LOL. Do you actually think the US experience with privately run electrical grids are well run?

With all due respect, that’s 7+ million migrants who are leaving Venezuela who very much disagrees with your opinion on that subject.

Yes. Our electrical grid is better than Venezuela. And if you really want to choose this hill to die on, be my guest. But this is really weird for you to get a hard on to the marxist/socialist utopia that is Venezuela. Methinks you’ll have a better job talking about other locations of the world and taking your L here before you get too wrapped up in the peculiarities of this debate.

Your grasp of the dynamics that impacted Venezuela are driven entirely by simplistic propaganda. I’m not taking on the task of educating you while you fight with nonsense at every turn. I’ve led a horses ass to water. If the ass shits in it, that’s just what asses do.

That’s fine. My goal here is to demonstrate that Venezuela’s system is so shit its causing a massive migration wave to come to the USA.

We need to be aware of the migrant population’s situation and understand their story. Each migrant wave is different. In the next 4+ years, whenever the next migrant wave comes, it will be a new story from a new country. If you want to get caught up in the peculiarities of Marxist Leninist theories of these failed countries, be my guest. Or… not get caught up. Whatever you want, its fine.

We got migrants to worry about. So all that’s off topic anyway. But I’m generally willing to bet against the country that all these migrants are leaving from.

Among many other things, electricity stopped working in any reliable fashion, leading to major issues internally.

Electricity stopped working because of decades of corruption of the Chavez / Maduro Regime, which forcibly took over the electrical grid and installed corrupt officials. No matter how much money Chavez pumped into the energy grid, it was all wasted in corruption.

The people who knew how to run the grid were then replaced by Maduro (albeit yeah, they were corrupt but… they at least knew how to run the system), and then shit really started to crazy because no one knew how to run the grid anymore and rolling blackouts became regular.

Lather rinse repeat for every other element of society. Remember that Venezuela is an oil state with plenty of energy reserves. They have plenty of chemical energy, its literally just the lack of brain that’s collapsing their society right now.

Ironically, electricity was more reliable when the USA’s AES Corporation owned the Electricidad de Caracas. So ummmm… maybe we should have pushed for more US intervention on this particular issue.

From a USA perspective: the migrants include the energy specialists who used to run Venezuela’s energy. But are now frustrated at this situation to the point that they’re leaving the country. Its to our benefit to capture those talented individuals and integrate them into our society. So Venezuela’s loss can serve as our gain if we play our cards right.

Not as much as the 7 million emigrants who left Venezuela for other countries.

I keep coming back to the power outages of recent years in Venezuela because they’re indicative of everything that’s going wrong. Venezuela doesn’t have enough technicians who even know how to fix the energy grid, because the vast majority of them left for other countries. Yes, some of them are migrants who are entering USA, but also countries like Panama or Mexico.

When your country suffers from huge emigrant waves, especially emigrants who were statistically the smartest and most well-educated of the country… bad shit begins to happen.

The reforms, which included nationalizing key components of the nation’s economy as part of an agenda of socialist uplift, made Chávez a hero to millions of people and the enemy of Venezuela’s oligarchs.

Lulz. You mean led to the large scale blackouts of an energy rich / oil rich nation. Amirite?

That’s a laughably inaccurate document you’ve got there. Clearly socialist / Marxist propaganda. But lets say, hypothetically, that you took away the electrical networks from the people who knew how to run them… directly leading to widespread power outages within a year, leading to a loss of industry and migrant waves to escape the country.

And you want to blame the USA for this? While also rewarding those who made such dumbass moves in their country?

I mean you can point to like… maybe all of US policy towards Venezuela post 1998 in this same light.

And completely ignore Hugo Chavez? Why? Hugo Chavez actually was in charge of Venezuela for the bulk of the period you’re talking about.

I know that Lemmy is filled with Marxists who want to have as favorable of a viewpoint of Communism as possible. But… uhhhh… Hugo Chavez and his successor haven’t exactly made Venezuela into a utopia.

What I do know, is decades of Hugo Chavez (and now Maduro) rule has led into Venezuela’s current predicaments. And that’s directly led, as in these are the people who actually controlled the country and built it up for what it is over the last nearly 30 years.

USA has foreign policy influence for sure, but the bulk of Venezuela’s problems are Venezuala’s alone to deal with. We aren’t responsible for the vast majority of decisions over there.

But whatever. If those migrant waves are coming to USA looking for hopes, dreams and opportunity, I’m on their side. There’s benefits to accepting the dreamers who make such a long trip. We have housing issues to deal with (and other population issues), but we can probably afford letting some of them in.

