Considering how badly the government has screwed up the parts that it nationalized [bloomberg.com] perhaps the small bits of private enterprise (and black markets) are probably all that's keeping it afloat.
Or maybe: "Even the small remaining amount of capitalistic imperialism is keeping Venezuela from restructuring its economy". This is actually true, the government can't set prices for individual goods because people will immediately exploit it. Not unprecedented, btw, it happened before in Berlin just before the Wall.
You would have to explain why countries like Vietnam and China that instituted capitalist reforms to move away from their even more socialistic policies have seem massive growth instead of downward collapse
Because capitalistic economy tempered with socialistic policies actually works much better than pure dog-eat-dog capitalism?
The majority of property in the USSR was privately owned
This is incorrect (I lived in the USSR, btw). People did not own real estate (ANY real estate), all the enterprises were also state-owned. The only private property was personal. By my classification the USSR had been truly socialistic.
In Venezuela, the government has either nationalized or heavily regulated most industries. Food, necessities like toilet paper, education, housing, land ownership, clothing... Almost all aspects of the economy are controlled by the government.
They are not. Food in Venezuela is produced by private farmers and most of the toilet paper is imported (although local production is picking up). The problem is the mismanagement of the currency by the government that basically makes any productive activity impossible.
As far as I know, the only remaining socialistic country is Cuba. They are not doing that well, but their economy is stable.
Again, nobody argues that Venezuelan government is stupid and the result had been predictable from the start. I'm arguing that Venezuela is NOT socialistic in the classic economic sense - they don't have a Soviet-style planned economy where the government allocates all the resources and controls the production.
Just nationalizing stuff is not enough. For example, Norway government owns (most of) Statoil but this doesn't make their economy planned. The prices in Norway are set by the free market and the government is simply a player on it. Amazingly enough, this describes the current Venezuela as well - the government there doesn't own most of the industries (except for oil), most of the goods are produced by private enterprises that can't function because the government is screwed up.
In contrast, back in the USSR, the government was actually producing most of the goods and managing their supply. There were basically no private enterprises (except for individual farmers).
You can't just use "socialism" as a bogeyman that describes everything that you dislikes (including taxes, healthcare or the Internet).
Venezuella is also not socialist. They don't have a centralized planned economy. They instead have a capitalist system with a weak central government that uses income from export to maintain handouts.
Any gerrymandering (redrawing of voting boundaries) would require redrawing interstate borders - which I don't believe has ever happened to a state after it has joined the union.
Obama did an equal shutdown, when congress wasn't giving him funds for the ACA --- now the shoe just happens to be on the other foot.
That's not true. ACA had been fully funded from the start and doesn't need reauthorizations. Ted Cruz shut down the government because he wanted to force Obama to "address the deficit" (not kidding) and cancel the ACA. This is exactly what Trump is doing now.
These are things that I know of in my everyday life where I have experienced noticeable differences in water temperatures that are in the range of several degrees. These changes are natural and have occurred my entire life (>50 yrs). No one reasonable will contest that.
See? You actually need to study that stuff and not "use a common sense".
The ocean actually consists of two parts - the rapidly changing top layer that can cool and warm in the matter of days and an almost unchanging bottom layer. As a vacationeer you're only dealing with the top layer.
The border between the layers is called "thermocline" and you can actually _see_ it if you dive deep enough, it looks a bit like haze above a hot road. The water past thermocline doesn't mix with the top layer and the main heat transfer mechanism is simple diffusion (and a small contribution from marine animals like jellyfish). Diffusion is very slow so it can take almost 1000 years for the heat pulses to propagate to the bottom of the ocean.
It's so slow that we can still detect the cold pulse from the Ice Age propagating down. It's now being chased by the global warming induced heat wave and it'll be completely overwhelmed.
Whether illegal aliens can obtain state benefits is not clear-cut. The short answer appears to be that they are not legally entitled to most benefits, but do in fact receive them
Illegals might be getting state benefits, but not the federal ones (SNAP or TANF). I'm also curious about the 60% figure, I can't seem to find anything about it.
Only an immigration official or federal worker whom the Secretary of Homeland Security has authorized may determine the immigration status of a person in the country.
