The morality discussion surrounding gambling is ultimately irrelevant, the fact is the Bahamian electorate voted against it and the PLP should have never bothered to waste a bunch of money and everyone's time if they were just going to ignore the result anyways. It was a giant middle finger in the electorate's face and basically told everyone voting is a waste of time TPTB will do whatever they want anyways. Very functional democratic system.

> Mr Ingraham warned party members against assuming victory is guaranteed

Sure, good attitude to have, but statistically speaking it's unlikely the PLP win the next election. No incumbent government has been reelected since 1997(!) and a wave of dropouts/potential dropouts from the incumbent party is never a good sign going into an election. I don't think the people hate Davis the same way they hated Minnis or Christie, but I don't think there is much enthusiasm either. Don't think it will be a '17 or '21 fashion blowout but I doubt he will upset the decades old trend of incumbents losing either.

Sad but true. It's why I don't fully blame our politicians for the BS that they do, the Bahamian people happily enable them and most don't want any better.

>upper crust

I think you've highlighted the bigger problem: most of the Bahamian political class is completely disconnected and out of touch with the needs and concerns of the average Bahamian. The average Bahamian, man or woman, is either 1.) working a service job for some meagre salary 2.) busting their backside to keep a small business profitable or 3.) underemployed, unemployed, retired etc. Issues like citizenship are just completely irrelevant and nowhere near the top of the list of the average Bahamian's needs and concerns, which mostly revolve around trying to make ends meet. For the most part the people that hyperfocus on these select social issues don't have to worry about trying to stay financially afloat in a very expensive country.

Say business licence is a product lmao. Paying upfront before receiving the licence would be completely understandable and reasonable if the fee was fixed but as it stands its basically a guessing game and people shouldn't have to wait long lengths of time to collect their refunds if it's going to remain this way.

Ok I'll reword "blame" to link. Trying to link him to the crash is silly. From everything available it seems to be just a screw up that unfortunately resulted in the loss of lives. There are plenty of close calls nobody knows about because nobody dies or no damage is done, honestly it's shocking there aren't more air accidents in the US just given the high volume of air traffic in the country. My point was shit happens sometimes and it isn't necessarily the fault of Biden, Trunk, or whoever happens to be President at that time.

Regarding the US government, yeah forcing people out MAY backfire but at the same time there is a lot of bloat in their government, just like here. I honestly don't remember very long X/Twitter outages in the aftermath of Musk's purchase, and really code wise Twitter and most social media is nothing special. Typical CRUD app that just fetches data and displays it. The only thing that may be remotely complex is the algorithm that displays posts, but even then that's not on the same tier as anything scientific or financial that usually requires specific industry expert input to get accurate results with. Infrastructure wise I'm sure they need a hell of a lot of resources to keep it online just to the sheer amount of users worldwide but I don't see why all of those people from the Dorsey era would be needed to do that either. You literally had people bragging about drinking free wine like coffee on the job, if that doesn't scream excess idk what does. Given that it's still active the trimming of staff has not been disastrous for the platform.

I do agree that I think government employees should be treated with some respect but at the same time most of them are probably not needed. Even here we only have such a bloated, useless, and inefficient government workforce because the private sector is not big enough to take them all in. At the end of the day it's the taxpayer subsidizing their salary and government employment (especially in this country) is basically just a giant welfare program that allows the beneficiary to retain some dignity. You can't expect the taxpayer to fund all of that shit forever, there comes a breaking point where it's simply impossible.

Where did I say that only black people funded the number boys? I never said that Pindling was the only person involved with drugs either, I said that he was the most prominent. Read my comment again.

The main point of my comment was that comparing the old white money that got rich from running rum to drug runners or the numbers boys is just stupid because from the local perspective what they did was perfectly legal. Argue the morality all you want but from a strictly legal perspective they were not doing anything wrong. By the times of drug running a lot of them were either dead, left the country, or didn't have a need to get involved with dirty money considering they already had clean fortunes amassed anyways so idk why someone would slander them with that either. The white people that did benefit from the drug trade were lower class that used it as an opportunity to move up and a lot of them then invested into legitimate business ventures anyways.

Again, whatever someone's opinion on the number boys themselves or gambling is irrelevant because the fact is they broke the law for years and then got rewarded by the government for doing so. What the Christie administration did was a national shame. Rewarding criminals is already bad enough, but doing so in defiance of the expressed wishes of Bahamian voters is just a giant slap in the face to everyone in this country. Why bother having laws? What example does it set when we tell criminals its ok to break laws as long as the leaders benefit too? Even better, what does it say when the leaders help them then get away with the crime and clean the money up? We wonder why we have such major cultural problems in this country but look at the piss poor examples of leaders we have at the top. The country is rotting from the head down and it will probably never get fixed because honest people don't last long in politics, especially in a small cutthroat nation like this one.

Agreed. Cruise visitors are good for collecting tax but so sadly most of them don't spend anything worthwhile on shore, which is where all of the local economy is. Air arrivals are much more important because those are the people who rent cars/get taxis, book hotels/AirBNB, support bars/restaurants and support the local economy in general. The Minnis government was similarly obsessed with cruise visitors. I get that governments want tax money but taxes don't build an economy.

Asfaik that plane crash in DC was the heli pilots fault. ATC asked them repeatedly if they had a visual on the passenger plane and they responded affirmatively each time, but apparently they were observing the wrong aircraft...at least that is the account that I read. Like yeah the tariffs are stupid and the ones on China will affect us but trying to blame Trunk for that crash is just silly.

This comment is stupid for several reasons:

1.) Rum running wasn't a crime according to British/Bahamian laws. Making money running booze to the States was perfectly legitimate means of income.

2.) It's rich to slander the "white knights" as drug dealers when the first black head of government was the most prominent individual implicated in that industry. The "white knights" left in the country didn't have a need to peddle drugs either, they were already filthy rich by that point.

3.) The fact is that the numbers boys are criminals because they broke the law for years on end. Our corrupt government, despite the express wishes of the Bahamian voters, then rewarded them for breaking the law. We then wonder why the Americans label us as corrupt. Big mystery.