I don’t think that the issue is that people don’t know; people don’t care. They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is, and think that the marginal convenience of being able to control your thermostat from your workplace, or have your refrigerator add milk to your shopping list outweighs the negatives of them being turned into botnets, or monetizing all of your data to squeeze every last penny out of you.
I agree. There are far too many people with the “if I’m not doing anything wrong, then what have I to hide?” mindset. I’ve seen people unironically say that all Tor users must be engaging in illegal activity, and I don’t think it occurs to them that in many parts of the world, freely accessing information is an illegal activity, and by adopting this mindset we’re empowering that type of state.
I like the way a coworker put it to me, it’s the same reason we have locks on our doors and curtains on our windows, it’s not because we have something to hide, but a right to privacy that tech giants have widely ignored.
The difference is the part immediately after you stopped quoting:
They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is…
What OP is saying here is that people know abstractly that smart devices are not privacy friendly, but they don’t understand how big a deal that actually can be.
We also shouldn’t be conditioned to just accept terms of services with no recourse, by this point I think most people just press accept and know by now whatever it is there, isn’t worth the trouble of fighting to have it changed. So companies get to legally have a free for all with your privacy, cause you consented to things you’ll later find out you didn’t even know you consented for.
It helps once, but does it push notifications when the TOS changes from the last time you read it?
The TOS could switch from protecting your data to sharing it for money at any point in time and that would apply to any existing data. Unless you know you can get them to delete it, the fact that the TOS used to say something does not matter once they change it.
@snooggums@throws_lemy@HelixDab2@Jessvj93 ofc that’s always the risk you take when using any service. Sadly a lot of the time the ToS is so long it’d take forever to read but this is the closest I’ve been able to find to quick overviews on the the ToS of a specified service.
Note that it does not have every service critiqued as I think ppl with TOSDR manually read the ToS and evaluate.
The TOS are the legal equivalent of a locked car door. It’s the bare minimum prevention against a lawsuit, but really doesn’t protect anything. It’s because they are so long and opaque that they are often unenforceable.
ToS are the worst thing ever. They are “contracts” that you are required to sign to do literally anything in the world but are not allowed to negotiate and can be modified at any time without your consent and your original signing is propagated to the new contract and it is still considered binding. Also, they are allowed to put clauses in which hand over rights to your property, intellectual or otherwise, which is irrevocable and perpetual. Additionally, you have many “software” providers putting clauses in which state that you only lease the license, you do not own it. Even if you have a physical media with the software, you only purchased a lease and it is therefore illegal for you to resell it. They are also allowed to revoke your lease at anytime, without recompense of any sort. That is the real power of SaaS, not the subscription, but the fact that nobody is ever allowed to own something, no matter how much money you have paid.
Yes, as others have said, they are virtually unenforceable, but it does happen often enough to make sure you are afraid of it.
I also feel many don’t understand the full extent, either. They’re used to using fairly secure devices in their everyday life (often not realizing how much the software they install is also spying on them), so why wouldn’t these IoT things also be secure?
In my experience, it’s all very vague and ethereal until the risks are highlighted for them. “So what if Google can read all of my emails? What could they possibly do with that information, anyway; why should I care?” is an example of a portion of a real conversation I’ve had.
The best solution IMO is don’t let your smart devices have access to the internet. Put them on a VLAN, block them at the firewall, whatever method you prefer. Accessing your home network remotely is one thing, but your air conditioner doesn’t need to INITIATE a connection to the outside world.
That’s what I did 🙃 Unfortunately, some devices do not work at all without a connection to the manufacturer’s cloud, this also needs to be taken into account.
I have flashed all the bulbs and ceiling lights in my house and they work locally on FOSS firmware now 😉 It is not a big deal. I have very poor soldering skills, and I did this anyway.
