Topics > TEOTWAWKI
Pollyanna Hoyt
Weisshaupt:
$170 Hamburger is an "inconvenience" I mean just stop eating Hamburger right?
--- Quote ---A hamburger sold for 1,700 Venezuelan bolivares is $170, or a 69,000-bolivar hotel room is $6,900 a night, based on the official rate of 10 bolivares for $1.
But of course no merchant is pricing at the official rate imposed under currency controls. It's the black market rate of 1,000 bolivares per dollar that's applied.
But for Venezuelans paid in hyperinflation-hit bolivares, and living in an economy relying on mostly imported goods or raw materials, conditions are unthinkably expensive.
Even for the middle class, most of it sliding into poverty, hamburgers and hotels are out-of-reach excesses.
"Everybody is knocked low," Michael Leal, a 34-year-old manager of an eyewear store in Caracas, told AFP. "We can't breathe."
--- End quote ---
Sure glad Hoyt's relative are able to make do eating dirt instead of hamburger, after all Its just an inconvenience.
But the Mass entertainment! That is still there right? No radios made out of stone knives and bears skins right?
--- Quote ---Jaimes lives with his family of seven, and tries to get by on a monthly salary of 35,000 bolivares -- in reality, around $35.
That sum is too paltry for him to even think about dropping into the cinema upstairs in the center, where tickets are 8,800 bolivares.
If somehow he could, he'd find the same sort of entertainment being shown in American multiplexes: "The Jungle Book," "Captain America: Civil War," and "Angry Birds."
But motion pictures and popcorn, while maybe an enticing diversion, are luxuries Venezuelans these days can ill afford
--- End quote ---
So yeah, Ms. Hoyt, you can relax. Its still there. People just have to choose between watching a couple hour movie and eating.
But - hey there are still electronics to entertain us right?
--- Quote ---In Chacao, a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, office workers lined up outside a nut store to buy the cheapest lunch they could afford. Nearby restaurants were all but empty.
Superficially it looked like the center of any other major Latin American city: skyscrapers, dense traffic, pedestrians in short sleeves bustling along the sidewalks.
But look closely and you can see the economic malaise. Many stores, particularly those that sold electronics, were shuttered.
--- End quote ---
Libertas:
There's that word again...malaise...Progs the world over create it and call it "progress", all it breeds is the seeds that eventually destroys itself. Unfortunately a lot of misery and death has to happen in the interim.
Weisshaupt:
And what does FelFal have to say about Venezuela? Ms. Hoyt?
Oh right, it can't happen here because America's currency and prices are made stable by "wealth"
There is after all a lot of "ruin" in a country. Of course, the amount of possible ruin has nothing to do with the rate at which ruin can be created.
--- Quote ---
For the average "middle class" person in Venezuela -- educated and still holding on to a good job -- he needs two years of wages to buy a single plane ticket in his own currency. He needs to work for two full years to buy one single plane ticket -- he's stuck there. The problem is that he waited too long to leave. That's something important that I write about often: You have to know when to leave. You needed to leave Venezuela at least three or four years ago; now you’re getting to the point where you’re stuck there. The official exchange rate between the USD and Bolivar is 1 to 10, but unofficially which is the real one you experience, is more like 1 to 1,000. So they basically are starving you to death through a completely devaluated currency which is what you’re getting paid in.
Basically need to find ways of leaving the country by any means possible. What I would do if I was in Venezuela right now is I would leave on foot. I would leave any way I could, because it’s not safe. I know people that have killed people surviving Venezuela, I actually know guys that had to do that to live. You can't even find some land and grow your own food. You cannot do that when you have the government stealing it from you. It’s a no win situation.
--- End quote ---
FerFal is basically saying get out before it goes bad is your best survival strategy. I still don't think that will be a viable opion when the dollar collapses and 1/4 of the worlds market disappears. The US is "too big to fail" - which of course why everyone goes along with the slow roll collapse. But no one is going to take up the slack, and Americans will not be welcomed anywhere.
He says you won't win by trying to keep your farm. Again it comes down to taking as many as you can with you. Its almost certain to turn into a civil war if the govt starts trying to take farms and businesses by force.
Libertas:
I'm not stuck, I'm merely a pre-positioned freedom fighter!
Glock32:
Fran Poretto also noticed her article, and commented on it
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