Vietnam deleted the rule that made its ID numbers decodable, and nobody stopped decoding them
Since 1 July 2024 no Vietnamese instrument says the 12-digit citizen ID has any internal structure. The decree defining...
Guides & How-tos · Worked examples · Real numbers
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One sky, three verdicts: why Singapore says unhealthy and Malaysia says moderate
The same 70 micrograms of fine particulate reads 116 on Singapore's PSI, 96 on Malaysia's API and 161 on the US AQI. Alm...
Four ASEAN countries have no time zone of their own
Asia/Phnom_Penh, Asia/Vientiane, Asia/Kuala_Lumpur and Asia/Brunei are not time zones. They are links, and the files beh...
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What passports do when you have only one name
The near-universal advice is to write FNU in the empty given-name box. That is not an ICAO rule. The standard says a nam...
What a country will let you name a child
A name generator hands you something that sounds right; a registrar decides whether it can be recorded. Japan now regist...
Why a Pay Rise Won't Grow Your Pension
The OECD says Thailand's pension replaces 41.5% of an average wage and 20.7% of twice that. Singapore falls from 57.6% t...
Thailand Raised Your Social Security Deduction. It Also Raised Your Pension.
The wage ceiling had not moved since 1995. On 1 January 2026 it went from THB 15,000 to THB 17,500, and it is scheduled...
Vietnam Salary Deductions Explained (2026): New Tax Brackets, Insurance and Take-Home Pay
Your tax bill fell in January 2026, not July — on a ₫30,000,000 salary that is ₫450,000 a month. Seven brackets became f...
Philippine Salary Deductions Explained (2026): SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG and Tax
Your offer says ₱30,000 and your payslip says ₱26,542.45. Here is exactly where the rest goes — the three contributions...
Your Database Has One Collation for Southeast Asia
MySQL 8 ships 89 collations for utf8mb4 and exactly one is for a Southeast Asian language. Five of them sorted the same...
What a Character Limit Does to Khmer
Truncation looks like the simplest thing a program does, until the same twenty-character limit hands an English reader n...
What a Year of Currency Movement Does to an Invoice
A USD 10,000 invoice raised in January and paid in August was worth 10.8 million more rupiah, and 141 fewer Singapore do...
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