I must say it’s cool to visit a thread that started about elections 2 years ago and just keeps on going. Elections don’t ever quite end do they?
Posts by ben
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Yep, life here is a lot more… prosaic. In a good way.
Except the healthcare, which makes me weep for Argentina. For a very very decent price I had excellent coverage for my entire family, in terms of facilities, access to services, etc.
Healthcare here is utter dogshit in comparison.
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Thinking today about how fast things are changing, I wondered how difficult it is for members not currently in Argentina to keep up.
At some point, I realized that I had just stopped. This, despite the fact that I still worked “inside” the country in some ways, maintain strong family connections, and have been back a couple of times.
I pop into infobae whenever I need to be on top of something, but the interest in the “stuff” is largely gone.
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William Wallace or Mel GIBSON?
I’ll settle for the latter meeting the fate of the real-life former.
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Not a fan. He’s a bigoted MF. I hope he rots in hell.
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When comparing prices for products such as computer components for example, which exchange rate is recommended?
Say a component is AR$20,000 on Mercadolibre and US$170 on Newegg, how would one come up with a viable comparison?
Official at AR$75 or blue at AR$134?
Here's an example for two identical products.
Mercadolibre:
Newegg:
I find this question confusing.
Shouldn’t the answer be... whatever rate you expect to get?
(Unless, like many people, you go ahead and max out your arg cc in order to get the difference.
In that case, the money you’re spending on the specific item should be assessed at the blue rate, to reflect the opportunity cost of using your card for that specific item.)
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I thought you were back in Canada! Glad to read your informative posts and sorry your main line of business was so badly affected.
I am! When I talk of permanent residence, I mean my wife not me.
(I’m still a PR in Argentina, for if I ever want to come back).
The travel business is picking up slowly but surely. I am back to selling at least something every day, which was not the case even one month ago.
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Hi ben and welcome back.
When did you manage to escape?
What worries me is the amount of airlines that may not return.
Norwegian have our money for a Sept flight they cancelled, giving us cash points in return which we probably won't be able to use if they pull out completely.
We got out in November, I am still working in travel but that has taken quite the hit.
Norwegian is very unlikely to continue to exist in my opinion. I hope I’m wrong.
We haven’t achieved permanent residence yet, but are on our way. Unclear when that will happen. But the process is underway, we’re here legally, and our kids are all in school.
Had we been in Argentina now, we’d be truly and utterly [censored].
Argentina is opening its aviation way faster than Peru, which still has next to no flights at all.
The larger problem is that even once countries open up - which will take a while - people will still take a very long time to continue flying the way they used to.
In many respects COVID is but accelerating the societal changes that were underway anyways.
Business travel will likely be heavily impacted permanently, as business will have learned to manage in the absence of physical travel. People have been forced to telecommute, and lots of workplaces will have found it can actually work better than expected. Demand will stay depressed for a long while. Any number of airlines will likely shut down.
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So, we left Argentina in the nick of time, as it turned out.
Getting my wife permanent residency if we were to start now would be infinitely more complicated than it was.
Regarding flights, it is all but certain is that the “special flight“ regime will continue for a while, at least through November. There have now begun to be flights with some degree of regularity, there are two weekly flights to Miami, one to New York, some to Madrid (and maybe Rome?), and one or 2 weekly Air France and KLM flights. Requests by several airlines to increase their frequencies have, as far as I know, been turned down.
Longer term, even if Argentina begins to allow “regular“ flights to operate, it is very unlikely that schedules will return to anything near to what they were a year ago. For as long as Argentina does not allow foreigners to enter - and that appears to be a long ways off - and even after it does, it makes very little economic sense to maintain daily flights for most airlines.
Warren Buffett pulled out of airline stocks completely at the very beginning of this pandemic, and events appear to be justifying his attitude.
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Here’s the video. Nicely done.
Nice to see that the “drain the swamp” rhetoric has crossed the pond.
