
Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand - znq
http://blog.mobilejazz.com/working-remotely-from-a-tropical-island-in-thailand/
======
ben_pr
I'm in Puerto Rico, moved here from the states two years ago.

There are a number of tax incentives for people wanting to start tech
companies here. Google Puerto Rico Act 20.

Short version: "Act 20 offers a four (4)% corporate tax rate for Puerto Rican
businesses providing services for exportation, 100% tax-exempt dividends from
earnings and profits derived from the export services income of eligible
businesses, and a 60% exemption on municipal taxes."

Eligible businesses include IT software development.

Besides the tax benefits there are a lot of other things to like here.

~~~
jreed91
I just traveled there for a vacation and fell in love. Any places to look for
those wanting to find jobs in PR?

~~~
ben_pr
Best to find a job in the states that lets you work remotely. I have not had
any problems with the internet here either DSL or cable.

For the most part of the year it is the same time as ET zone so it works out
nicely for east coast jobs.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Can I just clarify - you work remotely for NY finance industry, at presumably
near NY rates, paying 4% coproation tax and no tax on dividends from that
income?

With tropical weather.

What's the schooling like?

~~~
johnm1019
If you're a US citizen it's not so easy. You are taxed on your worldwide
income no matter what. There is a deduction for living abroad on the first
$100,800 (2015) of income or you can also take a credit for income taxes paid
to another country. You also need to pay into SS and Medicare either in the US
or in another country which we have a treaty with. Don't get me wrong, getting
the first $101k @ 4% tax sounds pretty good! Just want to make it clear that
US citizens will pay taxes to Uncle Sam no matter where you try and hide.

~~~
airmondii
Puerto Rico is not a foreign country so these rules you cited don't apply. If
you are a bone-fide PR resident, you don't owe federal tax (FICA still
applies). However Act 20 (and Act 22) are recent changes to try to bring more
job creator-types to the island.

------
eyeareque
I worked remotely from Tahiti for a few months. It was an amazing experience
that I'll always cherish. Now I just need to convince my new boss to let me do
this again somewhere else.

For those of you in the pacific time zone (sf bay). If you're interested in
doing this, I recommend Tahiti or Hawaii. It's three hours off from pacific
time during the summer months but only 2 hours off during winter. You can
easily work a local time of 6-3 which would be 8-5 in PT. This gives you the
rest of the day to enjoy paradise.

A tip on how to convince your boss to let you do this: Plan to go on a two
week vacation somewhere. When asking for time off, ask your boss if they mind
you working remotely for a couple weeks following your vacation. It might just
work--and like in my case I found out that my boss didn't care if I stayed
longer.

~~~
iolothebard
Lol, 8am Pacific Time. If the developers I worked with were in by 10am scrum I
was surprised.

I called it CA time. Roll in at 10am, 1.5-2 hour lunch, surprisingly most
everyone gone at 5pm because kids or something else.

My coworkers would ask me how many hours I was working, to which I'd reply 40.
How many are you working?

~~~
slayed0
I am a developer in SF and work in finance. We are all in the office before
6am PT to be ready for the market-open at 6:30am. No one leaves for lunch as
the market is still open. These things change quite a bit industry to
industry, shop to shop. It's not necessarily a developer thing, just a
business culture thing.

~~~
toomuchtodo
That actually sounds terrible :/ Quality of life and all that jazz.

~~~
slayed0
Well I get off work at about 2:45pm which leaves ~5 hours of daylight after
work. I go to bed at about 9pm and feel much better than I ever have energy-
wise. You can argue that these were not choices I got to make, and maybe I
just have stocklholm syndrome, but I sure do not miss browsing the internet
until late into the night and waking up groggy every day. Plus on the weekends
I wake up with the sunrise, which actually is sleeping in for me, and get much
more out of the day. If you have flexible working hours I highly recommend
forcing a schedule like this on yourself for a few months. I think most people
would find they feel much happier and energetic.

~~~
getsat
Where do you work, if I may ask? This kind of arrangement would actually make
living near and working in SF tolerable. No traffic getting into/out of the
city at those times.

~~~
slayed0
Because of the way financial institutions like ours are regulated, it would
actually be a SEC violation to mention the name here (silly I know but it can
technically be considered a form of marketing and we are very restricted in
the ways we can market). I put my email address on my profile page if you
would like to discuss further.

