Maybe Orson Scott Card is right. Maybe Brazil will be a place of great influence in the future. I would very seriously consider moving to a country that actually focused on governing its people while allowing business to continue in an intelligent fashion.

Sadly, I don't know where that would be at the moment, but I wouldn't feel bad about learning Portuguese if it turned out to be Brazil.

> Sadly, I don't know where that would be at the moment

At the moment that would probably be the US, or Canada, or one of the European powers. Probably not any emerging country. Certainly not Brazil.

I'm Brazilian. Brazil has come a long way in the past 20 years, but corruption is still way worse than the corruption that happens in the US. To sum up, in the US you have a music industry lobby donating money to candidates which then vote in favor of copyright laws. In Brazil we have Colombian drug lords associated with the ruling party.

Just because people in UK and US are protesting in the streets it doesn't mean that things are in any way close to the crap that happens in developing countries. It just means you have different standards.

> I would very seriously consider moving to a country that actually focused on governing its people while allowing business to continue in an intelligent fashion.

Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway come to mind. Ireland has a pretty good business environment too.

> Ireland has a pretty good business environment too.

Definitely. Too bad about the economy, though.

"In Brazil we have Colombian drug lords associated with the ruling party." I'm also from Brasil. Whhaaat?? from where did you take this man? there is no evidence or anything about that, don't just say things you can't prove. Thats not even on the good media.

> don't just say things you can't prove.

It was on Estado de Sao Paulo e Veja, as diego_moita said.

(in English) http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brazilian_President_party_receiv...

(in Portuguese) http://pt.wikinews.org/wiki/FARC_pedem_para_participar_mais_...

Info on a related incident was leaked to wikileaks too. http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/07/06BRASILIA1511.html

> In a decision taken and kept in secret, the Brazilian National Committee on Refuges (CONARE) July 14 granted political refugee status to Francisco Antonio Cadena Collazos (known in Brazil as Olivera Medina), the so-called Ambassador to Brazil of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), who was arrested in Brazil in August 2005 at the request of Interpol, based on a Colombian arrest warrant which included charges of murder for terrorist purposes, kidnapping, extortion and terrorism.

Being in the media is not any kind of proof, specially the media you just cited.

The second link has a transcription of the FARC website. It's not a rumour, FARC used to be present in the Foro de Sao Paulo meetings. But of course you're free to reject any evidence you want.

From Brazil too.

Before the last presidential election, the newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo and the magazine Veja published articles showing that the FARC (Colombian guerrilla group supported by drug dealers) donated money for the Worker's Party (PT) campaign.

You are probably from sao paulo, like me.

Original poster is probably from rio.

I tend to agree. Drugs are a big part of Rio's politics. Sadly.

Hey, learn from our mistakes. Don't stop when corruption is down to manageable levels and pretend it's all good. Go all the way.

Don't stop till you've got a transparent society and then come help us get one!

If the company that employed you found you secretly dealing with one of their competitors you'd be fired and tossed off the premises immediately. Why do we accept less from our politicians?

I did just that -- moved to Brazil to start a company -- but for different reasons. Believe me, stupid copyright laws are the smallest obstacle for any new business. The absurd bureaucracy, the lack of credit and the escalating taxes, however...

Try Chile.

Bureaucracy and taxes are bad indeed, but on the good side you can make good money on consulting alone, and living cost is much lower than in US.

Can you tell us the name of your company?

Brazilian here, and I have to agree with you on that. It's so bad to start a company here that many start-ups are going to other countries trying to ease their way. Taxes and bureaucracy are insane here.

India is doing good in software patents and drug patents as well. Software cannot be patented and drugs have to be innovative (incremental is not good enough).

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-01-13/india...

This is a great piece of legislation, it's sad that here in Canada we're seeing the opposite with the current government proposing a pretty draconian copyright bill:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/law-cracks-down...

You know what's weird? I'm brazilian, I follow up this kind of content and I just found out about this here on Hacker News. I haven't seem an article about this in any of the big portals.

Anyway, IMHO, one of the most important parts of the bill are the Article 14 and Article 15. I've seen some increase in bloggers getting sued because of other people's comments on their blog, and the problem also spits out on social networks and other user generated content sites every now and then. Finally we get a sign that someone is looking into that.

Me too! the mainstream midia in Brasil is in really bad shape.

Mainstream media is in bad shape everywhere and Brazil is no exception. Unfortunately our media outlets appear to make extra efforts not to anger current government (whatever the current government is).

You want an example? It took weeks for Occupy Wall St to be mentioned on CNN. I don't remember I saw anything on the police abuse happening there either.

Our mainstream media would rather go bankrupt than saying anything positive about Brazil, reasons being extremely political though not allegedely.

Seek alternative media for information.

I'm brazilian and I don't think that its a WOHOO act or something. It's just that US and EU governments are so full of interests(and shit) that it looks good.

We don't have a big(and stupid) elite like the US does, so things stay reasonable.

> We don't have a big(and stupid) elite

Can I also get some of that stuff you're smoking? It looks awesome, dude!

Wait until subverting your government gets a bit more lucrative. Then, enjoy the ride :-)

I think that Brazil is anything but immune to money in politics:

http://www.economist.com/node/15580390

"Brazil is probably no more corrupt than other countries of similar size and wealth. It came out better than China and India and a long way ahead of Russia in the latest index of perceptions of corruption compiled by Transparency International, a German NGO. Brazil is blessed with competitive and aggressive media and tenacious institutions that investigate such scandals, revolving around the public-prosecutor’s office, a semi-autonomous part of the federal government and its local equivalents. This scrutiny has a price: the government thinks that another watchdog, the audit tribunal, is holding up spending on infrastructure unnecessarily."

ACTA hasn't been waved around in front of normal people enough to get to the point where everyone can articulate why it is a bad idea.

Its a bad idea because it propagates class ordering on the basis of knowledge.

wow! this needs more international support!

>ACTA is the last-gasp attempt of the US and the EU to preserve their intellectual monopolies.

If only. No doubt when this fails the bastards will think up something even more draconian, perhaps forced re-education or lobotomies for downloading μTorrent.

Western governments have been thoroughly captured by interests that represent a fraction of a percent of their populations. Anyone who expects this to come to an end while these governments still exist, is deluding themselves.

All laws in brazil are well thought and mostly free of influence.

The problem lies in the executive.

Basically, there's no enforcement of most laws and others are interpreted as they want.

If laws are interpreted as one wants, than don't you agree that it's not all that well thought to begin with? Or left ambiguous in purpose?

We have a long history of lenient laws regarding corruption.

> All laws in brazil are well thought and mostly free of influence.

I wouldn't go as far.

Starting a company is insanely complicated. Shutting one down is ten times as bad.

because of dumb bureaucratic stuff.

most of the time your papers stay in one place for no reason for years ...mostly when it's going trhu the IRS equivalent.