Puerto Rico is amazing in a million ways... Butttt, there is a lot of government corruption and misallocation of funds for infrastructure among other things. There is a burgeoning tech scene and a lot of well educated folks here to do the heavy lifting. The taxes on locals are too high and there is a massive hangover from government pensions of yesteryear.
The amount of grifting that goes on focusing on PR being a 3rd world hellscape for their own views/clicks/etc is insane.
Thank you for this comment! There are parts of Puerto Rico that are "3rd world hellscapes," but they are tiny and not the norm. It is a beautiful island with a ton of natural resources and hardworking people.
Where else can you drive 3 hours and go from dense rainforest to absolute desert, spend your morning snorkeling pristine reefs and your evening deep in the mountains, and see a mix of old and new everywhere?
But, do you want to go deep in the mountains? I lived in Morovis for about 4 months. I’ve never seen anywhere more infested with more cockroaches and rats in my life.
I live outside the metro area and there are definitely 4x4 only areas as far as transportation and it becomes quite rural pretty quick in the hills. Not to mention the chupacabra.
Jayuya is one of my favorite places in the world, but you are right the bugs are out of control. Especially at night, two screens on the windows and the buzzing all night.
> Where else can you drive 3 hours and go from dense rainforest to absolute desert
I've never been to Puerto Rico. Rainforest I can imagine, but where on that island is there a desert, even a relative one?! When you say "absolute desert" I'm imagining, I don't know, something like the Sonoran Desert.
Average annual rainfall of 24-39" is not exactly anyone's idea of a desert (I believe 10" a year is the typical definition), though looking at the photos it does appear to be more similar to the transitional area in Texas Hill Country, for example, with short trees and more shrubs. Certainly a far cry from the lushness that I expected to encompass all of Puerto Rico.
It's typical for Islands to have a wet side and a dry side. The wet side gets the brunt of the storms and rain carried by prevailing winds. And the dry side is in the rain shadow.
Offhand thought 24 inches in a hot climate doesn't go as far as 24 inches in a temperate one.
what struck me about Hawaii on my last visits though is the juxtaposition against Puerto Rico (the lost opportunities). Very similar in a lot of ways- but hasn't nearly leveraged the richness of its culture (history, music, cuisine, etc.) as much as Hawaii has.
Is it really like that? It sounds, truly, like paradise. There HAS to be a catch. How big are the mosquitoes, tarantulas, carnivorous ear worms, bees, ants, snakes, etc?
I grew up there in near rain forest area (just slightly short of the technical rainfall requirement). There aren't really any poisonous snakes on the island, just one type that has mildly irritating saliva (I caught and got bit by lots of these as a kid, barely noticed). Depending on which micro-biome you are in, there can be lots of mosquitoes, or not many at all. Where I grew up, there were very few probably because of all the predators (and most of the water was moving not standing). Caught a few tarantulas growing up, never got bit. There were some pretty giant centipedes where I lived but I rarely saw them, never got bit. A few bee stings, but nothing too bad- but wasps... hate those f**ers.
Lots of catches. Many places have bars on windows, those pristine reefs are surrounded by areas with unexploded munitions, tons of bugs, roads that are not necessarily safe for cars, etc.
Agreed, I was born and raised there and lived until my late 20's and it's comparable to most of the US in terms of services you get. The issue is as you get older you notice that salaries are lower, a lot of goods such as gasoline are expensive, you get regular power outages, and the government is fairly incompetent and corrupt.
Most people who leave do so because it's like living in a bottom 50 state like Mississippi or Alabama, why stay when your quality of life will improve significantly just taking a 2 hour flight to another state? I was able to attend a top engineering school in the US and most of my high school friends were also able to get great jobs elsewhere too. We would love to go back but the drop in quality of life makes it a difficult choice.
> focusing on PR being a 3rd world hellscape for their own views/clicks/etc is insane
Yep. I find it weird and annoying that Puerto Rico (and most of Southern and Central America and Mexico) are treated as 3rd world (read: "poor"/undeveloped). The only undeveloped countries (below 0.650 HDI) in the Americas are Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala. It's just pure racism tbh.
Economic turmoil aside due to the shutdown of Naval Shipyards in the 90s, Puerto Rico is by every definition a developed country, and they are a massive player in both the financial and pharmaceutical manufacturing world.
P.S. Don't give me the pedantic Cold War 3rd world definition. No one uses that definition anymore
I can agree with you that Puerto Rico is an amazing place, but I really don't know what you mean by "heavy lifting" in this context.
