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Traveller posted:Also, some Chilegoon should try making an effort post re: the current spate of corruption cases and general bullshit going on. I think I would miss key events if I tried, and in any case it would serve as an interesting parallel to Brazilchat. I'll lolpost when the labor reform is finally passed.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2016 13:36 |
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# ¿ May 13, 2024 17:07 |
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Negrostrike posted:Shieeeet...I think Dilma should grow a pair and go Allende against the impeachment forces. Hmmm how did that work out.. Oh. =(
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# ¿ May 11, 2016 15:41 |
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SexyBlindfold posted:In less exciting news, municipal elections in Chile. Kathy Barriga as mayor of Maipú, René de la Vega as mayor of Conchalí (hopefully???), DJ Méndez narrowly losing Valparaíso. These elections were a gift DJ Méndez was getting crushed as of late last night. Evelyn Matthei as mayor of Providencia, too. Chile Vamos (rightist coalition) won 144 mayorships to the Nueva Mayoria's 142. Does not bode well for NM in the national elections. Nueva Mayoria - proving that while leftism sells, gross incompetence generates many returns.
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# ¿ Oct 24, 2016 15:33 |
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Plenty of evangelicals here in Chile. I think it's because a big part of the culture of evangelical churches is all about going out and hustling for parishoners.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 14:51 |
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In recent news: Chile decides to burn this motherfucker to the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JszXMocYnxA On the lighter side, the huge cloud of smoke drifting over Santiago and blotting out the sun might moderate the recent heat wave!
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# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 12:55 |
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Messi is a pussy and FIFA needs video replay. Thanks for listening.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2017 01:23 |
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whiteyfats posted:I am not Latin, but I am American, so maybe you guys can help. Do you think Puerto Rico would be better continuing as they are, as a full state, or full independence? Statehood would probably be most advantageous but I doubt Congress would go along. Independence would leave PR proper hosed because the federal money would stop.
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# ¿ Jun 4, 2017 01:27 |
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Elections coming up in Chile pretty soon. Piñera victory looking good.
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2017 15:15 |
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Non Serviam posted:In a sea of assholes, he's definitely the best option. Yeah pretty much. Somewhere out there is a government that has the vision to pursue social change and the competence to not wreck the economy getting there, but until that precious unicorn emerges I'm voting for the assholes who can keep the lights on.
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2017 15:15 |
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SexyBlindfold posted:So uh, how about those chilean elections The center got murdered and both the far right and far left gained seats. Going to be a bumpy ride. O.o
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2017 13:09 |
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Whose idea was the new AV?
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2017 13:50 |
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Six days to go until 2nd round elections in Chile. Should have done this a week after wtf drawing this out for a month.
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2017 13:45 |
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Non Serviam posted:To allow for political campaigns that target those who voted for others? It's kind of obvious. I mean, I get it but it's really nerve wracking. And the more time Piñera has to talk, the more likely he is to say (more) things to undermine himself. If we could ever manage a government that simultaneously had a progressive agenda and could manage to pay its bills on time I would be p. happy. edit: Though Piñera might actually follow through on pushing the Plan Unico de Salud and that would be more progressive than like everything that has happened in the states in the last 18 years.