Oh, I could make it worse if you’d like? That tool isn’t made for just the bulbs I got at Costco, it’s made for any device in the Tuya ecosystem. What’s Tuya? They’re a Chinese white-label manufacturer that makes smart devices that other companies can slap their brand on. They’ll throw you together an app too, but all of the API calls go through their infrastructure. Bonus, they also make security cameras that send footage to their servers, and smart locks too. They’re literally everywhere, but I’m in Australia so that’s where I’m basing this list:
I mean, there are still plenty of ways to have smart things that don’t communicate with the internet. Ikea’s stuff is all zigbee, they don’t have wifi at all. You can get one of their hubs to control from your phone, or they sell remotes with zigbee you can pair directly to control a set of bulbs. They never have to see internet at all.
Yeah. As well, if you want to upgrade to a Home Assistant setup down the line, all you need is a $50 Zigbee USB adapter. If you’re more tech-savvy then you can also buy bulbs from somewhere like www.athom.tech that come pre-flashed with open source firmware. Either ESPHome, Tasmota or WLED are available. These are wifi, but everything is local, and you can block them on your router without issues. ESPHome is what I have running on the bulbs I rescued.
Good link for that site. Currently shopping bulbs for my just recently arrived home assistant green and hard to find consistent information on best bulbs to be using. Love that these are flashed with open source already but I think due to the amount of bulbs I need and their location I’ll be better suited with Zigbee. Will definitely check this place for future devices as I build out the system.
Are you new with Home Assistant in general? I’ve got it running in a VM on a rack server, but those HA Green’s sure do look like a tidy little bit of kit. Ikea stuff works well with it Zigbee-wise, I’ve got some of it around. You can get their remotes working via HA to control other things too. Here’s the Blueprint I used: github.com/…/zha_ikea_tradfri_5button_remote_cust…
Thanks for the info! I am somewhat new to HA, my only experience with it was temporarily checking it out on a VM on my windows Plex server but at that time didn’t have my own place was just checking it our for the eventual move. I think I’m going to add Sky Connect for Zigbee and eventually Matter/Thread devices.
The newer version of Ikea’s Tradfri bulbs (they aren’t selling the old ones anymore) have thread/ matter support on the chips. They should be getting a firmware update soon to enable it. You can also check out the Integrations section on Home Assistant to find devices/brands that are private and work well. The Shelly integration is rated Platinum, and has Local Push: www.home-assistant.io/integrations/shelly/
Edit: Also, feel free to hit me up here or on Matrix (link in my profile) if you have any questions or just wanna chat about HA or other self-hosted stuff 😊
A long while ago, my first foray into smart home stuff was a Phillips Hue system. I used to use it exclusively offline, but I got deeper into smart home stuff and wanted to add some integration into my system. I don’t remember what anymore, but it meant setting up a Hue developer account, so I signed up. Gave them my email address. Stopped using the integration, moved, reset the hub, used it offline for years.
This February I logged into the hub for some reason. I think an accessory wasn’t working and Hue user docs said to log in or some such nonsense.
Five days ago, I got an email from Amazon. They told me that one of the batteries in a Hue switch was running low, and they helpfully provided me with a link to buy new ones. Their page for the device indicated that they were being updated with its battery percentage every 4-8 hours - and that I had authorized Alexa access to my Hue system in February.
I checked the Hue app, and it indicated no apps or services connected to my account.
Logged into the Hue website, dug into my settings, and there were a dozen app’s and services that had been “authorized” to access my account - none that showed up in the app.
Every smart device that has been on my network - devices that I never integrated with Hue (on purpose!) were all happily showing very recent access times to my data. Systems I don’t have accounts to anymore. I revoked access, of course.
Three days ago Amazon emailed me to let me know a different device needed a battery, and showed that Hue had shared the battery level of the device with them that day - 2 days after I revoked access.
Yeah… all their products are getting trashed, reflashed, or used with zigbee hubs I’ve built.
You should never fully trust ANY device on your network. Even if it’s not collecting your personal information and sending it off to who-knows-where, there could always be a zero-day exploit just waiting for someone to find it.
