I got myself a pretty little condo in Asturias for a steal, at least compared to US prices. I tried first just outside Madrid but it’s crazy expensive there, I saw a small and modern condo and they wanted more of what I paid for a brand new large home in the US very close to a big city, massive in size by European standards. If you want a modern tiny condo in Madrid city center you are looking at over a million euros for sure. Almost NYC prices. But Asturias is so freaking beautiful, and people are sooo laid back and kind, the best! There’s also a train that takes just over 3 hours to Madrid.
This is barely an inconvenience for the Venezuelan regime. Oil contributes very little to the economy these days. The oil industry was dismantled many years ago and replaced mostly by drug trafficking and illegal mining. With over 9 million expats fleeing the regime, “remesas” also keep whatever is left from the economy moving. Most Venezuelans don’t work, or at least not for money, just to keep their sanity, as salaries cannot buy any basic goods. Exceptions are doctors and some emergency trade occupations like plumbers or mechanics, which are entirely $US based. Most families depend on relatives sending money from abroad. There’s also some tourism, mostly Russians and Chinese. Other than not much going on there, the 0.0001% in power already made their fortunes in illegal markets (and in crypto, as some in the regime used the limited power in the country to mine bitcoin) so they have little to worry about some dirty oil not being “sold” to Cuba or Iran. The rest of the population continues surviving however they can.
Oil contributes very little to the economy these days. The oil industry was dismantled many years ago and replaced mostly by drug trafficking and illegal mining.
Mind sourcing that? It's not what's on the Wikipedia page for Venezuela's economy, nor the CIA world factbook for the country. The largest estimate I could find for drug trafficking was 8 billion USD, which came from transparency international, an org with sketchy history on Latin American numbers. The latest petroleum export numbers I can find are much higher.
Don’t need to source it. I lived under the regime and still have many relatives there. I know exactly what I am saying by my own experience not by reading a journalist from the NYT. The drug business is very real and has deep roots in the military since the early 2000s so this is not new. Even the presidential plane has been used to transport drugs, that’s well documented. Chavez himself didn’t like it once his son got involved, but he died and Venezuela became the Wild West. There are two factions controlling the country, the ideological one and the “business” one. Both are involved in drug trafficking but the ideological branch supports Cuba and other communist regimes with free oil. Cuba hasn’t paid one dime for oil in more than 25 years. In fact many of the ships leaving Venezuela are bound to Cuba’s “customers” directly. The non ideological branch of the regime hates this “deal”, and many senior military are actually anti-Cuba, they have never been there, reason why the Cuban regime keeps Maduro in power. All of Maduro’s security ring is Cuban for that reason. The non ideological branch made a deal to stay out of oil in exchange for illegal mining. There’s a human and environmental catastrophe happening in the Amazonas state, with natives being displaced or killed and one of the most beautiful naturals reserves in the planet being destroyed. This is also well documented. Most of the gold is sold to Russia and Iran. There’s also some mining for uranium which Iran needs for their nuclear program. And that’s it, there’s really no other economy in the country. Don’t be naive believing Maduro is selling oil and keeping the country funded. As I said the economy is largely supported by “remesas” from the exodus and by the informal economy which is completely dollar based, no one takes local currency there.
Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
> I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
My most memorable moment from the show was when Bourdain visited some poor farmer to see how they were harvesting yuca (or maybe yams, I forgot) and he went into the typical (I am paraphrasing) "oh look, this is the life, so perfect being one with nature, etc...". And the farmer shut him up pretty quickly with something like "How about a trade: you stay here and farm yams in the rain, in the perfect unity with the nature, and I go to live in your apartment in New York?"
Jon Krakauer pointed something similar out in relation to the native people around Everest attaining a higher quality of life (and thus more Western lifestyle) as more and more commercial Everest expeditions started happening.
Climbing tourists would be complaining that the local culture was being destroyed and that the huts they would visit would have the local kids be wearing, say, a fashion shirt and the huts themselves had amenities like a heater instead of burning dung for heat.
Basically, wealthy climber tourists wanted these people to live in stasis in a lifestyle of poverty just so the atmosphere of quaint mountain life was maintained for them. Almost like an open-air museum.
I think there's a more charitable way to interpret their perspective, as well as that of Bourdain. Climbing Everest is pain, suffering, and a fairly significant chance at death. And practically speaking, to even try to do it in modern times you generally need to be wealthy. So why are these people doing it? Because wealth doesn't provide contentment or satisfaction in life in and of itself. It's people searching for a meaning and purpose in life.
And so when you see people who live lives that are indeed much harder, but for whom there seems to be true meaning and purpose, there's going to be some major internal conflicts in seeing them striving to push that away to pursue something that one knows leads to just vapidness and emptiness in the end. Obviously you might argue that wealth need not trend towards the end of culture, but scarce is the society with a rich culture and a rich economy. Does it even exist?
