<$BlogRSDURL$>

Monday, February 22, 2010

Dysfunctionality neatly summarized 

If you speak spanish and want to watch just one video to get a sense of the dysfunctionality of the Venezuelan government this would be a good choice:

Watch live streaming video from aporrea at livestream.com


It can also be found here with an article summarizing it.

I don't know how much I need to say - the article and video speak for themselves. But I thought some of the highlights were:

The government of Hugo Chavez - the very same one that ran its mouth in Copenhagen about how others were destroying the environment - has now discovered that hydro-electric power is bad and thermo-electric power is good. They openly brag about canceling hydroelectric power projects and replacing them with generating plants that burn hydrocarbons such as gas and oil.

Next time Chavez talks about how capitalism or rich countries or someone else is messing up the environment maybe someone should tell him - no, idiots who cancel hydroelectric projects and replace them with oil fired power plants are messing up the environment.

Now Chavez is in rush to build more than a dozen thermo-electric plants. Well, if the country was going to need them due to growing electric usage and the country was overly reliant on hydro-electric power why weren't these built 2, 3, 3, or even 10 years ago. The same issues, if studied, would have been obvious years ago, why all the rush at the 11th hour?

Another interesting part is when Chavez talks about how factories need their own power generation systems and that this should be planned for some new steel plant they are (supposedly) building. Well, thank god the Chavez government is as incompetent and slow in building new industry as it is in building electric generation plants. Had they actually built much of any industry their electric grid would be totally screwed.

Continuing on with the lack of planning notice that never once in the article or the video did Chavez mention how much it would cost to fuel all these power plants. If it takes 100,000 barrels of oil per day to fuel these plants and oil costs $80 per barrel that is a cost of nearly $3 billion dollars per year!!!!!! But I guess that they area already losing more than $17 billion per year to domestic consumption (mainly peoples private cars) another $3 billion seems trivial.

And finally the one scene in the video that had me rolling was when Chavez noticed that his jack of trades minister Ali Rodriguez actually took notes during the meeting. This struck Chavez as novel and a great idea!!! This might seem odd to any even mid level manager who has carry out projects of any size. But when you are Chavez and pretty much everything that you do is improvised, and at least half of what you say you are going to do is soon forgotten about never to be spoken of again, why take notes?

Anyways, get some cotufa, pull up a chair, and enjoy.

|

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?