REGULARS
“Too good” life insurance?
“How many widows have you met who thought their husbands had too much life insurance?
I have been to quite a few “wakes” in the old country and at most of them the grieving widows, who knew I sold life insurance, were, in the midst of their grieving' too embarrassed to talk to me.
When I had approached them about buying life insurance the standard response had nearly always been “Life insurance? - Oh we have enough. ” Enough for what? I would reply and that was usually as far as the conversation ever got.
Twice I had attended “wakes” where the deceased had a few years earlier purchased a life insurance policy to provide financial protection for their families. I can tell you know that despite the attendance of far-flung relatives, I was the most welcome person at those funerals. I realize it's not a great boast to say I am the star man at many funerals.
I know this is a dull subject and very few expat's like to talk about their demise. But the reality is that most “Farangs” who are married to local Thai women are a lot older than their wives and in the natural order of things will die many years before their wives.
Some “farangs” will say. “My wife will have no real problem when I pass on. She can go back to the farm in Issan and the children can work there or in Bangkok and give her the support she will need. Count yourself lucky girls that this is not your husband.
Others will say, “May mi pen ha”. My wife will have the house or condo which is paid for and she will inherit $200,000 from my will and a little pension of 5,000 baht a month.”
Just imagine that you have two children a girl age 2 and a boy age 3. If you are a normal parent you will want the very best for them in the future. If they are smart enough you may want to send them to university in Europe or the USA . The girl might want piano lessons, pony riding and foreign holidays with her school friends. The boy might be a good sportsman, likes playing golf, tennis and for sure would like to go to England sometime to see a Premier League game or go to see the Red Sox play baseball in America . You may want to buy them their first car or help them with the deposit of their new house when they get into their twenties.
The reality is that if you can live for the next twenty-five years you can provide for all the little expenses of family life and provide the upbringing that we may have missed out on. Surely each generation tries to improve the lot of the next - especially for your own children.
If you have two small children and you had died last night do you really think your widow could provide the financial security for your family that you can now? I don't think so - even with the mortgage paid and the 200,000 inherited. It is very likely that you could have provided all the above if you had lived but time ran out.
What life insurance does is provide time. To calculate what you should be insured for work out the family's annual expenses now and the projected expenses in the future. Let's say you think your wife and family would need $40,000 a year in ten years time not just to live on but to fulfil your objectives for your children then an investment that would at 5% give that amount annually would amount to insuring yourself for US$800,000.
You may not be able to provide the emotional support that every family needs but is that any reason why you should not supply the financial support? When your children are adults they will know what you did for them
Of course if you and your wife are both in your sixties and are grandparents then in reality you have no need for life cover. The critical years are the first twenty-five after having your first child.
Most life cover needs a comprehensive medical check up and with the insurance I have in mind, that is done at Baumangrad Hospital totally paid for by the insurance company.
Someone once said to me you know Jerry if you flake out and leave behind small children then your wife will have several choices. She and your children could try and get support from the state. Another choice is she could ask relatives for some financial support or she could have forced you to buy life insurance in your lifetime and finish up self-supporting. For someone from the west to leave their family in penury when they could have provided for them to me amounts to almost criminal neglect.
After all life insurance is not “if insurance” it's “when insurance”.
Appreciate your comments to jerry@swissinvestcenter.net
d'Geek
Get your fix of technological innovations and keep up to date with the news from the world of computers, gadgets and toys for boys in this month's d'Geek.
HD DVD - Blu ray?
A difficult choice for those of us only happy when we can boast about having the latest hardware. Blu-ray appears to have the edge in the newest generation of video hardware, but it's still up in the air. If you make your choice now you may realise two years from now that you've bet on the wrong option.A player for the dominant format is going to cost maybe $200.
The two movie disc formats that are competing to replace the DVD have had a difficult start, with clunky first-generation players and an audience that's been reluctant to buy them for fear of betting on the losing side. Do you remember cassette cartridges?