Like don't you see a paradox in effectively equating a higher quality of life and a more Western lifestyle, when in the West a vast (and rising) percent of people are drugged out on various psychotropic pharmaceuticals just to make it through day to day. Yet look at poorer cultures and it's not like 1 in 6 people are walking around with untreated mental conditions - they simply seem to be far healthier from a mental, to say nothing of physical, perspective.
So I think wealth and quality of life have a far more nuanced relationship than most appreciate. And the ostensible subset relationship (a rich man can easily become poor if he so chooses, but the other way around is much more difficult) is not so simple. Many people are endlessly addicted to things that they genuinely believe make their life worse, and that they could easily cast away, yet find it difficult to do so. See: social media. And obviously casting away wealth is going to be many orders of magnitude more difficult than something like social media.
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
If you only eat it when you have a grandma that remembers how to make it, I would consider that the very definition of "traditional". And also interesting to hear about!
(But yea, perhaps not "everyone here eats" in that case. And yet, if everyone knew what it was -- even if it's "what grandma used to eat" -- I'd even let that slide. I don't eat what my grandparents ate, but I know more about it than a foreigner.)
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
The production crew would have used "fixers" to get insight into good locations for filming and other things of interest. Whatever fixer they used was probably just friends of and/or part of this "wrong" crowd. Bourdain and his producers made a lot of shows over the years, some are going to be better produced while others are flawed. How it goes. Bourdain and his team weren't perfect — doesn't make them inauthentic at a wider perspective.
Not only this, but depending on which season of which show of his, there may have been other reasons for why spots were chosen. For instance there was at least one season of No Reservations where episodes were themed with the location as a backdrop. The episode he had in my hometown caused a lot of locals to complain that he wasn't choosing the best spots, but the point was the whole episode was a narrative and the spots chosen fit the narrative.
I wish he sticked to food, his only expertise. His Newfoundland episode in Parts Unknown is the best and most tasty piece of television I have ever watched. Why is that good? Guess what, he brought on his pals that are great chefs from that place.
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
Maybe it's just the similarity in appearance and cause of death to Carradign and Epstein making me see patterns that aren't there, but I cannot watch a Bourdain clip without getting the sense something is deeply wrong.
I know a few autistic people including one of my nephews. They are different in some ways particularly when they are very young and are still struggling with expressing their emotions. But none of them are arrogant and disrespectful. I think you can be autistic and also a jerk, one doesn’t justify the other.
I'm going to be rude now, but I don't mean it to be taken that way.
"I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able".
I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases.
But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged.
Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude.
It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly.
Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue.
> I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
I'm going to say that your definition of "severely autistic" is actually mild to moderate at worst.
The definition of "severely autistic" I know of and have seen in personal experience (family) and in my career has nothing to do with "masking" and such.
It's being a late teenager who is effectively non-verbal, who wore diapers until age 12, who has an "anchoring dog", a 150lb Newfoundland that was trained from birth with audio recordings of him screaming or tantrums, that acts both as an emotional support, but as a literal anchor - tethered to him so that when, as many severely autistic people do, he starts to wander based on internal stimuli - the dog can just sit down and tense up and say "Not unless you plan on dragging a very large dog with you that is trained to stay still when it notices you walking away from your family".
Things along those lines.
> they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
This is demonstrably not RMS. He is quite aware of this, and quite openly states he has no intention of apologizing for it, let alone "fixing it".
The “severe” autism that I used to experience, at least the most severe that I experienced was non-verbal, sometimes with violent outbursts.
But of course there’s a whole range.
What concerns me though is that when I’m on the internet, people talk about autism like it’s a quirky character flaw that can be overridden with moderate effort.
Hasn’t the definition of autism in the DSM changed to the point of requiring only a single characteristic to be “technically” on the spectrum, whereas it used to require many more criteria? I think it’s literally “not what it used to be”.
It seems like a diagnosis that would benefit from more distinguishing words so as not to conflate people at different ends of that spectrum.
It must be infuriating or
Bewildering to see someone knowingly nodding along saying, “oh yeah. I’m autistic too,” when other autistic people you know literally aren’t capable of doing that.
> nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, most people have not met someone with more than mild autism.
I think the other issue is that people are confused as to _what_ autism is (it doesn't help that its a massive fucking spectrum) For most people, meeting a dutch grandmother for the first time would assume that they count as autistic.
I run a "uniformed organisation" for kids, and as we make sure that we take _all_ kids regardless of who they are, I bump into a large amount of interesting diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions. Currently I look after siblings, one who is mostly mute and diagnosed, and the other who is very much lightly on the spectrum.
There is another kid who is both ADD and autistic(Diagnosed). He is prone to RMS-like behaviour. If you talk to him in the right way, he can understand why certain behaviours are to be not repeated. However, he is and remains a teenager.
I am not diagnosed as autistic and also have trouble understanding why people can call my interactions rude as I just tend to try to be honest and precise.
It just happens that I don't like hypocrisy.
I am not an antisocial and consider myself a very polite person and will often say hello and wish a good day to strangers when I am riding my bicycle in the trails or walking in a village / small town.
