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This masquerades as a sincere personal connection to the country when it is simply a short sighted rant. Brazil is coming into its own on the world stage, but n

This masquerades as a sincere personal connection to the country when it is simply a short sighted rant. Brazil is coming into its own on the world stage, but not following the same paradigms as India and China. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks are moving hi-freq shops into the country because the margins are exponentially higher than in US. This information alone bodes well for the country as the government and these global corporations cooperate in developing the necessary infrastructure to support their operations especially i.t.o. internet pipelines. The advent of Rio as host for the olympics is further evidence of restructuring that the Brazilian government has achieved. And despite the inevitable cost of the infrastructure development outweighing short term gains, the long term gains (see Shanghai Expo 2010) will catapult Rio into the same stratosphere as an India or a China. On entrepreneurship, I'll be honest I am not up on details, but there have been significant articles about particularly financial start ups, which confirm the rapid evolution Brazil is undergoing.

whatever_dude 16y ago
All fair and well, but no amount of Olympics or World Cup hosting will change the fact that the country has problems that are so deeply ingrained into its culture that they have a huge halting impact on everything else. The culture of corruption and advantage-seeking is a big part of the Brazilian's way of life and that's what leads to every other problem - bureaucracy, slow development, bad education, etc. You can't solve the country's problems with faster internet pipes; when phone companies form a country-wide lobby just so each can have their own monopoly on specific states, it's not a problem of technology or investments anymore, it's a problem of a government that overlooks things like that and of a population that ignores the issue. And this is just one example (of many). We tend to read a lot of positive things about Brazil in the news. But after living in the country for a bit more than 30 years, I've come to understand how these are usually just overly positive spins, optimistically ignoring the larger picture of how crippling the country's culture is to any effort that is trying to move it forward. The government hasn't achieved any "restructuring". That anyone believes that is baffling and almost offensive to me. And I'm not talking about the current or previous presidents; this is not because of an individual or a group, but rather something that is really part of the country and will take decades to change, if at all. No one can really understand Brazil until they understand Gerson's Law: http://bit.ly/glzY06 http://bit.ly/glzY06

whatever_dude 16y ago

All fair and well, but no amount of Olympics or World Cup hosting will change the fact that the country has problems that are so deeply ingrained into its culture that they have a huge halting impact on everything else. The culture of corruption and advantage-seeking is a big part of the Brazilian's way of life and that's what leads to every other problem - bureaucracy, slow development, bad education, etc. You can't solve the country's problems with faster internet pipes; when phone companies form a country-wide lobby just so each can have their own monopoly on specific states, it's not a problem of technology or investments anymore, it's a problem of a government that overlooks things like that and of a population that ignores the issue. And this is just one example (of many). We tend to read a lot of positive things about Brazil in the news. But after living in the country for a bit more than 30 years, I've come to understand how these are usually just overly positive spins, optimistically ignoring the larger picture of how crippling the country's culture is to any effort that is trying to move it forward. The government hasn't achieved any "restructuring". That anyone believes that is baffling and almost offensive to me. And I'm not talking about the current or previous presidents; this is not because of an individual or a group, but rather something that is really part of the country and will take decades to change, if at all. No one can really understand Brazil until they understand Gerson's Law: http://bit.ly/glzY06 http://bit.ly/glzY06