What is going on in Argentina?
memoirsandrambles.substack.com
memoirsandrambles.substack.com
The other thing to note is that Mastercard (and Visa I believe) have a newer rate specifically aimed at tourists (the MEP rate), which normally stays closer to the informal rate (blue dollar rate). Annoyingly they tend to charge your account with the official rate, and then refund the difference a few days later.
There's also this website which has a view of all the different rates: https://bluedollar.net/
It was super sketchy. When I sent the money, the western union person said there was a chance western union would block it because it was such a large amount, but luckily it went through. When my sister picked it up, they basically stuffed it into a backpack to carry around. Seemed very dangerous to be carrying that much cash (even in the US it would be), but it worked out ok.
Constant GDP per capita is up ~50% from 1960: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG
The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land.
It's kind of like a Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.
Hence why the poverty rate near instantly skyrocketed after the huge cuts to government spending recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina is surprisingly comprehensive. The sidebar has agriculture at 7% of the economy. The place is not without industry, it's just making and selling things at ""wrong"" prices because of the currency issue, which in turn comes from the balance of payments issue. There's clearly substantial local commerce, just not quite enough export.
Even by world standards, 70-80% of urbanization in the 60s and 92% now is quite a lot. Especially a lot for a country which mostly exports agricultural produce. Without checking, I would expect it to be 50% in the 60s and 70-80% today.
Not sure how Argentinians are supposed to do better using cryptocurrencies.
They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)
So again, this is really a symptom of a deeper problem.
With regards to out of control spending, I think Milei is trying to get that under control. No idea if it'll work though.
The kind of intermediate-level inflation (not tour typical inflation, but also not hyperinflation) that exists in Argentina (or Turkey for that matter) is typically caused by governments addressing underlying problems by driving inflation up (it's not an unintended consequence of poor monetary policy, they aren't oblivious). Sure it's not nice, but the problem is: how do you solve the underlying problem anyway. If you just say “I'm gonna play the "strong money" card no matter what” you're not solving the problem, you're tying your own hands and now you have two problems.
Be careful what you wish for.
Just hyperinflating forever though seems to just be making the pop of the bubble that much worse.
1) I used to work in a very large IT group in Latin America, and I worked with some EngManagers who hired and managed some folks in Argentina. One interesting dynamic was due to the inflation, we used to give to folks 'monthly' salary increases to offset. Since the company captured the inflation also in the prices, for a long time offer that offset with a small plus was a very huge retention factor for us;
2) After 2015/6, our IT director started to give 1 Bitcoin or USD 500 equivalent in Bitcoin for our argentine colleagues as part of their monthly salary, and eventually those guys ended up holding or selling it with more than 10x over it.
It got some upvotes, but sadly no discussions at all. Highly relevant when discussing Argentina at the moment though, but keep in mind this is just one extreme perspective, one side of the coin so to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436291 (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/javiermileiworldec...)
We are driving our future off a cliff by allowing collectivism to return over libertarianism.
For example his perspective would be very consistent with the perspectives of the founding fathers of the United States. The Founding Fathers would have widely agreed with the speech’s support for free-market capitalism and its critique of collectivism, socialism, and excessive state intervention. Advocating principles that promote economic freedom and prosperity would resonate with them as a reflection of their own efforts to create a government that promotes individual liberty and economic opportunity. celebration of the entrepreneur as a hero of prosperity and its warning against state overreach would likely find broad support among the Founding Fathers. They were, after all, establishing a new nation built on principles of liberty, property rights, and opposition to tyranny. The speech’s call for economic freedom and limited government intervention mirrors the Founding Fathers’ debates on the proper role and size of government. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, would likely support the speech’s endorsement of free-market capitalism. The emphasis on economic freedom and the role of free enterprise in lifting people out of poverty would resonate with his and similar Founders’ views on economic development.
Yet somehow this is generally considered the majority opinion today of his speech:
> has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas
Milei is quite extreme when he claims that markets can't fail. He's trying to move Argentina in the right direction. I would have voted for him. But that's an extreme claim and is rejected by most economists.
Regarding “most economists” it would depend on how broad you allow the claim of being an economist is a valid one. We have literal socialist and marxists claiming to be economists. That’s as absurd as creationists claiming to be evolutionarily biologists. Those are perspectives that are empirically proven to be rubbish yet due to human instinctual biases persist for long periods of time. Eventually collectivism, socialism, and marxism should be banished to the gutters of history, the only question is how much more pain and suffering will it take before human civilization decides to include proper social and economic science as part of core education curriculum, like evolution is taught in most places today.
