Innsbruck. Lived there for two years. Beautiful place.
Hallstadt is another amazing place. The “most beautiful city in the world next to a lake”. It is so popular that china created a copy of it haha.
If you travel all the way to the east, the border with Switzerland has a beautiful lake.
will Argentina, and specially the Kirchners, be able to control themselves when they inevitably return to power
You and I know that this will not happen. Everyone has their hand way too deep into everyone's pockets to try and do the "correct" thing.
I don’t like are the ones mentioned everywhere else (newspapers) regarding the abortion, potential gun law for the population,
Yesterday he said that
- regarding the abortion, he will make a plebiscite "because there was business lobbying and due to the low quality of politicians."
- I don't know how to feel about this point, but at least it is better than just "reverting it".
- Regarding the gun law, he said he was going to enforce the law that is already in effect, meaning that you wouldn't have to seek legal protection orders for ANMaC to authorize your possession.
I agree with you. I hope that Argentina becomes a better place. There are so much amazing things that are obfuscated by the politics.
Milei’s government plan
Translated from here with Chat GPT:
- Reduction of public spending: Aims for a 15% target after advancing in a "reorganization of the State."
- Elimination of taxes: The proposal aims to remove "90%" of taxes that have a 2% impact on GDP and "impede" the economy.
- Labor reform: Proposes implementing the UOCRA model, a scheme of unemployment insurance with "greater financial depth."
- Unrestricted trade openness: Proposes following the Chilean experience and removing all types of limitations, both for exporting and importing.
- Elimination of the Central Bank: "There is no other way to end inflation," states the document, which foresees the extinction of the organization as a "monetary issuing agent."
- Monetary reform: Proposes rescuing the "liabilities" of the Central Bank, developing alternative plans to recover and advance to a scheme where "Argentinians can trade in the currency they want."
- Energy: Eliminate economic subsidies by recalibrating the economic and financial equation of contracts "to lower the cost" for companies; this way, "realistic tariff schemes" will be implemented that, as stated, "will not directly affect the pockets of Argentinians."
- A reform of energy regulatory bodies is also proposed.
- Reform the ministries of Health, Social Development, Labor, and Education into a single ministry called the Ministry of Human Capital.
- Continue with social assistance until an economic model is adopted that allows for "wealth creation, job generation, and well-being."
- A private health and education system, after a "reorganization of the State."
- Combat childhood poverty through nutrition plans, income protection programs, and incentives for students, among other proposals.
- Security reforms: Changes to the penitentiary system and to the laws on Internal Security, National Defense, and Intelligence are proposed. They also propose stopping land occupations, prioritizing the fight against drug trafficking, and ensuring free movement throughout the territory.
- Defense policy: Revalue the Armed Forces and reformulate the current National Intelligence system.
- Foreign relations: Promotion of free trade and alignment with all liberal democracies in the world.
- Infrastructure: Replace public works with a private initiative scheme similar to Chile, with Peruvian wayouts and Swiss-style incentive schemes.
- Public spending: Creation of a control area for the spending of each ministry, elimination of drivers and security personnel for officials in general (with exceptions for relevance).
- Public media: Closure or privatization of Télam, Public TV. It also foresees doing the same with the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (Incaa), and the National Institute Against Discrimination (Inadi).
- Elimination of exchange restrictions, all withholdings, and export rights, generation of a "special regime of promotion for long-term investments."
- Negotiate the elimination of the gross income tax. This is a tax charged by the provinces.
Find the whole proposal here (in Spanish).
Macri also admired Trump. And the current president is in good terms with the Venezuelan "president"
But aside of this, let's have a bit more of context:
Political State of Argentina
Argentina is mainly split into two parties, and, usually, no other party comes into power (like Dem/Rep in US or Conservatives/Labor Party in the UK). Even with stupid ads saying that you are team Argen or you are team Tina.
Those two parties basically kept the status quo, or made it slightly worse. For example, last 20 years:
- Peronist party (the Kirchner marriage) hold the presidency for 12 years.
- Country became worse (corruption, inflation, etc)
- Macri (opposition) became president.
- Came with a lot of half baked ideas, country became worse.
- Alberto Fernandez with his new vice president Cristina Kirchner came into power
- He has been publicly against the Kirchners in twitter, and suddenly did a 180 degree change and become pro them.
- Country is even worse than before
So you can see, they vote one side of the coin, and because it doesn't work they end up voting the other side of the coin and they flip it over and over.
There are a lot of other delicate situations here, like the fact that both parties are constantly trying to stop the other party of achieving something (even if its good) or that one party brings an idea that sounds good but it's half baked (like the abortion law or the government budget) and when the other party wants to stop it they call them fascist or anything.
Javier Milei, the new candidate
Milei has slowly being growing in the social medias and winning the general young population.
He is eccentric, he is charismatic (in his own weird way) and he has new ideas.
He came up with some interesting propositions, (which I'm gonna write them all in the next comment) that are very detailed. Most parties propose to "improve the economy" or "give more rights to the workers" without explaining how.
Milei has a very detailed plan on that, and he wants to tackle a thing that annoys most of the argentinians:
- Taxes
- Inflation
- Social plans
Taxes
As you may have heard, Argentina is heavily taxed, there are a lot of expected taxes + a lot of hidden taxes. Every time you buy something, you have a VAT tax of 21% (which was supposed to be 13% but it was “temporarily upgraded” in 1995 and never lowered down).