Calling a spade a spade is already considered rude in some cultures/contexts, so I think the most you could say is "this isn't even rude from my perspective".
I know somebody who smoked a lived to be 90 years old, therefore all that they speak about harms of smoking are lies.
You realize people are different, and your knowledge of tiny number of data points tells you very little about people who aren't those people you know?
This is becoming a real problem. I spend a good amount of hours driving across states visiting customers and hit few interstates busy with semis. I have seen so many close calls in the last few years and reckless maneuvers that I am now doing some of my work, which includes onsite product demos, remotely, with all the inconvenience and friction that adds in closing a deal. I am also warning family and friends who have long commutes to be extra careful with semis. Keep a good distance, stay out of their blind spots (when passing do it fast don’t drive next to them) and anticipate their actions. I don’t see how we fix this problem other than minimizing our exposure by not driving as much and avoiding busy highways even if that adds time to our commute.
Chicagoland here. We have a pet theory that covid changed how people drive. From where I sit, it is not just semis ( though those will have the biggest impact should something happen ). That said, just yesterday I was dodging ice balls falling from massive semi ( my only real question was how... was it just getting on the road or something? )
Ice forms on the roof and they need to get up there manually and clear it off and I don't think they do. :)
I was driving the Gaspe coastal road once after an ice storm and we were on the road with a bunch of semis early in the morning. The switchbacks had massive sheets of ice coming off them over the sides. It was wild.
It wasn't so thick that driving over the shattered pieces was an issue but it was a sight to behold and turned a white knuckle drive into a real jaw clencher.
Was there for a family issue and had to be somewhere otherwise I wouldn't have been on the road that day at all, let alone first thing.
My feeling is the same, but I would love to see data from insurance companies. It feels like a lot of new drivers who bought cars with stimulus, constant use of phones while driving, and general normalization of anti-social behavior.
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
In 200 years time Ken Burns the 6th is going to make a documentary about climate change, and quotes like this will be read out to illustrate just how short-sighted, selfish, and hyper-nihilistic people were.
This is the most "I've got mine" statement that I have seen these past months.
It's not because it was "OK" so far that it is going to be OK moving forward, it's just kicking the can down the road and hope for a miracle, and they have done this since people have wondered about greenhouse gases (and this happened very early on).
Note that most of the issues we will be facing was not because of all the conveniences, but just because doing things in a way that was sustainable and/or more regulated would have hit the bottom line of big oil...
At the end of the day, it will not matter whose pockets were lined when there is no more food to feed people...
"most" of us? Really? Once you add up the people in the countries the West invaded / started wars for the sake of oil, countries where the oil industry gets rich while the population suffers in poverty due to oil induced instability like Venezuela, all the countries where climate change induced national disasters have destroyed lives and livelihoods you'd find that its not really 'most' of us. But hey at least you have your strawberries.
Actually this was (and still is) commonplace these last decades, for poor and rich people alike. Even the poorest could afford to have a car and put petrol in it. It's becoming untenable for the younger generations because of government intervention and mishandling of the economy.
Petroleum is subsidized so heavily globally. Most oil actually comes from nation companies. That's, like, the maximum amount of government intervention you can get.
The people who think oil are or were a "free market" are beyond delusional. No, that was never the case - all the big players are governments, all of it is centrally planned, and all of it is subsidized by the population. That's why it's so cheap.
The reason it's going up in price is BECAUSE we're doing this less, as renewables become more competitive.
From a livestyle perspective renting sometimes makes sense. Financially almost never does. There are of course edge cases like very expensive urban areas where there’s no possibility to buy because there are no units on the market and commuting is not possible. But if you work remotely, or suburbs are nearby then owning a place is likely a much better choice than renting particularly if you take advantage of subsidies like state/federal assistance for first time buyers and tax abatements in opportunity zones.
Can you support this claim by evidence? There are various sources [1] reaching the opposite conclusions:
> One thing is clear: renting your housing is not a waste of money, and it can even result in a greater accumulation of wealth over the long-term compared to owning
Usually you don’t buy a whole house when you are 25. You start with a small unit. My first condo was 700 sf which I sold for a good profit and use the money to pay for a bigger condo, about double the size. I then combined the profit of the second home with my wife’s profit from her house which was also small and together we got our first nice house just outside the city, about 15 min commute. We paid around 220 $/sf compared to 600 $/sf for a similar home in the city. Our house is 3X the size of the house I grew up in with my parents and 3 siblings, which was standard size for a middle income American family in the 80s. Not to mention the quality and amenities of our house is so much better than a house from the 80s. Yes houses are a lot more expensive today but only if you are buying in busy urban areas. If you dare to look in the suburbs you’ll find great homes which by square footage have not increased that much in the past 30-40 years after adjusting for inflation. In the city you are competing with everyone else wanting to be able to walk to their favorite brunch place. Cities also have crazy regulations that prevent building affordable homes.
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