We're still getting electricity from the privately owned generators.
The main grid has always had shortage, it never provided 24/7,
the reliance has always been on the privately owned generators.
Due to the severe fuel shortages since the beginning of the year, the main grid provided very little hours, less than 2 hours per day in many cases.
The privately owned generators haven't been able to keep up either, we're getting power cuts for several hours during the day, every day. And the fees are increasing.
Here's a rundown of the current situation
- fuel is rare, queues at stations are horrible, it takes up to 6 hours to get some, violence and accidents there has killed many people
- fuel prices have increased 4x since the beginning of this year
- currency inflation from $1 = 1,500 LBP to $1=19,000 since late 2019, max reached 23,000, could reach more
It's starting to kick off, several households are implementing it, it costs $5k+ here which given the current situation isn't the top priority
But honestly I do hope we reach a point where private solar and wind take over the main grid and the generators
Probably won't be sufficient for a router, but it would charge a battery bank or phone pretty well (make sure it's angled 30 degrees south, and use a usb battery bank between it and the phone because the phone usually won't adjust the charging current up and down as clouds come over). For laptops, use a power bank with a laptop 19v output.
International transactions are pretty hard in Lebanon the government constantly puts restrictions on dollar accounts and other accounts that can process international transfers.
Many payments services are also unavailable in Lebanon for various reasons.
If you are in a position to order things from Alibaba or eBay you are already pretty well off and anything sold locally would be sold at a very steep markup.
Hello! I have been involved in system design and logistics (freight and customs) for getting solar to some folks in Lebanon over the past six months. Based on your on the ground experience, if you have time, I would be interested in your thoughts on what would be the most valuable efforts to get household solar (not a panel or two) to more people. Is the primary constraint financial ability?
Cost is the most important factor, after that comes finding a space, most people live in buildings in the city, one roof won't be enough for all the apartments. Houses are usually in villages.
People are getting interested by seeing it work for their neighbors and friends, it's still new and people want see some garuntee for such a long term investment.
How would you describe the income level of the clients you shipped solar panels to? Were they building a new house?
I can’t speak to income levels, but the budget frequently communicated is ~$5k, which covers a 3.8kw inverter and just under 5kw in solar panel modules. Wiring and racking is typically sourced locally.
I will optimize my sourcing for cost. Thank you for the feedback.
Infrastructure investments require stable society and trustworthy politician.
Lebanon has neither atm.
The people there need to over throw the current govt, and remove their own religious prejudices that led to the current state of govt in the first place.
It's complicated. Suffice to say that it's in part from years of corruption, rampant debt, political revolution, international pressure/manipulation, an influx of migrants/refugees, and no significant trade/business to repair the economic impacts. The problems have been bubbling for years, but 2019 was the beginning of the implosion.
I don't know why you are focusing on the stupid coins. The idea that we do away with the debt system is insane. The debt ceiling was never used for any fiscal reasons, it's always turned into a political weapon and the consequences are just plain stupid.
I don't have a problem with debt. However outstanding debt should never be greater then GDP, the fed should be barred from buying debt, and government spending should be capped at 20% of GDP
Debt is fine if you're a big country. If you're a factory, a bank might decide to not loan you any money if it thinks you're not going to make any profit (e.g. because of inefficiencies, unpredictable raw material costs, better competition) so you can return that loan with interest. If you're the United States of America, you're going to be around for a looong time and the population there are going to continue enterprising and paying tax, so the bank knows you're good for the loan.
I guess it's not such a good example since the US can just mint a trillion dollars as you moaned, but that's a coin that no one in the world would refuse, so I guess it's good to be king.
The normalcy bias of people combined with the pure arrogant hubris that the USD can not collapse will lead USD collapse
The people in charge of the money believe the world would not dare change to something else. Bullshit
The history of the world shows empires collapse. To believe the US is somehow immune is moronic
Having our levels of debt combined with unrestricted spending, combined with currency minplulation / creation is 3 strikes
The world has already sent a singal we have too much debt and too much spending as they have stopped buying our debt so the fed has to buy it all with money created from thin air
It also ironic you use monarchy anology here. I am sure you are correct that the king also thought they could do what ever they want right up until the peasants chopped the king's head off in revolution. As the blade came down I am sure he was thinking "this is not possible for i am the king "
At this point a USD collapse is a collapse of the entire planet's economic system. (IMO, I could be wrong.) It could collapse, but it will take the whole world down with it. To use the monarchy analogy again, yeah the emperor might be naked, but as long as we pretend he isn't, we'll continue to have order.