And these authorized officers check all the federal welfare applications.
The last thing an illegal immigrants wants is attention from the government, so they try to lie low and behave themselves (crime amongst illegal immigrants is _lower_ than in the general population).
It's unlawful for them to release people who are fugitives from the feds, but they do it.
No they don't. Illegal border crossing is a civil infraction in the US, not a felony. So states are not obliged to notify the federal police about it.
Theoretically illegal aliens aren't supposed to be able to apply on their own, but in fact about 60% do receive public assistance.
Only immigrants with children born in the US (i.e. the US citizen) can receive public assistance. I would like to see the source for the 60% figure, that doesn't seem to be correct.
Certain states with a lot of illegal immigrants, which are known for being liberal and flouting federal law regarding immigration and drugs, go ahead and hand out the money.
That's up to states, they can't dole out federal money to illegals.
The six dependents don't have to be legal.
That's not how welfare works (SNAP, EITC or TANF). You can't claim welfare for dependents who are not the US citizen and there's also a 5-year ban. The exception I think is WIC which does give benefits to the mother of the US citizen. Here's an overview: https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-rep...
My background: I'm a legal immigrant and I actually researched that stuff before immigration, in case I needed it.
Companies are still legally responsible for pollution so it's not like they are doing to start while monitoring is suspended.
My friend will be furloughed next month because their company needs an OSHA safety sign-off to proceed. I'm pretty sure chemical companies also need periodic EPA sign-offs to work.
Trump could agree to no additional funding for the wall, while the Democrats could agree to redirect all social services spending (i.e. food stamps, housing assistance, education funding, medical assistance, etc.) currently being spent on people here illegally, being spent instead on building a wall and repatriating those not here lawfully.
Illegal aliens don't get foodstamps or housing assistance. The only medical care they can get is Medicaid for pregnant women giving birth in the US.
Education is paid for by local taxes (usually property and sales) which illegal immigrants pay almost always. And anyway the US has to provide secondary education to everybody.
Seriously, get computers out of the classroom (except for computer science classes). They don't help with ANYTHING.
Use notebooks, pencils and textbooks instead. And a whiteboard/blackboard for instruction during the classes. It's the most effective way to actually train the mind.
They got it recently, so it's not grandfathered. This was a special offer for rural areas that they got when subscribing to https://www.att.com/internet/f... - it's normally $200 but with a phone and other stuff they got a significant discount.
I'm not sure about what VZW is doing. I would assume that they are confused about everything as always.
There's a reason for the limit - the bandwidth is scarce and if everybody starts streaming 4K Youtube over the cellular network, it'll collapse. So operators have to make sure that users have a motivation to save the data.
When congestion is not an issue (in rural areas) you can actually get fully unlimited wireless connection for your home Internet from AT&T. My friend in rural Nowheristan of Nevada has one of such plans, they push more than 700GB a month. Though they do get throttled during the peak load times.
5G will help a little by providing much more shared bandwidth so that the ISPs can throttle less.
Incorrect. 5G is strictly better than 4G, it uses more advanced modulation and beam-forming methods. Even if mmWave or 6GHz bands are unavailable (because of rain, fog, walls) it would still be capable of supporting more clients or give better speeds/latency than 4G. Additionally, 5G can seamlessly hand over the connection to LTE so in the worst case you'll see no difference.
Of course, disabling 5G now might still be good because hardware is still not polished enough. In particular, 4G fallback is still not reliable in the current crop of modems.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering how badly the government has screwed up the parts that it nationalized [bloomberg.com] perhaps the small bits of private enterprise (and black markets) are probably all that's keeping it afloat.
Or maybe: "Even the small remaining amount of capitalistic imperialism is keeping Venezuela from restructuring its economy". This is actually true, the government can't set prices for individual goods because people will immediately exploit it. Not unprecedented, btw, it happened before in Berlin just before the Wall.
You would have to explain why countries like Vietnam and China that instituted capitalist reforms to move away from their even more socialistic policies have seem massive growth instead of downward collapse
Because capitalistic economy tempered with socialistic policies actually works much better than pure dog-eat-dog capitalism?
