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What is going on in Argentina?

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Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#111

Post by koolba »

rglullis wrote: post #76
koolba wrote: post #68

> It also didn’t just stop there. January saw a 20% inflation rate, meaning from the day we crossed the border from Uruguay to Argentina to the day we crossed the border back to Brazil, about a month later, prices were about 20% higher. That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount. That’s a 1.2^12 - 1 = 791.60% inflation rate.

"inflation rate" does not necessarily means annual rate, so it will depend on the context. For those that never lived through hyperinflation, they rarely see it discussed in terms of month-over-month comparison, but someone in Argentina, Venezuela or 80/90s Brazil would just assume that "20% inflation" means "monthly".

Unless otherwise specified, rates are assumed to be annualized. That’s standard for everything from mortgages to inflation as it allows for an apples to apples comparison.

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.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#112

Post by javcasas »

miunau wrote: post #97
javcasas wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries? 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 in…

It seems like you are confusing two different terms, liberalism and libertarianism.

Can you explain the difference? Googling it is quite hard, as it mostly throws me biased views.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#113

Post by kragen »

cbeach wrote: post #67
kragen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are incorrectly conflating socialism with peronism, which is more fascist than socialist, though it certainly has socialist factions within it

Peronism is relevant, but its an unhelpful term, as its meaning has mutated over the year with different "Peronist" leaders. But fundamentally (if you look at the twenty tenets of Peronism) it is a populist leftwing ideology that aligns strongly with trade unions, social justice and economic nationalism. We can argue the toss as to whether this implies it is "socialist" or not, but it's certainly far from free market…

yes, it is certainly about as far as you can get from free-market capitalism, but not in the same direction as socialism

what you said was, 'Actually the Government has been socialist in Argentina from WW2 to 1970, and then from 1989 onwards', when in fact the numerous socialist parties in argentina have held the presidency or a majority in congress for a sum total of exactly zero days during that time

clearly what you're referring to there is peronism, not socialism, and you're also unaware of the administrations of frondizi and the various military dictatorships before 01970

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#114

Post by kragen »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #81
kragen wrote: post #21

this is a pretty good post 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 and read milei-diary.md, which are my observations here on the ground, after having lived here most of my adult life. it's been a few weeks since i added an entry to it, but i'll update it again soon one minor problem with the post: 'the white rate' is a phra…

I'm not going to clone a git repo to read a file, but I did waste some time clicking around your site trying to find this file that you mentioned, to no avail. Just FYI.

yeah, as far as i know, it's only available by git cloning. it doesn't benefit me if you read it, just you, so it's fine with me if you don't read it. i'm only mentioning it for the sake of the people who would find it interesting

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'))
but it's easier to just clone the repo

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

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#115

Post by alchemist1e9 »

slibhb wrote: post #102
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! 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 princip…

That whole debate wouldn't have made sense to the founding fathers. Yes they were liberals, but "capitalism" wasn't coined until the 19th century. 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.

I respectfully disagree in that perhaps some vocabulary would need altering to use words they were more familiar with, but free markets and free enterprise, along with property rights and low taxation was exactly their founding perspective.

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.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#116

Post by javcasas »

swarnie wrote: post #108
javcasas wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries? 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 in…

> Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries? 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 y…

Well, oligarchy is the eventual result of liberalism. Even though we may have started equal, some people, through luck or questionable methods, have attained a position of power, possibly by being owners of a company that has a monopolistic status. And now, via regulatory capture and targeted actions against competitors, looks to subvert the "free" hand of the market.

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.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#117

Post by kragen »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #90
kragen wrote: post #21

this is a pretty good post 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 and read milei-diary.md, which are my observations here on the ground, after having lived here most of my adult life. it's been a few weeks since i added an entry to it, but i'll update it again soon one minor problem with the post: 'the white rate' is a phra…

Beware, exploits have been found in the past where cloning a repo allows remote code execution.

interesting; i hadn't heard about that

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

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#118

Post by notahacker »

thworp wrote: post #93
kingofthehill98 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

This is such a tired argument. The socialist block was, at least by the 1980s, much more wasteful and destructive to the environment than the capitalist world. I encourage you to search for videos like "1980s krakow winter" or "Elbe river GDR" to see a few examples. Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws. More than that, it's easy to make abstract sta…

> Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws.

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)

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#119

Post by beAbU »

rglullis wrote: post #76
koolba wrote: post #68

> It also didn’t just stop there. January saw a 20% inflation rate, meaning from the day we crossed the border from Uruguay to Argentina to the day we crossed the border back to Brazil, about a month later, prices were about 20% higher. That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount. That’s a 1.2^12 - 1 = 791.60% inflation rate.

"inflation rate" does not necessarily means annual rate, so it will depend on the context. For those that never lived through hyperinflation, they rarely see it discussed in terms of month-over-month comparison, but someone in Argentina, Venezuela or 80/90s Brazil would just assume that "20% inflation" means "monthly".

Not sure if I'll call this hyper inflation though?

At it's peak, Zimbabwe had a month-on-month inflation of ~80Billion %.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#120

Post by luzojeda »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #31
luzojeda wrote: post #28

>And Argentinians, thank you and best of luck. Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal? Milanesas are a godsend tbh though

Knew this would be a bit of a contentious point! Have you seen how we do lunches in Brazil though? (search for images about 'self service brasil' for instance)

Damn, they look amazing, planning to visit our neighbours soon, will be sure to find a place with something like that.

I think we are simpler fellows regarding food but we enjoy them a lot :P

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