Living in Venezuela:
After more than a year of official announcements about the petro, nobody knows what it is, nobody has ever bought, sold, owned nor seen one.
Some people have sent other crypto to some sort of pre-sale, but never got anything back.
I don't know what is the petro, but it hardly exists and it is certainly not a cryptocurrency.
Corbyn described Chavez as socialist, not Maduro.
Maduro has undone the "socialist" stuff that Chavez had more or less enhanced like free healthcare and free education.
Maduro certainly labels himself as socialist but, living in Venezuela, I can't identify any socialist policies going on.
In some regions, especially close to the borders where there is lots of smuggling, it is hard to find gas.
In Caracas you can buy as much as you want but I don't really see the point of having a full tanker truck on my garage lane.
Well we "pay" in bolivars but I converted to USD.
The price was 0.50 Bolivars (VEB) since I remember. In 2008 they converted to the "Bolivar Fuerte" (Strong Bolivar = VEF) so the price became 0.0005 VEF. The exchange rate is 3684 VEF/USD.
I live in Venezuela and just looked at my electricity invoice:
In November I paid 0,00004 USD/kWh. The prices were raised in December: 0,00016 USD/kWh.
If you prefer having your own generator, diesel fuel is 0,0000001 $/L. You can get 7356000 Liters for one dollar.
So basically energy is free.
Something was quite wrong with their navigation if they where around Cuba between Caracas and Paris! ;-)
Not even flying to New York would take you over Cuba.
Reading this article is quite painful due to all the measurements given only in feet & inches, why not give the data in both systems of measurement?
Only 3 countries in the world have not adopted the metric system (Australia did) and this is about GPS and worldwide measurements. Not even NASA uses the imperial units anymore.
Things have changed a lot since this was written in December.
I live in Caracas, there's massive national food shortages. Now you can't have 3 meals a day for a month with 100€, and would spend quite some time finding it (on the black market). Last time I saw sugar, it was around 3€ per kilo.
Edit: If you want a realistic picture of how is life today, read this piece, written by a foreign journalist that actually lives there (sadly, most things I see in foreign media is written from outside): http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930...
I would add most programmers don't know some time zones have offsets in minutes. In ancient times, some were in seconds.
I live in UTC-04:30 and regularly encounter bugs because of it.