------
bart42_0
It sounds and looks very nice. I have two questions:

1) Why did't they move to one of the Canary Islands? Part of Spain, Barcelona
is a part of it. Less hassle because you stay in Europe, same language, same
culture as in Barcelona. I rent a flat (70m2, furnished, 500m from the
palmtree-beach, €500 /month), in the center of the capital on one of the
islands, the internet connection is reasonable. Sounds comparable to Thailand.

2) How long did they stay in Thailand, was it a 2 month project-move or a
multiple-year company move?

~~~
znq
Hey, I'm one of the co-founders who runs Mobile Jazz.

To answer your questions:

1) We actually wanted to experience a new culture and also have some kind of
adventure. We're already doing things in Spain, so we just wanted to try out
something new and see how it works :-)

2) This was only a 2 month experiment, but our whole company is set up for
remote work. So some of us continuously travel and work from different places.
Myself I've been living in a camper van for a year now (blog post pending
;-)), but this was the first experiment where we actually rented two houses
offshore and moved a bunch of people there.

Since then we also had another experiment. We spent some time in the Austrian
Alps for skiing. We'll write about it soon.

And the next thing we want to do is actually in Spain (in the mountains) and
then we're planning to go to Mauritius for a month or so.

~~~
bart42_0
Ok, clear.

It can be a great way to run project in a lovely pressure cooker. Everybody
7days per week involved/committed without the distraction of homely nuisances.

I'm very interested in your camper-van-blogpost

And Mauritius is great!

~~~
normloman
Do you realize how evil that could sound? "I can force everyone to work 7 days
per week by moving them to an island, miles away from their friends and
family."

If you need people to work 7 days per week, that's a problem. Hire more
people, or set longer deadlines. Emergencies happen, but working late for a
whole week or more is a systemic, productivity and morale sapping flaw.

But you're right. Mauritius is great!

~~~
bart42_0
No, you can't force. But you can put a team close together, they don't have to
work more than 8hrs/day. But if they meet on weekends, on trips, bbq's, there
wil be shoptalk. That is good for the project. In most cases. I used to work
for an 'offshore pipeline desig company' hard work, drinks on friday evening,
family BBQ on Saturday. Lots of fun, and everybody was ALWAYS talking about
kids, dogs and work.

~~~
normloman
I don't see anything wrong with team events, as long as they are optional.
People should be encouraged to have interests outside of work. It promotes a
healthy work/life balance, and discourages groupthink. The occasional team
building event can be great for morale, but be respectful of people's
obligations.

Your original post talked about relocating so team members could spend 7 days
a week committed to the project. That goes far beyond a weekend BBQ.

------
neindanke
Is what they're doing legal? I'm pretty sure a tourist visa means you can't
use it for work (activities for which payment is received or capital is
gained), even remote work. I'm told that the Thai government is pretty harsh
in punishing such things.

~~~
znq
We were there on holidays ;-)

But I know what you're talking and while what we're doing is technically a
gray zone, what the government is after is mostly freelancers that basically
live in Thailand, but are not paying taxes there and are constantly on a visa
run to re-enter the country.

~~~
neindanke
> We were there on holidays ;-)

No, you stated you were working. From your article's title: "Working Remotely
From A Tropical Island In Thailand"

> what we're doing is technically a gray zone

Did you file a tax statement and did you pay any taxes on income earned while
you were residing in Thailand?

~~~
znq
> No, you stated you were working

Noticed the smiley?

Nevertheless, how do you differentiate between holidays and work and where to
draw the line? If you're responding to a work emails while being on holidays,
does that count towards the taxable income in that country you're visiting?

> Did you file a tax statement and did you pay any taxes on income earned
> while you were residing in Thailand?

Absolutely. We're not evading taxes. All income is taxed in Spain. And we
weren't residing in Thailand. We were only visiting it and happened to also do
some things that were related to our business back home in Europe. The work we
did had nothing to do with Thailand itself.

I'm not an international tax specialist, but at least from a moral point of
view I don't see that we did something wrong.

In European countries for example you only become a tax resident if you spend
more than 183 days there.

EDIT: formatting

~~~
ashconnor
>In European countries for example you only become a tax resident if you spend
more than 183 days there.

Pity Thais cannot easily come to Spain and work illegally. Despite what you've
said it's blatant public abuse of the tourist visa system in Thailand.

Honestly when I see blog posts like this my opinion of the author and company
goes down considerably. Breaking the rules and publishing the fact that you
are makes me question what other grey areas you'd operate in.

