Chavez to us on the electricity crisis: you pay! (bonus: electrical engineers you would never hire)

Big Brother is in Cuba

And thus we return to the past.  This week end Zulia state reached very high temperatures and suffered a major blackout, long enough (a day in some areas) that even your ice cubes in the fridge melted.

I supposed in a way it was the last straw for a government that decided to punish the customer for the blackouts: we consume too much electricity, it is not the government's fault, never was, and of course, never will be.  Before Chavez, blackouts were occasional, under Chavez they are regular but that part of the much hated 4th republic is never brought forward by the regime.

Thus today new harsh sanctions have been approved for those who are not able to bring their electricity usage 10% below their 2009 level.  Observe also on the picture that Chavez is bigbrotherly present at the announcement even though he is, supposedly, recovering in Cuba.  One wonders if Jaua and Rodriguez subconscious did not betray them, trying to link the new sanctions to Chavez and not to their incompetence in solving the electricity crisis for which they have been in charge for a bout a year now.

In fact, Ali Rodriguez Araque is becoming fast a certifiable mean idiot.  He said:

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

"En primer lugar hay una mejor distribución del ingreso en Venezuela como ya lo ha explicado el ministro Jorge Giordani (…) Es raro ver un hogar en Venezuela que no esté dotado con una antena de televisión y eso aumenta la demanda"  First there is a better distribution of income in Venezuela as minister Giordani explained (...) It is rare to see a Venezuelan home without a TV antenna and that increases the demand [for electricity]

I do not know where to start...

Before Chavez Venezuela was already one of the countries with the deepest TV penetration.  Surely it cannot have increased that much under his tenure.

Next, a TV antenna is not plugged on any electrical outlet.  Heck, not even my Direct TV antenna, though admittedly it is connected to my decodifier.  For an electrical engineer blaming the electric crisis on TV antennas is, well, grotesque.  I am reminded of the Pedro Carreño immortal conspiracy theory that all the decodifiers of Direct TV were equipped with electronic eyes to spy inside Venezuelan homes....

Those are the people in charge of solving Venezuela problems.....