> El Salvador receives millions of dollars in aid from the US.
This has been true for decades. Not anymore. A couple of weeks back the US gov said that it would stop all USAID funding and give it instead to ONGs in El Salvador which are basically the opposition or anti-Bukele.
I assume that there are other ways that the US gov sends "aid" but I'm sure these will also stop soon enough.
Wow this is the REAL story then. I had no idea why this move to BTC came out of nowhere and passed as law so quickly. Really scummy move from the US, using aid money to bully small countries and enforce its will. Too many strings come with US foreign “aid”, it’s more like predatory lending. I hope this works out for El Salvador.
As a Salvadoran living abroad but keeping an eye on politics there, I feel the need to comment given the amount of skepticism shown here, which is understandable given the history.
I believe that what the president, Nayib Bukele, and his team have done is monumental. The reason is that I also believe that the financial system crashed back in 2008 and has been kept alive by central banks worldwide. Last summer we saw how Lebanon banks reneged to pay back their customers their holdings in USD. This seems to be increasing. The thirst for USD around the world is increasing and all the so called printing by the FED is not getting to the other countries and international companies fast enough.
El Salvador is in a though position since it does not control its main currency. The other one, the Colón, while still legal tender is for all practical purposes unusable. It would take too long to grow the economy enough for it to be valued appropriately against the USD. Mandating BTC as legal tender is an awesome move. To me the most important benefit is that the 70% of the population which was excluded from banking and relegated to use physical currency will now be included. If the economy is an engine and money is the oil, El Salvador, which had only some drops of oil, will now get a complete oil change with synthetic on top of that. Lets remember that the law obligates the government to instruct all citizens on the use of the technology and to provide the means if necessary. This means that the government now has to provide connectivity to all citizens and teach them. Nayib has shown that he’s up to the task. For example, El Salvador is providing every child in the public school system with a laptop and free internet connectivity.
So I think this is beyond if BTC goes up to 200k. It doesn’t matter. If it goes back to 10k is OK too. What matters is that every citizen will now be included as equal in this new financial system.
> Mandating BTC as legal tender is an awesome move. To me the most important benefit is that the 70% of the population which was excluded from banking and relegated to use physical currency will now be included. If the economy is an engine and money is the oil, El Salvador, which had only some drops of oil, will now get a complete oil change with synthetic on top of that.
You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function, it encourages people to hold onto it with white knuckles. It's not oil for the economy, it's sand.
> This means that the government now has to provide connectivity to all citizens and teach them.
And when they don't provide connectivity and teach citizens?
> You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function, it encourages people to hold onto it with white knuckles. It's not oil for the economy, it's sand.
In my opinion, that's the biggest lie that people have been made to believe to justify constant stealing of their purchasing power over time.
People will always spend money for things they need, they will also spend money for things they want, our current system is forcing them to spend it for the sake of spending it causing unnecessary over-consumerism.
It doesn't matter how much Bitcoin price will appreciate in 5 years. If I need to eat, I'll have to spend today, if I want to buy a house, I'll have to spend too. Instead, I will think twice on upgrading to the shiny new iPhone every year, maybe doing it once every 2-3 years, which is a good thing.
Correct. Keynesian economics is a fraud we're taught to disguise the fact that we're being robbed. You don't need an inflationary currency for a currency to work. Gold and silver worked just fine for thousands of years, and only ran into problems when corrupt governments and banks printed more paper receipts than they had reserves. Central banking just legalized this practice for private profit, and then the peg to gold and silver was eliminated once they had monopoly control.
Those years when "it worked fine" were also when the entire world lived in squalor and horrible conditions. Including kings. I don't think we should call the past horrors "fine" in any way. I'm not saying the gold had anything to do with it. But you shouldn't say that world was OK.
The US gold standard collapsed. That's a fact of history.
It also encourages them to invest their money. The choice isn't either spend money on over-consumerism or lose it, the choice is either spend it or invest it so someone else can allocate more resources to what they are doing.
