Guderian

Noooooo! The GF's just been diagnosed with haemorrhoids, lol!

Hardly a freak weather event, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has been recorded having a serious effect on the weather going back to Inca times, so it's got nothing to do with AGW, either. It's what gave us the extraordinarily hot and dry weather for most of this year. Interestingly, it was predicted to peak in the Autumn and possibly result in 2024 being the hottest year on record, but now it looks like this strong El Niño is going to decline unusually rapidly, and things could be back to normal by April.

The air quality has been much better so far this cool season than it has for years. There seems to be a lot less burning going on than in the past, even in Pattaya I haven't noticed the usual suspects starting to burn all their garden rubbish as soon as the rainy season ends. Are they finally starting to enforce the rules on burning garden and agricultural waste?

Nice to see a sensible approach to cutting emissions for a change, all the Western politicians can come up with is to make us all live in 15-minute caves.

The committee members should be reminded that, for someone of Thaksin's status, the only suitable gifts to take are Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh.

So spending is down by almost 10%, big deal, the way prices are going here, inflation will quickly deal with that drop.

The barracks on Drake's Island should do nicely,,, https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/english-island-with-military-barracks-underground-tunnel-hits-market-for-6-million-111618

I wonder how they will increase the taxes on the Western expat community to pay for this? lol

That's hardly surprising if it had been fuelled for the journey from Bahrain to Dhaka, and ended up in Bangkok, 1,500 km further on!

My goodness, finally an admission that the big-spending Chinese, Indians and Malays aren't the only thing that matters, and that not all Western tourists are here for cheap beer, cheap food and sex (no longer cheap, sadly, lol).

It's certainly got worse since this morning in Pattaya. The AQI was a bit over 100 this morning, which you could 'see' as the big condos near me (500-1,000 m away) were a wee bit hazy. This afternoon, Air Visual says the AQI is well over 150, and over 170 in places, and indeed the 36-storey Supalei Mare condo nearby is decidedly hazy, while Unixx a bit further away is almost lost in the murk.

No mystery then why he's getting excited, salivating at the prospect of the rich foreigners sending yet more plane-loads of cash to Thailand for doing nothing, sorry I mean for striving to get to net zero by 2050, yet oddly and sadly failing to come anywhere near it.

I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

Lotus has plenty in its candied fruits section. I use the one on Sukhumvit, and the candied fruits are on the other side of the fresh fruit and vegetables area, before the dairy cabinets. Bags are priced by the kilo but sold with individual weights, so check the price on the bag. The candied pomelo peel is something else, really good. I always make a batch of crystallised ginger in dark chocolate for Christmas, which is why I know what's there at the moment.

And don't forget that you need an up-to-date TM30 before you can apply for a residence certificate, lol. No, really.

I see that TAT's Quality Tourist programme still isn't yielding anything positive then, lol!

There are some excellent specialist doctors in Thailand, and also plenty of incompetent rogues. If I've found one of the excellent ones I don't much care what it costs me, to be honest.

Thanks for the replies, that doesn't sound encouraging.

[SARCASM] It's good news that the RTP are cracking down on this brand new phenomenon of child sexual exploitation in Pattaya, better nip this one in the bud before the City gets a reputation for it. We wouldn't want foreign news channels like the BBC describing our beloved City as an 'industrial scale brothel', after all. It's also a good job that this interest in underage sex is entirely confined to Pattaya, and could never happen anywhere else in Thailand. [/SARCASM]

Really? Nobody has ever used the online booking system? Or were the results so traumatic that you can't bring yourself to tell us about them, lol?

The subtle point I was making is that with targets like these, the TRD has zero chance of squeezing any money out of them, which is maybe why they're likely to focus instead on the expat community which won't yield as much but won't come with the same potential heath risks for the tax inspectors as trying to milk the Thai Pu Yai's.

Maybe that, or if you use one of the agents that insist on a new TM30 every time, like the guy in Soi Post Office who's used by many expats. I sometimes think it's not just different rules for different people, but also for different agents too. OTOH, it may be that some agents themselves aren't sure of the rules so insist on having the maximum amount of paperwork, even if it turns out that it's not actually needed. The agents aren't infallible by any means.

Surely, as we've all recently learnt, if you're living in Thailand for more than 180 days a year then you're tax resident and you're not entitled to a refund, unless your entire taxable income for the year is less than 150K Baht. Or at least that seems like it will be the situation as of 1/1/24. OK, I know the tax bands are a bit more complicated than that, but it was a bit of a pain doing it 10 years ago, I certainly wouldn't bother now.

That wasn't my experience when I returned from a 6-week trip to the UK back in October. I needed a residence certificate to buy a new car, which needed a valid TM30, and the old TM30 slip in my passport from a year or so ago when I found I'd lost the old one (in 20 years here I've only ever done two TM30's), was fine. Of course, it often seems like there's rules for one person and different rules for the next, so you can never be sure.

I come under the Jomtien Immigration Office, and I've seen mixed reports on using the online appointment booking system. Some people say they've booked an appointment, but when they turned up for it they were told to go and join the queue to get a number like everyone else, so what was the point of making a booking? OTOH, I have also seen the rare report of someone who booked an appointment and - apparently - everything went OK. The obvious thing to do would be for me to PM those people and ask for more details of what went right or wrong, but those are posts made over months and no way can I find them again. Anyway, I need to get another annual retirement extension and Jomtien Office is like a zoo at this time of the year, so I thought I might try the online appointment booking system. I assume once you've selected a date and time, it allows you to print out an appointment slip, which you then take to the Immigration Office and bypass the lengthy queues. What happens then though, as you need a queue number that the IO calls when it's your turn, yet I don't think the online system can give you that? As far as I'm aware, at least in Jomtien, only the guy at the first queue desk can issue those, which may be why people who had made appointments were told to go and join the queue there. Or is there some way of getting a queue number when you turn up with your appointment slip without going back to the beginning? I know I could just try it and see, but I don't really want to waste an afternoon travelling there to be told to join a queue backing out of the door onto Soi 5, so if anyone knows how an online appointment translates into a queue number, I'd be grateful if you'd explain what I need to do. Thanks.