I honestly still don’t get, what exactly all this is for.
Why are companies pumping more and more money into advertising? What do they expect us to do? Most people can’t spend more money and if you have to increase prices because of your overblown ad budget, they’re even less likely to do so.
And what exactly are they thinking they’re getting from companies like Google and Meta? The amount of ads I get that are actually relevant and not super-obvious is miniscule. Ad tech does not work even remotely as well as advertised.
Seriously, that sounds like such a bullshit approach. It’s uneconomical for the criminals. It’s super involved and doesn’t pay that much. Why would anyone do that, if regular fraud is right there to commit.
Or, bear with me, just send a massive amount of spam mails to leaked mailing lists. Maybe 1 in a million reacts and you scam them (cfr all the “Nigerian prince” scams.
A looooot less work because the victim’s will contact you themselves. No need to go and “compare which phones show up together and them figure out why they were together and then figure out if it was an affair or not and then contact them in the hopes they care enough to pay ransom”
You don’t get it because you don’t have the endless supply of information on ever man woman and child on earth.
The information is valuable so they can continue to squeeze every cent out of everyone I’m every way possible, including those who can’t afford to spend it.
You’d be surprised the amount of times I’ve heard someone say they got something after seeing a targeted ad. I personally just zone out until the ad’s done. It’s hard to believe people actually pay attention, and then go so far as clicking the ad and buying the product.
It definitely should be, but I have heard at least 2 people make that statement, so the fact that it’s not 0 is mind blowing. Maybe I just need better friends.
I, too, am curious if there’s an advertising bubble. I hope so.
I’ve noticed something about my wife, though. She’s not a “mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff”, but she does pay attention to advertising a lot. We need more diapers? Well, it just so happens there’s some new startup app that’s advertising a free first month, so if she signs up for that up, we could get free diapers, and we’d only have to keep the membership for another two months, and they have deals on peanut butter, and we’d get access to their free streaming service and they have Disney, so it’s probably worth it overall.
And so it goes, with a million of these deals. The thing is, each “deal” is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to know which ones we’re actually saving money on. The cynical would say “you’re never saving money: everything’s rigged”, but that’s clearly not true. Some of these deals clearly do work out for us (and some of them cause the startup to immediately go bankrupt). But most of them aren’t clearly better or worse for us: we’d have to spend several hours going through hypothetical scenarios to do the full CBA, which we don’t do.
I do wonder, on balance, how much it’s costing us. I also wonder how many of these deals are specifically (personally) targeted at my wife because they know what she needs and what her habits are.
That’s because you’re not a typical consumer. Average consumer those ads target is a mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff. Especially in US (but not only) people are trained by their capitalist master that ‘you are what you own’ and spending money is a way of living there. I’m sure you see it everywhere. People go absolutely crazy over brands like Marvel or Star Wars and spend thousands of dollars on useless gadgets. People go crazy over snickers and buy hundredths of pairs. People go crazy over phones and and take credit just to own the latests model. And the ads are there to program those people into wanting more and more things.
Didn’t he win the vote? Trump lost the vote. He won the election because the American system is designed to sometimes hand victory to the loser - Trump was the 5th or 6th example to date.
He was voted on by 14.5 million votes, which was 56% of the votes, but it is also out of a population of 45 million, and he only got 30% in the first round of votes. They have a completely different voting system to the US, so they had a second round of runoffs.
The point is, no most people in Argentina did not vote for him, but many did not vote at all.
I’m sad for the common folk who will be hurt here, even the ones that voted for him because they desperately needed relief. I fear they’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
That’s exactly what they did, and we all knew this was going to happen. Like I said before, if you don’t manage to cut your toenails with a fryig pan a gun is not going te be much help either, dumb fucking cunts
Now with outbound communications nearly completely cut off, how often will we get updates on what’s happening on the ground? On the crimes against humanity Israel’s committing?