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# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 13:00 |
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Hopefully this means a return to fiscal balance and the government being able to pay suppliers before they die of old age. Someone told me Chile is apparantly the best payer in Latin America and all I could do was LOL. Piñera will hopefully 1) keep order and 2) not bankrupt the country. Incidentally, those are the necessary conditions to support a sustainable progressive agenda. Non Serviam posted:Edit. The tears of the left today are pure nourishment. Bottle some for later they'll still taste great in 3 months.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 12:31 |
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Symbolic Butt posted:Classic conservativism. Sorry Non Serviam that's not how economics work, you were conned by some weakass austerity rhetorics. Spending until you can't borrow anymore then defaulting on the debt hasn't worked super well for any country on the continent as far as I'm aware. =(
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 12:34 |
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Symbolic Butt posted:I don't want to get too much into macroeconomics because I'm not even the most qualified/eloquent person to talk about it at length but I'll just hammer this point: No country ever in history got into a debt crisis because they spent too much on welfare, that's a ridiculous notion. I mean...it's not, really? A country gets into a debt crisis by accumulating obligations that grow too large for it to make payments on. The bond market gets scared and investors stop lending the country money and you have a debt crisis. The problem is unsustainable deficit spending and not welfare spending specifically but welfare spending does contribute. =P The US gets away with big structural deficits by having the world's reserve currency and a giant internal market to sell bonds to. A country like Chile has neither of those things. edit: Austerity sucks because government spending is still spending and that money is also income, so it boosts the economy. But the money to do the spending and distribute the income has to be paid back eventually out of what the country's economy produces. And when that debt gets so large that the country can't even make its interest payments there is a gigantic fiscal drag from 1) not being able to borrow money to do the spending and 2) Still having to pay interest on the existing debt because money for free is not a thing. Then everyone cries about how austerity is horrible when what they really mean is "wouldn't it be great if you all had just given us billions of dollars and if you'd continue to do that, thanks". It's better for everyone to spend less now (especially on things that don't have a good return on investment), take a small economic hit now, and not end up in that situation down the road. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Dec 18, 2017 |
# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 13:45 |
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hoiyes posted:The point is that money spent on welfare tends to immediately be injected back into local economy, and generates more wealth in the country. It doesn't accumulate or find its way offshore as quickly as, say tax breaks. That's beside the savings in health and security spending that a welfare safety net provides. It wasn't by chance that Australia was one of the developed economies least affected by the global financial crisis. They gave out extra cash to everyone on welfare, no strings attached as a part of a stimulus package. Compared to austerity, which causes a death spiral of low-negative growth leaving the country less able to pay debts and with a worse rating, making future debt more expensive. That's a fair point. Look at the edit I made above (that I was doing while you were posting, apparantly). Austerity is generally something that happens once the country has already poo poo the bed and there are no good outcomes. Spending a little less to get the budget in balance so it doesn't end up in that situation does not have the same growth implications. edit: I'm not saying all welfare spending is bad. I don't believe that. Just that however the money is spent, it has to be within the means of the economy spending it.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 14:01 |
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Negrostrike posted:Didn't Venezuela get in the poo poo mostly because of rampant corruption from an extremely criminal and authoritarian government? Por que no los dos?
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 14:20 |
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hoiyes posted:The thing is, you don't have to spend less, you can spend more, provided you get a return on your investment greater than the cost of financing the debt. Yeah, this is true. But the bolded is something that can't be taken for granted. In fact, investing is pretty hard and a lot of potential public projects are not going to make the cut (especially if the people doling out the money do not care about this, which is the case for Chile right now). hoiyes posted:And there's plenty of academic studies that show targeted welfare spending can generate double digit returns. This is the basis of business, use other people's money to leverage your growth. I think you're misunderstanding the literature you've read. Targeted welfare can generate stimulus to the economy greater than the money input, but if you're talking about that money generating enough cash to the government to repay the bond then no, that is not a thing. Financial perpetual motion does not exist any more than any other sort of perpetual motion. For example, take $100 of welfare and assume everything not taxed is spent and that the effective tax rate is 20%. That $100 welfare will generate about $600 of spending, which is a nice stimulus. But it will only generate (asymptoticly) $100 of tax to the government in this simplified example. The government eats the cost of financing. The real world is much more complicated, but mostly in ways that make that reduce the recovery through tax. You can stimulate your economy through borrowing and spending but you can't finance the stimulus with itself. Non Serviam posted:There are distinctions that need to be made though. The plans proposed by the left in Chile would have absolutely bankrupted the country, not because they were "welfare plans," but because they were bad plans. Also 1000 times this.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 16:01 |
