Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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When we were ready and it wasn't going to destroy a) millions of people b) the economy
Edit: A lockdown never meant to stop Covid from happening
Wherever you got that nonsense from, perhaps stop listening to them
He's not going to fix Argentina. He's just another populist, right-wing arsehole who said a lot of stuff on the campaign trail he's not actually going to do, and will probably rig the system and suppress political dissent to try to keep himself in office.
The lion, the wig and the warrior. Who is Javier Milei, Argentina's president-elect?
His legions of fans call him “the madman” and “the wig” due to his ferocity and unruly mop of hair. Javier Milei refers to himself as “the lion.”apnews.com
Honestly, they need it.
"Once the problem is gone, lock down the border and you're pretty much good as gold."
Sound familiar? I know you want to take pride in your home, but some things are just chance or circumstance. Imagining you solved what the rest of the word couldn't manage is a bit silly.
It's Latin America, rules work differently down there. There are two political camps:
A) Kleptocrats and US puppets, getting US intelligence community backing via the School of the Americas, who simply pretend to be right-wing populists and nationalists.
B) Socialists who do tend to have popular support, and a nasty tendency to win the minority of Latin American elections that are actually free and fair (i.e. the US intelligence community screwed the pooch and allowed it to happen).
When group A wins, they enact policy that make the rich richer, the poor poorer, but more importantly prove wildly profitable to US corporations while the media manufactures consent for it all, pretending it's an economic miracle when it's anything but. When group B wins, and suddenly becomes for some mysterious reason a rogue state facing severe US economic sanctions and attempted US-backed coups...and when that government fails because it has the most economically-powerful military and economy on the planet actively sabotaging every single policy proposal while encouraging civil conflict, it's advertised as the failings of either that individual government or left-wing policies.
Either group suppresses political dissent, that much is true. The difference is one suppresses popular protest, the other suppresses US intelligence astroturfing, political interference, and economic warfare from within.
Javier Milei's buffoonish act and three-ring circus of a campaign wasn't an actual political campaign. It was a job interview to get on the Company's payroll.
Heard Javier's vision of Argentina referred to earlier as "An-Capistan" so in the absence of better silver linings am gonna be committing to that'n.
These are not inconsistent.
My understanding is that he's the catspaw for Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eunekian. Nevertheless, he's played the hard right line very clearly, all but talking up the Argentinian military junta of years past, and other grotesquely repressive conservative notions ("libertarian", they call him - Viktor Orban was called a libertarian once, too).
@Ag3ma @Eacaraxe
Milei won because the kirchneristas' answer to 148% annual inflation, 50% child hunger, 40% unemployment and 10% homelessness was to let the current Minister of Economy - the face of every economic woe for the last year and a half as well as de facto president - run for the presidency. A man who over that period of time oversaw a crawling peg of over 300%, devalued the peso 22% when he lost the primaries, raised the gross income tax from 45% to 100% when he lost the runoffs, and quit the ministry as soon as his campaign came to an end.
(The current Minister of Economy, by the way, being the third of three ministers we tried out over the course of 2 weeks in July 2022, because this government burns through elected officials like they're trying shoes at the store)
People are sick of losing their money monthly to inflation. Americans ***** about their 7% inflation rate per year. Try 148%. Try saving your money in this economy when your net worth loses 12.5% of its value every month, and you're not allowed to save in other currencies. Buying dollars is against the law for most people. A few are allowed to buy 200 max per month, while being taxed 156% per dollar (or dollar spent, if you're carding internationally). And every dollar spent is a dollar you won't be able to legally buy next month. Card over 200 in November? That means you won't be able to buy dollars until January, when the peso racks up 25% in inflation.
If the kirchneristas wanted to win the election, or at least not lose by a whopping 12 points, they could've gone with Axel Kicillof or Wado de Pedro or literally anybody who wasn't intrinsically tied to all their failures for the last couple of years. They went with Sergio Massa, a professional political turncoat with more ties to the drug trade than Scarface.