~~~
znq
Actually Thai people can do exactly the same.

While from a legal perspective it might be all correct what you're saying, I
think that most people simply have more important matters to worry about.

For example, it's also illegal to cross a red traffic light as a pedestrian at
3am in the night on a deserted street. That doesn't mean that it is immoral or
that it causes harm to anyone.

And I wouldn't even want to know all the "illegal" things you're doing that
you are not even aware of. Just saying.

~~~
wila
> Actually Thai people can do exactly the same.

Not really. Thai people do not easily get a tourist visa for visiting Europe.
There's a whole bunch of constraints to keep them out.

------
codingdave
My company works 100% remotely, and some people have lives more compatible
with adventures like this than others. Most people will travel freely, working
from wherever they are. We don't even tell each other when we travel for the
most part... in our day to day operations, it just doesn't matter if I am in
my home office, in my parent's kitchen in Florida, or in a hotel in another
country.

But we also do all have families with their own lives, so we have a stable
home somewhere, and spend the majority of our time at that home. We also get
into a working rhythm at our home, which gets disrupted with travel and
adjustments to a new working environment, so when we really need top
effectiveness for a project, it works better from "home", at least in our
experience.

~~~
znq
That was one of the problems we actually described in our blog post about the
Thailand experience. It took as us while to actually find out rhythm (simple
things like finding food, doing laundry, etc.) and that was taking a lot of
our energy and time in the beginning.

And then once you're set up and feel 'home' in that new place it's already
time to leave again. So the biggest learning experience for us is to stay
longer next time.

~~~
borgia
>That was one of the problems we actually described in our blog post about the
Thailand experience. It took as us while to actually find out rhythm (simple
things like finding food, doing laundry, etc.) and that was taking a lot of
our energy and time in the beginning.

Would it not be wise then to send someone ahead to scope these things out? As
in, you're planning to have a team move to X, send someone to X two weeks in
advance to sort out logistics, get internet dongles, map out places to eat, do
laundry, etc?

Rather than having whole teams trying to sort it out on arrival.

I think what you've offered is great btw. The criticism being leveled on you
here is pretty unfair and I'm not sure what is behind it. It's of great
benefit to the locals to have westerners on western salaries come in for a
month or two, spend maniacally on local resources and then leave.

The argument against it is well you should be incorporating there and
providing the locals with jobs and that's nice in theory but unfeasible in
reality, and all those tourist bucks create and supply the locals with plenty
of jobs in themselves.

------
rdl
I've always wanted to do this, but the objection raised is "how does this work
for people with families?" (partner with a job is one thing, let alone kids).

~~~
bart42_0
In most cases the kids will have a ball in a different country

~~~
Hytosys
I predict there is much more to parenthood besides fostering adventure,
unfortunately. Educational and social stability come to mind. Relocating your
family for two entire months is easier said than done.

~~~
obstacle1
The kids get two months off every summer. Take them then. Consider it a
vacation.

The most capable, adaptable, and accomplished adults I know moved around a
bunch as kids. It forces you to learn how to live in the world and get out of
your comfort zone. The most anxious, bitter, and underperforming adults I know
grew up in the prototypical suburban bubble environment. End meaningless
personal anecdote.

~~~
gbog
Well, I know of some people whose parent moved from one city to another every
year, for professional reasons. And they had hard time building long term
relationship with kids of their age, which means having a childhood with
mostly adults "friends", and it is not good for everyone apparently.

I still agree, and in fact kids are often more adaptable than adults. Usually
they can handle change, and it is good for the mind to experience different
worlds.

------
nthState
I've always dreamed of having a company (that was making money) where I could
relocate my team once a month every month to a different place on the planet.

London, Tokyo, Singapore, China, San Francisco, Iceland, France, Germany,
Russia, Australia, India, Canada...

We could be a travelling startup.

That would be so cool!

~~~
normloman
Yeah but then you'd need a team who'd travel with you. And few people can just
pack up and move every month. If you have kids, you'll want to keep them in
the same school. Or you might be tied down to care for a family member. I
would never leave my area for long because it's where all my friends live.

It's simpler to have a remote company. Then you can take all the trips you
want, and your team can work from wherever they want.

~~~
iolothebard
Bah, everyone's in their 20 with no family!

