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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

> It is like living in a city where crime is expected so everyone puts up iron bars on their windows and the parks are all locked-down nightmares.

That's life in Brazilian big cities.

Brazil has been very violent for a long time because the government enforces a zero-sum game against the population. The poor half of the population is overwhelmingly colored people and the richer white half would rather burn it all down than share it better. Brazil is one of the most unequal societies on the planet.

If we go that direction globally, security will erode everywhere.

Trust me, we don't want that. You don't want every metropolis to become like a big Brazilian city.

Go find some Brazilian media website and read the news. It's pretty grim. It's what society is like with persistent high inequality, a forced zero-sum game to preserve status quo and the resulting general insecurity.

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As someone who’s lived in Latin America this is something I try to point out to people in the US every chance I get. If you have hundreds of millions you can post up in some remote mansion and get things delivered but even then your staff might steal things, your kids are targets, etc. And for everyone else, even the 1%, it’s not going to be a fun life. I’d much rather pay some more taxes and know that everyone has a safety net and UBI so that a much smaller fraction (never zero) are going to be so desperate, drug dependent, etc to commit crimes, especially the harder core ones. If you’re in the top 1% and everyone else is poor and desperate you are going to lack connection, community and safety. That's not good. We are all happier in a more equal society.

> We are all happier in a more equal society.

Fully agree. I've seen this to be the case

Oh, are you talking about Ecuador? Or maybe it's most of latam at this point.

I am living now in Portugal (has its own defects, won't hide it) after 10 years in Ecuador. Here, people park their cars in the street and expect them to be there next day. That would be crazy talk in Ecuador.

And then in Estonia you can drop your wallet or phone, and someone will take it to the police, and you get it all back without even a cent missing. We have robots on the streets, we can leave things like bicycles outside, every store is 80% self checkout with no security guards to speak of.

I lived in Buenos Aires for a year and it made me realize how good I had it. The contrast is so massive that it might as well be two different planets.

Portugal has its issues and it has some bad places, but overall is the most peaceful place I ever live. I wish one day I could go back and live there, but by the look of it it has become expensive to retire there.

Well Ecuador is special even when compared to its neighbour, Peru. The difference at the border is stark.

Being honest, this is 100% in big cities, but in the countryside it doesn't hold. A lot of cities between 100k-300k are pretty safe to live, people with gates leaves them open, even leave their cars entire open while getting a beer inside the house (all unlocked).

Most of the 50 most violent cities in Brazil aren't even the biggest in their State. The top 3 are all between 100 thousand and 150 thousand inhabitants. They all have homicide rates that are 2x to 4x as much as the national average. By comparison, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are much, much safer.

https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2023/07/20/anuario...

Reading down the list, I’m not sure the US is doing much better than Brazil. Mexico is stand out terrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

This list does not have the latest data from Brazilian cities. The Brazilian list I linked has dozens of Brazilian cities with a homicide rate of around 80 per 100.000.

New York City is one of the largest and safest places to live.

As someone who had a broken lock on their outer front door for a very long time, I could attest to this.

> this is 100% in big cities

Comparing Brazil with Mexico with Madrid with Tokyo and coming to the conclusion that "is all the same" seems farfetched.

Policies that see "the poor" as the problem instead "poverty" create violent dystopian cities. Good policy works and make big cities great places to live. Reducing inequality, giving good safety nets to citizens, treating drug addiction as a disease, etc. make a difference. Not 100% of big cities are the same.

I think they meant big cities in Brazil vs the countryside in Brazil.

Not big cities across the world.

Yes, I meant in Brazil.

Off-topic: I really need to add more context to my replies without considering the parent comment, it's not the first time that caused confusion.

It works wonders in San Francisco, doesn't it?

I am not American, so I could be wrong, but is San Francisco a good example of a city with low inequality? My understanding is that the opposite is true.

I read the parent comment as being sarcastic.

Neither am I. I just wanted to point out that the policies suggested in the parent comment didn't work out.

> globally, security will erode everywhere.

Just a day or so ago, Trump was asked about AUKUS, the closest military alliance that the US is a part of. He didn't know what it was.

For some months now, the Australian Liberal party has been going on and on about building nuclear power plants.

It's not about the electricity generation -- when pressed they'll admit that it might be as little as 4% of the supply -- but secretly it's about giving us the option of building nukes to defend ourselves in case our relationship with the US falls apart.

We can't be the only country thinking like this. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and many others have the industrial base and most have nuclear power plants already, nuclear engineers, etc...

I just checked: Singapore has started talking about building nuclear power plants also.

Sigh...