Even China isn't interested in a bankrupt USA/a crashed dollar, because it wants to keep its people fed, and they get fed when they can toil in the factories making cheap shit for Walmart...
While none wants the dollar to collapse they are also not willing to see their own economies suffer at the hand of irresponsible people in the fed and Treasury.
It is pure hubris to believe the it is impossible for the world to get off the dollar. Hell their have been talks about it in a orderly way by many nations for a long time. OPEC is one of the leading reason for US dollar dominance. If OPEC starts trading oil in something other then USD well we here in the us are going to have a bad time.
> The normalcy bias of people combined with the pure arrogant hubris that the USD can not collapse will lead USD collapse
Reserve currencies do not "collapse", they get replaced. The GBP didn't collapse for example: over the course of decades the USD came up and for many years they were used equally.
So if the USD is to be replaced, the obvious question is: with what? EUR? CNY/RMB? JPY? Other? A mix?
For a paper on possible multi-currencies, see Eichengreen 2014:
For a good historical overview see How global currencies work past, present, and future by Eichengreen, Chitu, Mehl.
> The history of the world shows empires collapse. To believe the US is somehow immune is moronic
The US is not an empire. It is a hegemony: it simply exerts (exerted?) influence because of the size of its economy relative to everyone else, and it was willing to spend a whole bunch of money to basically keep the peace.
> The world has already sent a singal we have too much debt and too much spending as they have stopped buying our debt so the fed has to buy it all with money created from thin air
What signal would that be?
The US Treasury sells bonds to interested buyers, and the Fed then gets the bonds on the secondary market. No one has stopped buying US bonds.
Further, the purchase are done with US Fed reserves, which are not "real" money as they do not enter the economy and simply sit in the accounts that institutions have at the Fed.
>>Further, the purchase are done with US Fed reserves, which are not "real" money as they do not enter the economy and simply sit in the accounts that institutions have at the Fed.
I am really tried of this lie being repeated over and over again, the money enters the economy at the point in which the Federal Government spends the money it gets from selling the debt. The Federal Reserve can not buy US Debt and claim that money never enters the economy because the US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SPENDS THE MONEY.
Sure the Fed itself does not spend it, but just because it it 2 or 3 transactions removed does not change the fact that the money did enter the economy
Also the fact that the fed buys up the debt from "the public" is a bit of hand wave as well, knowing the fed will buy up any debt they obtain from the treasury these straw purchasers use this assurance to eliminate their risk and further fleece the public, if the fed stopped buying up this debt as soon as it was sold to the "public" the public would stop buying it.
Okay, I understand that there's some sort of world-wide supply-chain issue. Recently I've heard about fuel shortages of various shorts. It's unclear how related the mess in Lebanon is, since the article states
> Prior to the outages, citizens had for months only been given a few hours of electricity per day
and I thought the fuel shortages were a recent phenomenon.
Regardless: does anyone have a link to a decent primer on what's going on (regarding supply chains, fuel, and all the other recent economic disruptions)? I'm not interested in the usual politically motivated "just so" stories, just a list of what's happening, what parts are definitely understood, and what parts are not understood.
What I can piece together post the Lebanon war, Saudi Arabia and other gulf states provided substantial aid to Lebanon to reconstruct. But in 2016 Saudi Arabia cut off its aid when relations got spoiled. Lebanon has lots of government corruption so much of aid was wasted. Then there is the explosion last year that set them back even more. Foreign countries want reforms before they will donate further.
You could trace it back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Lebanon supports the Arab states, the Palestinians spill into Lebanon, and fighting continues over various decades (50's, 70's, 80's, 90's), including a civil war that took 16 years, after which point it's sort of Syria, Israel and Hezbollah grappling through Lebanon, of course with the other usual cast of characters (US, UK, Iran, Saudi, and a dozen different rebel groups).
But probably the majority of the current crisis stems from the 2006 war.
"Lebanon’s GDP plummeted from close to US$ 55 billion in 2018 to an estimated US$ 33 billion in 2020. GDP per capita fell by around 40 percent in dollar terms. "
>>>but it's likely a direct consequence of the historical conflict in the region.