I mean, the biggest thing indirectly being caused by the USA is maybe climate change, which has caused waves of famine, drought, hurricanes… and further disasters like Volcanic Erruptions wrecked the Northern Triangle in the 2010s. This all culminated in a temporary migrant wave under the Trump administration.

But that is not Biden’s issue today. Biden’s issue is largely one of Venezuelan in origin because of all that other crap happening totally elsewhere for completely different reasons.

I know people want to pretend that the USA had some major role to play in all of this, but its just bullshit. We had some major events about 100 years to 50 years ago. But we all know where the bulk of modern USA has been (and that’s in the Middle East, at least since 2000s).

And bullshit from Central American nationalists who have dumbass conspiracy theories about CIA boogiemen aren’t exactly a good source of information either. I know that Venezuela wants to blame everyone else for their problems, but their arguments don’t even pass the barest of muster.

We all know what the USA was focused on in the last 30 years. The bulk of US effort was in Afghanistan, Iraq/Syria, with more recent focus on Ukraine, China, and now Israel.

Blaming the USA for random ass shit that happens in I dunno, Venezuela’s shitty socialist takeover of their energy grid (leading into large-scale blackouts) and trying to tie US Policy to that is… well… a conspiracy theory. Sure, nationalists from beyond our southern border can believe whatever the fuck they want, but I’ll call them out on the bullshit. Venezuela fucked their own country over, and we’re doing those migrants a favor by letting them in.

I’m happy for us to do our duty to take in those who qualify for sanctuary, or otherwise need such assistance. But USA has other concerns that we still need to balance against that (such as our housing shortage, that’d be complicated with more migrants). I think we can make it work in any case but its not going to be easy (or politically easy at that to even decide on a path forward).

In any case, letting in a bunch of US haters would be against my policy anyway. There’s too many people in line as it is, so if they don’t want to accept the USA’s side of the story, they can just stay out of our country.

What fruit company existed in Venezuela that’s related to today’s (largely) Venezuelan migrant population?

Hint: you’re talking about the wrong portion of the world if we’re focusing on today’s migrant crisis. Venezuela was oil and has a completely different set of circumstances than you might believe.

2018 was Northern Triangle that at least is somewhat related to fruit company (albeit a hundred years later, but whatever. If you want to ignore modern history so much so bet it, at least you’re somewhat correct for the Northern Triangle migrants). But 2024 is Venezuelan migrants under a completely separate issue.

USA had nothing to do with Nicolás Maduro disasterous takeover of their electricity system, leading to widespread brownouts of 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Venezuelan_blackouts

Get your head out of the USA’s asshole. The world is bigger than just us. There’s like, local politics and local issues at play here that absolutely have bigger effects on the current migration than any shit the CIA did decades ago.

The “Northern Triangle” migrants of 2018 (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) had nothing to do with any US Policy. We had to deal with the major wave of immigrants anyway. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/IF11151.pdf

Today’s wave of migrants is the 2024 ongoing collapse of Venezuela. Which is everything to do with shitty Venezuelan politics, and again nothing to do with the USA.

I’m well aware of Banana Republics of decades ago. But its rather stupid to blame everything on the USA when the recent migrant wave has more to do with local issues like MS-13 (2018 era), or the handoff of Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela).

For today, in 2024, is the ongoing Venezuelan collapse.

Communism is not your savior to the argument, not with respect to the legion of Venezuelan migrants traveling to the USA. We had nothing to do with Venezuela’s current set of issues., The random ass set of autocratic rule + socialist ideals of modern Venezuela have more to do with the troubles in that country than shit we did 50 years ago.

USA doesn’t control the source of the problem, which are random-ass civil wars that occur in Central America or South America.

What we do control are the legal limits of accepting immigrants. But remember that while the jobs market can likely accept more bodies, our housing market doesn’t have enough housing for a population boom.

Immigration law exists so that we can better plan jobs/housing/etc. etc. it’s a good thing in the abstract to control, no matter how sad the stories are of the people we turn away.

That being said: I’m overall supportive of more immigrants in this economy. Jobs are a major factor and it’s really 'Just Housing’s that’s a practical consideration. If we can get Congress + States to pass housing starts laws, then we can absolutely accept more immigrants in a way that’d benefit our country.

I mean, I don’t have much problem with people disagreeing with me. But I’m pretty openly pro-capitalist, though I’m not a dumbass libertarian.