I hope for the best, I really do, but I feel so helpless. I’ve already contacted my representatives and told them they need to do their part or I’ll be rescinding my support. I’m vocal within my community as well. But beyond that, there’s so little I can do but bear witness to what is happening.
Just based on the article, these “reforms” are clearly aimed at harming the working class. I’ll give you one guess as to which other class of people will benefit from them.
That’s very dismissive of the failures the former ruling party had. It’s hard to drum up votes for the guy considered responsible for tanking your county’s economy and spiking the poverty rate.
Like I agree, him winning is unfortunate and short sighted, but I think blaming the victims isn’t going to do anything other than help asshats like him win.
I’m not attempting to victim-blame; nobody is completely immune to propaganda and it’s not the fault of the working class that we’re bombarded by it constantly. Often people have no clue they’re being lied to all their lives. When they make decisions based on faulty information that’s shoved at them for decades by the rich and powerful, the working people are not to blame; the people who make the propaganda are.
Security risk is the bigger concern IMHO. These devices are often a security weak point for networks. Putting them on their own wifi network and then isolating that network is critical.
How can you ensure this is done? There are so many devices that need to connect to the internet and some that require access to other network devices to function.
You basically need to employ network engineering level security - very tight firewall rules, use NAT where it’s available (IPv6 removes NAT, which ipv6 apologists will tell you is a good thing - they’re wrong, as it removes per-service level control and moves it out to per-device/per-NIC), and punch very specific holes to grant access where needed.
Is this before or after the Hamas war crimes tribunal?
They can do that before or after, but I hope they do both soon. There is no difference between Hamas and Israel’s right-wing government led by Netanyahu.
Because it was Israel’s fault they were attacked on all sides in 1948. I guess this at that point one day old nation shouldn’t have worn such a short, Jewish skirt.
They were attacked because they stole like half of Palestinians land. Palestinians didn’t even get to participate in the UN vote.
Two countries that were recently partitioned by the UN and suffered massive violence as a result (India/Pakistan) both voted against annexing half of Palestine to create Israel.
Yes, the Nakba was Israel’s fault. And they still need to return the land that they stole
Why do I suspect that even if we said, “after”, you would still turn around and object to these Israeli assholes being held accountable if tribunals came to pass?
No, war crime trials are for their other abuses, like killing a record number of journalists, aid workers, doctors, and of course women and children. War crime trials are for cutting off food and water to civilians, and bombing civilian infrastructure. War crime trials are for funneling civilians into “safe zones”, and then bombing them.
But you know that. You just don’t care, as long as the monsters you support win instead of the monsters you don’t support.
I don’t think you are aware of just how small this war is in terms of death toll compared to other wars that are currently going on. There is however a disproportionate number of articles (and thus also journalists) covering it:
This doesn’t meant that one should discard the suffering of the civilians caught in the crossfire. It’s horrible and I weep for every innocent who has to suffer because of the decision a small number of terrorists made - but it’s one thing to acknowledge that they died in this conflict and demand both parties to protect civilians and another entirely to claim that Israel is responsible for a record number of war crimes. Not every dead civilian is a war crime. Neither is not supplying your enemy with resources nor is bombing civilian infrastructure that is being used for military purposes. These safe zones were also established to protect civilians from the bulk of the ground fighting. At no point did Israel make the unrealistic promise that they would be safe from bombs. Given that Hamas operates from there and uses these places to stage massed unguided rocket attacks against civilians in Israel, this would be entirely unrealistic. Nobody in their right mind would deny Israel the right to strike these targets. You would do the same if you were in their place.
You are either willfully ignorant about how wrong what you’re saying is, or you are truly a lost cause.
I don’t think you are aware of just how small this war is in terms of death toll compared to other wars that are currently going on.
