Web design & stuff.
As you may or may not know, here in Venezuela we have some pretty severe restrictions to acquire and use foreign currency. Specifically, I can only spend online $400 per year. This isn’t the venezuelan government giving me $400 to spend in a year, it’s the venezuelan government allowing me to spend $400 of my own money, earned from my hard work, in a year. That’s all I’m allowed to spend on software, books, hosting, domain names and anything else I can only get online, in a whole year. When my $400 are over, that’s it, I’m screwed for the rest of the year.
In addition, when I travel I have to present a sworn statement detailing where I’m going, when I’m going and how long I’ll stay, and then the venezuelan government’s Commission of Currency Administration (CADIVI) will decide how much money I’m allowed to spend while I’m there, up to $2,500 per year. Once I spend the amount they authorized, my credit card is automatically blocked for the rest of the trip, regardless of my credit card’s actual limit. And once I hit the $2,500 yearly limit I can’t travel for the rest of the year: a de facto way of preventing venezuelans from leaving the country.
At any point the government might audit me for no reason, and I would have to go to CADIVI with all my invoices and receipts, and not only account for every cent I spent, but justify why I spent them. If at any point they decide I didn’t make appropriate
use of my money (i.e. in a way that’s in accordance to their socialist
ideals), they can simply cut me off indefinitely. This happens to over 60,000 people every year, and very few manage to successfully defend themselves.
In short, this is a dictatorship: I’m not free to spend my own hard-earned money however I choose, and I’m not free to leave the country whenever I want. I am not free.
Simple. If you need to buy some stuff from Amazon, just use the link below, shop as you normally would, and I’ll get a small 4% referral fee for anything you buy during your visit, at no extra cost to you, which helps me stretch the limits imposed by the venezuelan government, and maybe it’ll even help me save enough money to leave this dictatorship one day. If you don’t need anything right now, then please consider bookmarking this page for later. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.