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qnqnx posted:The Frente Amplio is not the Nueva Mayoría, and they just barely said they supported Guillier in the second round after much crying. Guillier would have pretty much been reliant on them to govern, though, and he presents as too weak to put a check on the crazy elements. A Guillier administration would have been even more of a shitshow than the Bachelet administration is.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 16:06 |
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qnqnx posted:Mere conjecture. I can't get to the alternate universe in which he won so yeah, that's all I've got. But it seemed likely enough for me to vote the other way.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 16:11 |
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qnqnx posted:And would have still better than another Piñera administration, this time courting the Kast voters. Piñera seems more likely to a) make sure public institutions pay on time and b) not throw the country over a fiscal and social cliff so yeah I'm ok with what we got.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 16:20 |
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hoiyes posted:Of course no stimulus can pay for itself, and the best performing welfare investments, such as early childhood education interventions, take decades to reach a break even point. But the same point stands for large construction projects, which imo are even riskier prospects, but create an asset ripe for privatisation. Every project has to stand on its own merits. "Don't borrow money to give away or invest in risky long-term projects whose returns you are not even concerned with" would be a good starting point for a fiscal policy, I would say. A lot of big construction projects here are franchised. They get built with mostly private capital in exchange for a lease, so the public outlay is low.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 17:48 |
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tekz posted:Perhaps governments could get better revenue streams by, say, raising taxes on the upper classes and nationalizing things. A lot of people on the left here like to talk about Norway and the problem is that Norway is 1) much richer per capita, 2) much smaller and 3) culturally distinct from Chile. Trying to implement nordic socialism in Chile results in Latin American socialism instead, which is a total poo poo show without exception. Chile HAS a soverign wealth fund that could eventually, if the copper holds out and it gets invested profitably instead of spent, fund a welfare state. But the first is a big if and the second hasn't happened, at least so far. tekz posted:Perhaps governments could get better revenue streams by, say, raising taxes on the upper classes and nationalizing things. More likely those governments could run those busiensses into the ground, provoke capital flight, and destabalize their economies. Like...pretty much what has happened all throughout latin america when that has been tried. edit: IMO class animosity is a lot of what is different between latin america and the nordic countries. In Norway they understand that you can't kill the goose that lays your golden eggs if you want to keep harvesting eggs. Here everyone wants to eat goose. =/ wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Dec 20, 2017 |
# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 13:39 |
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ZearothK posted:In addition to what Cup said, Norway also doesn't have the same level of inequality that Latin America has. Our class animosity goes all the way back to the royally appointed landowners and slavery of colonial times and in many parts of Latin America the legacy of that still informs economic and social relations. While we have our entrepeneurs and successful businessmen, a lot of the wealth in Latin America is still concentrated in traditional families that have been here for centuries and, I can mostly speak of the experience of Brazil, these entrenched oligarchies mostly use the government to maintain their power, sometimes through laws that benefit themselves and their allies, but also often through corruption. All this feeds into a sense of revolt and is a tangible reality in the geography of many Latin American cities. It's similar here in Chile though (probably?possibly?) with less overt corruption. The problem is, that is really unhelpful when it comes time to actually implement an agenda and run a country. The left takes power and tries to attack the business sector because through that ideological lense business is the enemy, but in doing so they gently caress up the engine generating the wealth that they depend on to fund their social priorities and that the citizens who aren't oligarchs depend on to fund their daily lives. That is why Piñera won instead of Guiller who was the most natural inheritor of Bachelet's agenda Incidentally it's also why the unemployment rate is up. If you want to turn the ship of state in a new direction, and I'm not saying it's a bad idea, you have to do it without punching holes in the bottom. Cup Runneth Over posted:Also obligatory "the rich don't lay golden eggs they just steal them from the workers and hoard them" The sooner marxism dies as an ideology in Latin America the better off everyone will be, jfc.