Inflation
The Argentinian peso has been going down since I was born, they print it so much that they started to import new bills from Europe as the machines in Argentina and Brasil can not keep up with the demand. As you can imagine, printing it so much generates inflation (tho one of the parties will deny it all the time).
Milei proposed to remove the peso and use American dollars.
Is it a good idea? I don’t know. But maybe it would be for the best when the peso seems like it will never really recover.
Social plans
There is a lot of hate discussion regarding this subject.
Let’s start with facts:
- 55% of workers in Argentina work for the government
- Which means that only 45% works for private entities.
- Argentina provides social plans for people who can not meet their needs.
- This has been very criticized. The most common argument is that it makes people lazy and that they don’t want to work.
- Tie that with the fact that salaries are extremely low, and poverty is quite high and now you have a place to focus the anger of the “working” population.
This brings arguments like:
I don’t want to pay taxes for to maintain “these” people.
Milei also have a plan for this, offering to slowly remove social plans by adding requirements to get them and promoting work and studies.
This is a very delicate proposal, as I personally don’t know if this could be achieved.
Also, Milei is very much against having so much public spending in government work and social plans. When he got the majority of votes he said:
Leftists sons of bitches, tremble, freedom is advancing!
(The name of his party is “La Libertad avanza” that means “freedom moves forward”)
The conclusion
So, at the end of the day, you find two strong parties which have been failing at changing the country, and a new party that had risen with a charismatic leader, who has a detailed plan and is a new face.
People (specially the young) are tired of the same old people fighting to keep the country the same way, so they vote for someone who is different. Milei is known for appearing in discussion TV shows and arguing a lot with facts (tho he argues in quite a heated way) so people are more exposed to him, with his facts and attitude.
And this scares the people. In Argentina the peso devalues with any political event. Didn’t matter who would have win, the peso would go down.
V Rising and the Witcher. So literally nothing will change in both universes.
V Rising has overpowered vampire and monster hunters.
The Witcher has vampires.
A monitor with Ethernet? That sounds interesting.
Can you please give me the model name? Thanks!
I think that it is also different if you get fired. Don’t know in detail, but I assume that if they fire you without a valid cause they don’t have any grounds to complain that you did a sensitive and unique work.
It is true what they said about the Americans or Chinese buying companies.
Any big company here ends up being an “add on” to one of the big tech giants.
For example, Wolt, a very big Finish food delivery app, was recently acquired by Doordash.
As soon as something becomes huge in Europe, the big companies buy them.
Is there a community for news/world news? I always found interesting news in Reddit and liked seeing discussions about it.
As the title said. I have participated in several hackathons over the last decade (10 hackathons).
And a thing I have noticed is that, in the last hackathons I went, winners were selected based on the inclusivity of their idea and not on their ability to build such idea.
To clarify, this were blockchain hackathons (I don't know if this can be relevant)
Examples
So I don't just sound like someone complaining, let me give examples.
In one big blockchain hackathon organized by Eth Global (a very big group) one of the 10 winners was a project for helping women and people of color. They presented only a presentation.
In another smaller hackathon, one of the winners was a great idea on how to fight censorship to help LGBTQ+ access the information they need in current times (and this idea was very well thought, I really like it). Again, they only presented slides, but didn't have any code at all.
My problem with it
It may be something new, or maybe I'm outdated but when I go to a hackathon, I expect people to actually build a proof of concept and present it.
I always thought that was the idea, get together and see what you can build in 24/48 hours. And at the end, the winners are selected by a mix of how original their idea was + their ability to actually build it.
When I see a team winning by presenting a project without having actually built enough to show it, I feel cheated. It feels like I'm watching Shark Tank or any show where participants try to sell the idea to VCs, instead of a programming tournament.
The fact that hundreds of people spend one or two all nighters planning a project that they can actually do in that time, fighting bugs, designing the site, testing their functionality and struggling with all the process of software engineering just to see that the winner didn't actually do anything of that and proposed an idea that maybe it can not even be done in a hackathon, is frustrating.
I want to clarify, my problem is not that I didn't win, my problem is that I always look up to the winners, I want to see their project, how it works, how amazing it is, how they were able to build it in such a short notice, and when I see that they didn't actually build anything, I have the problem.
When I participated in GameJams, having a submission was always a requirement, and I could play hundreds of amazing games, original or not. And the winner usually was someone that make a game from which I can learn a lot.
So, coming again to my question:
Have hackathons became too political? Is it only a blockchain hackathon thing?
I really enjoy going to hackathons, but this have been a bit frustrating between the last ones.
I'm a professional. I'm currently working on some side projects like storybot, a blog written only by AI or ai-guessr, wordle but with AI images.
I did some years of Game Development, but mainly it was a mix of having a first job where I had to "learn how to learn" and then working a lot on side projects.
I find that side projects is the main way to learn and experiment. In a corporate job you can't experiment (and break stuff so much) so someone that codes as a hobby has experienced way more situations that could work in a professional environment.
The thing that really disappointed me was that they pretended that he tried to blackmail them.
They clearly were not expecting that Christian would have recorded the call and that it was not going to be "he said, I said".
Very proud of him.