However what is the reason governments should be involved in imperfect information or transaction costs?
Please provide specific market failures.
Additionally creationists is the perfect analogy for collectivists, socialist and marxists, their ideas require magic fairy dust to have any chance of working.
Creationism is also the perfect analogy for people who either are ignorant of or deny basically anything past the first page of an economics textbook in favour of the dogma that if markets fail to deliver optimal results it must be the fault of state intervention. Much like Marxism, the economics of Mises needs a lot of fairy dust
(I imagine the libertarians campaigning to abolish government involvement in product and environmental regulation would also be confused by the insistence they absolutely believe that the role of the government is to protect the environment and regulate products. Next minute you'll be telling me poor people deserve medical treatment!)
There's no need for this. Marxism seems to be a re-growing school of thought, taking various angles in modern society and culture. No ranting has happened, and your mischaracterisation of things is revealing.
When I make a pro-libertarian comment I’ll initially get many upvotes, I know this because I refresh HN periodically and so I notice my points go up.
Then many hours or even days later I’ll be downvoted heavily and even go negative. I’m not sure what to make of it tbh.
Wanted to mention it because now your comment is faded which I think means negative feedback.
How this is relevant in general is that I find it disappointing that the tech community in general somehow has a very poor education in economic history and in particular seems to not be aware of the tragic consequences of collectivist and socialist policies. Which is clearly an indicator of problem within the education system.
But yes, I think there is a set of people - who you can spot by their vocabulary - who think that sawing off the root of the branch that causes us to even be able to develop the advances that we have.
Milei's bark is likely to prove more extreme than his bite, of course. He's already pointedly not abolishing the central bank and quietly mending relations with China.
Your perspective is too non-collectivism skewed. The West is a mish-mash, but it's the bastion of economic liberalism and capitalism. Those are so effective that they can pay for all sorts of social policies without affecting the productivity too much of the people making the money.
You should be thinking about the millions starved and killed in China or Russia or now Argentina when you think of the problems of collectivism. Thinking of somewhere like Sweden as a collectivist paradise is wrong - there are plenty of billionaires there. It's easy to pay for "free" stuff when there's plenty to go round, and the plenty is generally not provided by a collectivist state.
There are plenty of people who think that eating the rich would pay for everything. They think billionaires actually have yearly billions in cash to pay for social entitlements, rather than one-off ownership of valuable companies. That's the worry that's being discussed.
He explicitly isn't saying anything about the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward, and he is criticising the leaders of the United States, the EU, the UK and Sweden for being too "collectivist" (and suggesting that neoclassical economics is insufficiently supportive of capitalism because it concedes market distribution might not always be perfect!)
The world doesn't lack defences of capitalism or criticisms of the USSR and Latin American socialism, nuanced and otherwise. But the perspective of equating the policy stance of the Biden or Macron or Sunak administration on welfare and regulation with Stalinism or Maoism or even Chavismo is the definition of extremism, and not even high-quality, evidence-based extremism.
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina
(advise: skip all other random talk about AI, LLMs and ML stuff, you may easily get outraged)
I don't see anything worth reading here. It is deceptive with intent and fundamentally unhinged.
But I disagree with "I don't see anything worth reading here", even if it's unhinged and you fundamentally disagree with their point of view.
He is the democratically elected president of a country in despair, and trying to understand what will happen to the country requires understanding the motivations behind the actions, which are laid bare in his speech, no matter how factual his points are.
There is a lot of distance between promising economic changes and getting a positive outcome. His path seems to include a lot of reducing income to the government, privatization of government services and shuttering government branches that promote sciences, etc.
I think he wants to recreate Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Javier_...
Fully severed and deprived of any US privilege, it's leadership could quickly face any number of newsworthy options like mass die offs due to minimal health care and low vaccination rates, being overthrown by a Latin / South American interest or dying in a bloody coup because they couldn't muster enough resources to complete their 10000 Sweltering Gulags plan fast enough.
In Brazil we have a saying "pior que tá não fica", which translates to something like "it cannot get worse than this". Belive me when I say this: it can (and probably will) get worse. It can (and probably will) get SO MUCH worse.
We tasted this poison with 4 years of Bolsonaro trying to get away from the establishment. What did we get in return? 700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem and after the piece of shit lost the election he attempted a COUP. Luckily he's going to jail on the next few months, but the damage is done.
That's the problem though. It's completely understandable to vote against that. But to have one option to the status quo, and that option is this?
