,....

Start with Chomsky.

Point number 1: If you want to participate in a discussion then you have to discuss. Merely waving the name of a scientist as though that settled the question in a way too obvious to mention only makes me wonder whether you are one of those troglodyte members too inarticulate to be able to state his own case.

Point number 2: From what I know of Chomsky his view is that language arose as a byproduct of tool use and was then put to a myriad of other uses. Such a theory of the evolution of language in no way conflicts with Miller's ingenious idea that language arose from sexual rather than natural selection.

The hypothesis on which this post was made is not based on what we know of linguistics.

Looking at the way language can influence thought or perception, it is possible to have thought affect ones color perception, as in color words can affect color perceived.

However, you are going down the wrong road if you think that language changes thought.

Language is a tool which evolved for the sole purpose of allowing humans to think.

We think what we think, what we want to think, using languages which are extremely similar to one another.

Oh, there are many theories about why human evolved speech. My favorite theory is that it evolve for men to sweet talk chicks. Seriously.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mating-Mind-Sexual-Evolution/dp/038549517X?tag=duckduckgo-ffsb-20

Evolutionary psychology has been called the "new black" of science fashion, though at its most controversial, it more resembles the emperor's new clothes. Geoffrey Miller is one of the Young Turks trying to give the phenomenon a better spin. In The Mating Mind, he takes Darwin's "other" evolutionary theory--of sexual rather than natural selection--and uses it to build a theory about how the human mind has developed the sophistication of a peacock's tail to encourage sexual choice and the refining of art, morality, music, and literature.

Where many evolutionary psychologists see the mind as a Swiss army knife, and cognitive science sees it as a computer, Miller compares it to an entertainment system, evolved to stimulate other brains. Taking up the baton from studies such as Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it's a dizzyingly ambitious project, which would be impossibly vague without the ingenuity and irreverence that Miller brings to bear on it. Steeped in popular culture, the book mixes theories of runaway selection, fitness indicators, and sensory bias with explanations of why men tip more than women and how female choice shaped (quite literally) the penis. It also extols the sagacity of Mary Poppins. Indeed, Miller allows ideas to cascade at such a torrent that the steam given off can run the risk of being mistaken for hot air).

That large personalities can be as sexually enticing as oversize breasts or biceps may indeed prove comforting, but denuding sexual chemistry can be a curiously unsexy business, akin to analyzing humor. As a courting display of Miller's intellectual plumage, though, The Mating Mind is formidable, its agent-provocateur chest swelled with ideas and articulate conjecture. While occasionally his magpie instinct may loot fool's gold, overall it provides an accessible and attractive insight into modern Darwinism and the survival of the sexiest. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

A. I would say

ซื้อAและBที่ร้านต่างๆ

B. When the classifier is the same as the noun you may omit the noun, but not the classifier. So, either คนสองคน or สองคน is correct. In fact, you may sometimes omit the noun, but not the classifier, even if they are not the same when the noun is clearly implied. See the following example.

อัน is indeed widely used. For instance, the classifier for หนังสือ is เล่ม, but you might her a Thai with a book in her hand ask the clerk: อันนี้เท่าไหร่

I am guessing that you might get away with อัน instead of แผ่น with กระดาษ, but it wouldn't work with ร้าน. อัน is for small things.

The key to learning the use of classifiers is to be very clear about the words that call for a classifier and here I am not talking about the nouns themselves, but the quantification words. When to use a classifier is to some extent more important than getting the classifier exactly correct, a point on which the Thais are tolerant. So, these words require the classifier:

นี้

นั้น

ใหม่

numbers

เยอะ เยอะแยะ

น้อย

คนละ แต่ละ ทีละ

เดียว

ต่าง

I am sure that I forgetting some, but the list is not that long, fortunately for us.

Many others are going to be in this same boat when their Required Minimum Distribution kick's in and there is no way around it

I'm far removed from the $170,000 surcharge threshold for filing jointly, even with RMD. But, since having to take the RMD for the last few years, I found out that I should have started earlier, cashing in those IRAs to the extent they remained in the 15% tax bracket. Now I find that the RMD is nearly all in the 25% bracket. Oh well.

Rather than taking distributions, you should have converted them to a Roth IRA to the top of the 15% bracket before the RMDs and then those assets would have grown or produced income tax-free forever.

Converting traditional IRA to Roth IRA is a subject more people need to investigate. I have substantial amounts in both and have run the numbers. At the moment, most of my traditional IRA money comes from my 401k roll overs. The catch here is those contribution monies came when I worked in a Tax state (California). So those pre tax contributions were not taxed by California. now, when I later withdraw those monies I will be doing that as the Florida Resident which has no state income tax. So I effectively avoid state taxes on all that 401 k contribution monies. Of course any taxation if I do convert a traditional to a Roth would also now not happen since Florida has no state income tax. So I encourage any of you fellow USA folks to consider your state residency when taking traditional 401k or IRA distributions or if converting a traditional IRA to a Roth. CA has 10% state tax in general so all things being equal, you save that amount in taxes by doing things in a tax free state, Nevada, Florida, Texas, et. al..

Quite true. If you have moved to Florida or to Thailand, for instance, when you do the Roth conversion you escape state taxes on the IRA money forever. Even if you subsequently move back to a state with an income tax since by then it is safe in the Roth, although I wouldn't try that trick with California.

Analyzing whether it's worthwhile to do the Roth conversion is complex. Basically, the longer the life span of your Roth IRA (not necessarily you), the higher the return on your investments in the Roth, the more worthwhile it is. If, for instance, you have a younger wife then the tax-free Roth money might be feeding her decades from now since in addition to its tax-free status the Roth is free from Required Minimum Distributions, unlike a Traditional IRA.