It's time to choose sides: Blu-ray or HD DVD. Blu-ray appears to have the slight edge, but it's still difficult to choose. What if the format you buy turns out to be the Betamax of the matchup?
You can minimize your risk by renting. If you buy, consider that in two years' time, when you realise you've bet on the wrong option, a player for the dominant format is going to cost maybe $200.
If money is no option buy one, and keep your first player to play the “wrong” format discs that you bought.
Of course you could invest in one as a future collectable, there are many Geeks out there willing to sell their granny for one of the first Apples.
Keep your ears and eyes open if you are in the market. Our bet is on Blue Ray but then of course we could be wrong.
Heck how are you going to impress your friends.
R.I.P. hard drive ?
Samsung Electronics announced that it will launch two mobile computers in early June that will do away with hard drives altogether, replacing them with 32 gigabytes of NAND flash memory. The notebooks will be the first to use flash memory as the main storage device.
The Samsung Q1, described as an “ultra-computing device,” will be complemented by the Q30, a 12.1-inch notebook PC. Unfortunately to start with, both will be sold in Korea only.
Magnetic rotating hard drives have typically been used inside notebooks and PCs simply because they can be manufactured more cheaply than flash memory, although the need to rotate the disc consumes more power than the solid-state flash chips. Samsung's components division, however, is the largest manufacturer of flash memory in the world, and is already the chief supplier of the NAND flash found within the Apple iPod nano MP3 player.
The use of flash memory will allow the computers to enjoy several advantages, one being that the Q30-SSD will operate in complete silence.
No hard drive means no hard drive fan, cutting down on that background computer noise, it also means more space in laptops.
The two Samsung notebooks will boot approximately 25 percent to 50 percent faster, reading and writing data at 53 Mbytes/s and 23 Mbytes/s, respectively, significantly faster than a typical 4,200-RPM hard drive.
The Future Has Arrived
Remember when you were promised all those amazing future tech innovations? Just around the corner was supposed to be a shining technology utopia with flying cars.
Enter the virtual keyboard. This tiny device will laser-project a keyboard on a flat surface.
Useful but also a way to impress your friends, simply remove the small device from your pocket and use it to compose an e-mail on your Bluetooth enabled PDA or Cell Phone. It will have 63 keys and full size QWERTY layout.
The Laser Virtual Keyboard will reach typing speeds of a standard keyboard. You can then type away accompanied by simulated key click sounds. Estimated price: 5,500B
iPod Saves Soldier
Kevin Garrard, a soldier in the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq , was shot in the chest with an AK-47 at very close range. A bullet of this calibre at close range would normally pierce through body armour. Luckily he had his 20-gig iPod in his jacket pocket.
The bullet struck the iPod and slowed down the projectile enough that his body armour stopped the bullet from piercing his chest.
And you thought your iPod was indespensible!
ARTS & CULTURE Photorealism and post-modern art
The last venture in our chronological journey through art movements over the last hundred and fifty years or so covers the photorealism, Soviet art, les Automatists and Post-modern art movements, bringing us as up to date as possible. That is until the next movement comes along...
Photorealism is the quality of resembling a photograph, generally in a hyper-realistic sense. In art, the term is primarily applied to paintings from the photorealism art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a full-fledged art movement, photorealism sprang up in the late 1960s and early 1970s in America and Europe (where it was also commonly labelled super-realism) and was dominated by painters. Louis K. Meisel was the first to name the movement Photorealism and has written all of the major books on the subject. The first generation of American photorealist includes such painters as Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Ron Kleemann, Tom Blackwell, Charles Bell, Chuck Close, John Kacere, David Parrish, Ralph Goings, Richard McLean, John Salt and Ben Schonzeit. Duane Hanson was a rare exception of a photorealistic sculptor, famous for his amazingly lifelike painted sculptures of average people, complete with simulated hair and real clothes. Often working independently of each other and with widely different starting points, photorealist often tackled mundane or familiar subjects in traditional art genres--landscapes (mostly urban rather than naturalistic), portraits, and still lifes.
