Electricity is still out in most of Puerto Rico, along with clean drinking water, even though Hurricane Maria was a month ago. It looks like it will be six more months before power is fully restored.
Puerto Rico is a fantastic example of big government, high taxes, and stupid regulations utterly destroying what could be, and should be, a happy and thriving island nation. Watch the above video and be prepared to cry. As you’re watching it, ask yourself, “Would Asian island nations, like Hong Kong or Singapore, ever do this?”
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Ramoantana
Posted at 05:36 am, 20th October 2017Despacito, baby..
This is how we do it down in Puerto Rico ?
Joe
Posted at 08:33 am, 20th October 2017Reminds me of Argentina faulting on their debt (in early 2000s I believe)
I’d guess that PR prices drop sharply over the next few years as they did in Argentina – this could make PR a viable place for nomads to live in for 1-2 years.
Peter Schiff recently said in an interview that he moved his business and employees to PR to completely avoid taxes as well.
Cronos
Posted at 08:59 am, 20th October 2017ROFL
Caleb Jones
Posted at 10:28 am, 20th October 2017Absolutely. Foreigners pay only a 4% corporate tax and 0% capital gains tax in PR. Awesome. I’m looking at PR very closely as my possible country B.
Arod TuCaress
Posted at 06:51 pm, 20th October 2017i call government weather manipulation – but i have a tinfoil hat on
Shubert
Posted at 06:27 am, 21st October 2017A Mexican friend of mine had this to say about Puerto Ricans: “Those are some of the laziest people I ever seen! They do nothing.”
Me being the horrid racist that I am, who has seen Mexicans work their ass off on construction sites for pennies on the dollar, took his word at this fact.
Dave from Oz
Posted at 10:35 am, 21st October 2017Why is the electricity still out? Well, consider this simple question: how many Puerto Ricans know how electricity works?
If PR was full of average home handymen, the kind of guys who have a table saw in the basement, industrious, regular guys who work with their hands and brains, then they’d be generating power by now. There’s be ample volunteer labor to fix the storm damage – labor that you could reasonably trust to not short out the entire system.
Government and private enterprise are two ways to apply labor to society’s problems. Both work ok when that labour is plentiful and of decent quality, and neither work at all when the men can’t read and have a culture of not working.
David
Posted at 10:48 am, 21st October 2017interesting cultural points being made. Maybe Caleb can do an article on the best culture for business owners or a breakdown of what makes one country succesful and another totally broke…
Throughfare
Posted at 12:13 pm, 21st October 2017Should point out that the Puerto Rican government has made a commitment to enhancing English learning in the public school system, and they’ve even floated the idea of an English immersion program.
Native Puerto Rican teachers have been resistant, because hardly any native Puerto Rican people are fluent in English, and the native English speakers are almost all rich gringos, or people with government jobs, who would never work for shitty Puerto Rican teacher’s pay.
There are also a number of private English language academies, that pay slightly higher, but still shitty, salaries. Craigslist and other classifieds site have ads up.
If a young guy, or girl, wanted to have an adventure though, and would be willing to work for low Puerto Rican teacher’s pay, but pay no federal income tax and live on the cheap, it would be possible to build up a little nest egg, while doing some internet side gig, and paying no tax on that . . .
and you’d end up very fluent in Spanish (if you can talk at full speed with a Puerto Rican, you can talk to anybody, LOL)
Jack Outside the Box
Posted at 01:02 pm, 21st October 2017I call an act of nature, but I’m a climate change denier.
P.S. Tinfoil hats are gay.
Steven
Posted at 05:52 pm, 21st October 2017They look gay when you’re playing your HAARP.
Marty McFly
Posted at 10:31 pm, 21st October 2017^^^ Zing.
joelsuf
Posted at 08:43 am, 24th October 2017For the last two or so years, I too am wearing my tinfoil hat with pride when it comes to the weather, among other things. I live in South Florida, and there have been more hurricanes that have been “set to hit as a category 5 or greater” in the last five years than I can ever remember and I’ve been living here since I was a kid. This isn’t a coincidence.
And what has happened? Corporatist price gouging and martial law. And citizens accept this happily, thinking that the state is gonna “protect” them. lol.
I believe it exists, but it is negligible, part of the planet just dealing with things the way it knows how, and many who study weather will tell you this. Kaku, Nye, Tyson, and Hawking are all puppets, and they are the four biggest authorities on science at the moment. This article explains how they get away with it.
Gil Galad
Posted at 10:18 am, 24th October 2017You do realize that every person who happens to witness an unusual series of cataclysms will tend to (un)reason like that, right? And that this happened in the past even when weather manipulation wasn’t even conceivable (and no, it can’t be done yet, not at this scale).
The planet doesn’t “know” anything. It isn’t a living organism, it isn’t sentient, it isn’t “wise”. Even as a metaphor this is lousy. Every time life on Earth recovered from a disaster, it was because whoever survives happened to have what it took to survive, a tautology that tells you NOTHING about any intrinsic self-regulatory mechanism: it’s just darwinian selection at work. There is NOTHING about the Earth or nature that is “protecting us” from what we might do to it. ANYTHING no matter how bad CAN happen to the climate if we push it hard enough, and no traditional or secular gods will save us, including the ridiculous belief in a self-correcting Gaia.
Joelsuf, why don’t you actually go through some temperature archives? It takes some time, but it’s not that hard. Then come back and tell me that it’s been “negligible”. And if you look hard enough you might even find some *written* (not electronic) archives. At some point Occam’s razor has to prevail. You can’t believe ALL this data is being retrospectively falsified EVERYWHERE to fit with a narrative; just take a moment to see just how ludicrous the idea is.
Is it that hard to entertain the thought that dishonest people can sometimes use TRUE facts to further their agenda, not just lies?
Throughfare
Posted at 08:46 pm, 14th November 2017LOL, here’s an article about the usual corruption & price gouging that goes on when moronic government officials who aren’t spending their own money are supposed to clean up after a disaster
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/rebuilding-puerto-rico-the-lineman-got-63-an-hour-but-the-utility-was-billed-319-an-hour