The majority of property in the USSR was privately owned
This is incorrect (I lived in the USSR, btw). People did not own real estate (ANY real estate), all the enterprises were also state-owned. The only private property was personal. By my classification the USSR had been truly socialistic.
In Venezuela, the government has either nationalized or heavily regulated most industries. Food, necessities like toilet paper, education, housing, land ownership, clothing... Almost all aspects of the economy are controlled by the government.
They are not. Food in Venezuela is produced by private farmers and most of the toilet paper is imported (although local production is picking up). The problem is the mismanagement of the currency by the government that basically makes any productive activity impossible.
As far as I know, the only remaining socialistic country is Cuba. They are not doing that well, but their economy is stable.
Most of Venezuela economy is still privately owned although reliable numbers are hard to come by. This still makes them capitalist.
So does this mean that Venezuela has proven capitalism to be bankrupt?
Again, nobody argues that Venezuelan government is stupid and the result had been predictable from the start. I'm arguing that Venezuela is NOT socialistic in the classic economic sense - they don't have a Soviet-style planned economy where the government allocates all the resources and controls the production.
Just nationalizing stuff is not enough. For example, Norway government owns (most of) Statoil but this doesn't make their economy planned. The prices in Norway are set by the free market and the government is simply a player on it. Amazingly enough, this describes the current Venezuela as well - the government there doesn't own most of the industries (except for oil), most of the goods are produced by private enterprises that can't function because the government is screwed up.
In contrast, back in the USSR, the government was actually producing most of the goods and managing their supply. There were basically no private enterprises (except for individual farmers).
You can't just use "socialism" as a bogeyman that describes everything that you dislikes (including taxes, healthcare or the Internet).
Those countries aren't socialist though
Venezuella is also not socialist. They don't have a centralized planned economy. They instead have a capitalist system with a weak central government that uses income from export to maintain handouts.
We are at a point where there is simply no excuse to be a Socialist.
At this point there's no excuse to NOT be a socialist. Just look at what happened in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Any gerrymandering (redrawing of voting boundaries) would require redrawing interstate borders - which I don't believe has ever happened to a state after it has joined the union.
West Virginia split from Virginia in 1861.
Obama did an equal shutdown, when congress wasn't giving him funds for the ACA --- now the shoe just happens to be on the other foot.
That's not true. ACA had been fully funded from the start and doesn't need reauthorizations. Ted Cruz shut down the government because he wanted to force Obama to "address the deficit" (not kidding) and cancel the ACA. This is exactly what Trump is doing now.
Uhm... Sharia law is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia - the best friend of Trump.
These are things that I know of in my everyday life where I have experienced noticeable differences in water temperatures that are in the range of several degrees. These changes are natural and have occurred my entire life (>50 yrs). No one reasonable will contest that.
See? You actually need to study that stuff and not "use a common sense".
The ocean actually consists of two parts - the rapidly changing top layer that can cool and warm in the matter of days and an almost unchanging bottom layer. As a vacationeer you're only dealing with the top layer.
The border between the layers is called "thermocline" and you can actually _see_ it if you dive deep enough, it looks a bit like haze above a hot road. The water past thermocline doesn't mix with the top layer and the main heat transfer mechanism is simple diffusion (and a small contribution from marine animals like jellyfish). Diffusion is very slow so it can take almost 1000 years for the heat pulses to propagate to the bottom of the ocean.
It's so slow that we can still detect the cold pulse from the Ice Age propagating down. It's now being chased by the global warming induced heat wave and it'll be completely overwhelmed.
How do you know that an illegal immigrant stole it and not your best buddy Bubba?
Just write an executive order insisting that everyone in there either be charged and speedily tried, or released.
He was specifically barred from doing this by Congress: https://www.washingtontimes.co...
Yup, home of the brave, land of the free.
They steal identities to steal welfare benefits.
How are you going to receive benefits on stolen info? Do you know how many steps you need to pass to get it?
Thatâ(TM)s true of households but not individual immigrants.
