Ask HN: How do you see Brazil?
Would love to understand how the friends here see the Brazilian ecosystem, from the economic point of view, political, stability, entrepreneur and education.
Economic — I think it probably has the most potential of any country out there, except maybe India. A bit too protectionist, I don't understand why taxes on electronics are so expensive when Brazil doesn't produce them at home, as well as food being so expensive, or taxing cheap Chinese e-commerce sites when people don't have much money in the first place.
From what I hear the healthcare is amazing. My wife was shocked at how poor our healthcare system was compared to Brazil — apparently free, fast, high quality, thorough. For example, to see a GP here is sometimes a two week waiting list, on top of not being free, and of quite poor quality for a supposed first world country.
Political/Stability — It's a South American country, not much more to be said, corruption abound everywhere as well as bureaucracy (my father-in-law is waiting 5 years for an inheritance). And of course the country is shockingly dangerous
Entrepreneurship/Tech — One thing that amazed me in Brazil was the technology, I haven't been to the USA but in Europe it's at least a decade behind in terms of adoption of tech. From Pix, to NuBank, to iFood, Rappi, everyone adopting WhatsApp Business (no idea why this is barely used in Europe for small businesses). Maybe superficial examples but it highlights that entrepreneurship seems to be thriving there.
Education I have no idea, I suppose English should be focused more in schools since it opens lots of doors there
Did they not already witness the pros and cons of relying on other flavor-of-the-week social networks like Facebook for their landing pages and comms functionality?
See, you have a protectionist response to a problem, no wonder why others might be protectionist too.
The meaning is that Brazil should be a more successful country. Great location, favorable demographics, lots of natural resources, peaceful neighbors, large population, mostly stable government. But it just never quite becomes successful. But in could, in the future! But that's what people also said in the past.
Somewhere I read that around 1900, Brazil had the same GDP per capita as the United States. And that was the peak of Brazil.
I'm not trying to pick on Brazil. I have a favorable opinion of Brazil and its citizens. I hope that Brazil proves the economists wrong and becomes the country that it can be.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Brazil+is+the+country+of+the+futur...
Argentina is especially known for Juan Perón [1], who implemented a lot of socialist policies that were quite popular with the working class but were not generally helpful for Argentina.
Brazil suffered many times the exact same hyperinflation Argentina now faces. We have gone through several currencies now. If you search HN for Brazil, one of the top posts is about the creation of the real and how they convinced the population that this time it was somehow going to be different.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1757716
The real is merely 30 years old and has already inflated about 1100%. 1 BRL@1994-07 is about 12 BRL@2023-10. Somehow salaries don't seem to increase as much.
Much stronger rights for the enployees. We had employees essentially start protesting against “imperialism” (ie against the american company employing them) and stopped working and would disrupt meetings with passionate speeches anbout gender annd worker rights. This was the result of learning their American engineer counterparts made 3x more than them when they converted their salaries from reals.
we couldn’t fire them. In fact we had to pay them 1 year of salary when we let them go after months of discussions with brasil lawyers.
So good to hire from. Terrible to have an office there.
Nothing you said supports this statement. This comment pretty much explains why most roles are not at risk of being outsourced: it’s a pain in the ass to deal with.
Right now I run an engineering team from brasil but it’s on a contractor basis through a brasil company. Fantastic results. Incredible developer community. Deep desire to build proper code.
Almost all Python developers in Brasil go to yearly pilgrimages to Python Brasil or Python Nordeste or other developer conferences. Much higher participation in the “community” aspect of programming than anything I saw in the US or other countries.
I once felt bad about that as well. Then I learned all I could about the cost of living in the US and didn't feel so bad anymore. It's possible to live extremely comfortably here if you get paid in USD. With enough money, it even becomes possible to just ignore the numerous problems plaguing this country.