Yeah, the security situations in the 2 countries are VASTLY different. Lebanon has militant Palestinian refugees[1], Hezbollah, Israel, Syria, Iran, and ISIS-adjacent insurgents [2] all regularly killing each other (or Lebanese government forces) in their territory.
If you follow the link, the article that NPR is quoting is more specific: "...the economic and financial crisis is likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top 3, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century." The rest of the article gives the figures on the plummeting GDP and rising misery.
You know how in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z the Saiyans get stronger every time they're almost killed? That's antifragility. Now think about how many times Goku and Vegeta still die in spite of their antifragility.
Your bones are antifragile, but they can be broken. Cities and civilizations can be antifragile, but they're still susceptible to collapse given the right forces.
Your bones are definitely not anti fragile… it’s a common misconception in fact without modern medicine a compound fracture will not heal right on its own in most cases.
Again, anti fragile does not mean unbreakable. Anti fragile systems are less likely to fail because they get stronger when subjected to reasonable stresses.
Bones don’t heal up stronger, and I think you should read the article you’ve linked… it’s about physical exercise to reduce / prevent falls not that it somehow makes your bones stronger.
Physical exercise doesn’t make bones stronger, some physical activity may delay them becoming fragile due to old age but overall actual stresses on your skeleton cause stress fractures they don’t turn you into wolverine.
Bones get stronger where they're subjected to stress. If you don't stress them, they get weaker. If you stress them too much, they break.
Put another way, you're arguing that Hafþór Björnsson, the strongest man in the world, a dude who deadlifted 1,100 lbs, has bones with the same tensile strength as a sedentary man of the same age? Or somehow you've argued that Hafþór's femurs will actually be weaker because of microfractures? LOL
You'd think Israel would step up here. Sure, there's LOTs of history between the two, but having a failed state as a neighbor is kind of an own goal. It'd make much more sense for them to assist with the rebuild and build an ally.
I don't understand why people always make comments when there's a crisis about how nobody's helping. There's always aid! The question is, why do people not read about it, and declare there isn't any?
By no means am I saying the aid is enough, or that it doesn't involve conflicts, that it isn't being wasted or misused, or anything like that. But it is an artificial storyline that the whole world is ignoring any given crisis, that is never accurate.
- Iran has been sending fuel via Hezbollah.
- The US and Turkey have sent aid to Lebanon's military.
- The Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress was calling for "prompt and significant action" from the Secretary of State, around the beginning of October.
- Greece has sent "humanitarian aid".
- The IMF has been talking to the government about a bailout package, off and on for some time.
I don't vouch for the accuracy or political slant of the following, but it's an example of what people write/say about Lebanon:
"The international community has been providing humanitarian relief, but too much of it ends up siphoned off into the corruption networks that rule Lebanon. Some of the aid is smuggled into Syria, circumventing sanctions against the Assad dictatorship, while turning a considerable profit for criminal enterprises, including Hezbollah. More humanitarian relief is needed, but it should be run through reliable international institutions or through closely monitored non-governmental organizations if it is to support the Lebanese people and not the mafia-like syndicates."
A basic problem, obviously, is that different countries and organizations want to help some people and entities in Lebanon, and not others. But it's not an island from humanity.
It is a nice thought but that could not happen. When an event like this happens it is because of huge structural failure.
Corruption would have played a part. If you brought a tanker or free oil, whose business interest, or tax revenue, would be impacted by an influx of cheap oil?
Who is being incentivized not to solve the issue?
Where do you dock the ship?
Who gets the oil for free but then charges the next user down the supply chain?
How can you be sure the majority of the oil does not end up on the black market, exported or not used for grid energy?
Twenty years ago the most advanced economy in the world, California, had blackouts due to fraud and corruption. If it can happen in CA it can happen anywhere.
There's a cold war in the middle east between Saudi Arabia and Iran right now. Surely getting an entire nation state in the region on your side for the cost of a few oil tankers (of which KSA and Iran have no shortage) is worth it?
Because Lebanon is a pawn in the proxy wars between the US, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. All of them want to help, but only if Lebanon does things "their" way, and not the "other's" way, and none of "them" will allow the "other" to help. And the IMF says their government is not giving enough concessions. It's all pretty fucked up.
