Seriously, health departments around the world should have offered a fourth Covid certificate during the pandemy - tested, vaccinated, recovered and “will irrevocably forego any right to treatment in a hospital in case of infection”. That way all the tinfoil hats couldn’t have spread their ‘dictatorship’ bullshit nearly as easily, because hey, all you have to do in order to be able to go to the pub is to absolve society of the risk of you catching an absolutely harmless and possibly even imaginary cold.
Let a few thousand of those fuckers die and at the same time keep the hospital beds free for those who need them through no fault of their own. Watch the survivors crap their pants and mumble something about science maybe not being so bad after all.

The problem is that some people consider stupidity to be a virtue. That’s their right (sadly), but they shouldn’t be able to make society suffer the consequences.

I’m looking forward to the interview with the guy who got fired because he was late for work and offered “an airplane window fell on my car” as an excuse.

Why do you say this? What gives you the idea that they will face some form of workload pressure because of this?

Oh, I’d be very surprised if any actual personal responsibility found its way to them. But they’re gonna have to look super busy and worried for the press for a while, find somebody else to pin the blame on, call friends in government to ‘expedite’ any investigations and reassure their shareholders. That’s gonna cost them a lot of time they could have spent on nicer things such as working on their handicap, doing coke in the coutry club’s bathroom or firing a couple of hundred workers.

Other than that I totally agree with you.

Wow. My stepdaughter and her boyfriend flew with one of these just yesterday.

I hope this is resolved soon. The top brass at Boeing probably won’t be getting a lot of leisure time until then.

I can’t imagine the other choice could be worse

It probably depends on what you want to achieve. At the moment it’s probably to avoid hyperinflation, another national bankruptcy and poverty levels climbing to new all-time highs. Massa (the other guy) is known for trying to counter the effects of the current massive inflation by printing more money for government subsidies (let that sink in for a moment), so one could argue that whatever Milei actually does, it can’t be worse than that.

His (to put it mildly) over-the-top rhetoric, homophobia/misogyny and the suggestions to sell your organs to make ends meet etc. are different beasts altogether, but I can’t blame the voters for ranking having food on the table higher than strengthening LGBTQ+ rights. I’m grateful I don’t have to make that choice in my own country.

Probably a lot of both, though the last government Fernandez/Kirchner was a special treat, considering especially the Kirchner clan’s history of economic failure and record-breaking number of corruption charges. But during the 2019 elections Kirchner promised to have learned her lesson and do better this time, which appears to have convinced a majority of voters. 🤷‍♂️

I think that’s a bit oversimplified. Milei’s no doubt a knob and there’s a good chance he’ll screw up, but the alternative would have been the former minister of economy doing four years of the same, which would have been a 100% chance of screwing up. So before you make any more oversimplified statements, consider the alternative to Milei.

Milei has inherited a country on the brink of economic collapse and hyperinflation, caused by a government that has financed its overspending by just printing more money for decades, and borrowing whatever foreign currency it could. This is obviously not sustainable.
He wants to link the peso to the dollar (so the government can’t print more money at will anymore - not to mention the fact that many transactions are already half-legally done in dollars anyway) and do away with some of the many regulations that the Peronists have been promising for decades will help the economy, but which most experts agree have unsurprisingly crippled it further, and in many cases facilitated corruption.
His opponent’s political program can be summed up as “introduce more subsidies”.
Which one makes more sense to you?

Same here. Milei as an experiment could go either way, but staying the course would have led to certain disaster… and to be frank, the country as a whole doesn’t have a lot to lose at this point anyway.

Cue the people cheering who still have at least 500 rolls left in their basement from last time.

Your guess is as good as mine. 🤷‍♂️ You know how the things politicians say before the elections and the things they do afterwards don’t necessarily have a lot in common, so I guess it remains exciting.

From what I hear the answer is no. The current opposition party (JxC) started supporting him when it was clear that their candidate couldn’t win against the incumbent party’s candidate (Sergio Massa, the current minister of economy), but they say they plan to vote against some of Milei’s more radical ideas.
What actually happens, and how many of his ideas Milei will actually try to get through parliament, remains to be seen.

I know, right? Consider this though: Argentina’s biggest problem right now is the economy, and his opponent in the presidential race was the current finance minister, who one could argue has already given a quite impressive demonstration of his incompetence. “Four more years of the same” simply isn’t a realistic option. Milei’s plans for the economy on the other hand could be worth a try.

I suspect he’s a bit of a calculated risk to many - some of his ideas might actually be good for the economy (not the selling babies part obviously), and his more, uhm, controversial ideas are highly likely to be blocked by parliament. In that aspect he might be the kind of healing shock that the country needs.

So far we know that he appears to have toned down his rhetoric a bit since his victory, and that the other party supporting him plans to ‘keep him in check’ in parliament. Let’s see how that turns out.