It's basically like you have lived beyond your means for a long while and you live in a too big house and the sensible solution might be to get another job, sell the car and move to a smaller place. But see that choice doesn't exist. Your choice is to keep aggregating debt, OR you burn the house down and live in a tent.
The problem with very bitter medicine like this is that it risks swinging back the other way just as fast when people become angry enough.
Currently we have a successful but pretty crappy form of capitalism. Some countries have experimented with Communism, fascism, oligarchy (ism)?), feudalism ect ect.
Why not give libertarianism a shot?
Because it's capitalism on steroids? Are you not aware of the world we're living in? Every major forest destroyed, countless species exctinct, climate change reaching point of no return, etc.
We urgently need to slow down, not speed up.
More than that, it's easy to make abstract statements like "we need to slow down", but how do you imagine that could be done? Who decides which sectors need to be frozen and how do we make sure we don't accidentally starve millions of Africans while doing it (look up food self-sufficiency numbers)?
Then, for comparison, research the position people describing themselves as libertarians hold and held on the existence of these laws...
(I'm not a big fan of blanket statements on growth like "we should slow down" either, but libertarians deserve no more credit for the enactment of environmental laws they campaigned against than Stalinists do for the reunification of Germany)
You'll soon see.
Because liberalism, I/E shrink the state so that ~the corporations can rule~ the invisible hand of the market can fix everything.
Even Adam Smith recognised that you need a state to limit the power of the big actors in the invisible hand of the market.
"Liberalism": Broadly, what other countries call social liberalism, i.e. liberty, individual rights, equality, all rooted in Locke's notion of the social contract.
"Libertarianism": An American revival of what's formally called classical liberalism. Broadly: Small government, strong individual rights, free market capitalism, etc.
Yes, its in the post you're replying too. The USA run an oligarchy system where by the vast majority of money, power and influenced and controlled by an impossibly small interconnected group.
But its ok because every four years the peasants get to chooses which billionaire is the least worse and cast their vote.
What does anything in my post have to do with liberalism?
Why can't you get decent internet in the States? Because on each location there are two or maybe three companies that collude to keep prices high. And when you try to start your own ISP, suddenly these companies offer crazy good/under cost prices so that your new ISP is unable to survive, and then jack up the prices again.
Of course, at any point, as a consumer, you are absolutely free to enter into a contract with whatever ISP you want. If only there were a few more...
Now tell me how do you fix that without bigger state imposing specific regulations.
Liberalism and libertarianism are two very different things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Things weren't regulated for a long time, and that's why there were literal snake-oil salesmen blowing literal smoke up your ass while their 10 year old kids worked 7 days a week. It was only around the 1900s that we really started regulating things -- and for good reason.
Perhaps. But it might not be the kind of maturity that comes from 40 years of witnessing what politician promises are worth.
There are never politicians that ought to be adored.
That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian. In my country of 11 million (including Ukrainian refugees), we've had 45 thousand deaths. And anywhere where people frequent Facebook, the anti-vax movement thrives. It is not even specifically far-right, a lot of the crowd belongs to the organic green bio-mom milieu. I can't even begin to count all the middle-aged ladies in colourful ethnic clothing who hate vaccines based on very flimsy arguments.
The coup thing is fairly unique, though.
Not as much. It was heavily inspired by the events in the USA.
It's especially interesting since the whole thing with Steve Bannon & co. is pretty widely knwon.
Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. Our health system had one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world, we were nearing 100% rates on a country with a scale of continent. Since Bolsonaro our rates are dropping on a very alarming rate and on the streets you see people trash talking vaccines all the time, even solved diseases and infections are returning because of this.
And about the 700k deaths, a lot of studies have been published proving that if the piece of shit bought the vaccines earlier hundreds of thousands of lives could've been saved, or if he did not made a public campaign AGAINST the vaccine we could've saved countless lives.
In that sense, you were lucky before. In the Western world, widespread anti-vax paranoia dates at least back to the infamous Wakefield paper (1998) linking vaccination to autism. It was probably just a matter of time until it skipped over the ocean to Brazil as well. Language barrier might have protected you temporarily, but with the advent of automatic translation, it has been significantly lowered.
Ironically, there is no vaccine against bad ideas such as anti-vaxxery.
LMAO like the previous twenty years didn't exist eh?
Signed: an Argentinian
> Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal?
Science hasn't made that breakthrough yet :)
Fixed exchange rates are effectively an import subsidy. This staves off the problems of massive price spikes in things like petrol and medicines, but devalues the (already struggling) exports. At least Argentina is self-sufficient in food.