For sure, but then you have to understand and research what you're investing in. We also end up with sky high (in my opinion unjustified) P/E ratios just because money doesn't have elsewhere to go and it creates all kinds of wild inaccurate pricing imo.
In this world where the currency doesn't depreciate like ~95% over a 100 year period, only investments which make sense will get money thrown at them.
This is why there is so much VC money that people build "disruptive" companies whose primary trick is "let's lose money until all our competitors who don't understand revenue is boring are out of business" :(.
This is not about incentives to spend or invest - it's about having a functioning basic unit of economic measure that is 1) stable 2) has integrity and 3) hopefully under the control over the government.
BTC isn't good for any of that.
USD is good for 1 and 2.
The gov. can move to re-establish it's currency and have 3 as well.
Just the opposite, during difficult times people rush to USD which bolsters 1 and 2.
That it's used widely and fungible is what gives it value.
If your own currency is destroyed, you use the one that has the most integrity that's relative to your country. For most nations the default would be USD. For Vietnam probably RMB. For Belarus either Euro or Rouble.
Then you develop integrity in governance and switch to a national currency.
A nations currency is actually a vert good measure of the competence and integrity of the leadership class.
This is presented in a conspiratorial manner. "Who wants their money to be worth less?" "Governments don't want you to know..."
It's very simple. 100 euros in your hand right now is worth more than a possible/probable 100 euros in your hand next week. And Jeff Booth is arguing that we are trapped in a mental prison because we agree with this obvious fact.
Inflation is a different problem: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but if you have a bird in your hand you are better off trading it for a table because somehow a table in the hand depreciates less than a bird?
Yeah that's all fine and dandy until you need to take out a loan and on top of high interest you also need to account for deflation - good luck getting a house mortgage and falling wages. Deflation puta pressure on price of work as well - but people don't like pay cuts.
You know what happens then? House prices will fall because they won't have access to cheap money, so they'll end up being priced at their true value. Housing would stop being an investment, instead it would serve it's true purpose of providing lodging.
Yes, and then you know what happens? Builders stop building because of dropping prices. Trees stop getting felled.
It's called a 'deflationary trap' and everything falls apart.
Nations need a stable currency to function, BTC is untenable.
There's not much to debate here because it simply won't work, it's Banana Republic kind of stuff. They'll never switch over to BTC as a nation it's pragmatically impossible.
If they had the ability to effectively switch over to BTC, then they'd have the ability to responsibly issue and manage a currency.
So you're going to end up paying more in real terms (since deflation), for a house that's going to be worth less, you're making less and you have to pay interest. Sounds like an amazing deal, would vote for bitcoin tomorrow !
It's very counterintuitive, but actually the more unbanked you are the more you needs loans/savings and the more complicated your personal financial balance sheet is. I'd recommend the book 'the poor and their money'[1] for the details on this, but essentially if you haven't got savings you are constantly borrowing and lending informally with your community to meet life needs like a new roof or school fees.
The crypto holders have an irrational fear/hate about inflation and forget that it's a requirement for people to spend their money and supporting the economy.
People would spend very conservatively and nothing particularly interesting would happen. It would be virtually impossible to raise money for new businesses.
I mean, of course hodl, but not at the cost of dying of starvation or missing out on having your dream home, etc. Bitcoin subreddit is full of stories of people buying their first homes or cars, I've seen many people start their small businesses with their gains.
Life is short, you enjoy/spend what you have while you're here.
> Bitcoin subreddit is full of stories of people buying their first homes or cars, I've seen many people start their small businesses with their gains.
Sure. It's like the successful ipo's. While 1% succeeds and people want to have a startup, everyone forgets that 99% fails.
I earned the 2nd biggest amount of people i know personally and i can't buy a fancy car with it. On Reddit, you can see all people come together on a population of 10 billion, lol.
People that were interviewed for Bitcoin gains in the newspaper in 2020 had 20% of my gains in 2017. And it went life changing money either.