Photorealist very consciously took their cues from photographic images, often working very systematically from photographic slide projections onto canvases and employing techniques such as using grids to preserve accuracy. The photorealist style is tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate, such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric rigor of man-made environs.
20th century photorealism can be contrasted with the similarly literal, hyper-realistic style found in trompe l'oeil paintings of the 19th century. However, trompe l'oeil paintings tended to be carefully designed, very shallow-space still-lifes with illusionistic gimmicks such as objects seeming to lift slightly from the painting. The photorealism movement moved beyond this double-take illusionism to tackle deeper spatial representations (e.g. urban landscapes) and took on much more varied and dynamic subject matter.
SOVIET ART: The term Soviet art refers to visual art produced in the former Soviet Union .
During the Russian Revolution a movement was initiated to put all arts to service of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The instrument for this was created just days before the October Revolution, known as Proletkult, an abbreviation for “Proletarskie kulturno-prosvetitelnye organizatsii” (Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations). A prominent theorist of this movement was Aleksandr Bogdanov. Initially Narkompros (ministry of education), which was also in charge of the arts, supported Proletkult. However the latter sought too much independence from the ruling Communist Party of Bolsheviks, gained negative attitude of Vladimir Lenin, by 1922 declined considerably, and was eventually disbanded in 1932.
Among early experiments of Proletkult was the pragmatic aesthetic of industrial art, the prominent theorist being Boris Arvatov.
Another group was UNOVIS, a very short-lived but influential collection of young artists led by Kasimir Malevich in the 1920's.
Officially approved art was required to follow the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which subordinated art to the purposes of the state. In practice, it meant that artists had to produce works glorifying the leaders and policies of the Soviet Union . Art effectively became a form of propaganda. During the Stalin era, official Soviet art became a vehicle for the cult of personality.
One of the best-known official Soviet artists was Aleksandr Gerasimov, who was effectively Stalin's court painter. During his career he produced a large number of heroic paintings glorifying Stalin and other members of the Politburo.
Artists, who could not work within the boundaries of Socialist Realism, and particularly those who wished to work in avant-garde or non-representational genres such as Expressionism, were excluded from the official Soviet art world. Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed but did not entirely remove restrictions on artists who did not work in the genre of Socialist Realism. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union were artists able to choose full-time art careers solely upon the marketability of their art rather than official approval.
Soviet Nonconformist Art: The death of Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw, paved the way for a wave of liberalization in the arts throughout the Soviet Union . Although no official change in policy took place, artists began to feel free to experiment in their work, with considerably less fear of repercussions than during the Stalinist period.
In the 1950's Moscow artist Eli Beliutin encouraged his students to experiment with abstractionism, a practice thoroughly discouraged by the Artist's Union , which strictly enforced the official policy of Socialist Realism. Artists who chose to paint in alternative styles had to do so completely in private and were never able to exhibit or sell their work. As a result, Nonconformist Art developed along a separate path than the Official Art that was recorded in the history books.
The Lianozovo Group was formed around the artist Oskar Rabin in the 1960's and included artists such as Valentina Kropivnitskaya, Vladimir Nemukhin, and Lydia Masterkova. While not adhering to any common style, these artists sought to faithfully express themselves in the mode they deemed appropriate, rather than adhere to the propagandistic style of Socialist Realism.
Tolerance of Nonconformist Art by the authorities underwent an ebb and flow until the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Artists took advantage of the first few years after the death of Stalin to experiment in their work without the fear of persecution. In 1962, artists experienced a slight setback when Khrushchev appeared at the exhibition of the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Artist's Union at the Manege exhibition hall. Among the customary works of Socialist Realism were a few abstract works by artists such as Ernst Neizvestny and Eli Beliutin, which Khrushchev criticized as being “shit,” and the artists for being “homosexuals.” The message was clear: artistic policy was not as liberal as everyone had hoped.
The most important figures for the international art scene have been the Moscow artists Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrsky, Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid.
