bkk_mike

Look at the suggestion of RFK for health secretary. Here's an anti-vaxxer with a death count behind him.

Rules of origin mean most of the mechanical components won't be made in China, because so much of the electronics is imported, they have to use enough local parts to still sell it globally as an EU car. That's why the EU and UK are having problems with meeting rules of origin on EVs - because they're importing batteries...

Petrol cars are literally 100 times more likely to go on fire than an EV. And lithium batteries don't explode. That's petrol tanks you're thinking of. But lithium battery fires are really hard to put out once they start, so they make the news as people can arrive with their cameras 15 minutes later and they're still burning, where a petrol/diesel car fire will either have been put out, or all the fuel will have been burned up by the time the cameras arrive. And for EVs, you have the choice of LFP which is a little bit larger for the amount of charge, but doesn't catch fire even as much as regular EVs. Let alone as much as petrol cars.

Your investments are in cash? Not something that goes up, at least in line with inflation, like property, or stocks, or even gold, which was the chart you published.

Choices are, risk running an unpatched operating system with no security updates... - not a great idea if you're connecting to the internet with it. Update to Windows 11. Can still be done even if you technically don't meet the minimum requirements, but probably only viable if it's not ridiculously old. I.e. I have a PC with a first gen Ryzen, and a Dell tiny PC hooked up to the TV that's 6th gen. They're probably candidates for that, although, for the Ryzen, I could just replace the processor. Anything older than that, I've already replaced... But depending what you use it for..., Linux would work.

We pay the maid and gardener by bank transfer. Cash is for the tolls (we have a pass, but currently only one pass and two cars. And if the wife and I both go out, guess who doesn't get the pass...)

If it's a foreign credit card, it's borrowing, so untaxed in Thailand. I would expect that loophole will get closed at some point.

Brexit It's costing the country £2 billion a week. The money to replace that has to come from somewhere.

I'd struggle to get by on £86,000 p.a. in London. I left because I was getting annoyed because of the sheer amount of tax I was paying there (because I earned my income - it was all taxable...) Admittedly, I couldn't use expenses to pay rent for a place in central London.

A lot of the nurses and doctors in Thailand can't leave. Being a doctor is one of the things where the government will actually subsidise students to study abroad (you never wondered why the doctors all have good English), but as part of that agreement, they have to practice in Thailand (usually in a government hospital - at least part of the time). They do have the option of paying the government back, with interest, if they leave before their time is up. But most don't. By the time the clock is run down, they'll have families and status in the local hospitals, etc. It's also the case that, around the time that they're no longer required to stay, they may get quite a large pay rise.

UK can't be a banana republic - because you can't grow bananas in the UK (without a heated greenhouse).

Maybe a banner ad on the page where you check how much pension you're going to receive stating that if you retire abroad (depending on the country), your pension won't go up in line with inflation each year. People who watch Emmerdale or Coronation Street aren't exactly the demographic that intend to leave the country.

So you wanted to have veterans get Legionnaires disease, rather than the asylum seekers. Bibby Stockholm was converted into accommodation to house the homeless in 1992. Do you think, given it's intended usage, that no expense was spared in the method of construction? I think it far more likely that every expense was spared. And the barge wasn't new when it was converted into accommodation.

Your pension reverts back to your old frozen pension when you leave the UK again. It doesn't reset to the new level. You have to keep spending 183 days in the UK each year (or some other country where the pension isn't frozen) to stop it falling back to the original frozen amount.

It's not exactly advertised that if you retire to certain countries your state pension will be frozen. But the problem is only likely to get worse as the people who used to retire to Spain for more sunshine and a lower cost of living, especially those with too little income to get a Spanish retirement visa, start to look further afield for a place where they can live with more sunshine, and a lower cost of living than the UK. I know it's going to happen to me (when I get too old to do the 183 days a year in the UK and decide to stop flying back and forth). But I'm not even retired yet, and a state pension is not going to be my only source of income.