
Venezuela’s Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama - mark_element
http://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-nemesis-is-a-screw-salesman-at-a-home-depot-in-alabama-1479672919?mod=trending_now_1
======
nickff
[https://dolartoday.com/](https://dolartoday.com/)

This is a fantastic service, and I will support it any way I can. I was
looking for a way to make a donation, but it appears to be ad-supported.

This shows how advances in technology can help people. In the cold war, the US
was able to use Radio Free Europe to reach some of the oppressed people in
Eastern Europe. Now one man can both help the people of his former homeland
set prices, and understand the lies they are being told every day.

------
makomk
"Mr. Díaz is a U.S.-trained retired colonel, and he indeed tried to overthrow
Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, by participating in a short-lived coup
in 2002. Mr. Díaz, who had been deputy security chief to the businessman who
briefly took power in the ill-fated overthrow, said his conspiring days are
over." \- from later in the article. Not your average Home Depot employee.

------
firekvz
He's just the scapegoat for a clearly well organized group of people, I really
wonder why wsj picked this story up. It feels like an story that I would
actually read in dolartoday itself, for the ones who don't know, the content
from that website (dolartoday) is as disgusting as a child between the worse
clickbait websites in US

And is fine, we all get it, socialism sucks and specially venezuela's
socialist government sucks but acting like dolartoday is a totally legit
website doing some good job just makes me sick even more when they make him
look like they are a charity or something.

Just translating some of their latest headlines:

From: [https://dolartoday.com/asesina-sus-dos-hijastros-porque-
se-c...](https://dolartoday.com/asesina-sus-dos-hijastros-porque-se-comieron-
un-pan-los-ninos-habian-quedado-con-hambre/)

"father Kills his 2 stepsons because they ate more bread since they were still
hungry after their lunch- full caps"... oh come pretty sad news coming from
Venezuela, but do you really need to write it in full caps and try to make it
this bad? the story repeats for every single "news" article that they post".

There is tons of news coming from an entire country, yet they only publish
whatever clicks them the most or whatever would make someone angry.

Not to mention their tweeter feed, is just plain example of yellow journalism

Well they dont even generate their own content, they actually full copy paste
news from regular media most of the time without giving any credits, add the
super impressive touch (caps, overexageration, image edition) and go full spam
it for their readers.

They are a well known source of ENTIRELY FAKE NEWS like the one some days ago:
[https://dolartoday.com/corralito-financiero-sudeban-
ordena-l...](https://dolartoday.com/corralito-financiero-sudeban-ordena-la-
banca-dar-mas-de-bs-10-000-diarios-en-efectivo/)

The tittle for this was something like implying that venezuela has implemented
a corralito [1] and and ordered banks to limit all cash transactions to 10.000
VEF while the real news [2] was that venezuela increased the limit of cross
bank ATM cash withdrawal from 600 to 10.000 VEF

Of course, the initial fake news generated an insanely collective panic inside
the population and obviously the people was victim again from missinformation
from this website. The panic got so high that the goverment had to release a
press conference asking people to please calm down and understand what really
happened.

I dont really want to go into more details of how much of an impact have this
website economically, is really complicated, but believe when I say that this
people are actually ABLE to modificate the market. If someone wants I can easy
give you explanations of how this website does really affect our economy.

Btw, the part where it says that he only gets 4,5k USD from this website it's
hillarious, but thats another subject.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito)
[2] [http://www.elcorreodelorinoco.com/comunicado-de-sudeban-
banc...](http://www.elcorreodelorinoco.com/comunicado-de-sudeban-bancos/)

------
hga
Subtitle: "His site tracks black-market exchange of the bolivar, swaying the
price of everything"

And I've heard of him before, the government there is _very_ upset at him.

~~~
tokenizer
When your ideology hates people working with numbers, you know you messed up
somewhere.

~~~
hga
_Wars against arithmetic don’t end well._ \- Walter Russell Meade