Not to go too much on an AusPol tangent, LNP Nuclear stuff is more about delaying the green-power transition.

It keeps coal / gas power around for a nuclear future that is decades away at best (and never more likely). It’s a sop to the oil and mining companies. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JBqVVBUdW84

That is probably 75% of the reason, but it does dovetail very nicely with the acquisition of nuclear submarines with nuclear weapons capabilities.

I thought I was just imagining things, but I looked it up and it turns out that the Liberal party has been flirting with arming Australia with nukes since the 1990s or maybe the late 80s.

The planned AUKUS submarines have no nuclear weapon capabilities. They're nuclear powered attack submarines that use conventional weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSN-AUKUS

> In January 2023, it was reported that the submarines were likely to incorporate a vertical launch system (VLS) for land-attack missiles. This would be a first for Royal Navy SSNs, which currently launch land-attack missiles via their torpedo tubes. A VLS system was described as likely to increase interoperability options with the US Navy since future US land attack missiles may not have a horizontal launch option.

The Tomahawk and basically every similar cruise missile can easily be outfitted with any warhead. SLBMs aren't the only delivery platform.

the enrichment required for a bomb vs a reactor is a bit (a lot) different. how will all these countries that are not allowed to have nukes hide their enrichment facilities that cannot be used for reactor fuel? hollow out a mountain like NK?

Why would they need to hide them?

> these countries that are not allowed to have nukes

Who says they are not allowed?

Countries with them.

Like the US, which was offering military protection in exchange for allies not building nukes.

The assurances have now been shown to be worthless.

Yes, and it’s actually even worse, it wasn’t just ‘not building them’ with Ukraine, they were stripped of them.

Countries like North Korea and Pakistan managed to build nuclear weapons and credible enough delivery systems a couple of decades ago How difficult do you think it will be for other countries with today's much more modern technology if they really want to build them? Id be very surprised if the likes of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel or even Iran don't already secretly possess nuclear weapons. I'd expext at least several others have ongoing programns - the cautionary lesson from the different fates of Saddam, Gaddafi, Zelensky and Kim has certainly been learned.

One way to read Iran's ballistic missile attack on empty Israeli desert is as a demonstration that Israel's defence is unable to stop anything even approaching 100% of ballistic missiles. With nuclear weapons, the cost of even 1 leaker is unacceptable. You notice Netanyahu's public feud with Iran appears to be winding down.

Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades.

Isn't Singapore's interest primarily in small modular reactors for their power grid? https://www.eco-business.com/news/singapore-prime-minister-s... We're talking about civilian technologies here, not nuclear profileration.

Maybe think about switching to buying French submarines.

> the government enforces a zero-sum game against the population

Can you expand on what that means, in laymen terms?

They assume there's a fixed amount of wealth to go around and if they give anything up they should immediately get something more valuable in return else they're losing out.

In reality, by making certain trades or investments new situations and opportunities can be created, making everyone better off.

If someone is winning, it must mean someone else is losing (hence the "deal" sums to zero)

There is no comprehension that an agreement might actually benefit both sides

This is presumably why you hear such things as "Canada is screwing us for 200 billion dollars a year" because we buy things from them

Edit: you can see it in this thread, too. As though helping poor people could have no benefit to the rich

I've seen it with people complaining about paying taxes for public transit, even though they only drive a car. Bonus points if they complain about traffic in the same rant without ever putting 2-and-2 together

In a zero-sum game you benefit only when somebody else loses and vice-versa.

Which means if you make a deal with someone and they benefit from it - you lost. In other words - you should only do deals that hurt others.

It's a truly vile view of world, but what's more important is - it's false and counterproductive. There's no place for international cooperation in zero-sum universe. There's just exploitation through military or non-military means.

In a zero-sum game world USA does not join WW1 nor WW2. Instead it waits for Europe to collapse and invade to establish "American Europe". Anything else is suboptimal.

NATO makes no sense in zero-sum game world. NATO clearly benefits smaller countries which means it hurts USA. NATO should be therefore dissolved and let's shake them small countries for protection money.

The funny thing is - in such a world USA loses and China wins.

>In a zero-sum game world USA does not join WW1 nor WW2

WW2 is not the best example. The USA got attacked (Pearl Harbor). The USA didn't enter WW2 until the USA got attacked.

> In a zero-sum game world USA does not join WW1 nor WW2. Instead it waits for Europe to collapse and invade to establish "American Europe". Anything else is suboptimal.

That would have led to Soviet Europe. This is a very naive take, the involvement of the US on WWII was absolutely a rational calculation based on a zero-sum game (defeating the Nazi and establishing spheres of influence). The game becomes positive sum on the basis of long term economic development.