And I don’t think you realize just how many insane ratios this war is producing. For being so small, it is resulting in more aid worker, doctor, and journalist deaths than other, much larger wars. It has resulted in level of destruction (e.g. 60% of homes damaged) that hasn’t existed since WW2. The sheer percentages of children being killed versus adults (nevermind combatants), is just staggering.
If your only defense is to say, “but who cares about ratios and percentages?”, then you’re just arguing that it’s okay to genocide small groups.
But I’m suuuuuure you’re just weeping non-stop for them, right?
Neither is not supplying your enemy with resources
They are denying civilians water and food, and Israel is not the ones supplying those resources anyways, other countries are, and Israel is blocking them.
nor is bombing civilian infrastructure that is being used for military purposes
Which the water infra and power plants were not, but they were bombed anyways (and to be clear, Israel has never claimed that they were used to launch attacks, before you try to pull that out of your bum).
At no point did Israel make the unrealistic promise that they would be safe from bombs.
Ah yes, unrealistic to not bomb civilians. Of course. So smart. Why even have stipulations about war crimes, since apparently no one in a warzone can expect not to be killed indiscriminately anyways? Checkmate, human rights!
Given that Hamas operates from there
Hamas doesn’t “operate” from the 60% of residential buildings that have been damaged in Gaza, any more than the IDF could be said to “operate” from Israeli neighborhoods. Israel has shown no evidence (and in fact has been shown to have been dead wrong with their claims, such as at al-Shifa) that they are using the refugee camps and homes and businesses that Israel bombed to launch rockets (if they were all actually rocket launch sites, where were all the people actually living?). Simply having your soldiers live somewhere doesn’t make it a valid target, otherwise the rocket attacks into Israel are all justified too.
There’s a reason that Israel is rapidly losing support on the world stage, and why it’s going to find itself a pariah state before too long.
You would do the same if you were in their place.
When you wake up and find that most of the world is rejecting your country’s claims of conducting a war legitimately, perhaps you should question why, rather than rushing to spew out half-baked justifications and appeals to empathize with an abused group becoming the abusers.
It has resulted in level of destruction (e.g. 60% of homes damaged) that hasn’t existed since WW2.
You need to ignore lots of wars to come to this conclusion. Korea would be one immediately after WW2 that makes this one look like child’s play. More recently, the wars in Chechnya, the Syrian civil war, the Sudanese civil war, the civil war in Myanmar, etc. pp. are all vastly more destructive. There is a single death camp in Syria where Assad had up to 13,000 people murdered.
The sheer percentages of children being killed versus adults (nevermind combatants), is just staggering.
Could this be, because Hamas produces fake numbers to weaponize outrage against Israel? Read this:
Israel is not the ones supplying those resources anyways, other countries are, and Israel is blocking them.
Nonsense. Israel was supplying a significant portion of the strip’s power and electricity, as well as bringing in regular supplies of fuel and food. They stopped this on October 7. Israel has since continued this, even though they are not obliged, and also permitted foreign aid through the border crossing with Egypt. Meanwhile, Hamas have openly stolen a significant portion of these supplies, which is the actual reason why Israel stopped them in the first place. Hamas are the ones stealing from civilians and causing their suffering.
water infra and power plants
There’s only one power plant in Gaza, but you seem to have adopted the Hamas method of just making things up for outrage. I guess it’s rubbing off on you. As for the water infrastructure, do I need to remind you that Hamas is using water pipes to create unguided rockets to fire at Israeli population centers? That’s the actual indiscriminate bombing that few people are willing to talk about.
Why even have stipulations about war crimes, since apparently no one in a warzone can expect not to be killed indiscriminately anyways?
These rules are meant to not encourage the use of human shields, because this turns every group of civilians into a potential target. This isn’t difficult to understand - or at least it shouldn’t be. Many of the regulations of the Geneva Conventions are the least terrible solutions to awful questions. That’s sadly how the world works.
