Latin America: the fires immediately died down, because they needed socialism to burn

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Latin America: the fires immediately died down, because they needed socialism to burn

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Hahaha YES

# ¿ Dec 19, 2017 16:15

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 07:40

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Badger of Basra posted:

Humala ran against mines and then immediately started approving more mines so people turned on him pretty quick.

Mines? Like, land mines or something?

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 17:49

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Is "interior interior minister" a real position, or is that just a typo?

# ¿ Nov 8, 2018 20:57

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Oh poo poo, when did Ardennes become a mod?

# ¿ Nov 9, 2018 13:45

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ghost of Mussolini posted:

what happened in the Venezuela thread? there's like 800 new posts in a few days, its never been this active, even considering the recent developments

Tankies happened. People, including several Venezuelans, are explaining why Maduro is an incompetent, corrupt tyrant but, well, they're tankies. They don't give a poo poo about people suffering as long as they get to support whoever's opposed to the US.

The CSPAM thread is much worse, there the tankies are dominant.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2019 13:32

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

This was interesting: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-constitution-referendum-idUSKCN1QE22Y

quote:

Cubans have overwhelmingly ratified a new constitution that enshrines the one-party socialist system as irrevocable while instituting modest economic and social changes, according to the national electoral commission.

Alina Balseiro Gutierrez, president of the commission, said at a Havana press conference on Monday that preliminary results showed 84.4 percent of the 8.7 million potential voters participated in the Sunday referendum.

She said 86.85 percent of voters ratified the charter, 9 percent opposed ratification and 4.5 percent spoiled or left ballots blank.

By comparison, in 1976 when the current constitution was ratified, 99.02 percent of voters in a 98 percent turnout reportedly ratified and just 54,000 were opposed.

There are no independent observers of Cuban elections, however citizens may observe the count at their precincts.

And from Wikipedia:

quote:

On July 14, 2018, a Communist Party task force drafted a new constitutional text, then given to a National Assembly commission headed by Party First Secretary Ra�l Castro to assess, refine, and forward the new draft constitution to the National Assembly plenary. The reforms are seen as part of the attempt to modernize the Cuban government. The draft contains 87 new articles, increasing the total from 137 to 224. Among the reforms are:

* The recognition of private property, and the creation of a freer market;
* The restoration of the positions of President and Prime Minister of Cuba as posts separate from President of the Council of State and of Ministers;
* The transfer of head of Council of State to the President of the National Assembly
* The position of mayor being added to that of president of a municipal assembly
* The creation of a requirement for Presidential-appointed Provincial Governors and Deputy Governors to be ratified by local municipal governments
* The establishment of provincial councils made up of municipal leaders
* The creation of a two consecutive five-year term limit imposed on the president;
* Extending the terms of municipal council delegates to five years;
* Banning discrimination based on gender, race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability, (formerly included leading to the possible legalization of same-sex marriage);
* The restoration of a presumption of innocence in the justice system, last provided for in the 1940 constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Cuba#Proposed_2018_constitution

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 15:51

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Wikipedia has China with higher nominal GDP per capita, but Cuba with higher PPP GDP per capita.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 19:55

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

bagual posted:

I do get it, and I think the other guy got it as well. Cuba=Germany and Fidel=Hitler, is that it?

Trains running on time is a reference to Mussolini, not Hitler.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2019 17:08

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

IIRC Cuba already allows small businesses in a limited form, they've taken a few baby steps towards allowing entrepreneurship/capitalism, so they're not fully socialist anymore, and the new constitution looks like further incremental steps in that direction.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2019 17:13

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Grouchio posted:

I wouldn't say Japan is going to self-extinct itself. Rather it's population growth will stagnate and decline a little until it breaks even again, in a few decades (without immigration). Then it's truly stable.

Will stagnate and decline a little? Japan's population has already started declining.

Also, to break even again would require birthrates to rise significantly, right? I don't think that'll just happen by itself, you'd need policy or cultural changes.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 04:27

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

quarantinethepast posted:

A separate question: I just found out that apparently the average salary for a professional in Mexico is somewhere around 96,000 pesos or 5,000 dollars a year. That's below the poverty line in the US. I imagine this is a really basic economics question but why is it so radically different?

It appears to me that the answer lies intrinsically in the difference between the peso and the dollar, because 96,000 dollars in the US is a reasonable salary for a professional.

I mean beyond the fact that Mexico is much poorer in general? If you just look at the difference in GDP per capita, the US is about 7 and a half times as productive in terms of economic output per person, according to a quick googling.

Based on the other responses to you, it sounds like the actual difference in salaries for white collar professionals is pretty close to that ratio.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2022 21:19

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I think it's more that the local salaries drive cost of living, rather than companies looking at cost of living to set salaries. Companies will set salaries as low as they can find people for, even if cost of living is super high.

Conspiratiorist posted:

the dream for residents is having a remote job that gives you the big 1st world bucks.

There was an article about this a couple days ago that showed up on hacker news: https://restofworld.org/2022/latin-america-startup-developer-scarcity/

quote:

It took Andrea Campos, the Mexico City�based founder of two-year-old mental health app Yana, six long months to find a senior front-end developer. After launching her app in the early days of the pandemic, Yana�s usership ballooned from just a few thousand users in Mexico to over 5 million across twelve countries. Campos, who said her company has raised $2.5 million in 2021 to scale the app and expand her team, was looking to bring on someone with the experience and skills to guide projects.

