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Mercury_Storm posted:Why is smuggling products from Columbia so profitable? Are basic items like shampoo really that hard to find, or overpriced? It really is scarcity. The usual go-to in the previous thread was that you had a certain ration on toilet paper you could buy.
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Aug 27, 2015 16:14
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Kurtofan posted:That's still a lot of support for Maduro, that's pretty mind boggling to me. 25% is about the "will vote for a Ham Sandwich with -R next to its name" level here.
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Oct 2, 2015 15:28
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Ardennes posted:I don't think North America is really going leftward either, maybe more to the center in certain ways. That would still be moving leftward.
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Dec 7, 2015 06:56
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, and going even farther right-ward in other ways (look at most US state governments). If anything beyond social issues, it is sort of a draw. No, if anything social issues are the draw (abortion versus [etc]). Obamacare is an economic issue and while it isn't perfect it is a significant shift leftward, if only for the medicaid expansion (and while several states didn't accept the expansion, it didn't exist before hand so rejecting it doesn't count as "going rightwards").
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Dec 7, 2015 07:05
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Ardennes posted:Medicaid expansion was only in barely more than half the states and either way, the "good" of Obamacare is more or less easily cancelled about GOP control over a considerable majority of governorship/state legislatures/the House. Then you have the robust growth of an American populist hard right first with the Tea Party and now with Trump. There's no growth involved with the Tea Party. It's the same base believing the same things for 30 years.
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Dec 7, 2015 07:17
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Ardennes posted:Either way they (the populist right) have a more active voice in the government, and even if the Tea Party movement itself disappeared, it has had long lasting influence on the GOP. Trump may very well win the nomination in part because of it, something that wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. If anything the populist Right was more influential 20-ish years ago, going by Perot.
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Dec 7, 2015 07:27
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Ardennes posted:
You're not comparing apples to apples. If Trump goes 3rd party he won't do better than 1992 Perot did.
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Dec 7, 2015 07:42
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fishmech posted:You're forgetting that it will really hit transportation prices for all goods. Sure most people don't drive but you make the gas prices sane and prices for everything else are going to rise even higher. Depending on the distribution of fuel use it might be a decent compromise to only start eliminating the subsidy for private personal vehicles and then apply it to public and commercial vehicles later.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:36
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fishmech posted:Sounds kinda like South Korea - the Won there is about 1300 KRW to a USD (and has been for years), but the biggest note you could get til 2009 was 10,000. And for whatever reason a lot of shops would "strongly prefer" paying in cash for large purchases. China is similar. The USD is ~6.3 RMB but the largest note size they make is 100 RMB. Fortunately everything is dirt cheap there outside of airplane tickets (the largest single purchase I made was ~13 USD, and hotels are ~20 USD/night).
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Feb 19, 2016 17:05
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The Lone Badger posted:Where did all the drat money go? You used to be getting tons of it from oil exports, it has to have been spent on something. They had to support the other socialist state in the region. AKA, they bought a shitton of Cuban Cigars.
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Apr 9, 2016 06:40
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julian assflange posted:The Guardian article posted above said 95% of the exports were from oil etc. I think they have good farmland but price controls have made them unsustainable.
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May 21, 2016 19:46
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Sinteres posted:I really wish I understood how a country could build a culture of institutional legitimacy and public service to combat corruption, because it seems like it's much easier to corrupt institutions than to fix them--even the US and Western Europe are struggling to maintain public faith in their governments these days. It's because the definition of "corrupt" is "does something other than the exact standard laid out" (and in some cases, corruption means "doesn't do everything I say in the way I say it"). That being said, the US used to be just as bad as developing countries today. What happened there is that a President got shot by a crazy person who thought he was owed a job (The President appointed most of the government jobs in those days), and the public demanded civil service reform.
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May 22, 2016 15:45
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Kavak posted:If there were more examples of non-monstrous leftist regimes I'd feel better about things, but the only things I can think of are social democratic in nature. I guess that's why I've identified as one for a long time? Either that or anarchist communes that only existed because everyone was busy fighting other people.
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Jun 4, 2016 22:04
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