Some of your point are consequences not causes. For example: the reason Venezuela is using the US imports as dilutants for its heavy oil is because bad management of the industry, it wasn't always like that, you can say the same about the debt, Venezuela is not screwed because of the debt, it has debt because it's screwed.
Venezuela doesn't have a 2nd amendment, but the lack of guns is certainly not the reason, if anything is the excess of guns in the street, what people in America don't understand is that the government will always be better armed than the population, Syria is a good example.
What keeps totalitarian governments is will to power, how much os the government willing to risk against the population. Owning a gun is not the same as being willing to die.
First step is to reduce public spending and fight corruption, just very basic steps will bring significant improvement.
Then, welcome foreign and local investment: privatize most of the industries that were nationalized and are now idle, and fix labor laws a little, this also include liberalization of currency, enforce property laws so private companies feel safe investing in the long term.
When can this happen? As of today no sooner than 2019 when the next presidential elections will take place. Unless a coup is on the table but I don't see that happening.
Maduro has painted himself into a corner. He has very nakedly announced that he will do everything in his power to remain in power, even if it means crapping all over the constitution, and stripping the legislative branch of all its power.
He'll figure something out in 2019. He has all the guns, and he know that if he falls out of power, he'll be strung up on the nearest lamppost like Mussolini. He's doubling down because he really has nowhere else to go. Once you realize that, that he has to do everything he's doing to cement the military to his side, it all makes perfect sense.
I found the reason, I found the article on LinkedIn, if you compare both links you'll see that mine is different because linkedIn added some stuff at the end of the url.
Of course, but that doesn't make checking before submitting difficult at all: bottom search box, enter a relevant keyword (e.g. "ignorance"), then sort by date. You'd see that it was posted twice before with the first getting 104 comments.
linkedIn added some stuff at the end of the url
Yes, many sites (e.g. medium, signalvnoise) add phony fragment identifiers to URLs now; I can't think of a reason to do so other than to evade dupe detection.
Yes. I used the GDELT data set in a Geo-intelligence hackathon and it's very powerful, just have in mind that if you use Google BigQuery (actually the easiest way to use the data set) it will cost you money.
Hey Matthias, I came to the video through MAKE Magazine that so far has been a legitimate source of information to the maker community, I tried to edit the post but I couldn't next time I'll double-check that.
The main difference is that the Chinese government restricts or blocks several types of transactions, western central banks try to influence the market using specific policies, so it depends on what you define as "intervention", but in general terms Chinese currency do float freely but the government has more power to change its value artificially, for example, there's no "official" price of the US Dollar or the Euro, the Fed doesn't decrees a price for its currency, it can't do that because firms in the US are independent from the central government, on the other hand the Chinese government can set whatever official price they want and since it has almost complete control over the bigger firms it can force the market to accept it at least as a reference price, they have used that power in the past to keep their currency low and keep Chinese exports as competitive as possible