Seeing it on Reddit mostly means that you have found your "community".
But currency needs to move in order to be, you know, a currency. The lack of upward price movement of e.g. the US dollar means that there is no advantage to sitting on it. Invest it, spend it, or lose it.
Inversely, with BTC, you would want to spend as little as humanly possible. Make whatever philosophical arguments you want: this is not adding oil to the engine. This is adding sand.
> Inversely, with BTC, you would want to spend as little as humanly possible.
Sign me up. Hyper-consumerism has laid waste to our planet, commoditized every human interaction, and polluted our minds with its drivel.
Behold Denmark and its glorious decision to punish its citizenry for saving any amount of money at all. Hope you weren't thinking of saving your pennies for a ticket out of the renter's racket, Denmark would prefer you stuff it in stocks and pay them their cut.
It's time we seized control of the engine and refashioned it into a tool that serves our welfare.
Is it really so difficult to imagine a world where people spent less conspicuously, and invested more prudently?
In a sound currency world, interest rates are set by the relative availability of funds for investment - that is, they are counter-cyclically market-determined: if there is little investment, rates will be low, if the economy is booming, rates will naturally rise.
Secondly, the rate of deflation is determined by the rate of increase in the economy: if the economy is shrinking over time, there is no deflationary incentive to hold - so here again the currency is counter-cyclical, discouraging rapid growth while allowing for measured growth.
It's 'definitely not sane' to fix the amount of currency in circulation, either fiat or gold or crypto, arbitrarily.
It would be like saying 'we're going to fix the amount of roads we have' and 'people will be forced to use the roads more sensibly!'.
The only reason for 'fixing' currency would be to prevent bad actors from running the printing press. Now - this is actually a very real problem historically - however, it's a pretty crude solution.
The smart thing to do is manage your currency smartly - literally like everything else in civilization.
You need good Public Health Policy, you need good Monetary Policy.
Infinitely divisible money is an unit with unlimited ability to scale to the circumstances - if more is needed, simply add another zero. You err in comparing this to roads, which are necessarily in proportion to the amount of traffic over them. Money needs only to be able to represent value, and the relative value of different things.
Good monetary policy may be practicable by angels or saints, but not by men, who stand at the gates of unimaginable wealth that emanates from the printing press. Literal trillions of dollars - who can even conceive of that value, let alone decline the exercise thereof? Better to take it out of our hands.
If there was no elasticity in the monetary supply, then in both 2009 and 2021 the entire US economy would have collapsed probably taking down the world with in 2008, and most nations would have been wiped out in 2021 as well.
Also, most major currencies are managed well enough.
If you don't like your local fiat units, then don't hold on to them. Exchange them for anything else you value more and use local currency on as that - currency. Currency was never meant to be a long term store of value.
People in El Salvador will simply have the free choice to put their money into BTC. If people in El Salvador make or lose a bit of money because they diversify their exposure, will they not have contributed to the overall price signal process of the free market? Why is it bad to give people options?
I wonder what percentage of people in El Salvador have enough money to "put into BTC". Wouldn't most of the poor population be living essentially hand to mouth and spending their meager amount of money on daily food and shelter?
On the question of principles vs practicals... the principles sound great and all. I also appreciate that this takes advantage of the large number of mobile devices already out there, and encourages the development of rural internet.
But, I predict that the practicals are not going to be good. Bitcoin transaction fees are high. If anything, this is a gift to large criminal organizations with a large footprint in the country which will be far more able to make use of their BTC. The law enforcement arm of this will not be ready or able to deal with it.
There is a role for cryptocurrency in helping the underserved gain access to banking. This plan does not sound like the right one to me.
> Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function
With the rapid increase of the Money Supply of the USD, this is no different than any other Asset, especially Buyback driven stocks(where the supply diminishes over time!). To store value you also need to hold onto them with white knuckles. It also does not encourage an economy to function, hence why our GDP growth has slowed to a halt.