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 16:21 |
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tekz posted:A functional welfare state requires a large public sector with decent revenue streams im order to work. Going hat in hand to obligarchs that control major strategic resources in order to beg for a small portion of it in taxes is just bizarre when you can take it all. There's a reason oil, in particular, was nationalized in so many countries, most of which were capitalist. You don't need to go full USSR, just have enough revenue to actually take care od your citizens. You're locked into ideas that have already failed. Chile has nationalized copper, for example, but hasn't invested the revenue. Codelco, the state copper company, has become so bloated that it can't turn a profit unless copper is over $3/lb. The company is so broke it has to beg money from foreign concerns to do upkeep and expansion. Venezuela has oil wealth and HAD accumulated physical and social capital that made Chile look like a poor cousin and none of that stopped the country from imploding. Argentina was a developed and wealthy country and could have been the richest country in South America but pissed away decades of progress following the same bad ideas the Latin American left still idolizes today. Revenue is not the primary problem here.
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 17:54 |
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Like... here in Chile a big battle over the last 4 years has been for free education paid for by the state. But the major problem with Chilean education is not that it's expensive - relatively speaking, it's not. The major problem is that the quality of education at all levels of the system is at best mediocre and mostly awful. So to address that you could, for example, invest money in the long-term project of creating high quality public institutions that raise the level of education over a generation. Or you could piss away money and political capital forgiving loans and giving tuition subsidies to students at lovely institutions so that students can feel good about spending someone else's money to get a diploma of no value instead of their own. Which direction does the Frente Amplio want to go? I won't spoil it for you.
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 18:03 |
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tekz posted:I gave you a concrete example of how it can, and does, work. Revenue IS the goddamn problem, espescially when starving the government of funds to provide services is used for justification to show how it doesn't work and to gut them even further. The biggest failed idea that a lot of the world is locked into is austerity and I would never wish that poo poo on my fellow citizens anywhere. And I gave you concrete and very local examples of how it didn't, and doesn't work. Maybe, then, there is some confounding factor beyond grabbing revenue. =P Maybe in fact revenue is not the primary problem. Cup Runneth Over posted:That's kind of understandable. Sure, improving education is a worthwhile long-term project but students today can't wait however long it's going to take -- they are taking classes now and they need to graduate now. The only people who would benefit from the former are the next generation, and the current generation don't want to pay for a diploma and have it be worthless. Ideally you would invest in education at the same time that you made it more affordable (if not necessarily free, if that would overburden your budget). Yeah it's understandable, just a bad basis on which to make policy. With unlimited money all the things could be done and there would be no reason not to do them, but in fact there is usually very limited money.
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 18:21 |
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tekz posted:It feels like you're talking at odds with yourself? Raising the quality of education is not in conflict with making it affordable or subsidized for the majority of the population. The 'someone else's money' attitude is loving retarded too. If income inequality and rich people are allowed to exist, part of their money should 100% be used to subsidize the rest of society. They're only in conflict from a budgetary perspective - money spent on one thing can't be spent on the other. If there were unlimited money there would be no conflict, but there isn't unlimited money. And rich people are already taxed to subsidize the rest of society. =P That is fine. I agree that those who have more should pay more. I don't disagree with that premise ideologically. I am just saying that an economy (especially a small one like Chile's) is not a bottomless piggybank and that to have a sustainable social agenda there needs to be a commitment to spend within what that economy can support. edit: ...and like, beyond that, an understanding on the part of policy makers that the bolded actually matters, which is something lacking on the part of at least the Chilean left.
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 18:31 |
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dead comedy forums posted:the problem is, ofc, marxism Yes? That and the persistent belief that none of our failings are our fault or within our control to get a handle on. I would say "grow the gently caress up" but a lot of the Chilean left is old enough now to have done that if it were going to happen. I mean, the entire screed you posted is useless intellectual wanking. The left in Chile has both literal communists and more radical parties represented in congress. They had significant influence in the Bachelet administration as part of her coalition. The ideology of the late 60's and its ignorant inbred offshoots are still alive despite all the chaos and all the progress that has happened since. It's unfortunate.
