CaptHaddock

Another Thai thesaurus is "คลังคำ" by ดร. นววรรณ พันธุเมธา . See http://www.thai-language.com/book-reviews#4 for a book review.

Looks useful, but too bad it is short on examples. Thai needs an OED or Petit Robert.

Attempts at explaining why one language is more "sophisticated" than another simply reveal the cultural bias of the questioner and show a lack of intellectual sophistication. English gets new words by borrowing from other languages (e.g. schadenfreude, hummus, courage), by forming compound words (e.g. weekend, password, airlift), by re-using an existing word with a new, unrelated meaning (e.g. gay, troll, geek), by simply making up a new word out of nothing (e.g. uber, kleenex), by converting a proper name into a common noun or verb (e.g. boycott, swiftboat), etc. Thai does the same. Probably all languages, including Thai, do as well because all peoples are pretty ingenious at adapting language to suit their purposes. Most modern languages have a substantial element of borrowed words.

The purposes of groups of speakers are not the same however so the languages have different facilities. English, and other Indo-European languages, have a strong sense of narrative time. Recounting events more or less requires ordering them in time. Thai and the Chinese languages lack this strong emphasis, which can seem like a deficiency to an unsophisticated native English-speaking learning the language. On the other hand, English is comparatively deficient in expressing gradations of social relationships in the language. So, Thai has a much richer vocabulary of pronouns to adumbrate small differences and fluctuations in social relationships.

The notion that a language influences or restricts the thinking of its speakers goes by the name of the Whorfian hypothesis and is currently regarded as bunk. For a book length summary of the case against the Whorfian hypothesis see "The Language Hoax" by John McWhorter.

Generally, when we find what we think is a defect in the language we are learning we are only encountering our own cultural bias.

SS benefits are no longer paid by check. The choice is either direct deposit to a bank account, which in Thailand can only be an account at Bangkok Bank, or by SS prepaid card which can be used to make withdrawals at an ATM, including those in Thailand. I suggest you call the US Embassy in Manila to talk with the SS representatives there. In my experience they have been prompt and helpful. I don't know what you will have to do to convince them that you are authorized to represent the Thai widow. Probably they have some procedure for that.

I always use that line when accompanied by my Thai wife.

A life assurance policy is identical with a life insurance policy in English.

If he/she is overweight losing some could help a lot. Mine went away after losing.

You don't understand that from reading any book on economics.

Thanks, Morrobay.

I understand having a strong currency is better than a weak currency, but does Thailand have a compelling reason to prop up the baht?

Yes, things are getting more expensive. But how do you get from inflation to Thailand's reserves position and dollar liabilities? How are they related?

The Bank of Thailand is using dollars to buy baht in order to prop up the bahts exchange rate. If they are deceptive on their dollar holdings and are unable to continue artificially propping up the baht then the baht will devalue and inflation will go above the present , at least 10%, level. With 10% inflation for two years something 100 baht then is now 121 baht. (1.1)² = 1.21

Skate,

I was pleased to finish reading the first paragraph of your last post since I realized that it is the last paragraph of your I will ever read.

You might try out your friend google on "Dunning Krueger effect."

Best of luck in all your future endeavors.

Like you wife I also have both Thai and U.S. passports and always use both when traveling. Left Thailand with Thai passport and entered Germany with US passport with no problems.

I am actually going to the UK in May and will be using my Thai passport to leave and U.S. passport to enter and know a lot of Thai's that also do this.

Thanks very much Arkom for your straightforward answer to my question!

This is not a question that calls for reasoning from first principles. I was asking whether anyone had actual experience with attempting to switch passports in flight before arriving in Britain or not. The UK either permits this or does not. Laos does not. Laos permits a US citizen to enter the country, but not if she boarded the plane using another passport. Not principle is involved. It is not possible to reason out the answer. You either know what the British will permit or you don't. You don't.

Thanks anyway.

The reason your wife couldn't enter Laos as a US citizen is because she didn't board the plane using her US passport. Had she done so she would have had no problem entering Laos as a US citizen.