Without debating any of your points: bitcoin is a terrible choice for this. It is horribly volatile, it is incredibly expensive to transact in, it is an awful waste of energy.
Using a stablecoin on a proof of stake blockchain with high transaction rates would make a lot of sense.
But that wouldn't help the officials who pushed this get rich from their stash of bitcoin...
Once again, El Salvador is using lightning network which enable almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments. PoS isn't perfect either and has it's own sets of problems.
Lightning is a horrible kludge to deal with the fact that Bitcoin is terrible at being a currency. It essentially boils down to this process:
1. Pay huge fees to take your money off the blockchain.
2. Whiz it around a new, totally independent, centralized network where you need an always-on connection to anyone you're paying or receiving from and need to trust any intermediaries you're using, with brand new fees for every transaction and even at rest (so you can pay a "watchtower" to help make sure you don't get cheated).
3. Pay more huge fees to put your money back on the blockchain when you're done.
4. Wonder how you got yourself into a situation where you have all the disadvantages of Visa and Bitcoin, with none of the advantages of either.
We already have existing coins, like Nano, that can handle transactions instantly, for zero fees, and with nearly no energy use, on the main chain.
Channel factories will open/close many channels at once, so you'll only pay a fraction of the blockchain transaction cost. It has the advantages of Bitcoin's security and p2p network speed.
Security and trust are a lot more important for currency, nano doesn't have that. It has easily been spammed [1]. It barely has a market cap of ~1B$ and has never recovered to it's 2017 prices, so it's not even remotely close to being an ideal candidate for a country's currency.
Eh, it got spammed and transactions slowed to BTC level (but still with no fees) for a couple months. Spam is a solvable problem. A hard limit of 4 transactions per second isn't.
Ya know what doesn't have security and trust? Putting your entire country on two custodial wallets and having all your citizen's wealth in the hands of two foreign companies (channel factoried or no). No one in El Salvador actually owns any Bitcoin. It baffles me how anyone could get on board with the original ideals of BTC, then defend what's happening now.
It remains to be seen whether lightning network will actually work for this. If it does, then I'll allow that only the volatility and energy waste are the reasons this is a bad idea.
But yeah, if you sell this to me as a test of lightning at scale, then I'm definitely more interested in it, while still thinking a super volatile asset is a bad currency.
It does work, they have been using it in El Zonte town for quite some time now [1].
The volatility will come down as the market caps get larger, but it'll never go away (I mean even fiat currencies and gold's price fluctuate on a daily basis).
The energy usage (not waste if you consider it to be a useful thing) will only go up as the price goes up, but it'll use increasingly renewable % and stranded energy and even bankroll new renewable power plants that wouldn't have been profitable to start.
This "volatility will come down as the market cap gets larger" keeps getting thrown around, yet Bitcoin just lost 50% of its value at a market cap of 1 trillion USD. What market cap is required for Bitcoin to stop being volatile?
Well, how little volatility is needed to be called stable? Over a few years, large swings can happen with major forex pairs. Take GBP/USD for example: High of 1.71602 in 2014. Low of 1.14926 in 2020. It currently trades around 1.4.
So, not the same kinds of returns and drawdowns as BTC/USD, but enough to make one's eyes water and stomach churn. Forex has always had a reputation for volatility.
Gold is not a used directly as a currency anymore, in part for the reason that it's hard to control the value of an asset. It turns out that having some control over a currency's inflation/deflation is very powerful and good for economies to function.
Fiat currencies fluctuate too, even a big pair like USD/EUR has a high of ~0.9 and low of ~0.8 this year and if we are talking about smaller currencies like say the Turkish Lira, you're looking at much larger changes.
Gold isn't used directly because it's not convenient, are you gonna transport a heavy metal that you can't divide into small portions to pay for stuff? No! Lightning network wallets makes even tiny payments of couple satoshis very easy/instant/almost free.
> But that wouldn't help the officials who pushed this get rich from their stash of bitcoin...