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# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 13:00 |
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dead comedy forums posted:my dude, I am not defending this bizarre notion of "marxism", the point I was making is that actual, real "marxist" policies were a minimum part of actual government in latin america. All those issues you have mentioned have existed here waaaay before the communist manifesto, so why it is useless intellectual wanking exactly It's useless intellectual wanking because a) it's a broad sweeping historical criticism of politics in Latin America that does not address the history and evolution of any particular country and is thus not even coherent enough to be right or wrong while at the same time b) it is totally useless in a discussion of any actual policy - even if we accept that discourse as something worth having for Reasons, how does it help us talk about for instance viable education policies in Chile or approaches to indigenous violence in the Araucania or how to pursue progressive policy in a way that doesn't break the economy because of the sheer incompetence of the policy makers? Literally what is the point you're trying to make? Like are you a latin american studies major at a 3rd tier university in the states or something?
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# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 15:33 |
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dead comedy forums posted:lmao I am brazilian and I studied econ, thx You're being reductive when talking about the big issues of latin american countries, though. =P You're just laying the blame at the feet of colonialism or the US or whatever else instead of dumbass ideology. dead comedy forums posted:but then we can go back to the useless intellectual wanking to check our history and see that latin america had the largest pro-market reforms ever made in the history of the West back in the 80s, resulting to gently caress all in terms of actual economic progress because it broke everybody, exploded international debt and for some cases made inflation hilariously worse, but hey cheaper foreign imports Like, this worse than wrong. It is not even concrete enough to be wrong. It's useless wanking. dead comedy forums posted:we could also check and see that even after having a real deal totally legit no joke socialist revolution, Mexico isn't exactly doing hot poo poo well nowadays, so we can go and do some useless intellectual wanking to check what were the conditions to learn about that and inform policy That might not be useless wanking. If we wanted to talk about mexican economic policy it would probably be pretty useful. But what you did by bringing it up here is just furiously beating your brain dick. dead comedy forums posted:but when you say stuff like "jfc marxism can't end soon enough" you mistake a thing that hasn't been a real deal for quite a loving while in terms of your said primary concern (i.e. "Actual Policy") In Chile this is legit a problem, and continues to be a problem, tho. dead comedy forums posted:far more important than worrying about leftism is to check why, after different types of governments and economic experiences in this corner of the world, the same problems that existed since colonial times keep persisting after we did everything that we were "supposed" to do Again, you would literally have to raise your level of discourse to even be wrong. But staying on the same level I would say that holy poo poo, there has been a ton of progress in Latin America wtf is wrong with you. Problems still existing (as they exist everywhere) does not mean that things have not improved and it is trivial to look at a country like, say, Chile, and see that people are mostly vastly better off than they were a generation ago. In other countries it may be different. It might be a useful exercise to look at what was different between them. dead comedy forums posted:and that is why you get for example the problem of primary education being poo poo since useless intellectual wanking shows that our landowning classes since ever didn't believe in broad education for the public (because of the mentality that I said in my first glorious shining shitpost), and the state can't intervene hard here and push and shove to make it better because it doesn't have the money to do so, because it can't create better taxation systems because the wealthier citizens and the establishment go loving ballistic about it That is a whole lot of reductionism. You're lumping a whole continent together which seems like it would produce some loss of fidelity. dead comedy forums posted:or the indigenous peoples of Araucania or the Amazon or the Cerrado or the Andes getting screwed even nowadays because it is an unsaid imperative that between helping them or loving them over for a quick buck the second is the default choice done and has been justified for over four centuries of different governments, and that helping them costs money, and the state can't push through some timid reform before people go ballistic again, "NO loving MONEY OF MINE IS GOING TO HELP THOSE loving SAVAGES", because of the same mentality I mean, we could talk about the history of land reform and reparations towards the indigenous in Chile. We could talk about the recent violence including burning non-indigenous farmers alive in their homes and other shennanigans, and what the government (non)response has been to that. We could talk about a lot of actual things but no you want to beat your dick. dead comedy forums posted:tl:dr- to tie all of this with a nice bow: the true useless intellectual wanking, the one that makes actual bad policy happens, is things like "if only we could get rid of leftism", "if only we had the death penalty", "if only [this] and/or [that]", without giving any actual effort in how the problems came to be and why so :theironicatthatgetsbiggerforever:
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2017 15:13 |
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To be slightly more productive... When I'm talking about marxism I don't give a gently caress about the ideology as an abstract thing. I'm talking about the particular brand of idiocy that pervades the Chilean left right now at the invitation of politicians who really, really should have known better. When I talk about Communists it's literally the communist party of Chile, which was invited into government by the Bachelet administration. I don't give a gently caress about giant abstract idiologies so much as the idiots here on the ground.
