el-salvador (u/el-salvador)

el-salvador commented on Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning research.google/blog/andr... · Posted by u/michaefe

homebrewer · a month ago

I live in a seismically active (and poor) area. Dunk on Google all you want, they're the only organization who provide earthquake alerts in my area. The government has better things to spend money on (like pervasive corruption), but Google usually sends a notification 30-60 seconds before a perceptible earthquake happens.

el-salvador · a month ago

We’ve had this Google service in El Salvador for a while, and it’s really cool. The first time we received an earthquake alarm we felt like we were living in Japan. I never thought we would have Japanese-style earthquake alerts here.

iPhone users were a bit annoyed though, because it only worked on Android phones.

el-salvador commented on What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/cyberlurker

Volundr · 5 months ago

Honestly I'm getting pretty worried. We just had the current administration sell a bunch of young men into slavery in a El Salvador (they will be doing forced hard labor) then openly state in a court filings that they had no evidence of these men committing crimes, and still MAGA seems fine with this.

I don't know that there's anything Trump can do at this point that will lose him support.

el-salvador · 5 months ago

> We just had the current administration sell a bunch of young men into slavery in a El Salvador.

El Salvador has different prison systems for gang members and for other convicts. The prison they were sent to has a higher security level and is more strict, so they don't participate in the work program.

el-salvador commented on El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender ticotimes.net/2025/02/02/... · Posted by u/smallerfish

josu · 7 months ago

They didn't, the IMF just offers better terms than the free market. And they are still doing their Bitcoin thing, this was just a small concession they were willing to make.

el-salvador · 7 months ago

El Salvador has had limited or very expensive access to the bond market for the past years. I thinkneed it, otherwise they wouldn't have made a law to loan money from El Salvador's pension funds with 0% interest.

el-salvador commented on El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender ticotimes.net/2025/02/02/... · Posted by u/smallerfish

p_j_w · 7 months ago

>Now the businesses are free to accept it or not instead of being required to accept it. That's all.

Right, so it's no longer legal tender.

el-salvador · 7 months ago

Day to day there won't be much change, as bitcoin acceptance wasn't really enforced.

el-salvador commented on El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender ticotimes.net/2025/02/02/... · Posted by u/smallerfish

cle · 7 months ago

Ironically part of the long-term problem was El Salvador's dollarization, also preventing them from printing in a crisis (that crisis being the COVID pandemic).

el-salvador · 7 months ago

Dollarization was unpopular at first in El Salvador but after 24 years of dollarization, and both right and left wing governments, there are are no official plans of rolling it back. It's way too convenient to use the world's most used currency as our everyday currency.

el-salvador commented on El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender ticotimes.net/2025/02/02/... · Posted by u/smallerfish

pajko · 7 months ago

The loan was not to mitigate the risk of the Bitcoin. They needed the loan for reasons. The IMF deemed the high involvement in Bitcoin risky for the loan. The IMF text has a "meanwhile": https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/12/18/pr-24485-el-...

el-salvador · 7 months ago

> They needed the loan for reasons.

One of them being that El Salvador lost affordable access to the international bond market for a good part of the past years due to higher country investment risk, there were multiple reasons for that that are too long for one comment.

Some for the consequences have been:

The government switched to funding their bonds locally, including a good chunk of the local banks deposits which then the banks had to refinance to a longer longer term.

The government has been taking a good chunk of the pension funds with no interest paid back. Few details about this deal are available because the pension fund administrators and government supervisors have stopped publishing most of the financial reports for months.

el-salvador commented on El Salvador to Offer 5k Free Passports to Highly Skilled Immigrants imidaily.com/latin-americ... · Posted by u/andrewfromx

jqpabc123 · a year ago

I applaud the effort but the biggest impediment is likely to be the historically high crime rate.

This is really a chicken or egg problem. Which comes first --- skilled people moving to El Salvador or a society in El Salvador that skilled people want to live in?

el-salvador · a year ago

I think El Salvador should offer two alternatives: Passport OR permanent residency. As there are many other countries that don't recognize double nationality and would require the applicant to cancel their original nationality. And that's a harder decision than just moving countries.

I think there may be a niche that could take advantage of this model. Specially those coming form countries that have problems less present than El Salvador. Like those affected by war, bad climate, unstable currency o weaker passports.

While crime was historically high, El Salvador is a very different country now with today's low crime rate. It's been truly life changing for everyone in the country who is younger than 50 years old and never lived in a country without war or gangs.

el-salvador commented on Instagram overtakes TikTok as most downloaded app theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/tosh

cangeroo · a year ago

I think anyone talking about TikTok's content is doing themselves a disservice, because it fails to understand that the content is heavily curated by the algorithm.

I tried installing TikTok on a blank developer phone, and the content was vastly different from what I was used to. Absolutely appalling content, the worst that humanity has to offer.

But my own feed is nothing but serious and mature content.

The question is rather how those algorithms can have a negative influence on people's perception of reality.

Who decides what is bad content? Sociologists? Should we suppress it, to save democracy? Or does that kind of censorship lead to fascism?

el-salvador · a year ago

> I tried installing TikTok on a blank developer phone, and the content was vastly different from what I was used to. Absolutely appalling content, the worst that humanity has to offer

I've had similar experiences with new TikTok installs. One thing I've noticed is that I get lower quality content with new installs using mobile network shared IP addresses, while better content with residential IP addresses.

el-salvador commented on Ask HN: Why is the crypto booming again? · Posted by u/haebom

haebom · a year ago

Like this : https://www.bitcoinsensus.com/el-salvador-bitcoin-profit/

el-salvador · a year ago

The source cited by the article (https://bitcointreasuries.net/entities/48) is not a government website.

While I believe it's ok for my government to invest public funds in assets with different risk profiles. I would like to see an official website and an audited financial report.

This is not a far-fetched requirement for El Salvador, where a corporation with just $2000 in equity has to submit a yearly audited balance sheet for public record. Or even small town credit unions with assets a fraction of the bitcoin funds have to publish full reports online.

el-salvador commented on Ask HN: Why is the crypto booming again? · Posted by u/haebom

MakeThemMoney · a year ago

> El Salvador’s Bitcoin Stack Now in Profit by Over $50M

That's less than 8 dollars per capita. Hardly enough to solve a financial crisis.

el-salvador · a year ago

El Salvador is not currently on a widespread financial crisis... I mean by Latin American Standards of course. But some things are of concern.

First the country's access to international financing is still limited.

Right now International bondholders are being paid, but two major local debts have been renegotiated.

Last year the national banking association "voluntarily renegotiated" its short term with the government from 1 to 7 years. For context, the banks liquidity requirement has been lowered since 2020 and banks can buy more government issued bonds.

Also last year the ruling party changed the Retirement Fund law. And there have been changes to the individual and collective retirement savings accounts.

One of the changes on the collective accounts was that the old financial instruments that were interest paying were changed for new ones that include a four year 0% interest rate paid back to the account owners.

Information regarding this has been limited to a couple of paragraphs by foreign credit risk rating agencies and a tweet by the Retirement Savings management companies.

There is no publicly available prospectus for that new government debt, and the Retirement Fund statistics and reports haven't been updated for months.

Like if you go to check for a recent report on the regulatory government agency you get literally 404 errors.