~~~
normloman
The more time I spend here, the more I suspect that HN is populated with
single 20 year olds with no friends or family. Thus, they create a "work
family" to fill their social needs. The result is insular teams with mandatory
beer pong tournaments.

~~~
72deluxe
I am not in my 20s and I do have a family, but that's a feeling I get here
too! There also appears to be a strong dislike of older proven languages
(don't ever mention the word C++) and a faddish obsession with newer younger
languages. Perhaps it goes with the crowd?

Or are my conclusions inaccurate?

~~~
Svenstaro
Eh frankly I think we all pretty much like modern C++ here judging by the
posts that get upvoted.

~~~
72deluxe
Must be my inaccurate conclusions then! I must just be seeing the hatred for
C++, typically with 1998 examples attached to illustrate how "dangerous" the
language is.

------
gbog
I can't stop thinking that this seemingly nice story is in fact the story of a
failure. How many employees did learn Thai? How many did decide there was no
better place for them and stayed there? How many did find their so in this
island? Why didn't the whole team stay there indefinitely?

I say that as a French who decided ten years ago that China was my place,
learnt the language, married a Chinese woman and have kids and job in Beijing
with no special return plan.

~~~
socialist_coder
Your goal was completely different.

They like living in Spain / wherever else they live. They also like travelling
to other countries. They're taking a vacation and working from a new place,
for a short time. They don't want to live there.

~~~
byoung2
It also may not be possible to live there permanently and work because of visa
and residency restrictions. I wanted to move to the Philippines a few years
back (my wife is from Manila), but in researching I found it would be
difficult to live and work there as a US citizen. There are classes of visa
that allow you to live there and start companies (e.g. SIRV [1]), but they
usually require a large deposit (~$75,000 USD) and a lot of strict
requirements. There is also a retirees visa (SRRV [2]) which is a little
cheaper ($20,000 locked in for duration or $50,000 convertible to domestic
investment), but you have to be 35 or older (which I am as of 2 months ago).

1\. [http://philippinevisalawyer.com/?q=special-investor-
resident...](http://philippinevisalawyer.com/?q=special-investor-resident-
visa-sirv)

2\.
[http://www.pra.gov.ph/main/srrv_program?page=1](http://www.pra.gov.ph/main/srrv_program?page=1)

------
needaremotegig
I'm a software engineer in Thailand who is working on a startup while doing
some part-time consulting.

I started consulting in the last few months, and my biggest client has
recently had to delay payment because they don't have enough money. I've also
been applying to a few gigs on gun.io, and one proposal was accepted, but
they've just pulled out. They need some more time to scope out the idea before
starting development.

Living overseas is awesome if you have a stable job or a lot of savings, but
it can be pretty terrifying otherwise. So I'm in a bit of a jam at the moment,
and would like to ask for your help with finding a one-off or part-time gig to
stay afloat. I've already tried most of the remote job sites [1].

I'm a Rails developer with over 5 years of experience and I'm competent with
front-end development, most JavaScript frameworks, and DevOps. I also have 6
months of full-time experience with iOS development, in Swift and Objective-C.
One other thing is that I really enjoy debugging, and am pretty good at
tracking down difficult bugs. If you or one of your developers are stuck on
anything, I'd be happy to take a look. No payment until it's fixed.

My rate is $150 per hour, and is not negotiable. I can usually commit to 20
hours per week, but I will be available for full-time work (up to 60 hours per
week) over the next few weeks.

Please leave a comment if you have any advice. If you would like to get in
touch and view my GitHub profile, then please send me an email at
needaremotegig@gmail.com

[1]: [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-
job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)

~~~
hajrice
>> So I'm in a bit of a jam at the moment, and would like to ask for your help
with finding a one-off or part-time gig to stay afloat. I've already tried
most of the remote job sites [1].

>> My rate is $150 per hour, and is not negotiable. I can usually commit to 20
hours per week, but I will be available for full-time work (60 hours per week)
over the next few weeks.

So you're stuck in Thailand, turn to help on Hacker news, and then mention how
"My rate is $150 per hour, and is not negotiable."

Not sure how many people you'll attract with this strategy.

~~~
needaremotegig
I'm hoping to attract serious clients who value high-quality work.

I do have a little bit of a buffer. My client's site is also profitable, so
they'll be able to pay me in the next few weeks. But I'll have to ease back
the hours with them, so am looking for some more projects.

