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The future:
Modern Warfare 2 five-day sales hit $550 million
Half a billion in 5 days. Who would have thought that a ‘kids’ toy’ industry would become so important? Well, I did. BTW, my original point about Brazil’s backward approach on videogames continues to be valid: MW2 will be selling for the amazing amount of 250 Reais (aprox. 140 US$) compared to US$ 59.99 in the US.
The Past:
Fat cat pay – Then and now
Among all the stupid arguments and lies being sold during this recession, this whole controversy on CEO pay has to be the worst. Pure media garbage and political populism.
The clouds!
Chavez asking Cubans to ‘bomb clouds’ amid drought
What a clown.
Lula from 2000 makes a lot of sense! hehehehehehehehehehe
I thought this one was funny (in a bad way).
So what I got from this new “strategy” around avoiding tax evasion here is (Brazilian friends please correct me if I am wrong):
Every time a consumer buys something, the store is obligated to offer a receipt that is assigned to the customer´s tax ID (CPF). Then, when customers declare their taxes at the end of a fiscal year they can receive a “rebate” based on the total amount of those receipts. So basically the government hopes that customers become a tax enforcer of sorts.
Amazingly, this crazy scheme seemed to make perfect sense for my fellow Brazilians. Why, some people are thriving on this! They ask for every single receipt, sometimes they even instruct other people (who don´t pay taxes) to use their tax Ids so to “maximize” the benefit.
My simples question was: has the government even considered lowering these taxes to decrease evasion? Has anyone thought of all the new costs associated with this new crazy policy?
This goes beyond not knowing Occam’s razor. This looks like a bunch of bureaucrats playing economists.
I am visiting Brazil after quite a while and it´s been quite an interesting trip. I had a chance to meet some old friends, people I haven´t spoken to in 10, 15 years.
These meetings reminded me of a Borges´ short story called “The Other” where two Borges, one young and other old, meet. They know they are the same but yet can barely communicate. All told in the usual smart and profound Borges way.
When I spoke with these friends I noticed how they are all in this weird state of despair and resignation about Brazil´s situation. Most of them pretty much decided to ignore politics all together. It´s a mix of a “nothing can be done” attitude with a feeling that things at least are improving a little bit at the time (I bet there are many worse places in the world! They would tell me). Every single one of them hates Lula and all he represents, but in the end there is no alternative in the horizon.
It reminds me the way I was when I lived here. It was one of the main reasons why I decided that there was no alternative besides just getting out of here.
I could see how they got annoyed at me when I started to tell them everything I thought needed to be changed and how in the US things are always in flux and alternatives to issues are always being debated. People sometimes (maybe most times) don´t like to be reminded of certain things. Ignorance may not be bliss, but sometimes seems to be a necessary survival tool.
At the end I felt exactly like old Borges in the end of the short story. Our talks felt like a wasted effort in all fronts. My friends will probably forget quickly everything we talked about, and will only remember the fact that an old friend came to visit after so many years with some pretty crazy right wing theories of how to change the world. And I will keep the memory of seeing how things are still the same here, and how all my smart and nice friends continue to live in hopelessness and are ultimately lost when the subject is trying to fix the humongous mess called Brazil.
Another great idea that comes from the new world power: The government will pay a salary to a criminal’s family.
That’s right folks. You go to jail; your family gets a check at the end of the month.
Now that is what I call the definite solution to unemployment. Pure genius.
There must be something wrong with me.
You see, I have this crazy principle that people/groups/countries should be rewarded when they do things right. It is not so much a matter of what is just or not, but mostly a question of being rational and trying to push people to behave correctly.
But society nowadays doesn’t seem to understand this rule. It seems that the rule has been reversed, and we should actually give things to people who are failing on the hope that they can improve after being rewarded. When I say people, I really mean the left.
You can find this everywhere: The UN choosing Libya to chair the Human Rights Commission. FIFA choosing South Africa to host the soccer world cup. And now the IOC favoring Rio (over Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago) to be the host of the 2016 Olympics.
Seriously, what is the rationale here? Rio is a total mess. It cannot control its urban violence (more than 8 thousand violent deaths per year according to this – it is probably much worse since many deaths go unreported). Public transportation is a nightmare. Sport facilities are a joke.