So of course the vast majority of the country went with an actual economist (Massa, like most presidents elected since 1983, is a lawyer by trade). Someone with an actual plan to overhaul the economy (as fantastic and improbable as "dollarizing" sounds), stop reckless emission (the main cause for inflation) and cut government spending. And I'm not saying he's going to achieve all of that, but it's a break from 20 years of failed policy.
Honestly the current government lost the 2023 election in 2021, when a picture surfaced of the president hosting a dinner party July 2020, a few days after issuing an emergency decree ordering everyone into lockdown. Not even a shitty candid cellphone picture - the whole party was happily posing. It was the final fuck you as far as the country was concerned. Dude didn't even try to go for reelection.
Milei won because the kirchneristas' answer to 148% annual inflation, 50% child hunger, 40% unemployment and 10% homelessness was to let the current Minister of Economy - the face of every economic woe for the last year and a half as well as de facto president - run for the presidency. A man who over that period of time oversaw a crawling peg of over 300%, devalued the peso 22% when he lost the primaries, raised the gross income tax from 45% to 100% when he lost the runoffs, and quit the ministry as soon as his campaign came to an end.
(The current Minister of Economy, by the way, being the third of three ministers we tried out over the course of 2 weeks in July 2022, because this government burns through elected officials like they're trying shoes at the store)
People are sick of losing their money monthly to inflation. Americans ***** about their 7% inflation rate per year. Try 148%. Try saving your money in this economy when your net worth loses 12.5% of its value every month, and you're not allowed to save in other currencies. Buying dollars is against the law for most people. A few are allowed to buy 200 max per month, while being taxed 156% per dollar (or dollar spent, if you're carding internationally). And every dollar spent is a dollar you won't be able to legally buy next month. Card over 200 in November? That means you won't be able to buy dollars until January, when the peso racks up 25% in inflation.
If the kirchneristas wanted to win the election, or at least not lose by a whopping 12 points, they could've gone with Axel Kicillof or Wado de Pedro or literally anybody who wasn't intrinsically tied to all their failures for the last couple of years. They went with Sergio Massa, a professional political turncoat with more ties to the drug trade than Scarface.
So of course the vast majority of the country went with an actual economist (Massa, like most presidents elected since 1983, is a lawyer by trade). Someone with an actual plan to overhaul the economy (as fantastic and improbable as "dollarizing" sounds), stop reckless emission (the main cause for inflation) and cut government spending. And I'm not saying he's going to achieve all of that, but it's a break from 20 years of failed policy.
Honestly the current government lost the 2023 election in 2021, when a picture surfaced of the president hosting a dinner party July 2020, a few days after issuing an emergency decree ordering everyone into lockdown. Not even a shitty candid cellphone picture - the whole party was happily posing. It was the final fuck you as far as the country was concerned. Dude didn't even try to go for reelection.
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@Johnny Novgorod
Thanks for your perspective. It makes me curious about something tangentially related to the subject at hand: when there is a video game you want to play, how do you go about acquiring it? If the Argentine Peso lose over half its value in a year I suspect that makes the prices quite expensive, and I don't even know what platforms are popular over there.
Thanks for your perspective. It makes me curious about something tangentially related to the subject at hand: when there is a video game you want to play, how do you go about acquiring it? If the Argentine Peso lose over half its value in a year I suspect that makes the prices quite expensive, and I don't even know what platforms are popular over there.
Welcome to my TED talk.
Up until recently - literally 6 days ago - Steam had regional pricing for its games in Argentina. So understandably the overwhelming majority of gamers here are PC users playing on Steam. But between the conversion to dollars as of last week (Steam, very gallantly, let people know a full month ahead they could stock up dirt cheap one last time) and the 55% increase in taxes, PC gaming is finally as financially ruinous as console gaming.
You're charged 156% in taxes for every dollar spent. Essentially everything you buy, you pay two and a half times.