One month after his first day at Yana, the long-sought after developer told Campos he was leaving.

�An American company was offering him $15,000 per month to work for them,� Campos told Rest of World. �We cannot compete with that.�

Stories like Yana�s have become all too common across Latin America, where, according to every source who spoke to Rest of World and compiled salary data, demand for tech talent is skyrocketing, but supply remains relatively scarce, fueling fierce competition between startups, established tech companies, and outsourcing giants for qualified workers. While other regions across the world face similar shortages, Latin America produces far fewer tech graduates than Asia. Meanwhile, its proximity to the U.S. makes it a prime location for outsourcing for American tech companies, increasing the value of skilled workers to companies at home and abroad.

�Everyone knows it�s a bloodbath out there,� said Campos.

For stuff that's actually about tech, the comments for HN can be pretty interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30137720

quote:

My success with outsourcing some work to Latin America has been much, much, much more successful than outsourcing to India and other places in Asia for the following reasons:
1. As the article points out, being in the same/similar timezones is huge. With so many folks working remotely anyway, it's much easier to integrate these developers as part of the team. They join standups, we can have easy back-and-forths in Slack, etc. The timezone difference to India makes this virtually impossible, so that if you ARE outsourcing to India the model is totally different and you have to outsource a very different type of work. Plus, since the time zones are so off, the situation sucks for everyone - someone is either staying up very late or getting up very early. These days I refuse jobs where coordination with India is required, because it's just not worth sacrificing other parts of my life for it, especially when it's easy to get a job where this is not necessary.

2. In general, I have found there to be less of a cultural issue of Latin American developers proactively speaking up and letting us know concerns/potential issues than their Indian counterparts. One of the biggest issues we had many years ago is that, while we hired developers in India that were fantastic technically, they were loath to inform us of problems or schedule slip until it was too late; in general, there was a culture of "over-deference" which proved to be extremely detrimental. If anyone has read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, it was very similar to what he discusses about Korean Airlines' cockpit culture.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jan 31, 2022

# ¿ Jan 31, 2022 21:26

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/09/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-cannibalism-boast

quote:

“There was this time I was in Surucuru … and an Indian had died and they were cooking him. They cook Indians. It’s their culture,” Bolsonaro claims to the correspondent’s apparent befuddlement.

“Their bodies?” the journalist replies.

“Their bodies,” Bolsonaro confirms.

“But not to eat?” the journalist asks.

“Yes, to eat,” answers Bolsonaro, then an obscure congressman. “They cook it for two or three days and then eat it with banana. I wanted to see an Indian being cooked but the guy said if you go, you have to eat it. ‘I’ll eat it,’ I said. But no one else in my group wanted to go … so I didn’t go. But I’d eat an Indian, no problem at all. It’s their culture.”

What in the gently caress

# ¿ Oct 9, 2022 20:01

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Eric Cantonese posted:

Has Cuba volunteered to lead a force? Haiti sounds like one of those situations where you end up having to hope for the “least horrible” option to prevail.

Would Cuba be capable? They're of a similar population size to Haiti, and while they're much better off development-wise, they're not exactly rich either.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 03:16

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I'm reading about Peru's Congress now and I'm impressed they've managed to get eleven parties in there with a 5% threshold.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 21:36

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Building up Japan after WW2 was also done for self-interested strategic reasons, but that doesn't mean Japan didn't benefit.

Any country from the Americas going into Haiti would probably benefit from increased stability there.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2023 20:12

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Sephyr posted:

Milei elected in Argentina.

Lmao

Seems awful but it probably didn't help that other guy seemed also pretty bad? Being Minister of the Economy when you already have hyperinflation isn't a great look.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2023 01:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

He's far from a majority in the legislature though, right? How much of his wacky ideas can he actually follow through on?

# ¿ Nov 20, 2023 07:33

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

i fly airplanes posted:

Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in South America decades ago.

i say swears online posted:

was it? looks like its growth has been below average for the region for nearly a century

This chart is kinda useless for seeing how wealthy it was back then, all it tells you is how much growth has happened proportionally since 1950 for each country/region.

edit: here's better chart

So yeah, Argentina used to be quite well off, going by GDP per capita at least.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Nov 28, 2023

# ¿ Nov 28, 2023 21:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Elias_Maluco posted:

Agreed, though I think it would not be a direct military intervention, just money, arms, maybe some new sanctions

edit: maybe they can convince Milei to declare war on Venezuela

Guyana isn't even a million people. Even with money and arms they likely can't really resist.

If Venezuela decides to invade, seems like they'll easily take the territory unless another country directly intervenes.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2023 21:01

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/what-does-argentinas-shock-therapy-economic-package-involve-2023-12-13/

quote:

Government subsidies for media companies will be suspended, as they are a nonessential expense, the minister noted.

Argentina's universal child allowance plan will be doubled and a food card program by the government will be increased by 50%.

These parts sound fine at least. It doesn't really sound like he's done anything really batshit yet.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2023 21:08

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Welp

# ¿ Dec 15, 2023 23:33

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 07:40

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I guess neither side is interested in a compromise constitution that voters might actually accept.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2023 04:22

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Latin America: the fires immediately died down, because they needed socialism to burn