Yet, a lot of Brazilian friends are celebrating as if this was great news. Why I don’t know. Do they think the city will transform itself because of a sports competition? Why would that be the trigger? If anything, funds that should be used to things like education and health will be diverted to stupid new stadiums.
But even more important, don’t they know how wrong this choice is?
Why reward incompetence?
Lula diz que eleição presidencial não terá candidato de direita
“Pela primeira vez não vamos ter um candidato de direita na campanha. Vocês querem conquista melhor do que não ter um candidato de direita?“, perguntou Lula durante evento de comemoração dos 45 anos da criação do Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (Ipea).
“Uns podem não ser tão de esquerda quanto eram. Não tem problema. Era inimaginável outro dia que chegássemos a esse momento no Brasil. Não tem um candidato que represente a direita. É fantástico isso.”
Fantastic, indeed. What an idiot. How can this even be called Democracy?
No wonder! He does love all kinds of plants, leaves, etc. Happy times!
According to the CIA Factbook, these are the top 15 oil producer countries in the world:
1 Russia 9,980,000 2007 est.
2 Saudi Arabia 9,200,000 2008 est.
3 United States 8,457,000 2007 est.
4 Iran 4,700,000 2007 est.
5 China 3,725,000 2008 est.
6 Mexico 3,501,000 2007 est.
7 Canada 3,425,000 2007 est.
8 United Arab Emirates 2,948,000 2007 est.
9 European Union 2,676,000 2007 est.
10 Venezuela 2,667,000 2007 est.
11 Kuwait 2,613,000 2007 est.
12 Norway 2,565,000 2007 est.
13 Iraq 2,420,000 2008 est.
14 Nigeria 2,352,000 2007 est.
15 Brazil 2,277,000 2007 est.
So from the 15, we have 4 developed countries (US, Canada, EU and Norway), 4 ‘developing’ countries (Russia, China, Mexico and Brazil) and 7 basket-case messes (Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Venezuela, Kuwait, Iraq and Nigeria). One could even argue that Russia should be on the bottom group, and it is hard to ignore that they are going down that route lately.
Now that Brazil will probably jump up on this list with its new pre-sal fields, the question is: will it move to the developed group or descend into the hopeless crazy bunch?
For the developed countries, oil is hugely important as an enabler but not as a revenue source. US and EU import a bunch of oil, and Canada is in a real special situation due to its proximity of the US. I would say that the only exception is Norway, which depends big time on oil revenue and apparently has done a good job on keeping the other parts of its economy going (and avoiding the ‘Dutch disease’ syndrome). This article for instance says that the main reasons Norway was successful here were clearly defined ownership and sharing rules, and its strong democratic foundation… Can anyone say that Brazil has a history of defining bureaucratic rules well and a ‘very strong’ democratic foundation at this point?
I don’t want to be too cynical but it is hard for me to believe that Lula and his gang of lefties will be wise enough to play this card right. Especially with everything else that has been going on in Latin America, it seems to be that all things considered, Brazil is still much more similar to Venezuela than it is to Norway.
Wait and see I guess.
I thought Lula had topped the scale with his comment on “white blue-eyed man” causing the crisis. But yet again, I was wrong. Alex explains to us all that Lula didn’t really mean that our current crisis was created by white blue-eyed individuals but by “white blue-eyed nations”.
First of all, even though it is plausible that Lula really meant to generalize his racist rant, he was pretty specific with his words when he said that “I do not know any black or indigenous bankers”. So, before getting to the main point, let’s introduce Mr.Squid to some nice “black bankers”, many of them who had their fair share on the current mess:
Stan O’Neal – Currently serves on the board of Alcoa Inc. and is the former President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Merrill Lynch & Co.
Richard Dean Parson – Citigroup Inc. Chairman
Franklin Delano Raines – Former Fannie Mae CEO
Kenneth I. Chenault – American Express Chairman and CEO
Ephren Taylor – CEO of City Capital Corporation
Clearly, the fact that these powerful people are black is completely unrelated to the financial crisis. After all, we have many other black people commanding companies of other kinds, like:
Don Thompson – McDonald’s USA President
John W. Thompson – Symantec Corporation Chairman and CEO
Ursula M Burns – Xerox Corporation President
Ronald A. Williams – Aetna Inc. President and CEO
And many, many more.
