No one can really doubt that under most circumstances, being without electricity in the modern world as an average modern human, it would be much better to be without power at 40 degrees plus than minus.
But that doesn't excuse the way things are run here that result in long power outages for many people in an urban city just because it's easier to survive and therefore, perhaps, not as urgent an issue. I'm not saying the OP was trying to excuse or detract from anything, I just had a thought about the whole issue and thought I'd make a comment.
Last night I had dinner with a few buddies I know and an Argentino I'd not met before, a friend of one of my buddies. Doesn't really make too much difference to the story (ok, it's not just a comment...), but he came back to Argentina a couple of years ago, after living in New York for ten years. One of the first things he told me upon meeting him was that he hates this country. We didn't get into why he doesn't leave - that's not a question I like to ask. Everyone has their reasons and it's not my business unless they want to volunteer the information as far as I'm concerned.
He lives in Saavedra. I was shocked to hear that they recently were without electricity for 12 days. That was the longest outage I'd heard of as of last night. I have to admit that in the last month or so I've been terribly busy and have had time to do not much more than work and sleep, so I was surprised to hear that I was behind the times in some of the lengths of the cutoffs I'd heard about. My oldest sister-in-law, upon being related the story of my new acquaintance's (what I thought to be) record power outage, she told me about stories she was seeing on local news (don't remember what channel) that people are 30 days and counting in at least one place and 20 days or so has happened in others. I haven't verified that, I don't know that it's true, but even if only the outages that I have had related to me first-hand (and take a day or two off for exasperated exaggeration) are true, it's ridiculous the situation that this city is in.
I understand that other places in the world have their own situations with decaying infrastructure, and places like the US are falling down the same hole that Argentina is spiraling down more quickly. I don't live anywhere else and what others do doesn't excuse what happens here any way that you look at it. No need to go off into false sub-paths and distractions, at least for the main point. I'll probably get into a comparison or two at the end of my "long comment" (hey come on, I have a few hours free and a lot of pent-up frustration - you all haven't had to suffer a long rant from me for a few weeks at least
).
Subsidies in unstable economies are bad things. Being a Libertarian, I think that they're always a bad idea, but we don't need to get too far off "center" for most people to agree that at least subsidies CAN cause problems in the best of economies (not so great perhaps) but in unstable economies, subsidies are really bad.
I don't think what is happening has anything to do with "planning" exactly. The problem stems directly from the government paying for things it can't afford and being corrupt. That's really all it comes down to.
Money and resource don't grow on trees. In the world today, the things people want can't all be made in one country. To have any kind of modern standard of living, countries need to be able to trade for what they want. Someone has to pay the bill in whatever trade deficit you have to get things in. If you have a deficit, the amount of your deficit and the value of your currency can be very problematic if they are on the high debt/low value side. The more social programs you have, the more money you must take from the people to pay the deficit bill (and the people ALWAYS pay the bill one way or the other, the government's just the mechanism). If your people aren't productive enough there isn't enough money to pay the bills. The government tries to hang on to money it's gotten in the past and any new money (not local currency, but whatever has fluid value, in this case I'm talking Dollars) it can get its hands on now and prints local currency to do things like pay its huge workforce and pay SUBSIDIES. The more of the real money it must pay out for external debts, the less real money it has to really pay those subsides and other things, no matter how much is printed. People (even the government) still have to import items and that costs money. It pretty much affects every level of the economy and of course inflation becomes a problem.
All simplified and incomplete obviously, but the fact is, the government simply can't afford to pay for subsidies. And because of the inflation problems, the real cost to maintain and improve infrastructure is too expensive and doesn't get done. In the midst of all this inflation, the loss of subsidies is a real problem in that people basically had no time to get ready for the huge jump and they're already in trouble just trying to buy food.
And the government knew all this was coming. It had to. No matter what they say, they knew this was going to happen.
So back to the power outages this summer. Millions of people trapped in a city with no electricity for extended periods of time is a serious problem, no matter if the temperature itself is survivable. Everyone talks about the wonderful state-run health care system here, and I have to admit that it has some very positive sides, that everyone has access to at least basic healthcare no matter your economic status. Yet many seem to shrug off the lack of electricity for extended periods of time as merely an inconvenience, it seems to me. It's actually a serious problem.
A lot of the people that are in these extended blackouts (people I've TALKED to that were actually in them, not hearsay) talk about not having any water. The grandma that's trapped on the twelfth floor of some building with no way to get water or even get in and out of her apartment building without a functioning elevator. These things seem kind of serious to me.
Let's not even consider the impact to an already-faltering economy when businesses are without electricity in these areas, restaurants that lose not only business but also perishable supplies that need to be replaced completely.
I see this as pretty bad, warm or not.
Now, to detour from the path a bit and talk about the US (and many other "first world" countries are in similar boats). My country has gone insane. It's out of control. It's sliding on an obvious path to bring it even with Argentina, at best. AT BEST. Obama Care is just the latest and biggest symptom. We are so far in debt, we have military stretched all over the world and the only thing that keeps us going is the fact that the Dollar is currently the unofficial world currency. It seems so unstable to me - I can't believe that the world is going to continue to allow us to wrack up debt that can never be paid back with the way things are going. Infrastructure is a huge problem, and I don't think we can afford to do too much about it.
What the US is doing, and has been doing, to me is worse than what Argentina has done, even the huge default in 2001/02 and the end result will probably make everyone forget about Argentina's world record setting.
I have nightmares often about being in Argentina as the economy collapses here and shortly after the US' stupidity begins to catch up itself as well, as my dollars not only don't mean much, but the country in which I live is also in a pit of s__t. I wonder about being able to get north to Paraguay where my father-in-law has 11 hectares, about 3 of it planted.
Maybe I'm over-reacting with worry, but I have a knack of getting my financial situation improved and starting to run at full steam just about the time some s__t hits the fan and blows back in my face. I'm getting too old for this crap! Heh.