The people in tech who live in Puerto Rico are practically a net negative for the locals and people who are actually from there. 90%+ of them are not local to Puerto Rico and rarely is anyone hiring locals for these tech jobs, they are working remotely or getting their more well off friends/family to come join them.
They outprice locals from living arrangements since they drive costs up but the amount locals make is nowhere near what these tech workers do. And in my opinion its even worse than what happens in mainland US, since they are stuck on an island uprooting and moving is even harder than what happens to people in the states.
There are a ton of locals that are born and raised here and are well educated and technically literate to do any tech work. Businesses relocating from abroad to pay 4% local taxes is not a net negative. A lack of real estate or extra foreigners is not the problem with Puerto Rico, there is a distinct lack of population and abundance of homes falling further in to disrepair. You are parroting political talking points by people who would love to push decades of failed policy and corruption on jake paul, and in doing so you're also managing to discredit the majority of professionals in puerto rico.
For much better reporting than a quick comment on HN, for anyone who really is interested, follow the documentaries by reporter Bianca Graulau who is doing a great job at building awareness of the problem.
I'm not sure where you get your information but it is quite true that well-heeled Americans have sold out on the mainland and moved to plush locations in Puerto Rico over the last ten years to escape not only taxes here, but also what they see as the coming social disruptions that will place them and their wealth and family's safety at risk. Several who previously ran their newsletter empires from DelRay Beach, Florida or similar locations based on the US's SE penisula. (LOL)
For them Puerto Rico is the perfect place to be to retain their American citizenship, eat fantastic food, enjoy an awesome lifestyle at a large discount, while avoiding tax liabilities.
Libertarians who operate investment newsletters have been touting the advantages of selling out here and moving to PR for years. They are not alone, as pastor_bob notes there are plenty of other people with the means and the opportunity to flee the mainland so they can watch it burn down from a distance while still enjoying the benefits of citizenship but in a more tax-advantageous location.
It was actually pretty funny reading their bitching about the state of things on the island after Hurricane Maria. Motherfuckers actually had to endure hardships getting their internet access restored so they could publish their rags and then they filled them with gripes about what a hardship it was dealing with the disaster even though they kept themselves isolated in their compounds so they never saw the true scope of the devastation that PR natives endured.
There are plenty of people who move and live in puerto rico for all, some or more of the reasons you listed. None of which detracts from the fact that puerto rico is full of people with more than enough education and technical knowhow to build things and prosper, there are also tech companies that are here and not just running jake paul crypto schemes despite the non-stop media and political talking points trying to place blame on decades of poor decisions onto a youtuber and foreigners.
Yes. I agree with this but wanted to point out that PR residency comes with attractive incentives for wealthy people and many have elected to take advantage of those incentives.
Puerto Rico also has had corruption problems that may or may not be linked to the classical problems of people appointing friends to positions, inefficient allocation of resources such that wealthier areas are better maintained and have more of the ear of the government when it comes to acquiring resources to keep things maintained. Nothing involving governments is ever totally perfect or fair so there will always be a situation where it is who you know that counts.
After Maria, the federal response to the destruction was inefficient and inadequate to restore things to their previous state. As you find in any disaster on the mainland, the cleanup operations failed to vet contractors to insure that those doing the work actually had experience managing a complex process like hurricane cleanup and as a result there was massive waste. That's become the normal condition for US post-disaster operations so this is not a knock on PR at all.
I would love to visit. I have read a lot about it. One day it might happen. Good luck to all who choose PR as their home.
Fun story: a lot of Puerto Rico's problems are linked to a mis-translation of the Constitution from Spanish to English [1]:
> The big spending was fueled by a translation error between Spanish and English in the island's 1952 constitution. It enabled Puerto Rico to issue debt to fund many activities, including day-to-day operations. It all comes down to the interpretation of the phrase "recursos totales" -- total revenue or total resources? It was interpreted as resources, which is a broader term allowing the government to fund regular operations (e.g. education, policing, health care, etc.) via bonds.
In Spanish "recursos totales" is better translated as "total revenue" not "total resources".