In the 80s Brazil, there was a TV ad from Orloff vodka[1] where the guy talked to future-himself. The catchphrase was "Who are you?" "I'm you, but tomorrow".
That was it. Every news outlet started using the term "Orloff effect" to scare viewers and readers about brazilian government policies that would, in their opinion, inevitably make Brazil become an Argentina.
Milanesas are a godsend tbh though
(search for images about 'self service brasil' for instance)
But to be honest: empanadas > milanesas
I think we are simpler fellows regarding food but we enjoy them a lot :P
They recently elected Javier Milei (an economist and former sex guru) who although some media claim is a radical rightwing candidate, center-right Libertarian might be more descriptive. He essentially wants to radically reduce government's role and put the country through (economic shock therapy) in the short term so they can have a chance of making a turn around. He has fired a huge amount of government staff he calls the "parasitic class" and I think they just recently actually balanced the budget for the first time in a decade. We'll see how things go. He's trying to get the country on the dollar and off the peso, so they'd just have to deal with the more sensible American inflation rate. It also makes some sense as everyone wants to use the dollar anyway and are basically doing it illegally. He is also removing a lot of government red tape for businesses.
He recently flew to Davos and basically told off those in attendance. Some of the things he says I agree with, but many others not so much. He seems to take a lot of Austrian economics views and if you're not familiar with this, it is essentially the ideology that folks like Ron Paul and a lot of the libertarian think tanks (e.g. Cato institute) proclaim. He said a lot of things that are counter to basic economics like "market failures don't exist". I think he believes that given no regulations, things would always sort themselves out, but zero regulations brings about another kind of hell IMO. He also pulled Argentina out of the BRICS negotiations (kind of a very loose federation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as he didn't want to get involved with communists. Only time will tell if this will be a huge failure or just what the country needs.
Do you feel the sex guru part adds much though? Maybe he is in an open relationship, or actually gay, or xyz... does it matter in his economic reform plans for Argentina?
He was an economics professor for more than 20 years.
And he has also been a semi pro football player, played in a rock band, and been a tantric sex instructor.
That's unfair to Milei. He actually practices what he preaches.
Ron Paul would talk the talk but when it came to saying no to pork...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/top-of-the-ticket/sto...
His son is the senator from Kentucky...a state that wouldn't survive without "handouts" from the federal government...
Also..BRICS is a joke. It was made up by Goldman Sachs..
https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/archive/building-b...
if you're interested in what the fuck is going on in argentina, you might try
git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git
one minor problem with the post: 'the white rate' is a phrase this blogger made up; if you talk to people about 'the white rate' or 'el dólar blanco' or 'el tipo de cambio blanco' nobody will have any idea what you're talking about
i mean, in theory, you could do this in Python
>>> print(zlib.decompress(urlopen(
'http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git/objects/03/220089fdc6713fc459ac71da35d6c8abb5b110'
).read()).decode('utf-8'))
reading the file is going to take you an hour or two, so if spending an extra thirty seconds to clone the repo is a significant cost in this context, you probably shouldn't start
it looks like there was one in 02018: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/es/security/news/vulnerabil... and another one in 02021 which only affected macos users with a non-default configuration https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/git-vulnerability-could-e... and more worryingly two in 02022 https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/01/git-remote-code-vulnerabi...
hopefully there aren't any new ones
there are design considerations to consider, but it's not clear to me which way they shift the balance: chromium's sandboxing layer means that you need a sandbox escape, but, on the other hand, chromium intentionally downloads and executes malicious code all the time, and that's inherently riskier than what git does, which is efficiently synchronizing a merkle graph of blobs. it's hard to imagine that this matters more than the sheer size of the codebase, though
chromium's churn rate is also much higher, so the rate of new bug production is higher
regardless, the nonexistence of security holes is a much, much better protection than insufficient incentives to find the undoubtedly numerous security holes
I would imagine that by directly manipulating the cloning process and not just the repository, a larger attack vector could be exploited.
But yes, I agree with the rest of your points
there is, however, a faster 'smart http' git cloning protocol which apache can't participate in, and that is indeed a potential attack surface. i don't think any of the bugs i linked upthread were in that protocol though
put it in a pastebin or get a blog man. substack is a thing for a reason.
there's no code
Ah, no. You do the cambio in downtown Buenos Aires once for the whole trip. Random restaurants offering you different rates or inflating your bill is simply people trying to take advantage of a foreigner.
You might need a bag to carry cash for the whole trip, and it will attract the wrong kind of attention?