Step 3: Check in at the Airport

Authority:

Airline

Passport to Show: The One You’ll Use at Your Destination

Here we do the same thing as step two. We show the airline the passport we plan to use when we reach our destination country. It doesn’t matter if that passport does not allow you to be in the country you are departing from. That is not their concern.

Example: Michael checks in to his flight in the USA using his Italian passport.

Different countries don't have different rules about this. If you show the proper passport at the proper time it works. If you don't, it doesn't.

It's true that had my wife boarded the plan in BKK using her US passport she would have been able to enter Laos without a problem as indeed I pointed out in my first post. She could not do that because she had not entered Thailand using her US passport and so had neither a visa not an entry stamp in the US passport permitting her to enter Thailand legally. She could not board the plane using her Thai passport because that passport was due to expire in five months and Laos will not permit you to enter unless your passport is good for at least six months. Hence the question, could she exit Thailand using her Thai passport and enter Laos using her American passport. The airline told us that Laos would not permit her to "switch passports in flight" and she would be refused entry to Laos. Therefore, the airline refused to let her board the plane and her fare was not refunded. This, even though other countries do permit "switching passports in flight."

So, different countries very much DO have different rules about this despite the general descriptions you find on the internet and despite your evidently unshakeable belief that what google provides is complete and irrefutable knowledge about the world.

You might want to brush up those reading comprehension skills a bit.

This is not a question that calls for reasoning from first principles. I was asking whether anyone had actual experience with attempting to switch passports in flight before arriving in Britain or not. The UK either permits this or does not. Laos does not. Laos permits a US citizen to enter the country, but not if she boarded the plane using another passport. Not principle is involved. It is not possible to reason out the answer. You either know what the British will permit or you don't. You don't.

Thanks anyway.

My question was whether anyone has any specific information about whether Britain allows a visitor to "switch passports in flight" as described above, not about general use of two passports.

The answer to my question is: no, no one here has any idea whether Britain permits it or not.

I'm fortunate enough not to be living anywhere near the edge, but why throw away $100 per month for a system I'll never use? My life is here and I'll get medical attention here. Medicare part A is free and forms a backup if I should need hospitalisation on an occasional short visit to the US. The sort of repatriation I might need is more likely to be coming back to my home in Thailand, rather than the other way round! Obviously, others will be in different circumstances, but it does depend on individual circumstances.

Part A only covers hospital charges and maybe not all of those. I doubt if any US hospital would admit you without insurance to pay the doctors, medicine, etc. My guess is that Part A is probably completely useless by itself.

Medicare Part A IS hospital insurance. Part A coverage includes "inpatient care at a hospital, skilled nursing facility (SNF), and hospice. Part A also covers services like lab tests, surgery, doctor visits, and home health care". This is a direct quote from the official Medicare web site. Sounds worthwhile to me. Most hospitals accept Medicare as you can see by looking up coverage. Indeed, hospitals which at any time in the past have accepted certain types of Federal funds are legally required to accept Medicare patients and Medicare payment for their services---they don't have a choice. It is more of a problem to find a doctor who will accept Medicare patients, since quite a number do not, but this of course is a problem with Part B, which covers outpatient services, not Part A. Is your "doubt" and "guess" actually based on anything?

I believe I understand now where you got the mistaken idea that Part A is going to pay for a doctor's services. You found the page below on medicare.gov, an official govt website:

http://www.medicare.gov/what-medicare-covers/part-a/what-part-a-covers.html

This page is an example of the kind of bad writing that comes from low-paid govt workers. The heading of the page is:

What Part A covers

in large type. Below that is:

What's Covered?

in smaller, but still large type. The paragraph following begins:

Medicare covers services (like lab tests, surgeries, and doctor visits) and supplies (like wheelchairs and walkers) considered medically necessary to treat a disease or condition.