2% in gross income tax
8% in emergency tax
21% in VAT
25% in personal assets tax (or net worth tax)
100% in income tax (this was 45% until last week)
As for me personally, it's a matter of always waiting on sales, even when the value discounted will never match the taxes. If I buy a 60 dollar game that's on sale for "50% off" I'm not actually paying 30 dollars, because of the 156% overcharge I'm paying 76.8 dollars. And those are 30 dollars out of the allotted 200 that I won't be able to buy next month. Which sucks because buying dollars is how you save your money in this country. You gotta cash out of pesos regularly.
Conversely, if you wait for a sale long enough you might end up paying more for a "discounted" item than you would've half a year ago by paying the full price. 60 dollars on April are worth less pesos than 30 dollars in November. I paid less pesos for 60 bucks of Resident Evil 4 on April than I did for 30 bucks of Blasphemous 2 a couple of weeks ago.
There are basically three ways to go here:
1) Use pesos to legally buy dollars and then sell them for profit at the black market. The longer you hold on to them, the larger the profit.
2) Short-term time deposits. The interest in a time deposit is never going to 100% match the inflation rate but it's second closest after saving in dollars.
3) Invest in commodities and year-long plans. Anything from kitchen appliances to gaming subscriptions. Anything that isn't money goes up, always.
For gaming specifically, gift cards also work wonders. On any given day a gift card will always be more expensive than actually paying the amount at a digital store. But sit on a couple of gift cards for a few months and you'll beat inflation by a hell of a margin.
TL;DR It's a daily hustle and it never stops.
That's my entire point; Milei's act is just that: an act.
Well, we should ask ourselves how Eunekian's family got that money, and what political connections they have to whom.
The answer to that is...rather enlightening, to say the least.
These are not mutually-exclusive propositions, that's just the playbook for faux-populist Latin American right-wing strongmen. All the talk about freedom, liberty, trade, and the economy is just dog whistling his agenda will be to return Argentina to the banana republic days.
While I won't say it's a fundamentally conservative movie, I did similarly feel that scene let Captain Stacey off the hook way too easy. Gwen saying he's a good cop, eventhough him drawing a gun on his own daughter was his idea of being a cop. Not to mention starting a manhunt on the hunch that Spider-Woman was responsible for Peter's death. He's very much echoing the theme of being part of a system (the police) at the expense of the people you care for that the movie criticized with the whole spider-society and Gwen joining them at the expense of Miles. For Gwen to then semi praise her dad for being a cop during what's supposed to be her cathartic scene - realizing she hurt Miles by choosing the system over him, just like her dad chose being a cop over being her dad - left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
Although, one could say that all of Hollywood is fundamentally conservative, in that no big Hollywood production will ever truly step up and rock the boat, which in Spider-Verse's case means actually criticizing the police. They might nudge up against a critique, but they don't dare really going all the way.
Chicago traffic during rush hour duing the lockdown. It's like you guys are just trying to gaslight me, such and such never happened when I literally lived through it.
Chicago Quarantine 94 Traffic During Corona Stay at Home Order (March 2020) - YouTube
Do you have to do a RCT on parachutes to see if they work to conclude causation? Literally what would be the other explanation for car deaths rising when people drove less miles and total accidents were down over 20%? Oh!!! It's probably because of brain fog from all the long covid!!!
Nah, the fact that vaccines lower the mortality rate by 90% that you based all your math off of.
Firstly: an increase in traffic collision deaths could have any number of causes.
But your source isn't just including one specific cause of death, like car collisions. It's including everything, regardless of any connection. Anyone that died from falling tree branches, old age, accidental electrocution, or expired meds... your source is considering them all equally connected to lockdown as covid.
I guess I am just like Argentina throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
While that's obviously absurd (for the most part, I'd not be surprised if the odd weirdo had that position, but a tiny, tiny minority), there's a chance that Biden's support of Israeli committing genocide costs him the next election and Trump does get to get back in power, which would be a disaster.
My theory based on the elections in 2023 is that won't happen. Even in my own red state of Ohio both issues 1, and 2 won.
What's going to happen is that the anger, and grief among the young, and the arab-american community will die down. It's just sad that Israel had to do 10X the damage on Gaza, and then use this to steal more land.