The price didn't move much after the announcement. The whole point is to attract those who have already gotten rich from their stash of bitcoin to come to the country.
>> Lets remember that the law obligates the government to instruct all citizens on the use of the technology and to provide the means if necessary. This means that the government now has to provide connectivity to all citizens and teach them. Nayib has shown that he’s up to the task. For example, El Salvador is providing every child in the public school system with a laptop and free internet connectivity.
That could have been done with just like a public bank instead of bitcoin though.
If this experiment works, it should benefit the people in El Salvador because they now have the option to transact and communicate their purchase preferences all around the globe instead of just to the people they meet in person. As for using normal banks, I reckon we had the whole 20th century to try that experiment. Now, banks seem a bit like hope-cope such that it seems like a matter of shitting in one hand and "could have been done with just like a public bank" in the other.
Not gonna argue about bitcoin's merit, but this part:
> Lets remember that the law obligates the government to instruct all citizens on the use of the technology and to provide the means if necessary. This means that the government now has to provide connectivity to all citizens and teach them.
It's like proposing to dismantle old but working streetcars, because when the only way people can get around is by cars then the government will have to build decent highways. Sure, maybe the government should, but if it couldn't until now then what makes you think it will suddenly be able to?
> The thirst for USD around the world is increasing and all the so called printing by the FED is not getting to the other countries and international companies fast enough.
This is because all the Fed does is create reserves that it uses to purchase Treasuries on the open market. But when we talk of foreigners demanding USD, what they really demand are treasuries, thus more "printing" (it is electronic, reserves are just numbers in a database) actually reduces the supply of assets that foreigners want to hold. Of course the scale is not really relevant to make a big difference in either direction.
What would increase the supply of treasuries is more debt issuance. There is an insatiable thirst to hold risk free debt in stable jurisdictions where property rights are respected. That is why the U.S. can run enormous deficits every year and the yields on those deficits are negative in real terms. None of this has anything to do with the supply of Federal reserve liabilities, which are reserves, but with the supply of Treasury liabilities, both actual liabilities and the off-balance sheet stuff like mortgages which are federally insured and thus also risk-free. We live in a world where the globalization of capital means that the moment anyone has some money to save, they want to store it on account in some US Bank or as a US corporate bond or equity, as they don't trust their own local banks and their own local corporations. Thus the U.S. is the world's bank, and that's why there is a global demand for dollar-denominated assets independent of whatever the Federal reserve does to increase or decrease the supply of reserves within the US banking system. Adjusting those reserves with open market operations does absolutely nothing to supply more dollars to anyone in El Salvador (or in Kansas).
But the problem for El Salvador is not the technology of monetary systems, it is that El Salvador has an underground economy that prevents it from collecting taxes or having a working credit system. If all your dealings are under the table, you have nothing to show a loan officer. If you don't want to store your savings in a bank but want to instantly withdraw them and store them in a foreign bank or under your mattress, then you are not going to be able to get much in bank loans in your own currency. None of that will be solved or even improved with bitcoin. Proving once again that bitcoin is a solution in search of problem, even in the arena of El Salvador's monetary woes.
> But the problem for El Salvador is not the technology of monetary systems
I do believe that the monetary system IS the problem since El Salvador is dollarized and is subject to a foreign central bank antics while having no say in the matter. Having their own would be marginally better perhaps but IMO bitcoin is a much better solution.
The only reason nations get dollarized is because they do not trust the fiat currencies issued by their own government because the government chooses to extract more from seignorage than the benefits of having the currency or the government is not otherwise trusted to not seize bank accounts. Thus they choose to opt out of their local government-run system. That is an effect rather than a cause. Once that happens, a whole host of other problems occur, from breakdown in credit systems and payment systems to underground economies and loss of tax income. Bitcoin solves none of these problems, which are the core problems. Rather, trying to use bitcoins rather than seashells, gold doubloons, or foreign dollars is just an expression of the population's lack of trust in their own government and switching from one of these alt-currencies to another doesn't help the government at all. What would help the government is enforcing rule of law, establishing trust in financial institutions, providing value for amounts taxed so that there is popular support for taxation and trust that the money is well spent, and establishing faith in the government's currency. That is what would help El Salvador, not hoping that the US government makes it easier for foreign nationals to acquire dollar denominated debt.