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2017 15:20 |
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joepinetree posted:I want to thank you so much for proving my point. It's rare that we can talk about something and then have the perfect demonstration of it. What is the shallow symbolic exercise here? I think you're making my point about intellectual masturbation pretty well, too.
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2017 16:40 |
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ChainsawCharlie posted:Hes pretty right ,communism is a cancer,the problem is capitalism is super space aids cancer. "Everything they told us about communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about Capitalism was true." is an old joke and still a good one. ArfJason posted:its not the only thing, but it is a really big part of why we're so hosed. like, almost fundamentally so I mean ok...let's accept that for the sake of argument. How does that help in terms of unfucking things? Like we say "colonialism was to blame!" and then what? nerdz posted:What have been their victories on this regard? Were they to become a majority, how would they implement this? How would they become a majority/win elections without even accomplishing something other that "FULL ON COMMUNISM NOW" in the meantime? Just for example, taken from the below. http://www.pcchile.cl/2017/12/05/co...a-constitucion/ quote:1) Una Nueva Constitución en cuyo centro soberano se ubique el pueblo chileno deliberando democráticamente su futuro, es la madre de las batallas para la superación de un periodo histórico en chile marcado por el pinochetismo, el neoliberalismo y la sustracción al pueblo de su soberanía y derecho a decidir. Es una tarea de reivindicación histórica en la cual llamamos a toda la sociedad y a las fuerzas democráticas y progresistas en su conjunto a sacudirnos por fin de uno de los principales soportes institucionales de la dictadura y la derecha. El camino que ha señalado el Partido Comunista para la superación de esta constitución antidemocrática no es otro que el de la Asamblea Constituyente. This is priority number one, guaranteed to be an absolute disaster and promote social upheval. These are priorities not only of the communist party in Chile but of many leftist parties. Some things I actually agree with. =P Reforming pensions and health are good things. However, I don't trust the communists or the leftist coalition to do it with an eye toward not breaking the economy. It's not enough to have good intentions. Reducing the work week from 45 hours to 40 or even 35 I'd get behind, too. As far as personal stuff...there are protests and marches basically every week and tear gas lingers for at least a day. =/ Also I once parked my car in the wrong place and it almost got fire bombed. I could do with less of that. Also Merry Christmas my goons.
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# ¿ Dec 26, 2017 13:26 |
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bagual posted:wow who would say foreign institutions can not be counted on to be politically neutral at all times LOL at an index that estimates 3 man days to open a business in Chile. edit: fwiw all methodology changes from 2005-present are published so idk experts can judge for themselves. http://www.doingbusiness.org/Methodology/Changes-to-the-Methodology wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Jan 15, 2018 |
# ¿ Jan 15, 2018 12:46 |
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Cup Runneth Over posted:That was such a flabbergasting non-sequitur response. The index is dumb and kind of meaningless is my point. Also nobody at the Wrold Bank is trying to sabotage Chile jfc. Chile is perfectly capable of sabotaging itself thank you very much.
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# ¿ Jan 15, 2018 15:51 |
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dead comedy forums posted:"days to open a business" as an economic quality benchmark is typical of MBA school hackery and should be thrown in a fire It's super dumb. Also reeeeeeally not representitive of the actual bureaucratic process here.
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# ¿ Jan 15, 2018 15:54 |
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Badger of Basra posted:They literally admitted to doing this lol no they didn't. Roemer opined that some changes in methodology - that were not specific to Chile - might have been ideologically motivated and the Bank said probably not but we'll review.
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# ¿ Jan 15, 2018 16:30 |
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# ¿ May 13, 2024 17:07 |
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bagual posted:7x1 was an inside job 7x1 was karma.
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# ¿ Jun 21, 2018 19:39 |