> But the problem for El Salvador is not the technology of monetary systems
I do believe that the monetary system IS the problem since El Salvador is dollarized and is subject to a foreign central bank antics while having no say in the matter. Having their own would be marginally better perhaps but IMO bitcoin is a much better solution.
I'm afraid that if I try to retort to each point we may end up talking past each other.
But I will say this, I think that your assumption in point 1 is wrong. I think that the mismanagement of the financial system worldwide has proven that there is no country currency invulnerable to manipulation.
Jeff Booth talks about this towards the end of this interview which is great in it's entirety IMO.
> El Salvador receives millions of dollars in aid from the US.
This has been true for decades. Not anymore. A couple of weeks back the US gov said that it would stop all USAID funding and give it instead to ONGs in El Salvador which are basically the opposition or anti-Bukele.
I assume that there are other ways that the US gov sends "aid" but I'm sure these will also stop soon enough.
As a Salvadoran living abroad but keeping an eye on politics there, I feel the need to comment given the amount of skepticism shown here, which is understandable given the history.
I believe that what the president, Nayib Bukele, and his team have done is monumental. The reason is that I also believe that the financial system crashed back in 2008 and has been kept alive by central banks worldwide. Last summer we saw how Lebanon banks reneged to pay back their customers their holdings in USD. This seems to be increasing. The thirst for USD around the world is increasing and all the so called printing by the FED is not getting to the other countries and international companies fast enough.
El Salvador is in a though position since it does not control its main currency. The other one, the Colón, while still legal tender is for all practical purposes unusable. It would take too long to grow the economy enough for it to be valued appropriately against the USD. Mandating BTC as legal tender is an awesome move. To me the most important benefit is that the 70% of the population which was excluded from banking and relegated to use physical currency will now be included. If the economy is an engine and money is the oil, El Salvador, which had only some drops of oil, will now get a complete oil change with synthetic on top of that. Lets remember that the law obligates the government to instruct all citizens on the use of the technology and to provide the means if necessary. This means that the government now has to provide connectivity to all citizens and teach them. Nayib has shown that he’s up to the task. For example, El Salvador is providing every child in the public school system with a laptop and free internet connectivity.
So I think this is beyond if BTC goes up to 200k. It doesn’t matter. If it goes back to 10k is OK too. What matters is that every citizen will now be included as equal in this new financial system.
Using the military was normalized be previous governments from the left and the right. Nothing new in using them for security purposes. And lockdowns are being performed worldwide, so from a local perspective nothing abnormal in using the military for lockdown purposes.
> * Defect blame to all political opponents
Which blame? Keeping derelict infrastructure such as the potable water plant that didn't receive a repair for 30 years hoping that it will break down in order to pass laws to privatize access to water? A non-existing health care system for the most Salvadorans? On and on...
> * Threaten to shutdown the largest bank and mobile phone operator
The president used his power to keep these and other corporations in check since these were ignoring the orders of not seizing the stipend provided by the gov to the poorest. At least one bank was seizing this in "fees" and debt collection. As for the mobile company, there were people reporting that one company was cutting service to people for non-payment even though these have been prohibited by the gov to do so for a few months therefore illegal.
> * Bot networks that attack any dissenting view
This is a tired argument that has been shown to be false time and time again. The popularity of the president, Nayib Bukele, is such that 98% of the population have a positive image of the president and 97% approve his handling of the current virus crisis. There is enough people that approve his actions that anyone emotionally invested in the opposite cannot handle the reaction of others specially when any comments that they bring are at best uninformed, at worst lies. I know, these are high numbers; he's that good.
> * A government official publicly using the twitter api to identify tweets from the opposition
So, the gov is investigating public information about posts with unverifiable data aimed to discredit and possible incite violence against the president's family. What's wrong with that?
> * Order the military and police to use lethal force if someone does not comply.
Comply to what? To break lockdown? Nope. Use lethal force when engaged with violent life-threatening forces, which in El Salvador are gangs backed by drug cartels, corrupt business man, and prominent politicians from left and right protected by immunity because they are currently serving. Yes, that's right, current serving politicians from both left and right have been recorded providing funds to these gangs.
> We've had somewhat working separation of powers.
What? I guess you're talking about the president stating that he will use his constitutional powers to enforce any measure deemed necessary to protect lives. This is an argument used by his discredited opponents because they still control the judicial and legislative bodies. Before Bukele, the presidency danced to the same sick music that has kept this little country poor where both left and right were attached to the hip.
> It is terrible to see my country turning into an autocratic rule, and how the government is misusing Twitter to make that happen :/
It brings hope to see a small country that has been ruled by a primitive dishonest bi-partisan mafia to have at last a glimmer of hope for a better future in this time of incertitude.
Regarding you feeling that this is engineered, the following could be a reason why if valid:
The dual economy didn’t happen overnight, says Temin. The story started just a couple of years after the ’67 Summer of Love. Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
America’s underlying racism has a continuing distorting impact. A majority of the low-wage sector is white, with blacks and Latinos making up the other part, but politicians learned to talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black because it allowed them to appeal to racial prejudice, which is useful in maintaining support for the structure of the dual economy — and hurting everyone in the low-wage sector. Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People
"The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice."
This seems to me a good and complete answer as to why everything seems so hard. It's because everything that occurring is based on the "permanent" lie. The powers that be, be the deep state or whatever, cannot acknowledge facts or reality because it will loose its power. The sad part is that I think we also live in our own permanent lie in order not to see the homeless on the sidewalk, acknowledge the cow/chicken/etc raised in factory farming, the use of tax dollars to overthrow governments and kill untold number of people around the world, etc. Lots of issues that I think we need to tackle personally if we want society to do it too.
... the survey respondents didn’t necessarily perceive every non-euphoric event as negative. In fact [the study authors] deliberately avoided the word “adverse” in their study for this reason. Instead, they chose “challenging,” which better captured the meditators’ varied interpretations of their experiences.
I've meditated and attended multiple 10 day meditation retreats and I can attest that yes there are challenging moments and I have yet to experience an "adverse" event.
I would not say that meditation has a dark side. I would say that the meditators' minds are being stressed and challenged to the point where these react with such a force for which they were unprepared due to many reasons such as environment, emotional state, health issues, memories, etc. Like any activity, your mileage may vary.
I personally like to make that analogy of the mind to an OS which is trying to help you, an organism living in a giving environment, to identify and classify the stimuli it receives and generate an appropriate response. These responses are like programs that the mind/OS has generated to deal with the stimulus. All this is mechanical/automatic. If my limited understanding is correct, then meditation helps control this process and the process becomes less automatic and more controlled. The mind becomes more calmed and ready to focus on what you choose instead of whatever the stimuli dictates. Little by little the subconscious becomes conscious.
The view expressed in the article is not surprising when reading two other articles (see below) that appeared not long ago here in HN, one of which was flagged (I tend to suspect that these theses hit a little too close to home for some and hence the immediate dismissal).
When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU.
And that the paper:
...co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong.
I do believe that the monetary system IS the problem since El Salvador is dollarized and is subject to a foreign central bank antics while having no say in the matter. Having their own would be marginally better perhaps but IMO bitcoin is a much better solution.