1) It only takes a bare minimum of competence to create a currency that has integrity, and is stable.
2) Extending that digitally, should not be a hard.
3) Using energy supplies to calculate made up numbers seems like a giant waste of energy - that energy could be used to heat homes and power other things.
4) BTC is wildly unstable, since El Salvador depends on imports - and - nobody accepts BTC for payment - it's going to be a wild ride.
5) Nobody is going to be issuing debt in BTC so that part is moot.
6) BTC is inappropriate for 'unbanked' people - they're going to be the target of hackers worldwide. Sure, you could make a 'government wallet' that protects them from that ... but then why not just do regular banking.
6) For a currency ... if for some reason you can't do #1 ... the best option, by far, is to use USD. Prices in USD are stable. They're accepted globally. You don't have to issue debt in USD, but you can if you want. You can also digitally bank in USD if you want, it's not that hard.
7) If you really think that the best way to leverage volcanic heat is to mine BTC ... then fine. Do that - and exchange it for whatever currency you need.
This whole concept is fairly insane, regular people I feel are going to pay a heavy price.
Lastly - the problem is not 'finances' - it's the fools managing the country. If they acted with a modicum of responsibility, you'd be able to have all of the normal things other countries do i.e. a currency, basic banking. None of that is actually that hard.
A better solution would be to approach an established bank somewhere: US, Canada, Brazil, UK, Germany and ask them to provide online banking for your citizens, probably in USD or a mix of USD and local currency.
Do the BTC mining if you really want to, but as a secondary thing.
Final Note: this already has the stench of corruption. My bet is that the leadership already has a big stake in BTC and are 'Doing a Musk' by propping it up and they will be grafting off the top of the mining activity.
I'm afraid that if I try to retort to each point we may end up talking past each other.
But I will say this, I think that your assumption in point 1 is wrong. I think that the mismanagement of the financial system worldwide has proven that there is no country currency invulnerable to manipulation.
Jeff Booth talks about this towards the end of this interview which is great in it's entirety IMO.
There are over 150 nations, most of them tiny that have a currencies, it's not rocket science.
A nations currency will have the integrity and competency of the governing class, so El Salvador will be able to have a basic currency when they are not corrupt.
Frankly, this whole thing stinks of corruption, my bet is that the leadership are already speculating on BTC and are making big statements like Musk to drive it up, and that their fingers will be in the pot of the BTC volcanic mining.
But it may be moot: you can't force people to use BTC and businesses, esp. those that import will balk at it, and citizens likely won't adopt it.
Ask a US, Canadian, UK, Brazilian bank to provide basic financial services for citizens and they'd do it in a heartbreat.
The 'currency problem' in El Salvador is just a symptom of underlying problems.
> so El Salvador will be able to have a basic currency when they are not corrupt.
Ok, so I’m going to straight-up ask you to either retract this racist statement or justify your position with evidence.
I want to see your proof that the government of El Salvador is corrupt. This link seems to indicate the opposite [1].
To help you see the light, let me highlight the fact that El Salvador lost their own currency after a bloody 12 year long civil war that was funded by an interventionist US government that raised an army of child soldiers in the 1980s.
Per Wikipedia [2], the Carter and Reagan administrations spent $1-2 million per day in 1980 dollars to raise and train this army of child soldiers.
Tell me again why El Salvador is corrupt and that is why they lost their currency?
How stable are those national currencies to inflation over time though?
Notably, the British Pound Sterling is named such because 1 British pound originally represented a pound of Sterling Silver. Today it takes over 400 British pounds to buy 1 pound of sterling silver.
Twenty US Dollars were worth 1 oz of gold until 1933. Today it is nearly 2000 USD per oz.
