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Comment by glibgil | Hacker News Reader

There are parts of Brazil where people drink mate like tea. No straw, no gourd, no sharing, no herpes.

That's true of Argentina too (and most likely anywhere where mate is drunk), it's called mate cocido: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_cocido

Funnily enough, I only got familiarized with herpes when I moved to Brazil. I only recall a couple people ever having herpes in Argentina, but in Brazil it was a pretty common occurrence. I imagine it might have to do with the 'browner' people of Argentina being more resilient and maybe just being asymptomatic.

"the 'browner' people of Argentina"

Argentina has a much larger fraction of "white" people than Brazil, right?

You'd think that, but not so much. There's a substantial Germanic/Polish descendant population in the South of Brazil. Very fair skinned. I'd love to have a breakdown by ancestry of both countries, but from my own anecdotal experience is is more common to see fair-skinned people in Brazil than in Argentina. (Just going quickly over it in Wikipedia it looks like about 90 million people in Brazil are 'white'. That's double the population of Argentina already.)

Yes, I'm aware that people in the South of Brazil are generally fair skinned due to the factors you mentioned.

I understood you were comparing Argentina as a whole to Brazil as a whole (and the latter has a much larger fraction of black/mixed/amerindian people, the other 90 million who are not white i.e. half of the population).

But fair enough, since you mentioned moving from Argentina to Brazil, I should have assumed shortest path :) and guessed you were talking about Rio Grande do Sul or Santa Catarina (obvious after reading your other references to it on this post).

P.S.: I need to update my "memorized demographics" - I remembered Brazil's population was 180 million but that's the number for 2002, today it's 200 million. An easy mistake to make coming from a country with a stagnant population growth...

" That's double the population of Argentina already".

You're mixing relative and absolute numbers to make your point. Brazil has 4 times the population of Argentina.

I mean it's like me arguing it's more common to see irish in the US than in Ireland. There are 33 million irish descendants in the US - That's like 6 times the population of Ireland...

Right, but adding both 'white' and 'brown' numbers (their terminology, not mine) you still get ~170 million people, which is ~85% of the population being 'somewhat white'. That's roughly the same relative number as Argentina.

The difference is the distribution on the 'white scale' if you will. Brazil has a higher influence of fairer-skinned Europeans (vast majority Portuguese, but with substantial German/Polish/Scandinavian) compared to Argentina (mostly Italian/Spanish, with tiny pockets of German, Swiss and British here and there.)

tl; dr: the chances of meeting a 'fair skinned' (defined as "European descendant) person are roughly the same in Argentina and Brazil. The chances of that person being blonde and have very fair skin are higher in Brazil.

(p.s. from my own anecdata: I consider myself to be smack in the middle of the darkness scale for Argentina, not too fair, not too dark. When I first moved to the South of Brazil I was surprised by how much I stood out in a group for being 'tan'.)

>Funnily enough, I only got familiarized with herpes when I moved to Brazil. I only recall a couple people ever having herpes in Argentina, but in Brazil it was a pretty common occurrence.

without any specific tradition of sharing coming to mind, cold sores were pretty common in Russia while i never heard about genital herpes when i lived there (while there were normal occurrence of other STDs).

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