el-salvador

> You can come here with $3,000 in month and social security and live a very nice lifestyle. The downside is, it has begin to price out an exclude many of the citizens

It seems that every new apartment in San Salvador is being built to cater that income bracket. In the coastal region is even more. It's pricing out 97% of the Salvadorans who earn less than $3000 a month.

Judging from the instagram accounts of my friends in El Salvador, they are no longer taking local vacations. A week vacation to Mexico or Colombia, even including airfare, can be cheaper than a local one.

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.

> 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 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 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.

> And thus the perspective of El Salvador held by those who do not live there is wrong?

Sometimes wrong, sometimes contradictory and most of the times a very sugarcoated version of reality.

I think El Salvador has a very well run media-and-public relations department that creates media and guidelines for publications in different markets (countries). It relies on social media, instead of relying on traditional public broadcasting like German's Deutsche Welle, British BBC or U.S Voice of America.

This has given El Salvador lots of "soft-power". What I've seen is that it will talk about (well researched) the target audience's pain points and show how El Salvador solves them.

Not a natural disaster, but there's something similar happening for about 10 days in Central America.

The largest Telco was hit by ransomware and this has affected most of their systems. They are unable to receive electronic and card payments, or sell digital packages, it seems their billing, CRM and Helpdesk systems are down.

So all prepaid users are able to use the inrernet and call for free.

This has happened to me while living and travelling in the Northern Triangle of Central America in the 2010s which at that time were the unsafest not-at-war countries of the world.

Depending on the time of the day and location I just ran errands with only the smallest amount of cash needed and an old phone. And sometimes I kept an emergency $1 bill to pay the bus in my socks . If I was robbed, the most they could get from me was the small cash I had on hand.

As money became electronic, organized crime changed tactics, and instead of only taking money from victims, they'd take the victims to ATMs to withdraw all their funds. Banks then reacted by limiting withdrawals at about $300 in ATMs depending on the risk of the area.