
Is Brazil finally ready to fulfill on its destiny as the country of the future? - xrd
http://www.webiphany.com/2010/12/14/is-brazil-finally-ready-to-fulfill-on-its-destiny-as-the-country-of-the-future/
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oldgregg
No, it's not. Most of my extended family is in Brazil so my wife and I decided
to work remote from Brazil for a couple months this fall. It's hard to really
understand how crippling the culture of bureaucracy and corruption is until
you experience it.

Internet. $200/mo USD for a theoretical 1MB connection. That's assuming the
power stays on. Lots of people use the internet (mostly at cafes) but it's
only for games and social networking -- nobody thinks of it as legitimate way
to make money.

Crime. In many parts of Sao Paulo and Rio people don't even stop at stoplights
because the risk of getting shot and carjacked is too real.

Education. Completely broken. Cheating is so rampant most teachers don't even
try to prevent it from happening. That's at the private schools where my
cousins have attended-- public schools are apparently far worse.

Entrepreneurs. Most people literally don't even have a mental category for
this. At best they make vague negative associations about you being a
"capitalist." The dream job is either working for the government or getting an
engineering position at some multi-national corporation.

All of this is unfortunate because the Brazilian people are really delightful
and quite creative. My wife is a designer and she says some of the best design
is coming out of Brazil right now. Unfortunately corruption and regulation has
completely driven out the spirit of innovation and that is unlikely to change
anytime soon.

~~~
bioinformatics
"risk of getting shot and carjacked is too real"

check and check, when I was 17 and 20.

Your whole assessment is perfect, enumerating most of the reasons that made me
leave.

~~~
whatever_dude
Funny - same here, but 18 and 30.

~~~
bioinformatics
São Paulo, or some other part of the country?

~~~
whatever_dude
São Paulo. Stray bullet to the head (luckily just a scratch) and then having
my car (and everything else I had with me) jacked at gunpoint.

~~~
bioinformatics
I was robbed when biking, got me in the leg. Carjacked a couple of years later
with ATM visit, clothes, wallet, etc gone.

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evanlh
American, been following Brazil since I studied there in college. I am
cautiously optimistic about Brazil's prospects, I believe a lot hinges on how
quickly they're able to reduce their inequality and fix education. Bolsa
familia is an innovative step and education, though terrible, is improving:
<http://www.economist.com/node/17679798>. Right now most of their GDP growth
is based on China's commodity demand so a lot depends on how stable that
remains.

I see the corruption issue largely as a result of the massive inequality--
which, like the U.S.'s inequality, tends to fall along racial lines-- and
politicians have been great at exploiting it to their advantage with help from
the monopolistic mass-media. Ideally a shift towards internet and social media
will increase transparency and reduce corruption and the social programmes
will smooth out inequality in the long run. IMO the Brazilian culture of
jeitinho, taking advantage of opportunity where it arises, is very close to
the America entreprenuerial spirit but adapted for an environment with a weak
rule-of-law.

So the optimism is because all the fundamentals are there -- a growing, young,
tech savvy population that loves social media & open source and a government
using a commodities boom to invest in education and social programmes. There
are plenty of startups-- <http://www.predicta.net>, for instance, or follow
this blog: <http://startupi.com.br/> Obviously it's all very fragile but I
remain hopeful, the people are amazing and there's nothing I'd like more than
to be able to go back.

~~~
ryetoasthumor
I agree wholeheartedly with your point. China and India are in a similarly
precarious position especially in regards to inequality. The urban centers and
their peripheral regions in all three countries are lightyears ahead of the
rural countryside. China as many before has pointed out has approx 200 million
migrant workers. They have no permanent employment prospects in the cities
they are migrating to and they are coming out of abject poverty to begin with.

India is in the same position. Cheating is of no consequence when they aren't
enough schools to accomodate the population. And the disparity is not minor,
it is catastrophic.

These middle income countries are all in a precarious position, so writing any
one or all of them off is uneducated and foolish.

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ryetoasthumor
Blaming a country's problems on its "culture" however you are defining that is
a cop out. India has these exact problems at 5 times the scale. Have any of
you tried to start an education company there, all the government officials I
spoke to wanted a minimum 1 million dollar bribe, yet it would be idiotic to
say that India is doomed when their rapid development is staring you in the
face.

Brazil doesn't suffer from novel and "culturally" inherent problems. You would
never say that Brazil is culturally inferior to another country because that
is bigotted and ridiculous. The country is suffering the same developing
bottle necks that others have and continue to face. Look at where the country
has come from, look at where it is now, and I implore you to actually compare
Brazil to the other (B)RICS etc. since they offer the best contextual
comparison.