I recognize the need for the “capitalist edge cases” (externalities, monopolies, etc. etc.) that must be regulated and fixed for the system to work. I also recognize that we’ve failed to regulate externalities (ex: CO2 emissions), and failed to regulate monopolies / anticompetitive behavior (see Google).

So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.

We just gotta do the same thing today.

Overall, I accept that the commies / tankies were here first, and the history of Lemmy makes it clear why that happened.

Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.

From the perspective of “Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse”, it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.

After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.

The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy’s old community and the new community, as the new community basically “invaded” a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.

I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.

It does mean that we’ll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.

“eliminate” is a word added by TechCrunch, not by Google/Youtube.

Google’s actual phrasing was:

To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.

I guess “eliminations” is still related to eliminate. But I’d argue that TechCrunch is playing it up a bit by using more rage-inducing language.

They value Tesla as a battery manufacturer.

Which is funny, because Tesla has no chemistry chops at all. Tesla buys Panasonic cells and CATL cells.

Yes, Tesla is technically a battery manufacturer because they take individual cells from CATL and then add electronics to them. (A package of cells is called a “battery” in the Electrical Engineering world). But its not the battery people “care” about when talking about this subject.

The “cell” (aka: the chemical package of size 18650 or 4680 or whatever) is Panasonic or CATL. Almost no Tesla involvement at all. This is what “common people” call the battery pack, not the giant computer system + wires that connect the cells together (which is what Electrical Engineers call the battery).

In effect, Tesla / Elon Musk is taking advantage of investor’s ignorance and its hilarious. Its been like 15 years and the investors still haven’t figured out that Tesla has no “cell manufacturing” and has basically been misleading their investors this whole time.

In Electrical Engineering terms: its a AA cell and a 9V battery (9V requires 6x AAAA cells, so wiring them up together makes a “Battery”, a collection of cells). Since AA is just one cell, its a cell. Similarly, its an 18650 cell or 4680 cell. And cells are made by Panasonic or CATL, not Tesla.

This means that as other EVs come up, Tesla barely has any moat. All Ford or GM has to do is build a battery (aka: buy Panasonic cells and wire them together) and bam, there goes Tesla’s 15 year advantage. That’s all Tesla ever has accomplished. Its a laughably sad moat and is why so many companies can pivot into EVs faster than Tesla ever did.

This is literally a topic about poor, destabilized countries.

The Philippines is far more on-topic than USA here. Philippines in fact might be too rich / developing compared to many even worse-off countries.

The US isn’t “fine”. You can’t see past the superficial bling because it’s a rich country. It’s a really twisted country.

And that shit exists in the Philippines but is at least 100x worse. You likely don’t understand because you’ve never been to a place like that.

And note: Philippines is actually a lot better than other countries as well. Truly 3rd world countries like Congo care even less about their citizens. Such states are closer to something like a Civil War or maybe even Crime-lord / Mafia ring, where militia get military weapons from Russia or something and no one cares to listen to the official government anymore because the literal crime lords have more physical power.

Richest country in the world and yet has the biggest share of prisoners, homeless, personal debt. Highly educated, but by far the most school shootings.

USA has one of the best bankruptcy laws meaning debt isn’t actually punishing here. There’s at least schools in existence here… free schools mind you… and everyone’s allowed. There’s no segregation system or class system anymore so everyone (including women) are allowed to go through the public school system. Etc. etc. etc.

If you ever get into significant debt that you can’t pay it off? File for bankruptcy protection. That’s why the law exists, to prevent debts from becoming overly burdensome. That’s why so many citizens can enter deep debts, because we have a forgiveness system that few other countries even have.

The reason why student-loan debt gets so much attention btw, is because student loan debt is the one and only debt that cannot be protected during bankruptcy-protection.

Uhhhhh.

Anyone who has been to a developing country (in my case: the Philippines) vs USA will laugh at what USA citizens think of corruption.

You got Fucking assassinations paid for by Filipino government likely to cover up political rivals. Open corruption in the Police where you can just pay them to get out of parking tickets or even criminal acts. Etc etc.

Don’t be so much of a drama queen. USA is fine. There are entire countries of people trying to leave their country to enter USA to escape truly awful corruption issues. Phillipines is one corrupt example (especially if your family was politically on the wrong side of the Marcos family or whatever)

China and other advanced nations prove that an export based economy can work though.

I will say that export driven economies are very difficult though. See Taiwan and their export of chips. It only works because Taiwan is basically modern Vulkans / Wizards who have chip technology that no one else in the world has.

A system of top level universities to build that kind of knowledge and infrastructure is difficult and outside the reach of most countries.