Foreign intervention is unlikely without government reform. With traditional donors such as Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom and Persian Gulf nations both hesitant to push money into a corrupt system and also dealing with their own economic problems, Lebanon set its hopes on an International Monetary Fund bailout. But after weeks of discussions, there is no agreement in sight to even begin the negotiations.
The U.S, the largest donor to the IMF, wants any bailout to come on the condition that there is a diminution of Hezbollah’s power. The U.S is also the largest donor to the Lebanese army, making for a delicate balancing act. “We are supportive of Lebanon as long as they get the reforms right and they are not a proxy state for Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week.
In an unusual move, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said last week that Hezbollah would be open to receiving help from the U.S. despite calling it “an enemy” of Lebanon. Pompeo’s remarks followed Nasrallah’s comments that Lebanon had an opportunity to buy fuel from “a friend called Iran in exchange for Lebanese pounds.” The secretary of state dismissed the claims as “unacceptable”, adding that the U.S. will do everything necessary to stop Iran from sending crude oil anywhere.
There is little optimism for the future of the IMF talks, which have not even agreed on the balance of losses, let alone the negotiations and have now been stalled. “The government refuses to implement any reform, any prerequisite the IMF had for even continuing the talks,” said Jad Chaaban, an economist at the American University of Beirut. While the political elite argues without much consensus, the refusal to reform is crushing the Lebanese people.
> “We are supportive of Lebanon as long as they get the
reforms right and they are not a proxy state for Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week"
This seems sensible to me; we will help you if you become a friend instead of an enemy.
The issue is that Lebanon is not one coherent socio-ethnic-state, rather a loose conglomeration of diametrically opposed and deeply ingrained mostly-religious-fundamentalists (in government/power).
There is no coherent Lebanon to really even negotiate with, just a bunch of rabid factions playing off each other.
I think it’s actually impossible for ‘Lebanon’ overall to be anyone’s friend without also being their enemy.
The issue there is, there are also no clear and coherent socio-ethnic borders within the country. Everyone lives mixed in with everyone else (mostly).
When other countries historically have ‘solved’ this problem, it ends up being pretty terrible for the minority groups who either have their land seized when they get displaced or get wholesale slaughtered (see partition when India and Pakistan were formed, Bosnia/Herzegovina and the Balkans War, Rwandan genocide, or the active issues in Israel), and in Lebanon EVERYONE is a minority group [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Lebanon#Reli...].
And if you’re going to say ‘Hey, but Muslims have 60%!’, the current Muslim group
are roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shia, which have similar history as Catholics and Protestants - aka they hate each other and have a history of bloody fights. That means each group is actually smaller than the Christians as a whole (who are more like 35-45%), but also larger than any one Christian Sect (which includes said Catholics and Protestants BTw).
So for the most part since no one has enough of a majority to assert who belongs where (and it certainly isn’t obvious to everyone else either) or who would be naturally ‘in charge’, it’s endless jockeying for position, extremist recruiting within their groups, corruption to benefit their minority group and screw over the others behind everyone’s back, and the occasional terrorist bombing.
> When other countries historically have ‘solved’ this problem, it ends up being pretty terrible for the minority groups
It's pretty terrible in Lebanon now as well, and there was a horrible civil war between 1975 - 1990 which could happen again. I'm just saying - yes change could be for the worse, but it's not like things are peachy now.
A split up has advantages even if people need to relocate. Cyprus is a pretty good example on how it could work out. Also as horrible as the clusterf** of Bosnia was, it seems the more separated the different ethnicities are the better.
Very well could happen, I wish the regular folks luck as they’re the ones who usually get the worst of it anytime something like that happens.
It seems like a Lose-lose proposition to me frankly, they’d be better off (IMO) trying to minimize the divisions and working together as Lebanese instead of all these fragmented groups, but that seems unlikely considering the history.
> they’d be better off (IMO) trying to minimize the divisions and working together as Lebanese instead of all these fragmented groups
Yes that would be awesome. But indeed it doesn't seem likely, seems like religion or ethnicity plays a bigger role in that area of the world than nationality.
That would be like someone giving the United States 5 Trillion dollars to fix its budget problems. Would it help? Sure. How could it not? Would it also cause more problems? Sure.
The problem the US faces isn't a lack of money directly - it's that there's either an unwillingness to make trade offs or a perception that trade offs are not necessary.