Hamas doesn’t “operate” from the 60% of residential buildings that have been damaged in Gaza
In a single so-called refugee camp in Northern Gaza (it’s a normal suburb with houses - it merely inherited the status due to unique UN rules that solely exist for Palestinians and no other people), almost half of all buildings were rigged with explosives. I’m sure whenever Hamas blows one of these up, it gets added to the amount blamed on Israel, just like when one of the 20% of rockets fired from Gaza falls on Gaza instead of hitting a random target in Israel.
Israel has shown no evidence
Here’s a video that shows rockets being launched right from the middle of a refugee camp:
That’s just one of countless pieces of evidence that you choose to ignore in favor of that one-sided victim narrative of yours.
and in fact has been shown to have been dead wrong with their claims, such as at al-Shifa
You mean where they found weapons and a tunnel with an armored door with a firing port? That one? Or the al-Shifa hospital where a surveillance camera recording shows terrorists bringing in a hostage? Or was that a different al-Shifa?
Simply having your soldiers live somewhere doesn’t make it a valid target, otherwise the rocket attacks into Israel are all justified too.
I can tell you are not even trying to argue in good faith.
your country’s claims
I’m not Israeli.
half-baked justifications
At least I’m not ignoring evidence that is right in the open.
Let me ask you this: How should Israel have reacted to the terror attack on October 7? What would, in your eyes, an appropriate, justified response look like? Please be honest.
You mean where they found weapons and a tunnel with an armored door with a firing port?
Yes, that one. The one where all that was behind that door was a room with 2 cots and a table, where Israel had claimed (complete with a fancy 3D animation) that there was an entire multi-level command center with tens of rooms, housing potentially hundreds of Hamas fighters. That one, that didn’t exist.
Or the al-Shifa hospital where a surveillance camera recording shows terrorists bringing in a hostage?
This is always such a weird argument. Yeah, of course Hamas brought the hostage there for treatment. They were trying to keep them alive. They’re also the government in Gaza, so it would be no different than Israeli military bringing one of their hostages to an Israeli hospital. Are you under the impression that hospitals that treat war wounded are military targets?
Let me ask you this: How should Israel have reacted to the terror attack on October 7? What would, in your eyes, an appropriate, justified response look like? Please be honest.
Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Then, I’d say they should have conducted a ground invasion backed with actually targeted strikes on Hamas targets using precision weapons that the US is so enamored with.
and also permitted foreign aid through the border crossing with Egypt
Permitted a pittance, after blocking all of it initially.
I’m not Israeli.
That just makes your caping for their genocide and ethnic cleansing even more ridiculous.
Holy shit that's horrendous. And not such a propaganda win as they might think.
Tiktok also has millions of young people who support Palestine. You can't search directly but they pop up all over the place, often with a watermelon filter.
If the IDF are flooding TikTok with war-crime-adjacent content it's no wonder the majority of Gen Z is so opposed to Israel.
The IDF spends a lot of time trying to jam Tiktok because unlike an American-run company it’s not so easy to pull down everything supportive of Palestinian rights. I’ve seen more first-hand footage from the people being ethnically cleansed on Tiktok than anywhere else. Tiktok had live updates of the infants suffocating to death after they cut the power from Al-Shifa hospital and their generators ran out, and it was Palestinians themselves reporting on the situation moment by moment. That would not be allowed on Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, or Instagram.
I think it’s moreso that TikTok’s algorithms, whatever that black box may contain, are far better for discoverability than those of all the other platforms.
It’s guided by what each individual viewer wants to see (or hates to see, if they can’t resist interacting with videos they hate), so small media bubbles are created for better or worse, but Tiktok will hand on-the-ground news reported by Palestinians to people who want to see it without those viewers having to look for it or know it’s there to be looked for.
By contrast, if you go to youtube, you might see whatever shows up in the general “popular” tab, or you might enter a search for Palestinian news (which requires you to be actively looking for it in the first place vs just there and able to be shown it) but you’re likely to get mainly clips from major US news channels, with their framing of the situation, and maybe some Israeli ones. Not the heaps of videos by random individuals that you’ll find on TikTok. Even if that type of video is uploaded, youtube won’t recommend it if it’s from a new channel and doesn’t already clock a bazillion views. But TikTok can make a little video from a random person go from zero to everywhere very quickly.