No idea why they'd give up that opportunity over worker rights. Were it not for the labor arbitrage opportunity, the american company probably wouldn't have been offering those jobs in the first place. Brazilian companies aren't offering more.
Brazil: - Needs more capital for even very simple projects, like infrastructure, clean water supply etc - Finance/banking sector is really well developed, better than every country I've visited - Brazilians need to learn english, it's the world's language and so many opportunities are missed out - Companies still see Brazil as a country that the legal system is messy, power of law isn't thought to be as most first world countries - It's a country with a lot of potential, but to unlock it, Brazil needs to find something that its good at, that isn't commodities
Also, one one observation is if there's a Reddit video clip of some crazy random shooting or assassination or off-duty policeman shooting, it seems to almost always be coming from Brazil, which is pretty scary.
Similar experience traveling to Mexico, felt safer walking around Merida & Progresso (on the Yucatan) at night than I feel walking around lots of US cities during the day.
One example I like to use is the price of dishwasher detergent. Take in account that having dishwashers is a luxury in South America.
A brand-name ~5 lb dishwasher detergent powder package retails for $ 6.50 ($ 7.10 if we consider sales tax) in the US. Last month I've been in Argentina and saw that a brand-name 5 lb package which is imported(!) retails for something like $ 7.50 w/ tax. A 6% premium considering that it could be considered a luxury product, there's also higher sales tax, but it is essentially the same price. It's a commodity after all, it's just detergent powder.
The same detergent powder that is sold in Argentina, manufactured in Brazil no less, retails for $ 32 here.
Why? There are no feasible alternatives, there is no feasible competition, and people will pay. The local companies here try to excuse themselves blaming high taxes, but this is not the full picture.
If I wanted to setup a company to benefit myself from the arbitrage, I'd be out of money just to hire a tax lawyer to understand the tax implications of importing and reselling detergent powder. What's the effective retail tax rate for detergent powder? Who knows?
Now, let's assume for our exercise the tax rate is insane and detergent powder has a 100% tax rate, I could be buying them at retail prices, selling them at half of what it is currently being sold and still make a profit.
If this detergent powder price point is just pure profit on the manufacturer/retailer part, I'd rather have low stock to not be burned when they decrease their prices to cut me, but to benefit from the true import duties that are available for businesses (yes, that 60% import duty everybody hears about is only for regular people) I'd have to spend a lot of money to structure a full sized import/export business and order a ton of detergent to dilute my fixed costs. Now the risk of loss is greater, and my small arbitrage business idea doesn't look so good.
The established companies won't have any competition as it is crazy as you see above, so they set the price point they want.
It is exactly the same story with the automotive industry, fashion and even Apple. They famously sell the most expensive iPhones in the world, but I actually got mine 2 weeks after launch from an official reseller that just charged a fair price (like 20% over US retail) on a sale.
Sorry for the long rant, the taxes are high, specially when you consider the perceived return on the tax paid, but it's not the full story.
There are the federal import duties + taxes, amounting to 29.4%. Note that this rate is specific for powdered dishwasher detergent.
Considering the standard São Paulo state sales tax of "18%" which is actually 21,95% as you don't simply multiply the good's price by the rate, but divide it by 1-rate, you end up with a 58,38% effective tax rate for importing and selling the detergent powder. Ah yes, the federal taxes compose the tax base as well, so you are paying taxes on the privilege of being taxed.
A good proxy for the right retail price would be just multiplying the US retail price - that already includes the profit - by the effective rate, which would land it at around $ 12. Consider that no sane business would be paying retail prices (and the import duties are applied to the bulk/transfer price), you can figure out that there's at least 169% of profit tacked on the package of detergent.
And that is why Argentina is broke and Brazil's real is the strongest south American currency. I'll take that over cheap dishwasher detergent powder any day.
Do you really visit the place, then?
(Edit: also my use of 'communities' may have been a bit misleading, that was a direct translation of the portuguese 'comunidade' which refers to a bunch of them)
We're talking about ~210 million people. We're just below USA in population in the American continent.