~~~
borgia
A company in most states across the US and throughout the entirety of Europe
could pay a full time staff member with the same skills and experience you
have the same amount you want per week ($3k) to work full time for them with
significantly less hassle involved.

I think it's obvious why you're finding demand to be so low when you've set
your price so high.

The amount you want for 60 hours a week ($9k) could get two extremely
experienced engineers and provide them with a massive bonus incentive on top
of their salary almost anywhere in the world.

It comes across as a bit delusional.

~~~
needaremotegig
I understand where you're coming from.

I've been working with my current client for the last 3 months. He brought me
on at $150 per hour after he had to fire his previous contractors, and I've
been cleaning up their mess ever since. I've heard of quite a few situations
like this, but I'm sure that there are cheaper developers out there who are
doing great work.

Demand for part-time + remote jobs seems to be pretty low in general, but I
don't think my rate is the issue.

I am able to charge this much because of my experience with startups, and my
open source contributions. I was an early engineer at a startup which is now
worth over $500 million, and I'm currently the CTO at my own startup.

Obviously networking is one of my major weaknesses, and I need to work on
that.

~~~
hughstephens
As someone hiring some people* remote, your rate is at the way way top end of
the scale. Even for people with core experience in Node (where I'm hiring).

I get what you're saying, but as an employer, the "non negotiable" and
inflexible attitude is a point-blank no for me. Your OS contributions (caveat:
spent 2 minutes looking) are hardly much (lists on github are not 'valuable
programming', to me it's just content marketing that may as well be on a blog)
compared to people asking for 1/2 to 2/3 of your proposed salary, who have
core contribs, manage production-deployed packages/code that are in frequent
use etc.

Your mileage may vary, so best of luck. But that's my perspective, as an
employer, looking for remote devs. The competition is actually pretty high,
and you can get awesome candidates that might earn $120-160k a year when
working in the valley for $80-120k due to the lower costs they can incur
('valley tax') and the flexibility you offer as a remote employer.

Don't get me wrong, I know the value of a high-priced consultant (am/was one)
to fix an emergency. But you're not asking people to deliver you an emergency,
you're asking for a job. And to deliver in an emergency, you need a hell of a
lot more credibility and slickness, which your post suggest you don't have.

* might be one, might be more. Depends on who applies and what it looks like.

~~~
needaremotegig
Thanks for your feedback! For what it's worth, that's not my GitHub account. I
just posted that list of remote working resources.

------
b1twise
I work remote, and worked even more remotely for a year. Yeah, this was just a
2mo bit of fun. Great. But longer stays in Thailand quickly run into
immigration law.

If you're having power outages or brownouts, you want voltage regulators and
UPS'. Bad power will wreck your electronics. It's good to have a backup
internet connection as well. I've had outages lasting up to 3 weeks, and what
are you really going to do about it to motivate a telephone company to work
faster?

The 37signals people created a short book about working remotely. At about the
same time as I was having problems with someone not overlapping their hours
with the rest of the team, their book pointed out the same issue. If you don't
overlap, people will become isolated in a very bad way. If you hire someone
you just have to clarify the expected hours upfront.

------
socialist_coder
This is great.

My startup is really similar. We also value people over profits (and we're
profitable!), we all work remotely, and we all meetup in random places for a
few weeks so we can get a vacation plus some face-to-face working time in.

So far, it's been awesome. We've only done 1 meetup so far, at a ski chalet in
the Alps, and it was great. The significant others & kids came for 1 week, and
then we had 2 weeks of just the employees.

The biggest challenge is definitely the internet. When you have 6 people in a
house all trying to pull/push from git, sync dropbox, do skype calls, etc; it
can put quite a burden on whatever crappy DSL the vacation house has
installed.

We would love to do a SE Asia work trip but so far we have ignored the region
due to the internet connectivity. I'm actually really surprised that the
mobile internet there was good enough for you guys to work with.

Cheers, and keep it up! It's nice to see there are more startups like this out
there.