The most infamous incident regarding nonconformist artists in the former Soviet Union was the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition, which took place in a park just outside of Moscow , and included work by such artists as Oskar Rabin, Komar and Melamid, and Leonid Sokov. The artists involved had written to the authorities for permission to hold the exhibition but received no answer to their request. They decided to go ahead with the exhibition anyway, which consisted solely of unofficial works of art that did not fit into the rubric of Socialist Realism. The KGB put an end to the exhibition just hours after it opened by bringing in bulldozers to completely destroy all of the artworks present. Fortunately for the artists, the foreign press had been there to witness the event. The worldwide coverage of it forced the authorities to permit an exhibition of Nonconformist Art two weeks later in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow .
LES AUTOMATISTES were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal , Quebec . The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. “Les Automatistes” were so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism.
Members included Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and Marcelle Ferron and Francoise Sullivan.
The movement may have begun with an exhibition Borduas gave in Montreal in 1942. However, “les Automatistes” were soon being exhibited in Paris and New York also. Though it began as a visual arts group, it also spread to other forms of expression, such as drama, poetry and dance.
The title “les Automatistes” came from journalist Tancrede Marcil Jr., in a review of their second exhibit in Montreal (February 15 to March 1, 1947), which appeared in Le Quartier Latin (the Université de Montréal's student journal).
In 1948, Borduas published a collective manifesto called the Refus global, which is considered an important document in the cultural history of Quebec . Although the group dispersed soon after the manifesto was published, the movement continues to have influence, and may be considered forerunners of the Quiet Revolution.
POSTMODERN ART (sometimes called po-mo) is a term used to describe art that is thought to be after or in contradiction to some aspect of modernism. As with all divisions the lumpers and splitters problem applies; there are those who argue against a division into modern and post-modern periods.
Thus it has been used to denote what may be considered as the ultimate phase of modern art, as art after modernism or as certain tendencies of contemporary art. Post-modern art uses a vocabulary of media, genres or styles as parts of an extended visual language that goes beyond the boundaries of the modernist vocabulary. Postmodernism is, by its very nature, impossible to define clearly. Some of the best expositions appear in the theoretical writings of Jean Baudrillard, who concludes that what motivates art historical change is not any ‘authentic' or ‘original' impulse, but simply fashion, pivoting on the desire for novelty, which he sees as an organic and integrated process.
The basic premise behind post-modern art is that all forms of novelty and rebellion have already been explored, and that even if that wasn't true the particular emphasis on rejection of that which is old or already done is only handicapping to an artist's self-expression. Seen as such, post-modernism is in a sense arts' reconciliation of itself and its' past, and post -modernists typically collect influences from all periods and schools, using several media in a given piece in a pastiche like form. Artist Allison Hetter, when asked what post-modernism was, replied with the simple phrase: “Everything's been done already.” Many observers feel that we are in the stage of the po-po-mo where: “Everything's been re-done already”.
Useful Telephone Numbers for Hua Hin
Railway station
032-512 770, 032-511 073
Bus station of Hua Hin
032-511 654, 032-512 543
Bus station of Prachuabkirikhan
032-601 901
Bus station of Pranburi
032-621 443
Hua Hin Hospital
032-520 401
Dog Rescue Center
0-1981 4406
Wild life Rescue Center (Tayang)
032-458 135
Department of Land Cha-am office:
032- 430 846-7
Department of Land Hua Hin office:
032-536 164, 032-512 407
Department of Land Prachuabkirikhan:
032-611 211
Department of Land Pranburi
032-622 199
Local Government (Hua Hin)
032-521 340, 532 471
Local water supply
032-511 677
The Power Board of Hua Hin
032-512 215, 032 513 165
Observer office:
032-531 078
Red Cross.
032-512 567
San Paolo Hospital
032-532 576-85
Polyclinic International
032-516 424, 032-516 425
Shell Cooking Gas
032-511 144, 032- 515 620
The Communication Authority of Thailand
(Hua Hin)
032-511 351
Rotary Club of Hua Hin
0-1916 6637
Meeting every Thursday 8.pm
at Hua Hin Grand Hotel & Plaza
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