I don’t think most people actually voted for him - it’s more like he was the lesser of two evils. Now consider what that says about the other candidate.

It could be worse really. At least the people who watch NASCAR for the crashes are gonna have four very entertaining years ahead of them.

Aw man, having to quit when you can already smell the finish line is extra mean. I hope you were still able to finish your courses, even if it had to be elsewhere. But…! Spectacularly belated congratulations for the happy couple! If the festivities were in Buenos Aires it must have been quite an event.

This probably also gives you a unique insider view of the country from the outside, the culture and the people. I would imagine it to be quite interesting to get you talking over a good Merlot (or a still water if you prefer) and some empanadas (make mine jamón y queso).

Save for a short one-day stop between flights in September, we’ve last been in Buenos Aires around New Year 2019/2020. It is an impressive city in many aspects. My sister-in-law who is a cop accompanied us. Even then, we were advised to leave La Boca before 5 pm. I’m not sure I’d want to go there at all in the current climate, even though it was one of the more enjoyable and pretty parts of town. But then again, everywhere I go there’s that huge imaginary billboard hovering above my head that says “Gringo with money who’s unfamiliar with how things work here” in huge letters. Or maybe I’m just slightly paranoid.

I remain hopeful but doubtful that the people will eventually pick up on this and change tactics.

Same here. I’m not going to hold my breath though - I personally know too many people who voted for Fernandez/Kirchner even though the Kirchner clan is arguably the apex of corruption and directly responsible for one of the worst bankruptcies in the country’s history… just because they were unhappy with Macri’s budget cuts (which funny enough were way less far-reaching than what Milei wants to do) and Kirchner double-pinky promised to do better this time.

I’m not going to pretend to have the answer to all (or even most) questions. It’s just insert adjective for ‘argh!!!’ here to watch a country with such natural riches and resources so skillfully flush itself further and further down the crapper. But I’m going to have to agree with your assessment and there’s probably not much that can be done from outside the country.

On the upside: thanks to Western Union basing its exchange rates on the dólar blue, supporting my niece’s studies now costs five times less than what it cost two years ago, so there’s that!

I went to grad school in Buenos Aires and lived there for about 5 years

This is a bit off-topic and just personal curiosity: what made you choose Argentina, resp. Buenos Aires? Do you know somebody there, did you want to see the city/country, or is it just the logical choice where you’re from?

the practice decidedly does not correspond with their stated principles for most of them

No argument here. It just bugs me how some people misappropriate words. It’s a bit like Swiss neo-Nazis having resorted to calling themselves “patriots”. Being a racist bellend doesn’t make you a patriot, just as wanting to roll back several decades of gender equality doesn’t make you a libertarian.

I just wish that people would understand that if you’re afraid to call yourself what you really are in public, you should probably reconsider your ideology, not the word you use to describe it. Yes, I’m aware that that’s asking too much.

I agree with you on the healthcare, but that’s not where I’d start changing things. The main problem I see (and our friends/relatives in Argentina tell us about) is that the state is expected to pay for a lot of basic necessities because people, even those with a full-time job, can’t afford them… and the various governments have a habit of doing the worst possible thing.
For instance when electricity prices exploded in 2019/2020, the government apparently paid out 5000 pesos to every household but did nothing to address the root cause. Another time retired people got a flat fee of 6000 pesos. No money went into improving the country’s electricity grid or power efficiency (or no money that wasn’t somehow ‘lost’ underway, anyways).

The same goes for unemployment money. While it is important, in the long term it would make more sense to create an environment where the economy can prosper instead of paying the unemployed what is frankly a pittance. Most unemployed people would rather work than live off welfare, if given the chance.
But then there’s the challenge of transforming the existing economy, especially industry, into something sustainable that could survive without heavy government subsidies. But that discussion is going to lead to a fundamental discussion about peronism, so let’s not go there please.

A lot of these things are probably at least partially caused by incompetence, but that’s not a valid excuse IMO. If you run for office, you should bring the necessary qualifications, and also be able to judge the qualifications of the people working for you

Not to defend Milei (he’s a total knob), but one could argue that Argentina’s social infrastructure is a big part of the problem. The state has been notorious for spending much more money than it makes for decades… and still poverty is rampant and rapidly increasing in many parts of the country. It’s obvious that the established system simply doesn’t work, and hasn’t worked for decades.
Doing away with corruption would obviously be a great thing, but the fact remains that too many people are dependent on some kind of government subsidy either because it’s the easiest way (heavily subsidised parts of the economy, cozy government ‘job’, …) or because they simply have no other option due to the bad economy.

Personally I find it difficult to call him a libertarian when there are so many existing liberties that he wants to make illegal (see the parts of his agenda labelled ‘homophobia’ and ‘misogyny’).

Not that a label being misleading would ever have stopped a politician from applying it to themselves as long as they think it gets them votes…