I had one instance where there was only one western union I could use (because of the weekend) and they only had 100 and 200 peso notes. I walked out with 300 dollars worth of notes in a black bin bag and hurriedly tried to find a taxi before anyone noticed...
We never exchanged money like this, but were happy to pay the bill in dollars at the end (prices were never set in dollars). And the math checked out completely.
Note we also came with a similar-ish mentality. Let's exchange early on and be set. But this misses out a key point (that hopefully will become less relevant). The currency devalues fast. Exchange early on and you might find yourself holding a lot less than you got.
We spent a month in Argentina, and had we done this, we'd have taken a 9% hit just on devaluation.
A month for me was <$500 so the hassle was not be worth it (time, risk) but ymmv of course.
There’s also FB groups for expats to get a slightly better rate from shifty brits.
Also, with Uber, you're not likely to get many rides if you pay by card.
At the time, Cristina Kirchner had just won elections and BsAs was full of her posters. Being there at the time felt like being in Europe HDI with south american prices; it was that good and cheap. Cities were beautiful, clean, organized, I spent some time in La Plata which seemed designed in simcity, felt much safer than Brazil and although there were already some signs of decadence like some poor people around, it still looked much better than Brazil.
Around 2014 Argentina had already entered in crises, and so did Brazil. At my job, a new colleague was from Argentina. I think he was a level-headed liberal, he sometimes talked about something like how the situation there was. By that time, 1 BRL was worth around 4 pesos and 1 USD was worth 2.35 BRL.
Two years ago (2022) I talked with a friend. I explained him how in 2011 I could save all the money to travel Argetina in just 4 months, I couldn't do the same now even if I get twice the salary I had at the time: our prices increased a lot and even though at the time 1 BRL was worth more than 30 pesos!
Now, here we are in 2024: 1 BRL is worth around 170 pesos, 1 USD is close to 5 BRL. The article says: "We were mostly left with the impression that it wouldn’t be so bad to turn into Argentina after all.", " I felt safer in most places than I do anywhere in Brazil", "I had an incredible time in Argentina. The country is absolutely stunning, and the people are also fantastic.". Actually it is not Brazil who may turn into Argentina, but Argentina which is turning into Brazil after a long effort to keep social indexes high... artificially or not.
We in Brazil also had our own hyper-inflation period. It happened during the 80's. Prices were so volatile that my father bought things and wrote in boxes what the price was in liters of gasoline, so he could have an idea of how much it had really cost. We took a long time to reach stability, from the 90's to early 2000's, but we got there and I hope Argentina will be able to do the same.
Although Brazil and Argentina are seen as rivals, I really love that country and people and wish them the best.
Source:
"Por que o 'real' ganhou esse nome? Por que ele matava dois coelhos também. Tem fundo histórico, já que é o nome da moeda anterior ao cruzeiro, e remete à ideia de uma moeda com 'valor real'."[1]
Translation: How 'real' got its name? Two birds in one stone. There's also a historic background, since it is the name of the currency befrore cruzeiro and brings the idea of a currency with 'real value'".
[1] https://super.abril.com.br/coluna/oraculo/por-que-a-moeda-br...
Besides international trade which was fully controlled by the state the USSR wasn't a part of the global financial system. The ruble was more like a token or a scrip (with very limited uses) rather than a real currency. Which is why the state managed to keep a lid on stuff there, there was almost no way for goods/money/people to get in or out at any significant scale.
That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount.
That’s a 1.2^12 - 1 = 791.60% inflation rate.
My point with showing the annualized calculation was so that those of us in the rest of the world, the majority of people on this site, could better grasp the severity of the problem.
In the USA we’ve had about 20% inflation in consumer goods (or at least according to CPI) in the past three years and it’s been a hot topic. The Argentina numbers are staggering.
At it's peak, Zimbabwe had a month-on-month inflation of ~80Billion %.
Peso lost value hundredfold in a decade. Go figure.
The whole country has left a disorganized feel back then, so when we hopped the border over to Chile we felt we're having a vacation in a vacation.
https://www.greenpeace.org/argentina/campanas-ganadas/
Greenpeace helped ban salmon farming.
They also tried to stop offshore oil exploration, they just delayed it. This is the kind of things we cannot accept
The author talks about the people being very friendly.
If the author is white, that is a very different experience than if you’re a person of color.
Hollywood gives tall while people a special perception in places that don’t have white folks.
You could be super wealthy and black, and most countries would still treat you as a poor African.
The biases based on color are very real.