I'm not an expert on Lebanon but from what I've read I think the problems are not dissimilar. A tanker full of fuel would help Lebanon. Who in Lebanon it would help is at least an open question. In anything except the very short term I think the main problem is one of politics. It's going to be hard for people not directly involved in Lebanese politics to fix those problems.
- State collapse is more common than we think, but not impossible to recover from (Germany post WW2, Iraq post 2010?)
- The international community is willing to cooperate during major natural disasters (2004 earthquake, Japanese earthquake, Haiti earthquake)
- The international community is less willing to cooperate during man-made political disasters with humanitarian consequences (Somalia 1980s, Russia 1990s), though there are notable exceptions (Bosnian War, Kosovo War)
- No one really cares about genocides happening in other countries
- Successful nation building directed by a foreign power is the exception, not the norm.
Prosperity is unfortunately a zero sum game. Until we develop the means to fully automate the creation of all of humanity's needs and wants, there will be winners and losers at the national level.
That is definitely not true. Many of the things we value the most are found in abundance in all countries, if the society is well organized to achieve these ends. Leisure, food, space to live, friends, peace, safety, etc. There are some few goods whose production is truly limited by our ability to extract raw resources, but these are the exception, not the norm.
This is a good point, but I'd point out that well-organized societies are much rarer (and shorter-lived) than any vein of gold, one of the biggest enemies of having a well-organized society being the politics of envy and resentment as displayed in the post you were replying to.
When that type of culture is ascendant, then things are not only zero sum, but often negative-sum, since the party takes a cut of transferring wealth from winners to losers, and often just transfers wealth to itself.
Mugabe took land away from successful white farmers in Zimbabwe and gave the land mostly to friends and black people who wanted to start farms but had no ability to do so.
The former category might be extorting consumers and workers but he is "doing his job", he definitively values the land. When you give the land for free to friends those friends don't give a damn about the land because they got it for free. It's not difficult to see how this transaction is destructive. Every person involved is less happy than they could be.
The second class of black people who wanted to become farmers faced a completely different problem. They couldn't get loans to start their farms and they didn't get any financial support from the state to start farming, instead farmers were banned from selling their food when the government introduced price controls.
It doesn't take much to understand that hyperinflation results in absurd prices and a ban on absurd prices when every price is absurd is a ban on trade itself.
Now back to money. Money is zero sum. One person's dollar is another person's debt. That's not wrong but holding onto money for no reason will require better conditions on the debt (e.g. lower interest rates) or more debt overall to satisfy the savers. So telling the savers to get lost with inflation or negative interest rates will tell them that working to earn money that they don't intend to spend on consumption or investment is not wanted by anyone and they should either start working less or they should spend more. Letting money sit idle for no reason just doesn't make any sense from a societal perspective.
Only if you delude yourself that full time jobs and money are equivalent to prosperity, many have deluded themselves that this is the case but I did not, I live in reality instead of a financial world of made up work.
Why doesn't every country do balanced trade? The goodwill would be immense and we would pull billions of humans out of poverty into the global middle class. The goodwill would be immense.
Only recently can people access "the world" goods. In the past there was limited range to provision from outside. Mostly boats and carriages. Famines could then occur because of a bad harvest or a few in a row. Farming has never been a surefire thing!
As far back as the Irish potato famine, there was plenty of food - the problem was caused by the political power structures and rent seeking which would not bend an inch to help the peasantry.
In the modern era, we have more then enough food to feed everyone: no one goes hungry because there is not enough.
ever? The first entry in the wikipedia article for "list of famines" points to "4.2-kiloyear event", which was apparently global. At that scale it doesn't seem hard for the deficit to negate any meager surplus that non-affected societies can produce.
We're still getting electricity from the privately owned generators. The main grid has always had shortage, it never provided 24/7, the reliance has always been on the privately owned generators.
Due to the severe fuel shortages since the beginning of the year, the main grid provided very little hours, less than 2 hours per day in many cases.
The privately owned generators haven't been able to keep up either, we're getting power cuts for several hours during the day, every day. And the fees are increasing.
Here's a rundown of the current situation
- fuel is rare, queues at stations are horrible, it takes up to 6 hours to get some, violence and accidents there has killed many people
- fuel prices have increased 4x since the beginning of this year
- currency inflation from $1 = 1,500 LBP to $1=19,000 since late 2019, max reached 23,000, could reach more