Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricity Crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union

Just for comparison:

Berlin is at lattitude 52°31′N.

Marseille is at lattitude 43°18′N.

Hobart is at lattitude 42°53′S.

So Tasmania is more similar to southern Europe in levels of insolation. Not as great as mainland Australia, which has some of the best insolation levels in the world, but still not too bad.

And yes, Tasmania also has great wind resources.

Preventing utilities from hedging... how could that ever work?

It's caused by too many plants being poorly-maintained and breaking down and insufficient investment in new power plants caused by corruption and incompetence. In other words, not regular localised reductions or transfers of load, but the same wide scale forced blackouts as being discussed elsewhere in this thread.

There has, thankfully, been no load shedding over the past few months, but only because the economy has slowed down sufficiently that the country's electricity demand has dropped below its regular levels.

The pattern is simular, unstable supply leads to private infrastructure. Demand increases when supply is available, leading to more instablilty. Quality goes down because private infrastructure is usually second rate.

In egypt water quality is way down because of private storage in water tanks.

Compared to Kirchner's administration, Macri's waaaay better.

This is a sample of Kirchner's gov:

http://www.eltrecetv.com.ar/telenoche/impactante-video-el-hi...

You can see in the video, the son and the accountant of a major contractor from Kirchner's Administration. They're counting corruption money, and drinking a scotch to celebrate afterwards. Looks like a hollywood script. Reality surpasses fiction.

If it's primarily the bond deal, I would be sympathetic to the argument that Macri is just being honest and having the country take responsibility for the debts racked up by his predecessors. Another good sign is how he's cleaned up the government statistics office that Fernandez was using to publish ginned up economic indicators to make herself look better (which wasn't fooling anybody outside the country; I don't know how widely they were believed domestically). These sorts of moves pay off in the long term by restoring the goodwill of the international community and giving the government more room to maneuver. The fact that he's making them now, when they make his job more difficult in the short term, suggests a profound professional integrity that inclines me to think of him as a statesman.

Am I misreading your objection here? If so, I'd like to know more about your take on things. (Or maybe you could point me to some sources I could read?)

So I think its wrong to say "above anything else, gigantic incompetence", its more like "above anything else, bad insentives".

The causes for the problems in Latin America are complex, there is no single root cause that can be easily explained in an Internet forum, and keep in mind many of these countries -- well, I can at least speak for Argentina -- were historically owned and managed by decidedly non populist landowners which influenced the following generations of leaders (and some of these families still own portions of the country). So if populism was a reaction to conservatism and prior authoritarian governments, it cannot (alone) be the root cause of our problems.

Sure, corruption is a problem as well, but I think that alone it doesn't explain our problems either.

I think corruption and populism are more symptoms than causes.

In just three years, their inflation (the bolivar has lost 97% of its value) and economic contraction has taken their GDP per capita from ~$14,000 to ~$4,000. They've lost at least 70% of their economy, and it's not over yet.

Saudi Arabia's economic output is nearly five times greater per capita. Their median income and median household net wealth are both vastly higher than Venezuela. Saudi Arabia still has substantial capital reserves, while Venezuela has almost none.

Venezuela now has a $20 monthly minimum wage. [1] Most of the nation is struggling to afford food.

Saudi and Venezuela couldn't be any more different outside of being petro states.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/monthly-sa...

This is of course, ignoring the risks that the government claiming that they will take over the nuclear plant and put a high school dropout in charge.

What are you, a capitalist? That won't work in Venezuela's current political climate.

I'm a huge fan of nuclear power, but I do tend to think it would be a bad idea in an unstable country.

And take the risk of being "nationalized" by the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Of course radical libertarianism and authoritarian socialism, while both pipe dreams, are basically apples and oranges to one another, and can't be compared side by side.

But the point about the smaller-scale fiascos in Chile and Honduras is that it shows how farcical (and corrupt) that ideology can be whenever people do try to incarnate it in its purest form, out there in the real, actual world. This coming from people who claim to know vastly better about reinventing the world from the ground up.

"Glass houses, throwing stones", and all that.

I hate getting down in the weeds on this, but its "not considered socialism" by those on the left who are embarrassed that the Nazis were pretty much a command economy and have socialism in its name.

This is history that is mostly ignored or simply pased out of memory. Their was a version of socialism that was called 'Prussian Socialism' and the thinkers from this area had quite a bit of influence on the later devlopment of facism.

Many facists like mussolini were socialist that were pissed of by the socialist party. Hitler took a party with socialist elements and retracked it so that the socalist parts were neglected.

If you look at the original 23 points of the Nazi party, they look fairly simlular to many moderet socialist parties of the time.

The first chapter of Hayek 'The Road to Freedom' is an exploration of the history of thought. It was originally be intended to be part of a book on the subject (The Use and Abuse of Reason Part 1) but he had to no time and so he released it as a more populist book. Sadly this chapter did not get the attention needed and was removed in the version that became a best seller in the US (Readers Digest Version).

It is unfortunate that political terminology is muddy enough to allow for this sort of confusion. If I think these 10 countries are capitalist and you think 8 of them are socialist, what is the likelihood of us having a useful conversation discussing capitalism and socialism?

Sweden and Denmark are probably more free market than the US.

They do have high taxes and extensive welfare systems.