I'm not a Spanish speaker so I'm reliant on these accounts. Here's a more detailed explanation [1]:
> The legal framework for a balanced budget dates back to Section 34 of the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act, which states that “No appropriation shall be made, nor any expenditure authorized by the legislature, whereby the expenditure of the Government of Porto Rico during any fiscal year shall exceed the total revenue then provided for by law and applicable for such appropriation or expenditure, including any available surplus in the treasury, unless the legislature making such appropriation shall provide for levying a sufficient tax to pay such appropriation or expenditure within such fiscal year.” A provision
in Puerto Rico’s Constitution, which was approved in 1952, contains similar language in English: The appropriations made for any fiscal year shall not exceed the total revenues, including available surplus, estimated for said fiscal year unless the imposition of taxes sufficient to cover said appropriations is provided by law. P.R. Const., art. VI, §7. The Spanish translation of the Constitution, however, translated revenues as “recursos” which can also be interpreted to mean resources. A 1974 ruling by Puerto Rico’s attorney general clarified the legal meaning of “recursos” to a broader general definition of resources available to the government, including proceeds of bond issuances. P.R. Op. Sec. Just. 1974-15, 19
The way this reads is backwards to what I previously read (and stated) where "revenues" was translated into Spanish later to "recursos" in 1952, which was interpreted to include debt, bypassing the original 1917 act for a balanced budget.
My Spanish isn't native, but my reaction was the same as yours. It may well be an archaic usage though, and etymology won't solve that for you. (All the same wiktionary is a perfectly good general-purpose dictionary).
This was a very interesting article. I did not know about the special statuses of Micronesia with the US. Similarly interesting about Puerto Rico being the largest bankruptcy ever in US history and it being a potential model for NJ and IL (because of their massive pension debt [0]).
Yep. It's a holdover from WW2 - most of Japan's island territories in the Pacific were handed to the US, UK, France, NZ, and AUS by the UN to be managed and governed. Most of those territories were given independence and sovereignty in the 80s-90s, but because of their tiny size they still remain dependent on those countries, Taiwan (development grants for recognizing Taiwan), and China (development grants for not recognizing Taiwan).
That's a bit different. Tahiti's ties to France go back long before WWII as it was a French "protectorate" (colony) starting in the 1840s, and has been under French rule ever since, although now it (as part of French Polynesia) is an "overseas country" of France meaning it has a large degree of self-rule not unlike Puerto Rico's relationship to the US.
Yep. The Special Committee on Decolonization was started specifically to help with giving soverignity to the various Pacific islands. The US gave soveriginity to most of it's former territories back in the 80s
Fun fact - I’m a photographer in rural Minnesota and I photographed 3 different senior girls from Micronesia one winter. Apparently a town about an hour from me has a little community of people from there, which I’d never known before.
GCP Gray has a nice quick overview of all territories and their overlapping, conflicting, and controversial statuese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASSOQDQvVLU (just six minutes)
There’s at least one thing in the article that I’m pretty sure is incorrect - it says $33 billion in debt obligations were cut down through the PROMESA restructuring. I think that vastly understated the magnitude of the debt; I believe it was more on the order of $130 billion.
I watched the restructuring pretty closely for a while but eventually lost interest after a series of will they/won’t they court decisions. I hope it delivers a sustainable outcome to the island. It’s a wonderful place and deserves better than what it’s been through in recent years.
I want to note two salient points which are missing from this writeup: (1) the PROMESA board is unelected (2) the Supreme Court has ruled that the board doesn't have to provide requested documents and transparency. This is the face of colonialism and tyranny.
They do call the USVIs a colony though, and I do accept that the US has outsize influence in these matters and has gotten off easy in the decolonisation game.
Puerto Rico could be energy-independent if the US government changed the energy policy that it dictates to the colony with no say of the inhabitants. It's optimaly located for a 100% solar-PV system (see South Australia for comparison). As it stands, it has to import a lot of fossil fuel:
> It's optimaly located for a 100% solar-PV system (see South Australia for comparison)
How does it compare to South Australia? SA reaches from 38-26 degrees of latitude, with empty scorching desert in the north (towards the equator) suitable for mass solar generation.
Puerto Rich is just north of 18 degrees of latitude with a predominantly tropical climate, meaning lots of clouds and rain. San Juan, for example, gets just under 3000 hours of sunshine a year, which is similar to places like Memphis or Oklahoma City (vs. Las Vegas, for example, at 3800 hours).
My family is from there (I was born there) and my parents just installed a solar roof and panels, I can't remember the metrics (sorry) but the house was consuming .5 of the energy and exporting over 3 to the grid.
My parents have batteries as well for the solar power. Sorry not super helpful...
It also has enormous hydro power potential. The environmental ramifications would probably make this a non-starter though.