I challenge your statement that it is easy for a government to manage a currency over the long term. In fact it seems impossible for politicians and central bankers to resist the temptation to inflate their currencies to infinity.
Why haven’t the US, Canadian, UK or Brazilian banks provided services to the 70% of El Salvadorans today? What are were they waiting for all this time? I believe it simply wasn’t profitable enough for them.
Using the military was normalized be previous governments from the left and the right. Nothing new in using them for security purposes. And lockdowns are being performed worldwide, so from a local perspective nothing abnormal in using the military for lockdown purposes.
> * Defect blame to all political opponents
Which blame? Keeping derelict infrastructure such as the potable water plant that didn't receive a repair for 30 years hoping that it will break down in order to pass laws to privatize access to water? A non-existing health care system for the most Salvadorans? On and on...
> * Threaten to shutdown the largest bank and mobile phone operator
The president used his power to keep these and other corporations in check since these were ignoring the orders of not seizing the stipend provided by the gov to the poorest. At least one bank was seizing this in "fees" and debt collection. As for the mobile company, there were people reporting that one company was cutting service to people for non-payment even though these have been prohibited by the gov to do so for a few months therefore illegal.
> * Bot networks that attack any dissenting view
This is a tired argument that has been shown to be false time and time again. The popularity of the president, Nayib Bukele, is such that 98% of the population have a positive image of the president and 97% approve his handling of the current virus crisis. There is enough people that approve his actions that anyone emotionally invested in the opposite cannot handle the reaction of others specially when any comments that they bring are at best uninformed, at worst lies. I know, these are high numbers; he's that good.
> * A government official publicly using the twitter api to identify tweets from the opposition
So, the gov is investigating public information about posts with unverifiable data aimed to discredit and possible incite violence against the president's family. What's wrong with that?
> * Order the military and police to use lethal force if someone does not comply.
Comply to what? To break lockdown? Nope. Use lethal force when engaged with violent life-threatening forces, which in El Salvador are gangs backed by drug cartels, corrupt business man, and prominent politicians from left and right protected by immunity because they are currently serving. Yes, that's right, current serving politicians from both left and right have been recorded providing funds to these gangs.
> We've had somewhat working separation of powers.
What? I guess you're talking about the president stating that he will use his constitutional powers to enforce any measure deemed necessary to protect lives. This is an argument used by his discredited opponents because they still control the judicial and legislative bodies. Before Bukele, the presidency danced to the same sick music that has kept this little country poor where both left and right were attached to the hip.
> It is terrible to see my country turning into an autocratic rule, and how the government is misusing Twitter to make that happen :/
It brings hope to see a small country that has been ruled by a primitive dishonest bi-partisan mafia to have at last a glimmer of hope for a better future in this time of incertitude.
Regarding you feeling that this is engineered, the following could be a reason why if valid:
The dual economy didn’t happen overnight, says Temin. The story started just a couple of years after the ’67 Summer of Love. Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
America’s underlying racism has a continuing distorting impact. A majority of the low-wage sector is white, with blacks and Latinos making up the other part, but politicians learned to talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black because it allowed them to appeal to racial prejudice, which is useful in maintaining support for the structure of the dual economy — and hurting everyone in the low-wage sector. Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People
That article is not accurate, if you work for a salary you're in poverty. Before 2005 it was not that bad, we saw a major transformation with the downturn. Here in LA the cost of living has swallowed up all but the very highest paid salaries. High taxes in California combined with high rents and high cost of food, education and healthcare make for a brutal combination for working people of all stripes.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I work for a salary and am most assuredly not in poverty. Could you expand a bit on what you meant by that?
>the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.
So your belief is, the dominant economic-political movement in America regards "preserving the inferior status of blacks" as an end goal in and of itself? Or is this an instrumental goal that somehow serves some other purpose?
The sentence previous to the one you quoted suggests the political reasoning. Those in power see diversity as a threat to the status quo, and demonizing an enemy has long been a textbook way for demagogues to raise political capital.