Now, if we do have blacks CEOs, a black President, black Supreme Court judges, generals, governors, mayors, etc, how can we really still be a “white blue-eyed nation”?
Of course Alex will tell me that the problem is that we don’t have enough powerful black people! That the proportion of poor black people is way high, and that Obama is just an exception.
Isn’t that’s a nice copout? I mean, no matter how many times we break a stereotype, how much we advance as a society, anything but perfection (which would mean what? The exact same proportion on every single aspect across all races?) we are a white nation and that is it.
I can understand Lula’s ignorance. After all, he is an uneducated person who speaks what he has been told all his life. He probably doesn’t have a clue of what the American people look like besides what he sees on TV and the few top politicians who come to visit him. It makes sense that he has never seen a “black banker”, or a black doctor, or a black lawyer, etc. It is also very easy to prove Lula wrong. Nothing more than a 15 minute Google search on black CEOs.
Now Alex’s rationalization is much, much worse. First because it is impossible to prove right or wrong. But most importantly, because it shows the kind of crap that is being fed to American teenagers who pay thousands of dollars to go to universities to supposedly be educated and understand better the world. The kind of crap that goes from theory to practice really quickly, and with the help of our media, becomes the unchallengeable truth. I mean, Maureen Dowd even thinks white brown-eyed people suffer with the blue eye discrimination.
Am I saying that the US is a perfect nation? Of course not. But stupid myths like this one actually makes progress harder, not easier.
Câmara proíbe demissão de trabalhador cuja mulher esteja grávida; texto vai ao Senado
Besides being a great economic measure, this might also help bringing back the birth rate up!
Brazil Will Fall From 5 To 8 In Population Size By 2050
After all, what that country really needs is more poor children! Great stuff.
Autônomos só podem cobrar 13º se estiver no contrato
My only question is: Why stop at 13? Why not 14, 18, 29?
I was trying to find out some information about the candidates for mayor of Sao Paulo, so I went to UOL. Now, when I click on a candidate, I get this.
This is just amazing. They list the most irrelevant data first (age at the end of 2008??? CPF???) and even worse, they start to list the candidate’s assets next!
Seriously, someone has to help me here… Why would anyone in the planet care if Marta Suplicy has “5 Quadros, 2 Tapetes, 3 Esculturas, 4 Aparelhos de Jantar, 2 Anéis E Um Brinco de Brilhantes, Recebidos Como Presente de Casamento”????
Nowhere to be found are anyone’s plans for the economy, social issues or anything nearly relevant.
It’s been a while (or maybe I haven’t been watching closely enough) but Brazil’s brightest have come up with yet another great advancement in workers’ rights: Now internships are required to provide a 30 day vacation. Oh, and there are also a bunch of other requirements included in the bill, like the need for a ‘educational coordinator’ to oversee the intern (including status reports!) and a 10% quota for the handicaped.
My first job in the IT world was as an intern in a big multi-national company. I worked at least 8 hours a day, there was no real connection between my studies and the work I was doing, and for the 2 years I worked there I didn’t take one day off. Of course the company benefited from my cheap labor but at the same time I was learning some invaluable skills that no University can teach you. That internship helped me a great deal to kick start my career.
I wonder if these big multi-national companies will still hire young inexperienced people when they are forced to comply with so many stupid restrictions. But I guess stupid socialist bureaucrats will never learn.
Não leio muito o Reinaldo Azevedo (principalmente porque depois de 11 anos fora os detalhes da política brasileira são insuportáveis), mas esse texto dele está muito bom:
I wonder what his biggest fan will have to say about this.
So last week was my first time back to Brazil in 4 years. This is by far the longest I’ve been away so maybe this is the closest I ever got of getting a “foreign” vision of my dear bananaland. Here is what I saw:
The good
- More police on the streets. At least in the neighborhoods I visited (South side of Sao Paulo) this was pretty evident. Not sure how effectiveness plays here, but it is at least a start.
- Commerce has grown a lot. Small shops, big Malls, all sorts of office buildings. I am not sure why the economic numbers are not that great… Visually the economy seems much bigger.
- Less homeless kids on the streets. You still see plenty, but it is clearly a better situation.
The bad
- Everything is amazingly expensive. From top to bottom, cars, food, gas, services, I could not find one thing that is considerably cheaper in Brazil when comparing to the US. Books are at least 100% more expensive, and it’s even worse with electronics. I can only wonder how much this impacts education and business in general.