Renewable energy ought to be a no-brainer for PR, though. I just wish the utility wasn’t stuck in a spot where it has to triage the basic delivery of electricity and a minimally functioning grid, and instead could focus on investing on rebuilding the overall generation and distribution system.
Went there in Feb 1998 to take a cruise for the total eclipse and drove up to Arecibo and got a tour of the dish. Beautiful countryside everywhere although we didn't get out of the car much. The salsa(?) music in our hotel bar was amazing - the place was jumping all night.
I'm just glad there's no foreign power occupying PR with troops and backing separatist groups there. That would be a mess. Glad stuff like that doesn't happen in the 21st century.
It is interesting that the proposed act would allow PRcans to vote for independence, but Washington would get to shape the constitution.
While this is true, a large part of the problem faced by Puerto Ricans is the local corruption we see in most of the Caribbean. In my country, a lot of people wish we were a part of the US, even as a territory. Mostly, not having as many immigrationrestrictions, when it comes to going to the mainland. A lot of us see Puerto Rico position, as a privilege rather than a bad thing.
Well, Bermuda technically has the same status as Scotland and Northern Ireland, but like it's just weird (the entire British system is super confusing and filled with technicalities and edge cases).
British Overseas territories in the Caribbean are just a weird case itself, and every couple years locals and the British govt consider handing them off to Canada.
> the entire British system is super confusing and filled with technicalities and edge cases
On the front of my my first passport (issued in 1968) was the legend "BRITISH SUBJECT". Back then I could barely read, but even when older I didn't really notice it. A few years ago I ran across the passport in my parents' house and thanks to the web was able to look up what it meant: nothing. I apparently did "have" that status but it gave me no rights, privileges or even obligations. Just junk wording on the document.
This was an Australian passport. Though the passports no longer say that on the front, the Queen's name is still inside mine; I suspect that when I renew it in another six years her son's name will unfortunately appear inside.
Well, before 1983 it would have allowed you to automatically get voting status in the UK, run as an MP, become a PM, enlist in the Royal Armed Forces, and work in the HMCS.
This was done because of the mass emigration from the UK to Canada+Australia+NZ+ZA in the late 19th and 20th century.
You basically had full British nationality until the UK reformed the system in the 80s.
Not really. The US system is much more formalized, defined, and streamlined due to regulatory changes stemming from FDR.
A lot of the British system's weirdness is due to colonialism and the weirdness of the Commonwealth system.
You don't see a similar number weirdness/edge cases in Australia, NZ, Ireland, Canada, or South Africa either (all 5 forked the British administrative and legal system in the 1930s-1980s)
I guess it's a matter of perspective, the US is still very confusing to me. But thanks for the explanation & information, I wasn't aware that all this was still going on in the Commonwealth.
Puerto Rico has repeatedly held votes on whether they want to become a state, become independent, or keep the status quo, and keeping the status quo generally wins. The most recent election had become a state beat status quo 52-48, but turnout was 50% and those who prefer the status quo vote at a much lower rate. It seems clear to me that most puerto ricans are happy with their current colonial status.
When Australia had a referendum on the monarchy I didn't vote to remove even though I am a republican. The two alternatives on offer were unpalatable (intentionally so I believe).
I know some people voted to keep the monarchy because they like it (??) but I suspect it survived due to people who thought the same way I did.
> required disclaimer: this is not a “woke” position, simply a recognition of the state of affairs.
“This is not a <term for recognition of the state of affairs with regard to structural power imbalances> just a recognition of the state of affairs (of the structural power imbalance)”.
“Mild taxation without representation” being, after all, a famous motto of the American Revolution.
Also, The Jones Act (which, for Puerto Rico, is very similar to the kind of regulation of trade without local representation, that was, as much or more than taxation as such, the impetus for the American Revolution) is estimated to cost Puerto Rico almost as much as federal taxation does.
As a yucky neoliberal, I am 100 percent in favor of repealing the Jones Act and PR (and Washington DC) statehood. I’m just not going to pretend that PR pays for a small fraction of what it receives in indirect benefits from the mainland.
1. It has three bioluminescent bays : https://www.discoverpuertorico.com/article/guide-to-explorin....
2. It has one of the top 10 beaches in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamenco_Beach
3. I can't find the stat now, but I think Puerto Rico produces a ton of engineers relative to it's population. Also has pretty good representation at NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Puerto_Ricans_in_the_U...
DM if you want recco's on the island! I'm from Aguada so can help on the west coast :-)