And it turns out that poor immigrants are actually using less welfare than poor native families: https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
Whether illegal aliens can obtain state benefits is not clear-cut. The short answer appears to be that they are not legally entitled to most benefits, but do in fact receive them
Illegals might be getting state benefits, but not the federal ones (SNAP or TANF). I'm also curious about the 60% figure, I can't seem to find anything about it.
Only an immigration official or federal worker whom the Secretary of Homeland Security has authorized may determine the immigration status of a person in the country.
And these authorized officers check all the federal welfare applications.
The last thing an illegal immigrants wants is attention from the government, so they try to lie low and behave themselves (crime amongst illegal immigrants is _lower_ than in the general population).
It's unlawful for them to release people who are fugitives from the feds, but they do it.
No they don't. Illegal border crossing is a civil infraction in the US, not a felony. So states are not obliged to notify the federal police about it.
Theoretically illegal aliens aren't supposed to be able to apply on their own, but in fact about 60% do receive public assistance.
Only immigrants with children born in the US (i.e. the US citizen) can receive public assistance. I would like to see the source for the 60% figure, that doesn't seem to be correct.
Certain states with a lot of illegal immigrants, which are known for being liberal and flouting federal law regarding immigration and drugs, go ahead and hand out the money.
That's up to states, they can't dole out federal money to illegals.
The six dependents don't have to be legal.
That's not how welfare works (SNAP, EITC or TANF). You can't claim welfare for dependents who are not the US citizen and there's also a 5-year ban. The exception I think is WIC which does give benefits to the mother of the US citizen. Here's an overview: https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-rep...
My background: I'm a legal immigrant and I actually researched that stuff before immigration, in case I needed it.
Companies are still legally responsible for pollution so it's not like they are doing to start while monitoring is suspended.
My friend will be furloughed next month because their company needs an OSHA safety sign-off to proceed. I'm pretty sure chemical companies also need periodic EPA sign-offs to work.
His promise to close Guantanamo.
And he tried to do that. The craven Congress denied him funds for that.
A milk jug full of pure fentanyl is enough to give a hit to every junkie in the US. That's how powerful it is.
Trump could agree to no additional funding for the wall, while the Democrats could agree to redirect all social services spending (i.e. food stamps, housing assistance, education funding, medical assistance, etc.) currently being spent on people here illegally, being spent instead on building a wall and repatriating those not here lawfully.
Illegal aliens don't get foodstamps or housing assistance. The only medical care they can get is Medicaid for pregnant women giving birth in the US.
Education is paid for by local taxes (usually property and sales) which illegal immigrants pay almost always. And anyway the US has to provide secondary education to everybody.
Seriously, get computers out of the classroom (except for computer science classes). They don't help with ANYTHING.
Use notebooks, pencils and textbooks instead. And a whiteboard/blackboard for instruction during the classes. It's the most effective way to actually train the mind.
They got it recently, so it's not grandfathered. This was a special offer for rural areas that they got when subscribing to https://www.att.com/internet/f... - it's normally $200 but with a phone and other stuff they got a significant discount.
I'm not sure about what VZW is doing. I would assume that they are confused about everything as always.
There's a reason for the limit - the bandwidth is scarce and if everybody starts streaming 4K Youtube over the cellular network, it'll collapse. So operators have to make sure that users have a motivation to save the data.
When congestion is not an issue (in rural areas) you can actually get fully unlimited wireless connection for your home Internet from AT&T. My friend in rural Nowheristan of Nevada has one of such plans, they push more than 700GB a month. Though they do get throttled during the peak load times.
5G will help a little by providing much more shared bandwidth so that the ISPs can throttle less.
You can buy one from any European store: https://www.amazon.de/SAMSUNG-... - it will work fine in Germany.
Incorrect. 5G is strictly better than 4G, it uses more advanced modulation and beam-forming methods. Even if mmWave or 6GHz bands are unavailable (because of rain, fog, walls) it would still be capable of supporting more clients or give better speeds/latency than 4G. Additionally, 5G can seamlessly hand over the connection to LTE so in the worst case you'll see no difference.
Of course, disabling 5G now might still be good because hardware is still not polished enough. In particular, 4G fallback is still not reliable in the current crop of modems.