~~~
stephenr
Why would you assume SE Asia has worse internet connectivity options than
other countries? the _vast_ majority of people here use _just_ a smartphone or
maybe a tablet to access the internet. 3G is fairly ubiquitous, 4G is in major
locations, and data is relatively cheap. (I don't bother with a local Sim when
I go back to Australia - it's literally cheaper to roam and use data via my
Thai SIM than to pay for Telstra prepaid)

~~~
socialist_coder
Because when travelling through SE Asia previously, the wifi was generally
terrible. I didn't realize the mobile data was that good.

------
rogerbinns
Expensify take the whole company somewhere every year. Big picture about it
[http://blog.expensify.com/2013/10/25/ceo-friday-how-to-
take-...](http://blog.expensify.com/2013/10/25/ceo-friday-how-to-take-your-
whole-company-overseas-and-live-to-tell-the-tale/)
[http://we.are.expensify.com/offshoring/](http://we.are.expensify.com/offshoring/)

There are reports in the archives [http://blog.expensify.com/category/company-
life/](http://blog.expensify.com/category/company-life/) including Portugal,
Croatia, Thailand, Vietnam ...

------
zingar
500 EUR per room seems like a lot, and not just for Thailand. I'm planning a
holiday in France, I have a two bedroom place booked for more or less the same
price near the beach in Marseille (monthly rate on AirBnB, not the cheapest
option either). I'll also be visiting Prague where I see places for half that.
My home in Cape Town is a very well situated two bedroom flat, also half that
price.

~~~
geomark
That IS a lot of money in Thailand. But the truth is that nice stuff in
Thailand costs a lot more than what most foreigners think. Sure, you can rent
a one-room condo in a cheap part of Bangkok for less than 100 EUR a month, and
eat cheap street food for 1 EUR a meal. But that gets old fast. Resort
destinations that are popular with foreigners are pricey. The photos in the
article show a nice looking house in a popular destination so I'm not
surprised at the cost. Cheap food is cheap but when you want a nice steak be
prepared to pay 3X what you would in the US (local beef is horrid so imported
is the only reasonable choice). Nice bottle of wine 5X what you pay in France.
At least seafood is about the same as western prices, which is to say a little
pricey. And if you decide to stop being a tourist working on your holiday
(which is all that digital nomads really are) and stay longer you will want to
buy larger ticket items. You will find that electronics are higher priced and
vehicles are 2X to 3X the price compared to the west.

~~~
stephenr
If you come to Thailand and try to live a western lifestyle of course it's
going to be expensive.

------
NanoWar
I think you can go even cheaper in Thailand, though.

~~~
technomancy
I laughed at the "10 euros a meal" part; that would be a week's worth of
dinners out where I live in Thailand.

------
hustlebz
TIL: the startup world loves sunny beach locations.

Just posted an article about the blue house doing a similar thing in Morocco
(or at least providing a framework for startups to do so in tropical
locations):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9347228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9347228)

------
oinksoft
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Pg85UES...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Pg85UESFms0J:blog.mobilejazz.com/working-
remotely-from-a-tropical-island-in-thailand/&hl=en&gl=se&strip=1)

------
yallahaline
Funny, I saw a similar post on HN today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9347228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9347228)

It's about a startup residence in Morocco, startups came and work there for
one month

------
ar7hur
Do any of you guys have children?

~~~
znq
Many of us have families and on this particular trip to Thailand those people
stayed back home in Europe.

However for the trip we did just recently to the Austrian Alps pretty much
everyone joined. But that was also a lot shorter and the focus was more on
skiing/snowboarding than on doing work.

------
nathan_f77
About to do the same thing in Chiang Mai where my wife will be teaching
English. Really enjoying Bangkok so far, but want to check out some of these
remote islands sometime soon.

------
plg
a comment by way of someone (me) who is getting a bit on in age... nice idea,
but what about medical care? being in a large north american city, access to
high quality and high-end medical care is something that I've taken advantage
of several times and it sure makes me sleep better at night

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geomark
I've been living in Thailand for more than 10 years and have had a few major
medical events. Medical care here in Thailand is far better than what I
experienced in the U.S. The quality of care at private hospitals (and the
country's central public hospital Siriraj) are generally excellent. And the
cost is a fraction of the U.S. plus you actually know the cost going in
instead of the run-around bait-and-switch hide-the-price until it is submitted
to the insurance company game that is the U.S.

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lazyant
$20 helmets hmm, I guess it's better than nothing.

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znq
Those were already the best they had available on the island ;-)

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lazyant
Glad that you are setting an example ATGATT Salut

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alazar
Are there spiders?