- Slums are still everywhere. Being away for this long, it is revolting to see that the government is unable to at least organize this and create some sort of low income housing to replace this mess.
- No cultural diversity. This was really shocking. I went to several bookstores (Saraiva, Siciliano, Cultura) and found no book that could be considered right wing. No Ayn Rand, Friedman, Hayek, nothing. Not even Adam Smith! Of course, you could see Obama’s and Hillary’s books everywhere (I am not even going to start to talk about how easy it was to find Chomsky and others like him). On the other hand, there was not even a record of McCain’s in any catalog. To be fair, the one exception to the rule was Tim Hartford’s The Undercover Economist, which I found in one bookstore.
The Ugly
- I think that this government’s banning of all outdoor advertising has backfired big time. Because now all you can see is ugly graffiti and trash. Lots of trash, on the streets, parks, everywhere. I did see a report of some vandals being arrested for graffiti but this clearly has to be ramped up in some major way. The city looked as ugly as the worst parts of Newark… 20 years ago.
- Violence is still everywhere. You don’t feel safe driving, at home, not even in shopping malls. I met an Israeli girl on my way back and she said that Sao Paulo was the scariest place she’s ever been. No kidding.
- The traffic is really a joke. I can’t exactly describe it but that is not something that any city who claims to be civilized can have. The issue is not just the eternal bumper to bumper or the pot holes, but the total lawlessness and consequent war-like environment that you see everywhere. “Motoboys” reminded me of those gangs in Mad Max. Only angrier and multiplied by a zillion.
- Government in general is still a big failure. Anywhere you look, the Brazilian government is just a disaster after another. Corruption infests everything, from getting a license plate to getting a copy of your ID card. The labor laws are specially stupid and detrimental. A restaurant hires a waiter for instance, and he asks you not to be registered because he wants to receive unemployment. If he quits before you register (which is common), you still need to pay all kinds of legal penalties because if he sues your business you will definitely lose. All the absurdity of these financial shenanigans like the ‘13rd salary’, compulsory retirement funds and such are just such a stupid waste of time and resources. I know business owners who spend the majority of their day dealing with this kind of totally senseless bureaucracy. The number of taxes, fees and tariffs one pays is simply revolting. The fact that the country continues to grow despite all of this is probably the greatest riddle of all.
So what’s the verdict?
I am still happy that I left. I continue to try and convince my family and friends to leave. The amount of energy and stress you have to endure to succeed in Brazil is just enormous when compared to other places. I am not even saying that the US is the only place to go. I would try going to Australia, Canada, Chile, anywhere really. Even worse, my confidence that the current improvement trend will continue is really low. The pervasiveness of pre-historic left wing ideas is downright scary.
Unless some other family emergency occurs, I am not really sure of when (or if) I will ever be back.
“De Lula, é só “inteligência privilegiada”, “salvador do capitalismo brasileiro”, “Darwin andando”. São alguns dos epítetos que lançou sobre o atual presidente. Já em relação ao antecessor, que conhece há meio século, Delfim exercita sua capacidade ofídica. “O tempo que (Fernando Henrique Cardoso) poderia ter aproveitado para fazer o desenvolvimento, ele aproveitou para se reeleger. E o que é pior: pra nada. Porque o segundo mandato foi mais lamentável que o primeiro.”
That’s Delfim Netto. Can someone please tell me if people still believe this guy is a right-winger?
Ah, great words from another emerging idiot:
Correa to Bush: send us your troops or ’shut up’
I do wonder what people would think it the US sent troops to fight the FARC. Would this bozo like it?
—x—
Now here is the great Brazilian press showing its usual level of frivolity when interviewing Secretary of state Rice:
“QUESTION: The U.S. has been quoted as an interested player in the internationalization of the Amazon. True or false?
SECRETARY RICE: False. Brazil is a sovereign country that’s blessed with this great natural resource, the Amazon. Everyone in the world wants to see it protected and everyone wants to see it develop and be this great natural resource. But it would be working with Brazil in any way. But no, this is a false rumor. The United States doesn’t stand for the internationalization of the Amazon.”
That’s why I could never be a politician. Rice actually has to take these people seriously and respond an internet hoax as if it was a serious concern.
Pathetic.