For lots of people in the dominant economic-political elite, it's probably not exactly a goal but an enjoyment in itself. Besides if you're WASP, why you'd want to acknowledge the needs of blacks, or even more, have them as business competitors?
At best, you want their sales and votes -- but even that, not if they vote for their interests and/or more progressively.
Besides the blacks, if not predominantly now, for a lot of time, were also among the poor and working class, which is an even bigger enemy if you want to keep your privileges.
It's phrased funny, but the gist that I got from it (and which seems plausible to me) is that the issue has been framed as involving the "other", and therefore those in power don't care.
"The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice."
This seems to me a good and complete answer as to why everything seems so hard. It's because everything that occurring is based on the "permanent" lie. The powers that be, be the deep state or whatever, cannot acknowledge facts or reality because it will loose its power. The sad part is that I think we also live in our own permanent lie in order not to see the homeless on the sidewalk, acknowledge the cow/chicken/etc raised in factory farming, the use of tax dollars to overthrow governments and kill untold number of people around the world, etc. Lots of issues that I think we need to tackle personally if we want society to do it too.
... the survey respondents didn’t necessarily perceive every non-euphoric event as negative. In fact [the study authors] deliberately avoided the word “adverse” in their study for this reason. Instead, they chose “challenging,” which better captured the meditators’ varied interpretations of their experiences.
I've meditated and attended multiple 10 day meditation retreats and I can attest that yes there are challenging moments and I have yet to experience an "adverse" event.
I would not say that meditation has a dark side. I would say that the meditators' minds are being stressed and challenged to the point where these react with such a force for which they were unprepared due to many reasons such as environment, emotional state, health issues, memories, etc. Like any activity, your mileage may vary.
I personally like to make that analogy of the mind to an OS which is trying to help you, an organism living in a giving environment, to identify and classify the stimuli it receives and generate an appropriate response. These responses are like programs that the mind/OS has generated to deal with the stimulus. All this is mechanical/automatic. If my limited understanding is correct, then meditation helps control this process and the process becomes less automatic and more controlled. The mind becomes more calmed and ready to focus on what you choose instead of whatever the stimuli dictates. Little by little the subconscious becomes conscious.
No. Meditations is like switching off internal firewalls(reality models) and trying to read raw packets(thought objects) on an ancient OS you only know by interface. You don't control the packets coming out, but you can apply filters and examine their structure. As you try to peek inside the system, it starts to behave weird as if it has more and more firewalls keeping secrets from you and when you break them down you lose protection from outside hackers and have to build up defenses from scratch.
The view expressed in the article is not surprising when reading two other articles (see below) that appeared not long ago here in HN, one of which was flagged (I tend to suspect that these theses hit a little too close to home for some and hence the immediate dismissal).
When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU.
And that the paper:
...co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong.
The guys at The Automatic Earth[1] explain that after the multi-decade credit run up enabled by cheap oil would come when peak oil is reached. Once there the financial system is not able to sustain itself without cheap credit it will collapse and a sustained credit deflation will ensue. In this deflation all assets will decrease in price but the difficulty to obtain cash will be harder making them effectively very expensive.
This, they explain, will have the effect of making oil cheap to the point that there won’t be enough money to invest in maintaining the current infrastructure and even less to invest in green tech. Once the bad debts are cleared and growth returns the true effects of peak oil will be felt everywhere.
In summary, they say, don’t get your hopes up with clean/green tech. It is too little too late and it simply cannot replace oil. And nuclear energy is no better once you take into account the energy required to build, operate and decommission reactors and also dispose of radioactive waste in a safe manner.
They have in my opinion one of the best analysis available in the intertubes.
This has been true for decades. Not anymore. A couple of weeks back the US gov said that it would stop all USAID funding and give it instead to ONGs in El Salvador which are basically the opposition or anti-Bukele.
I assume that there are other ways that the US gov sends "aid" but I'm sure these will also stop soon enough.