TikTok in general is just better for finding “man on the street”/“what is it like to be there right now” reports from affected individuals. As well as for finding other own-voices type videos by individuals who aren’t media stars or news reporters or the hosts of big youtube channels, but who are the ones most directly in a situation.
Of course there is bias or outright misinformation on the platform too. It is best approached with caution and media literacy, but one need only look at U.S. media’s coverage of the current situation to see that is the case for mainstream news organizations too.
TikTok is a master example of enshittification, which consists in:
Offer users a good experience to hook them up
Introduce advertisements to hook up advertisers
Have hooked up advertisers bid against each other for a place in a users feed
Increase user engagement by showing them both what they like and the opposite
Tease users with a chance to earn money (taking just a 50% cut), so they get to compete against the advertisers, and each other, for a place in other users feeds
The discoverability on TikTok is abysmally bad, all you will ever find is either paid content, or content made by users trying to outdo each other in a race to attract/outrage (aka: increase your engagement).
Only thing you can easily discover on TikTok, is the most polarizing content possible, there is about exactly zero chance to get a realistic view into anything through TikTok; not even by averaging the extremes, which are custom tailored to your personal love/hate triggers.
I'm honestly interested to see how this goes. Usually when someone is elected who claims to be "libertarian" they don't actually adhere to the philosophy or just pay lip service. I lean socialist myself, but one size never fits all and Argentina is in bad enough shape that maybe this will help.
It looks like he’s trying to heal a patient with bloodletting. I think it might help to revive the economy, but also may be a disaster. Also I think that the social guarantees should at least be in force after things get better, if not the whole time. Trying to work things out for the country by putting the citizens in even worse position does not seem like a humane thing to do even if it works :(
Same here. Milei as an experiment could go either way, but staying the course would have led to certain disaster… and to be frank, the country as a whole doesn’t have a lot to lose at this point anyway.
Could go either way fucking lol, the man is an insane cunt - what fucking possible way could it go except to shit? He might become a normal dude after a stroke? What the fuck
I think that’s a bit oversimplified. Milei’s no doubt a knob and there’s a good chance he’ll screw up, but the alternative would have been the former minister of economy doing four years of the same, which would have been a 100% chance of screwing up. So before you make any more oversimplified statements, consider the alternative to Milei.
Milei has inherited a country on the brink of economic collapse and hyperinflation, caused by a government that has financed its overspending by just printing more money for decades, and borrowing whatever foreign currency it could. This is obviously not sustainable.
He wants to link the peso to the dollar (so the government can’t print more money at will anymore - not to mention the fact that many transactions are already half-legally done in dollars anyway) and do away with some of the many regulations that the Peronists have been promising for decades will help the economy, but which most experts agree have unsurprisingly crippled it further, and in many cases facilitated corruption.
His opponent’s political program can be summed up as “introduce more subsidies”.
Which one makes more sense to you?
It probably depends on what you want to achieve. At the moment it’s probably to avoid hyperinflation, another national bankruptcy and poverty levels climbing to new all-time highs. Massa (the other guy) is known for trying to counter the effects of the current massive inflation by printing more money for government subsidies (let that sink in for a moment), so one could argue that whatever Milei actually does, it can’t be worse than that.
His (to put it mildly) over-the-top rhetoric, homophobia/misogyny and the suggestions to sell your organs to make ends meet etc. are different beasts altogether, but I can’t blame the voters for ranking having food on the table higher than strengthening LGBTQ+ rights. I’m grateful I don’t have to make that choice in my own country.
You are talking about a guy who takes economic advice from a “psychic medium” who he believes is in turn talking psychically to his dogs, who he believes are clones of resurrected jesus-dog.
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