You can use this line of comment to disparage any discussion about any problem lesser than the holocaust.

Look at those whiners in the Holocaust. You haven't seen oppression until the Mongols come and build a pyramid of skulls from your whole country.

5/31/1223 - Never Forget ;(

Fair comment but if enough people complain about open floor offices it might actually make a difference (eventually).

With Venezuela, what can we actually do that's going to change anything?

It will get darker and darker, it may/will (unfortunately) cost more lives, but I hope that once clean elections take place (and a couple of government terms down the road) normality and calm will be established, and all that will be a thing of the past. Judging from Argentina's problems - I know, not the same source of problems - things are now better off than 10-15 years ago. Still in recovery mode, but the darkest days are a thing of the past.

Edit: adding the below (apologies) timeline

-Big Oil corporations tried to do business in Venezuela.

-Having a massive public sector, I bet there was A LOT of bribery involved.

-Big corporations then played the greed-game.

-Someone decided to have a revolution and bit the hand that was feeding him (bribes/public sector).

-Then then got caught in a Oil-price-power-game that hurt Russia and some other satellite countries.

-Been unable to cope with the lack of 'free-oil-money' they got caught unprepared to go through the financial challenges - no savings, no FX.

-As a country, Venezuela was living on the respective 'salary-loans', they went bust on the first hiccup.

-And it all went downhill after that. It took Venezuela a decade to get where it is now, it will take another 20 years to fix things.

Root Cause Analysis: oh so many things.. huge public sector service, very little privatization, plenty of bureaucracy, centralization of decisions (central government)

I didn't mean complaining is bad, on the contrary, these people just can't complain. I was thinking that if less dramatic circumstances can ruin your productivity, this dramatic situation must be hell.

You make it sound like everyone hates open floor offices and that the unanimous solution is to get rid of them.

Abolish socialism?

Because outlawing a political movement supported by millions of citizens has always worked so well?

My country, the UK, has been ruled by socialists for two fifths of my lifetime and we're doing fine. OK, so the 70s were pretty bad, but it's not like Chavez is the ideal socialist leader, any more than Batista and Pinochet are the ideal republicans.

Ah, the good old “it’s not real socialism” argument.

Yeah its like there is never any real socialism, even though something like 20 different countries with different cultural backgrounds have been at it. And following pretty much to the letter what Marx intended. Yet some folks refuse to see facts for what they are.

Its about time for people to realize that it’s a broken complex system which relies on unhealthy controls over economy and actually empowers corruption and opression it claims to oppose. And I suspect that is the case since most discussions nowadays are based at the moral level rather than economics.

>And I suspect that is the case since most discussions nowadays are based at the moral level rather than economics.

It's pretty obvious why. Communism/Socialism has failed big time in economics, in an unmistakable way, so the only ground left to fight is on philosophy/morals. But even then there's ample evidence this leads to bad outcomes, no matter how good intentions one starts with.

Marx founded communism not socialism which already existed, they are not the same thing. Many western European countries have had real socialist governments for much of the post-war period, including the UK.

The USSR was not a communist country either if you want to argue semantics, as they called themselves socialists. Socialism is just the kind of regime that leads to a communist utopia, in the future.

> With Venezuela, what can we actually do that's going to change anything?

Two simple things if you are citizen of a stable country: get elected as the head of your country. Annex Venezuela.

Not saying it will be easy.

Don't worry, we're getting political commissars in our offices too.