Guderian

Absolutely, it's up there in the design awards with British-designed electricity substations supplying "critical pieces of national infrastructure".... lol

With a base rate already not much above zero at 2%, there's not exactly a lot of room for 'aggressive' rate cuts. Unless they want to venture into the realms of deeply negative rates, but that didn't work out too well in the West, and Thailand's rickety banks might not be able to weather the loss of their overnight deposit income, much less pay to make deposits with the BoT. Which leaves massive QE, but with the public debt already being very high how much QE would the markets accept before they trashed the currency? Plus, QE can have a very expensive downside when you try to unwind it, as the Bank of England and Treasury are learning, well over £100 billion in losses are expected. The paper we're not allowed to quote from has a good article, just search for 'economy waiting to hit an iceberg'.

For someone who's supposed to be a high-flying business genius, he doesn't seem to understand much about how finance works. Unless, that is, he regards this as a better alternative to the government paying to help people in debt...

Yeah, but an incident similar to this could also have happened anywhere a dumb lowlife drunk happened to be near a young girl - a village, a condo, a corner of a beach, or a quiet street. By this logic, to avoid similar tragedies Thailand should ban all alcohol sales everywhere.

They need to fix two things before I'd part with a satang in income tax here: 1) Firstly, apply the same rules to your own citizens as you're trying to do to expats. When every single working-age Thai has a TIN and files an annual tax return, then I might consider doing so too. 2) Taxation is a two-way street, if you want to take you need to give something back in return. So, for example, anyone who pays Thai income tax should NOT be treated as a long-stay tourist but as a permanent resident, with the right to own land and access the Thai healthcare system if they want to, and no tedious Immigration reporting or annual visa renewals with all sorts of bells and whistles attached. As the situation stands, they're trying to take expats living here for suckers, applying strict rules for foreigners and extremely lax ones for Thais, milking pensioners for all they've got and giving nothing back in return. More fool you if you're willing to accept that.

Never say that the news is all doom and gloom! lol

Glad to see it's going to be in Chonburi (City) and not Pattaya (City), lol. If they'd said Nongprue or Banglamung, I'd have been worried.

The northern end of Patong Beach, July 2000, and not a Russian in sight I should think. I even used to rent the occasional jet ski with never a problem. After a hard day on the beach, I trekked back to Soi Bangla for a few well-earned frosties in The Shipwreck, opposite Soi Crocodile. I haven't been to Phuket for 23 years so I've no idea if these places still exist or not. Well, I'm sure Patong Beach and Soi Bangla do, but not the bars I used to frequent, lol.

People used to wonder the same thing about football hooliganism.

Mot herself is fine, but the English guy who usually answers the phone doesn't know his gluteus maximus from his elbow. A few years ago I asked him about getting the visa stamp transferred from my old passport to a new one and he insisted that I had to go to the British Embassy in Bangkok to get a letter confirming that the new passport was genuine. I told him that they won't issue those letters any more, I had a copy of the notice from the embassy saying so, but he was adamant that he was in Immigration every day doing these visa transfers and you have to have a letter from the embassy. So I just went and did it myself, free of charge and with no problems or requests for a letter. That was when I started getting sceptical about using agents, they claim they know everything but are often poorly informed, so I mostly do everything myself again nowadays. I also saw on another forum that Maneerat was giving people incorrect information about the requirements for the TM30. I knew the info was wrong as it didn't agree with my experience and it was also confirmed in a topic about TM30's on the Visa section here on AN. Maybe if they put a bit of effort in and bothered keeping themselves up to date on the latest developments I might be willing to hand over 5K or 10K Baht, but not any longer as things stand.

Turtles are so yesterday.... the bête célébrée du jour nowadays is clearly the Butterbear! lol

Swiss druggies, Swiss kicking lady Thai doctors, Swiss with a pack of vicious dogs biting locals and foreigners.... in the news for all the wrong reasons. The Brits need to work a lot harder at their bad behaviour as they're being eclipsed by the Swiss right now! lol

No need to poison the dogs, it's the owner who's at fault. Feed him some poisoned Gruyere instead... lol.

In my experience, many tourists have been calling for alcohol sales sanity for at least the 20-odd years I've been living in Pattaya. Why are they only now paying any attention. is their non-tourism economy really that dire?

This is basically why Khun Thaksin was so desperate to avoid actually spending any time in prison, he really didn't want some large, tattooed, muscle-bound inmates to commit suicide on him. lol

I'll wait until they open one closer to Pattaya. In the meantime, I can get reasonably-priced bags of frozen Swedish meatballs from Villa and Ikea lingonberry jam from Lazada so I'm happy acting the Swedish chef myself,,, ah, hergy dergy bergy....lol.

Now maybe they can also stop the ridiculous practice of all the civilian politicians dressing up in military uniforms. It was fair enough for loong Prayuth, because he actually was a soldier, but Srettha's a businessman, a suit and tie would be much more sensible.

The story makes it sound as if Pattaya City Council is just some innocent bystander in all of this, waiting wide-eyed to see what the authorities decide. The reality is rather different.

The mossies this year seem to be worse than ever, so I'm thinking of getting someone in to fog the garden for the first time ever. My usual pest control guy doesn't do this. I see that several companies like Rentokil and Pest Control Pattaya offer the service, but no prices. Does anyone know roughly what they charge for a modest garden, a 110 tw plot but more than half of that is taken up by the house? Any experience or recommendations?

Thanks Sheryl, do you have any idea of the price of the laser treatment at Siriraj? Not an exact figure, but is it about the same as Rezum, or more expensive, or a lot more expensive? Thanks.

A 62-year-old guy taking on a young and fit Thai security guard, probably trained in Muay Thai? He either has big balls or a small brain, lol.

I know a guy who had Rezum done at BHP a while back and he was very pleased with the outcome. That was maybe two years ago and I haven't heard recently how he's getting on. I had a look at the BHP website about it and they said you'd need to get it repeated every 2 to 5 years. Since the guy paid 200,000 Baht for it and I think the price is now 220 000 Baht, that's really a bit too much to have to fork out every two years or so. A friend in the UK had the laser treatment done 6 months ago, which involved a night as an inpatient. Is that available in Thailand, and does it last longer than the steam treatment?

Nice of the Thais to shave their beards off, saved their Chinese masters doing it once the poor sods are in chains.

Siamburi's stocks some of their products. I just tried the lamb Kofta and it was very good, nicely spiced. Not cheap but worth the money.

Sadly, it's far from a problem that's confined to Thailand. This one in the UK had an even worse outcome yesterday. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86pp14j0dxo