A reader might logically conclude since we seem to be talking about Part A, that Part A covers surgeries, doctor visits, and the other items mentioned. Nothing could be further from the truth. The writer of this paragraph has unaccountably and without warning fallen back at this point to a general discussion of Medicare, i.e. Part A, Part B and the rest. Part A does not cover all or indeed, any, of the services listed in that sentence. This becomes apparent as the writer returns further down the page to the matter at hand, i.e. what Part A covers and now is refreshing specific:

In general, Part A covers:

Hospital care

Skilled nursing facility care

Nursing home care (as long as custodial care isn't the only care you need)

Hospice

Home health services

So, where did the surgeries and doctor visits go? The items beginning with "Hospital care" are links that you can click on to get more detail. You may click away on all of them, but you will never come to a page that lists or even mentions surgeries or doctor visits that are covered by Part A. Because those are doctor's services covered by Part B, not Part A.

I am not trying to beat you over the head with this. The page in question is badly written and misleading. If you look further on any of the hundreds of websites that discuss Medicare you won't find any mention of doctor's services under Part A. I have tried to clear this up because it sounds as if you are relying on Part A for that heart surgery one day to keep you alive. If that's the case it would be better to know now why that plan won't work than then.

What's tiresome is to take 2.5 hours to download Yosemite plus another 30 min. or so to install it and maybe apply later patches. Probably I could find the Yosemite download on the backup, if it is still there after the install, put it on something, a thumb drive maybe, and install it from there before doing the restore and then the patches.

Or I could boot up my bootable external drive and have everything immediately with zero work. I guess I am just lazy.

It's hardly something I have to do on a regular basis, so I'm happy with the method.

I'm sure you think your way of doing things is better, but mine suits me just fine.

It's just because rebuilds are infrequent that the process is time-consuming and error-prone and often produces mildly unpleasant little gotchas. So, people with an engineering outlook prefer to have simple reliable and testable methods to get quickly back to the status quo ante which often involves a little more thought and planning than simply assuming that using whatever Apple provides out of the box must be the best approach.

What's tiresome is to take 2.5 hours to download Yosemite plus another 30 min. or so to install it and maybe apply later patches. Probably I could find the Yosemite download on the backup, if it is still there after the install, put it on something, a thumb drive maybe, and install it from there before doing the restore and then the patches.

Or I could boot up my bootable external drive and have everything immediately with zero work. I guess I am just lazy.

I prefer the 'set it and forget it' approach. Time machine for the Macs, rsnapshot for everything else. Incremental backups running throughout the day. Anything older than an hour or two is safe, and I can go back a few months if necessary. It just works with no intervention from me - life's too short to spend it copying data.

Time machine doesn't give you a bootable device, does it? So, when your hard disk dies you have to rebuild it, don't you? diskdupe is free and gives a bootable drive. Doesn't store multiple versions of files though.

If the hard drive dies, you fit a new one, install OSX, then restore from time machine and everything is back exactly as it was. Easy.

I understand how to do a rebuild. It just seems unnecessary when you can create a bootable image instead.

I prefer the 'set it and forget it' approach. Time machine for the Macs, rsnapshot for everything else. Incremental backups running throughout the day. Anything older than an hour or two is safe, and I can go back a few months if necessary. It just works with no intervention from me - life's too short to spend it copying data.

Time machine doesn't give you a bootable device, does it? So, when your hard disk dies you have to rebuild it, don't you? diskdupe is free and gives a bootable drive. Doesn't store multiple versions of files though.

There are many ways to skin a cat. I take a different approach to manage the risk of losing data/installation with Windows. I run Windows as a virtual machine in Vmware Workstation running on a Fedora linux installation. That means that my Windows vm is just a bunch of linux files. So, I can use linux tools to back them up, all of which are free. The one I use is rdiff-backup which makes and maintains an up-to-date copy (on an external drive in this case.) Since the copy itself is another vm I can verify it by just mounting and running the vm. Or restore a single file that way. In addition, rdiff-backup maintains negative differentials for whatever period you specify, 30 days in my case. Negative differentials take little space and enable point-in-time restores for the specified period. These are cold backups because rdiff-backup doesn't know anything about keeping Windows' internal states consistent. That wouldn't be useful for a production server, but for home use not a problem.