By denying access to basic services like education and health care, brutalizing the poor and enforcing laws selectively (black kid with few grams of weed = dealer; white kid with 50g and a digital scale = user), the government makes sure that the only options available to poor black people are misery or crime. Prisons are overcrowded and become effective schools of crime. Once you're through the system, you have very little option besides continuing to practice crime to feed yourself.

An extremely regressive tax system and overly complicated bureaucracy, designed to extract bribes, all but guarantee that only the well connected can invest and thrive, and makes sure that there is very little social mobility. Free education is available at all levels, but public basic schools are atrocious and public colleges have competitive admission, meaning that those with access to private education growing up get a subsidized degree from the government.

Building codes are rarely enforced so slum dwellers need not be paid more than enough to eat.

It is all very well thought out. Brazil is not underdeveloped. Brazil is a slave society with extra steps.

You can find the same thing (well, similar) in San Francisco, Oslo, Antwerpen. It's plain refusal to police and hold up societal values.

That is a simplistic assumption. These cities you mentioned have nowhere near the same problem that Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, for example, have.

Brazilian police do overwhelming policing against poor communities and the resulting brutalization only compounds the problem.

El Salvador is strong evidence that the issue is a lack of enforcement. It hasn't been well covered in the mainstream media because it goes against the typical narrative. Their homicide rate in 2016 was 107 - one of the highest in the world and several times that of Brazil. As of 2024 it's 1.9, a fraction of even the US' rate. [1]

The solution? Round up obvious gang members, who conveniently like to mark it all over their body, throw them in prison, throw away the key. If they get violent in the process then don't even bother with the whole prison thing. Were the people just terrified about this horrible abuse of power? No, their Supreme Court made an exception to allow him to run for another term and he won with 80%+ of the vote, his party gaining a super majority, and El Salvador is rapidly going from one of the most dangerous places on Earth to a very safe one.

"First they came for the gang members... and then life was pretty great and everybody lived happily ever after." BTW similar sorts of crackdowns have also happened in numerous places including Thailand and the Philippines (in both cases over drugs), with similarly resoundingly positive results. Enforcement works.

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-homicides-gangs-bukel...

I mean, it is covered by mainstream media. There’s like 4 articles on it in the last year in the NYT. Here’s one: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/opinion/el-salvador-safet...

Let's see how incarcerating poor people in droves without due legal process will play out in the long term. Brazil has been doing that for a long time. We have very strong nation wide crime syndicates expanding into Latin America now.

The problem with El Salvador is that it's a better lock up 9 innocent people than let one guilty person go free type of problem now. And it is guilt by how you look and some association.

It's great if you're a tourist with limited Spanish ability and are tired of Costa Rica. Very shitty if you have any family members that get thrown in jail forever with out due process based on how the government felt they looked.

It's also apparently great if you live in El Salvador. His approval rating is > 90% and has been flirting with getting mighty close to 100% +/- statistical noise. Gang tattoos are not random - they are intentionally designed and chosen to indicate your unambiguous affiliation with a specific gang in order to prove loyalty and acceptance. In many cases they can also go much further indicating rank, crimes committed, and more.

They are also often done in very visible places, including the face and hands. Here [1] for instance are various individuals with MS-13 (which was a group initially started by Salvadoran migrants in LA) tattoos. You're not going to make a mistake there, and the gang itself would have also also taken care of imposters.

The groups expressing concern about the gang members tend to be Western human rights organizations in different countries. The president of El Salvador has offered to allow the countries of these groups to take in as many of the prisoners as they would like, if they'd like to more personally look after and ensure their rights. His offers have not been accepted.

[1] - https://yandex.com/images/search?text=ms13%20tattoos

there's no similarity. A general property of cultures that are like Brazil's is over-policing.

> a general property of cultures that are like Brazil's

Interesting take. Another such "superior" culture (or rather, superior military-industrial economy built on sustaining/managing conflict) exports mass policing technology to Brazil. https://idanlandau-com.translate.goog/2016/02/04/technologie... (in Hebrew: https://idanlandau.com/2016/02/04/technologies-of-oppression...)

...which is OP's point, that it needn't be zero sum, at least not from regional/global superpowers.

As a quick proxy:

Intentional homicide rate per 100,000 in Brazil: 20. In Norway: 0.725, Netherlands: 0.691. United States: 5.763

Not even the US, which those of us in Europe often consider crime-ridden, is nearly as dangerous as Brazil.

Colombia, 25.269. It mysteriously increases with proximity to cocaine.

Hmm, but the Netherlands, though. OK maybe scrub that theory.

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