(Where “nice” means “puke-inducing”).
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Also, while on the subject of UK politics - this is a screenshot of a WaPo report on the last couple days. This lady was speaking very coherently and calmly about the issues at hand.
Can I mention that the juxtaposition of that calm discourse to the sign she’s holding is absolutely magnificent?
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He is a treasure.
His Twitter feed is also magnificent: https://twitter.com/hoc_speaker_mp
He has something with Michael Gove - seems he won’t let his little indiscretion go.
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If everything was clean, yes you'd have to talk to the bank a couple times, but you could certainly convert it to USD and withdraw it and/or transfer it out. Not anymore.
And yes, it was free floating. The proof of that is that the blue - by definition a floating currency - was roughly the same value. It appears that will change soon.
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Same goes for a few banking apps.
It’s not a big deal - creating another country account for the App Store is trivial.
You make a throwaway email address with Gmail or whoever.
Set up a new Apple ID with this new address, get the confirmation email there.
Log out of your App Store account, log into the new one you just made, download whatever you want. Done.
Once you're done, log out and back into your normal account.
It used to be that to update the apps, you had to log out and back in every time.
Now iOS supports updating apps with various Apple ID’s on the same phone.
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This was based on a real photo released by Johnson's campaign team after his domestic argument where the police were called.
Yes, and when pressed on whether the photo was from after that argument, he refused to answer the question.
Boris Johnson refuses to deny reconciliation photo with his girlfriend was staged
If you want just the video, that’d be here.
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It looks highly likely that Boris Johnson will be the next PM of Great Britain, mainly because there was no one else available of a marketable quality.
This NYT article sums it all up very nicely, with 0.5% of the UK electorate choosing the new leader.
I’m not particularly concerned about the democracy angle. There will be an election soon enough. Actually, possibly not soon enough, but still.
Its the future PM of the UK with his girlfriend , allegedly the day after the had an argument at her home.
The thing is his hair is much monger than the day before.....
He was asked about it in an interview and refused to address the timing under persistent questioning. He basically all but admitted it.
Make dissembling great again?
It’s a pity, because I didn’t mind most of his clown act until Brexit.
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Occam’s Razor is not a common reference.
Really? I’d say that it’s common enough - the proof being that even I know it!
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A few follow-up points, in light of the subsequent remarks:
1) The US has evolved in the last decades into a society where if you can’t sue it out of me, I don’t have to do it.
There’s not much that can be sued out of CBP, so this is what happens.
And there’s not much of a constituency that can demand that CBP be made sue-able, for obvious reasons.
The outcry now taking place over the inhuman conditions to which children are being subjected, will serve to show if the US public is up to demanding basic human decency towards everyone from its government.
2) There’s little reason to assume that this particular guy was on their radar. Occam’s razor applies: the obvious reasons for his treatment was that he was a:
- journalist (strike 1)
- covering Mexico (very likely a strike 2)
- who challenged their authority. (this in of itself is already enough).
As far as they’re concerned, he just about dared them into this. As someone who declines a full-body scan at US airports, I can attest to the “OK buddy, you asked for this” sentiment when you don’t follow the procedures they want you to follow. - Not only did he dare them into it, he seemed to be ill-prepared for the result. If he would have projected an air of nonchalance about it, shown himself to be on top of the procedure and that he knows what they can or can’t do, I’m guessing it would have gone much smoother.
He appeared to be the smart-aleck who didn’t even seem to know how this would work. From their point of view, they simply accepted his invitation for them to educate him about how the system works.
3) About the journalist thing, there is some evidence that there’s some guidance from on high that journalists are to be given “special” treatment.
As appalling as it is, if you’re a journalist just about anywhere, and as we now know crossing the US border, you need to be educated as to what you can and can’t get away with.
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Just a reminder that US bureaucrats, when not accountable, are no less willing to abuse their positions of power than are Arg ones.
