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It slowly bleeds the countrie's economy dry. I witnessed the problem first hand when visiting Cuba: Rented a car and a driver for a private tour of Havanna and
by choeger 5y ago
It slowly bleeds the countrie's economy dry. I witnessed the problem first hand when visiting Cuba: Rented a car and a driver for a private tour of Havanna and the driver was absolutely fluent in English. Like, better then me, close to native speaker, with only a slight accent. So I was complimenting him and asked, where he learned it. I was expecting something like really good language courses, because the typical Cuban would not be able to visit English-speaking countries. Turns out, the guy was a former high-level manager in the state-owned tourist company and basically responsible for marketing/sales in Europe. He decided to drive a car when he learned that the lady cleaning his office actually earned more than him. Obviously he became a great guide, to my benefit, but imagine the loss for the Cuban economy as a whole.
Edit: One more point: In Cuba you would typically tip with 1CUC, even for the most trivial of services. Someone pulls a chair onto the beach for you? One CUC. Cleaning of Hotel room? One CUC. Drinks brought by waiter? One CUC. And so on. The average monthly income is equivalent to about 30CUC. Assume you'd live as a programmer in the Bay Area, making some $120k and people start tipping $4k for pretty much everything. How long would you stay a developer?
- jbverschoor 5y agoWhat's the difference between that story and the tons of smart people trying to create dark patterns to trick people into clicking ads instead of researching and developing great things?
- mdp2021 5y agoThe "contempt for efficiency" disaster also has other sides: all the time you lose to navigate into what should have been done properly in the first place.
- bawolff 5y agoMost people consider smart people diverted to creating dark patterns, to be a bad thing. OP clearly thinks the tourist-dual ecconomy thing in Cuba is bad (for cuba as a whole). So why should there be a difference? If person A says X is bad, and person B says Y is the same as X, and everyone thinks Y is also bad, where is the contradiction? Its not like there can only be one bad thing in the world.
- phreeza 5y agoPulling a chair onto the beach for someone actually has value?
- noduerme 5y agoThis seems like whataboutism. Sure, capitalism creates some warped incentive structures - e.g. public schoolteachers being underpaid - but the Cuban government goes out of its way to royally screw anyone who tries to educate themselves or to create anything. Even the fact that we have a choice to create great things or create antipatterns presupposes that the free market draws people to acquire skills in the first place.