Are people there still using the Bolivar? Why haven't they switched to some alternative currency? Wouldn't that solve many of the current problems?
There are probably heavy controls on the import of foreign currencies.
How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
81–90 of 166 posts
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#82Opened page. Scrolled down and nothing happened. Please don't submit broken web pages in the future. Please, let's not encourage this sort of web design by linking to it. It's user hostile.
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#83"Revolutionary Cornflakes"... these people are pure evil.
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#84Lol, I spent way too much time fucking around with noscript before realizing that this page wasn't a text article
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#85This presentation is a great experiment, but it's just that, an experiment in presentation. It should never have been released to the general public, just to UI or web dev forums in order for them to learn from. I think that human computer interaction has taken massive steps back from the 90s. That, or I'm getting old. Could be both too. Aside: some great content here though. so many beautiful shots of the country. A…
The NYT has plenty of text content on Venezuela if you are so bothered by this... I for one love experimentation and pushing the envelope.
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#86Inflation in Venezuela is over 25k%. People are jailed during demonstrations when they are not shot in cold blood. Children are dying of malnutrition. But for everyone on HN the biggest problem is the article format. Utterly and completely unbelievable...
First world problems, indeed.
That being said, I can't criticize anyone who commented on the article format or method of delivery because as soon as I saw it, I immediately shut the page.
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#87For all the negative comments about the presentation, which I might normally agree with, I liked this format this time. It took a while to load (thank you multi-threading). I got through it because I treated it like an interactive video with subtitles, which is better than a video. I liked the sound - which, in my iPhone, was muted at the started as my phone was muted, so I didn't even realise there was audio. I like…
I agree, it is not that bad. HN is a grumpy bunch who wants everything to be a text file and every millisecond of loading is precious time wasted.
No, we're purists, and we prefer our information undiluted.
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually found this to be worth the time. I haven't paid much attention to the situation down there, and seeing it was enlightening. Onto the content... I wonder, can someone tell me why there are so many obese people in these video clips, if food is so hard to come by? Why does there seem to be so many people sitting around? Surely with so much manpower available, there are way to make them productive on a large s…
> ...why there are so many obese people in these video clips, if food is so hard to come by? This is generally the earlier stages of such a crisis; as the timeline extends, the caloric restriction will gradually chip away at the obesity, but it takes several years as most of these food scarcity crises are not zero calories per day average, but severely restricted, like maybe half TDEE. Fat is an extraordinarily dense…
> A DIY kit for those segments of the population left behind by capital owners
Anyone working on something like this?
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#89[flagged]
> This is what socialism does. No, this is what a power-hungry dictator does. But socialism/communism creates an environment where such leaders can easily take power and thrive. That's why democracy can be so powerful - it often successfully removes the power vacuum that creates dictatorships.
There is no study which supports your belief that democracy or dictatorship is good/bad for economic growth (or political stability).
Re: How to Survive When Money Is Worthless [video]
#90This is not an article, it's a movie with subtitles. (It should have a [video] tag.) And it doesn't address how to survive when money is worthless, it just shows some vignettes from Venezuela that illustrate how hard it is to survive when money is worthless.
Those of us who lived through the fall of communism in Eastern Europe know exactly what it's like to survive when money is worthless, and it's not pretty.
Worthless money doesn't quite destroy the country's infrastructure, so you have water, and electricity, unreliably. It's good to stockpile water.
Shelter will generally be ok. If you've got a place to live, the economy collapsing around you doesn't remove it - the people who own it or run it have their own worries. You can stay where you are. If you have debt, good news, you can sell a pair of shoes and repay your house loan.
Food is harder, since everyone wants it, but worthless currency doesn't entice anyone to transport it. Farmers do ok, as they grow their own food, but getting it to others is more difficult. You will be paying high prices for food in a foreign currency on the black market, but your idiot local government will try to destroy black markets, despite them being the only real access to goods.
This is unlikely in the US, but if you're worried, put a tiny bit of your savings into gold and silver coins, and have a good supply of non-perishable food, and some sort of access to water. The regimes which cause these kinds of problems collapse soon thereafter, so you just have to last it out. Learn useful skills - fixing cars, plumbing, whatever, and you'll be marketable in such a situation. Higher order skills become kind of useless compared to the day-to-day ones needed to keep stuff working.