In addition, Vmware Workstation enables snapshots which I use extensively. Whenever I do any operation that is the least bit risky, like installing new software or doing updates, I take a cold snapshot that allows me to revert to the known good state quickly and reliably without leaving any detritus from the problem-causing software. This ability has proved invaluable many times. For example, I tried a test install of vpn software on my Windows vm for use with a US financial institution. The vpn client created a network device which looks like new hardware causing Windows 7 to announce that I now had to reregister the product code. For complex reasons I would not be able to reregister that product code, although it was genuine. So, this would have been a headache had it been a native installation. Fortunately, I just reverted to my pre-vpn snapshot in minutes and the problem went away. The vpn client runs happily on the router.

In addition to making the odious, but inescapable, Windows easy to manage, running on Vmware enables me to isolate normal browsing, with its inherent threats, to "dirty" linux vms thereby keeping my critical data relatively safe on the Windows vm. On the Windows vm the only browsing I do is to trustworthy financial institutions for which I have accounts. No browsing ever from the underlying fedora installation.

If I had more upload bandwidth the rdiff-backup backups of the critical Windows vm would be encrypted offsite. As it is, I use the Windows backup software duplicati to encrypt and backup to cloud sites daily differentials of only the essential financial data from the Windows vm, but never sensitive data like password managers. I don't trust encryption that much.

The only real limitation to running Windows as a vm is that you can't run programs like Photoshop or Lightroom for which you do need a native Windows installation.

On the whole, this approach is far too complex to recommend to the average user, but with adequate linux experience there's nothing difficult about it. Linux is a lot easier to manage than windows: no licensing, no registration, no registry. When it's time for a new fedora release, just do a fresh install which does not touch my vm files and done. No reinstallation of software.

Part A covers, among many other items, doctor visits when you are an inpatient. If the hospital admits you (for good medical reason) you are covered and the hospital gets paid. Of course it does not cover outpatient treatment---no one is suggesting it does. If you don't have Part B, then yes, you are going to have to pay for outpatient care. It is hospital insurance. I don't know how much clearer it could be. Part A is hospital treatment, with all that this implies---including doctors, surgery, as an inpatient, and even nursing care and home care after you have left the hospital. This is straight from the official Medicare website. Part B is outpatient.

If you have an authoritative source that states that Part A covers doctor's services while an inpatient, please post the link. But the fact is that Part A does not cover such services. You are taking "hospital" in the common sense meaning of everything that takes place in a hospital because that's what "going to the hospital" means to you. In the context of health insurance in general and Medicare in particular, however, "hospital" services do not include the "medical" services which are provided only by doctors.

The following clip flatly and clearly contradicts your belief. If Part A covered all of the costs of hospital stays including doctors, then people wouldn't sign up for Part B.

Medicare Part A (hospital insurance)

Generally called hospital insurance, Part A covers services associated with inpatient hospital care (i.e., the costs associated with an overnight stay in a hospital, skilled nursing facility, or psychiatric hospital, such as charges for the meals, hospital room, and nursing services). Part A also covers hospice care and home health care.

Medicare Part B (medical insurance)

Generally called medical insurance, Part B covers other medical care. Physician care--whether it was received while you were an inpatient at a hospital, at a doctor's office, or as an outpatient at a hospital or other health-care facility--is covered under Part B. In addition, ambulance service, laboratory tests, and physical therapy or rehabilitation services are covered.

http://medicare.org/medicare-program.html

Therefore, without Part B you will not get admitted to a hospital unless you have some other way to pay for the doctors.

I'm fortunate enough not to be living anywhere near the edge, but why throw away $100 per month for a system I'll never use? My life is here and I'll get medical attention here. Medicare part A is free and forms a backup if I should need hospitalisation on an occasional short visit to the US. The sort of repatriation I might need is more likely to be coming back to my home in Thailand, rather than the other way round! Obviously, others will be in different circumstances, but it does depend on individual circumstances.