It's good for countries like USA to look after us, i believe we will eventually grow, we're still a babe democracy, the military dictatorship ended on the 80's.
So we still have a long way to go but we will get there. Brazil is one of the main SOY and Meat exporter. We're evolving greatly on the tech business preparing the man labor and launching startups on the market.
So yeah, keep a look out for us and let's grow together as entrepeneurs.
Brazil is a unique country. Like every country, including rich ones, it has its own set of advantages and challenges. I think that most people have an excessively negative image of Brazil, because of the reputation of it being unsafe. In reality, even though it's not as safe as Europe or Japan, it's not nearly as bad as people generally think. Outside of the big cities it's totally fine.
The main problems in Brazil in my view are wealth inequality and corruption. Brazil needs a big political reform to make it really hard for government officials to commit crimes without going to jail. Corruption is a problem because it's not punished, and people at the lower income levels see how this works and see no good way to get out of poverty. It's the main reason many turn to crime, because they see no future. Most people have a good heart and care for each other, though. Brazil has a kind of human warmth which is hard to find elsewhere. That's why many foreigners that go to Brazil say that the best of Brazil is its people, and they are right.
For people curious about Brazil, I recommend going to YouTube and just doing a search for "Brazil" (or "Brasil", for local videos). Recently, with the opening of visa free travel for a few countries, like USA and Japan, a lot of YouTubers started to visit and discover Brazil as a destination, and their videos can give you a rough idea of what to expect if you go. There are also many foreigners that moved to Brazil and make videos about their experience as well. Rio is very beautiful and all, but I don't understand why the obsession with it, I think it's much better to visit somewhere off the beaten path, like Florianopolis, or the Northeast, where Brazilians themselves go for tourism.
For other Brazilians, what I have to say is that Brazil also has many things to be really proud of, like being one of the greenest economies on Earth for its size, with over 80% of electricity coming from renewable sources, and increasing over time. Most cars in Brazil can run on any mixture of Gasoline and Ethanol, due to locally developed flex fuel technology, and I believe EVs will take a back seat to fuel cell ethanol vehicles in the future, so don't feel bad there aren't so many Teslas around. Ethanol is already available everywhere, unlike EV charging stations.
Brazil produces 6x more food than it consumes, so it helps to feed the world (see also Embrapa). However, it also produces airplanes, and other high tech products, even having its own small semiconductor industry. Brazil has a very advanced banking system that puts many developed markets to shame.
Brazil has if not the best, close to the best food in the world, including our local variations on Italian, Japanese and other cuisines, along with our own unique dishes, fruits, etc, which are not found elsewhere. Our culture is rich, with many genres of music unique to Brazil, like choro, which is unfortunately not so well known outside.
Brazil has tremendous biodiversity, and natural beauty in many forms. There are so many places worth to visit, like: Jalapão, Iguaçú falls, Lençóis Maranhenses, Chapada Diamantina, thousands of kilometers of beaches, beautiful islands like Ilha Grande, Ilhabela, Fernando de Noronha, too much to list all here.
Brazil is, paradoxically though, very closed, isolated. Search YouTube for the interesting custom car scene in Brazil to try to understand this a bit. Asianometry also recently put out an excellent video on Brazilian computer industry. In part there is this excessive protectionism, which leads to some commercial isolation, but also immigration is not like in the past when lots of Japanese and Europeans came, even if more recently more and more people are moving to Brazil. Things are more expensive in Brazil in part because of this strategy, which I actually do understand, because Brazil is one of the few countries that can be self-sufficient on most things (tech being a sore exception). When there are wars like now, not being too dependent on the outside world provides the country with stability.
When I retire, I'd like to go back to Brazil. If you mostly ignore the government like most people, and have enough money to be at least in the middle class, I think Brazil is a really great place to live, and I say that having lived in various parts of the developed world.