The most incredible thing about Brazil is that despite the insurmountable odds
whether it is the wheels of capitalism, passionate people, or government
involvement - or perhaps a hybrid - Brazil is not lost.

Cynicism has its place too, but in an objective analysis of Brazil's prospects
on the world stage, leave it out. I respect your experiences and what you have
contributed, but the points of information you have provided are without the
global context necessary to understand Brazil's place.

Will Rio offer the world the next Silicon Valley? Only time will tell, but its
clear to me that it has a damn good shot.

~~~
whatever_dude
How long have you lived in the country, other than seeing 'articles' about it?

~~~
ryetoasthumor
My father grew up in the favellas without parents, his mother (my grandmother)
died when he was just a kid and he never knew is father, as is common in the
slums. He was able to support himself through pickpocketing and any other way
to feed and clothe himself. Sometime in his late teen years, through a gang
connection, he was placed in a job at a factory. He worked his ass off at jobs
like this for twenty years.

He has never told me how, but one day he left his job and started a small
manufacturing business, partnering with the manager from his very first job
who he had befriended.As soon as he could afford it, he took my mother and
sister and moved to the United States.

I lived in Brazil for almost five years after grad school. My father passed
away just last year, and I promised him to go back and look for entrepreneurs
like him to fund with micro loans.

My father represents the entrepreneurial spirit that you claim is lacking in
Brazil. I know that you are wrong when you say Brazilian culture cannot
support a Silicon Valley.

------
whatever_dude
Easy answer: no.

Brazil has a lot of positive things going for it, but when you have a cultural
background that's as rotten as Brazil's one is, you can count on everything to
fail stupendously.

~~~
bioinformatics
Brazil has been the country of the future for at least 37 years.

~~~
dguaraglia
Once a friend of mine who happens to know someone working for the CIA said
(and I quote) "this friend guy at the CIA tells me they see Brazil as 'the
country of the future' and they are doing their best to keep it that way". I
guess he was (partly) joking but, truth is, Brazil only started to recover
when it stopped following the 'advice' coming from the IMF and started running
the show on its own.

I hear the right-wing free-marketeers crying "regulation! socialism! welfare
state! high interest!" and the rest. Yet, what works best for the US might not
be what works best for Brazil. Just saying.

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lhorie
I'm seeing a lot of (justified) negative feelings towards Brazilian culture,
but I think dismissing the tech scene in Brazil outright is a bit like talking
about the american redneck stereotype and forgetting about this little place
called Silicon Valley.

I recall seeing an article a while back about some successful entrepreneurs
from Brazil and I know a guy that is trying to get a VoIP startup off the
ground there. If anything, I'd say that technology is Brazil's best chance at
becoming the eluded "country of the future". I mean, voting machines and Lua
came from there, so it's not like there isn't potential.

~~~
whatever_dude
The techs are alright. Both things you mention are two prime examples (I'm
still flabbergasted how well the voting machines thing worked out, because it
had all the reasons in the world to fail).

But when you need to invest 4x more on hardware and software to have something
that is 2 years older than standard hardware and software, all inside a
bureaucratic state that adds dozens of legal impediments or delays to anyone
who wants to make some honest money, it's easy to see why any potential
entrepreneur has to tread much more dangerous waters in Brazil than it would
anywhere else.

~~~
lhorie
On the one hand I agree that there's a lot of complications on the non-tech
side of things over there, but on the other I can't help thinking that many
successful tech efforts had some non-trivial roadblocks to overcome, e.g.
google (who needs another search engine?) and youtube (how are they possibly
going to monetize that?) come to mind.

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quanticle
Is there any reason for the random hypenation? Its very distracting.

~~~
alexh
for some reason, the hyphenation does not show up in the source. Could be a
glitchy javascript library trying to do intelligent line wraps.

~~~
jwegan
It appears to only be glitchy on Chrome. I opened it up in Firefox and the
hyphenations were only at the line wraps.

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dguaraglia
BTW, what the heck is it with all the misplaced hyphens? It's kind of
annoying.

------
BluePoints
The US should follow their energy independence stance... there is no reason
why they can and we can't.

~~~
Symmetry
I don't really see why we should try to be indpendant in energy rather than
copper or cars or anything else. Trade and specialization are important and
its only nationalism to want to try to produce everything in one's own
country. Now if you're saying that we shouldn't be dependant on the the
particular countries that now produce oil I might agree, but what would be
wrong with the US being dependant on Mexican solar energy or Brazilian
sugarcane?

~~~
nwatson
problem here is we choose to not depend on Brazilian sugar cane ethanol. we
instead impose huge import tariffs to protect our possibly net-energy-negative
corn ethanol lobby.