Part A only covers hospital charges and maybe not all of those. I doubt if any US hospital would admit you without insurance to pay the doctors, medicine, etc. My guess is that Part A is probably completely useless by itself.

Medicare Part A IS hospital insurance. Part A coverage includes "inpatient care at a hospital, skilled nursing facility (SNF), and hospice. Part A also covers services like lab tests, surgery, doctor visits, and home health care". This is a direct quote from the official Medicare web site. Sounds worthwhile to me. Most hospitals accept Medicare as you can see by looking up coverage. Indeed, hospitals which at any time in the past have accepted certain types of Federal funds are legally required to accept Medicare patients and Medicare payment for their services---they don't have a choice. It is more of a problem to find a doctor who will accept Medicare patients, since quite a number do not, but this of course is a problem with Part B, which covers outpatient services, not Part A. Is your "doubt" and "guess" actually based on anything?

I do not claim to understand Medicare and it's quite possible I never will. However, I note that a common sense understanding of "hospital" costs and doctor costs is hardly adequate.

Medicare Part B (Medical Insurance) covers most of your doctor services when you’re an inpatient. You pay 20% of the Medicare-approved amount for doctor services after paying the Part B deductible.

Also, you are an inpatient only when a doctor has ordered your admission to a hospital and the hospital has formally admitted you. Otherwise you are an outpatient even if you are staying overnight in the hospital, for instance, for observation or emergency room treatment, all of which is outpatient and not covered by Part A. Of course, doctor's services in those cases would only be covered by Part B, not Part A.

That being the case, why would a hospital admit you without Part B or some other insurance that would pay for doctor's care?

My expectation is that if you or I are getting treatment in a US hospital, unless we have the full complement of insurance including Medicare Parts A, B & D, or better yet, Medicare Advantage, we are going to be screwed financially. The most we can sign up for as expats is Part A & B. So, that's what I do and that's what I recommend. I do not do so in the belief that it will actually be adequate.

From cms.gov:

https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.medicare.gov%2FPubs%2Fpdf%2F11435.pdf

I'm fortunate enough not to be living anywhere near the edge, but why throw away $100 per month for a system I'll never use? My life is here and I'll get medical attention here. Medicare part A is free and forms a backup if I should need hospitalisation on an occasional short visit to the US. The sort of repatriation I might need is more likely to be coming back to my home in Thailand, rather than the other way round! Obviously, others will be in different circumstances, but it does depend on individual circumstances.

Part A only covers hospital charges and maybe not all of those. I doubt if any US hospital would admit you without insurance to pay the doctors, medicine, etc. My guess is that Part A is probably completely useless by itself.

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And now, no land tax either, according to that unlinkable newspaper. So, the ammart does not want to be taxed on their land or on their inheritances and, they won't be! If there is anyone in the room who still takes seriously the generals' talk of reform, it's time to take the blinders off.

I love it when white old blighters use the world "ammart" - lmao

<snip>

/Mod edit: English is the only acceptable language anywhere on ThaiVisa including Classifieds, except within the Thai language forum, where of course using Thai is allowed.

And now, no land tax either, according to that unlinkable newspaper. So, the ammart does not want to be taxed on their land or on their inheritances and, they won't be! If there is anyone in the room who still takes seriously the generals' talk of reform, it's time to take the blinders off.

You should consider signing up for Part B if there is any chance that you may ever return to the US. If you don't sign up at age 65 and then sign up later you will pay a 10% penalty for each year after age 65 that you failed to sign up. You will pay the penalty until you die. As for Parts C & D and Medicare Advantage you cannot sign up for them unless you reside in the US. Unlike Part B, if you were to repatriate you would have a two month window in which to start Parts C, D, and/or Medicare Advantage without ever having to pay a penalty. So, no incentive to sign up and pay now.

I do not intend at this time to repatriate in the future, but I can't rule it out. So, I signed up for Part B. I would recommend the same to any American expat since we cannot be sure that we will never want or have to return.

I have never seen canned albacore tuna in Thailand.