—x—
Ahmadinejad’s Nuclear Mandate Strengthened After Iran Election
Now, I keep hearing that the Iranian people are not interested in fighting or provoking the US, and that the radicals led by Ahmadinejad were just a minority.
So how are we suppose to translate this news that his party is actually getting stronger?
Oh, is it just because we are trying to get them to stop? If the whole world just left Iran alone they would just become a fine and dandy democracy?
Please. This is very similar to Iraq’s situation before the war. Iran is sending all the wrong signals, and our great pacifists keep telling us that we should not take any of this seriously and if something does happen it is all our fault.
My real concern is: Is Obama going to be the Chamberlain of the 21st century?
A friend of mine lost her father recently. She is American, but her father was Brazilian. She traveled to Brazil for the funeral and to start all the legal stuff. After more than a week visiting dozens notary public offices, she sent me an email with some findings:
- Brazil’s bureaucracy is much worse than you think: Besides the usual stupidity of having several documents to “prove who you are” (CIC, RG, birth certificate, etc) she found that being married is a big problem for women. That’s because there are certain documents that “only the husband can sign!” Now, her husband is also American and had not traveled to Brazil… So one of the notaries ended up recommending the best way to bypass this: not mention that she was married.
Now she only has to wait five, maybe six years until the will is executed.
- Death subsidy: Besides just being amazingly expensive and time consuming, the Brazilian system has some laws that sound too stupid to be true. My friend’s father had a mortgage, and while she was trying to figure out how they would now pay for it, she got informed by a lawyer that “the mortgage was not a problem anymore”.
That’s right! If you die in Brazil, your mortgage is gone. At first I could not believe it and thought it was some shenanigan that lawyer was trying to pull. But no, he was right! My brother even told me about some story in the news recently about gangs who would buy real estate using old people’s ID so eventually the loan would just be ‘forgiven’.
I wonder how lenders try to avoid this kind of thing. Does a loan application include a check-up? Can they discriminate on age? Would thy sell a house to someone who likes to skydive?
No wonder it is so hard to finance real estate down there.
–x–
While talking with my brother about this, he told me about another specially crazy idea that the great Brazilian legislative concocted: if a company has a marketing campaign that promises prizes, something like “find a special stamp in one of our boxes and get another product for free” kind of thing, and for some reason a prize is not given to a customer until the promotion is over, the government gets the prize!
I wonder what would happen if the company “dies” during a campaign. Would they still be required to give the government those freebies?
Nelson Motta, para a Folha:
“SALVADOR – Conheci uma senhora portuguesa em Nova York que não conseguiu aprender inglês e esqueceu o português. Quando deixava recados, em vez de pedir para retornar ou “call me back”, dizia “chama-me para trás”. O projeto do deputado Aldo Rebelo que proíbe o uso de palavras estrangeiras também soa como um chamado para trás.
Sob pena de multa, mulheres nacionais não farão mais stripteases, mas excitantes “tira-provoca”. Os restaurantes terão dificuldades de explicar em seus cardápios que o “soprado de queijo” é o velho e banido suflê e que o “marronzinho” é o ex-brownie. A Aids terá de ser chamada de Sida sob pena de o doente não receber os remédios. E os lobistas, coitados, como se chamarão?
Ninguém falará mais laptop, que deverá ser chamado de “ordenador de colo”, já que computador é americanismo e também está fora da lei, só poderemos falar ordenador -macaqueando os franceses e os espanhóis. Falar em PC só se for o do B: os ordenadores pessoais serão os populares OPs, os programas rodarão no sistema “Janelas”. Já os CDs terão que ser chamados de DCs, “discos-compactos”.
As lanchonetes terão que mudar de nome. Como se chamarão os sundaes? O milk-shake será “leite-chacoalhado”? O afrancesado croquete é fácil, vira “cocréte”. Assim como as balas Hall’s são chamadas de “Rális” na Bahia.
Estou preocupadíssimo com os publicitários, que terão que fazer muitos seminários para se adaptar a uma nova e estranha língua. Mas eles são criativos, encontrarão boas expressões nacionais para layout, release, top de linha. Pior para os surfistas, que já não tem um vocabulário muito amplo e ainda serão privados do pouco que têm.
Livre da nefasta influência estrangeira, a nossa língua será pura. Nem nós a entenderemos.”
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