I remember congress preventing middle eastern interest from purchasing a couple of east coast ports. If they can prevent sale of ports, then why couldn't they prevent sale of a company that produces ITAR protected equipment ? If the US govt can't be trusted to step in, then it can't be trusted for launching their rockets.
1 - Lockheed Martin and Boeing aren't forbidden from participating in the new truly competitive launch market. They just need to truly compete, instead of resting on their laurels, innovating at snails pace. 2 - There's Orbital Sciences two. 3 - Doesn't ITAR prevents SpaceX from being sold to the Chinese or Russians ?
This looks like a bunch of goons paid by ULA to smear SpaceX. And guess what, you're not succeeding. Each Space Shuttle launch cost (wasted) US$ 1,3 billion. SpaceX total cost to date was a little more than a single Space Shuttle launch, and they already did what 4 Space Shuttle launches couldn't do !
There's no national security if the USA is broke, buried in debt.
I look forward to Congress hearings on why ULA launches are soooo expensive !
There's nothing economical about United Launch Alliance. There's only United Launch Cartel in my opinion. Let's see it for what it is, a cartel and a jobs/pork barrel program.
This isn't so much about spam anymore, but about massive DDOS attacks. I even admit I had a few systems with wrongly configured DNS servers, there were used in DNS amplification attacks, and I would have loved to know about it before they were used for that. All fixed now. DDOS attacks are reaching 100Gbps for christ's sakes. If this prevents large sections of the Internet from griding to a halt, I'm all for it.
Of course, this makes NO sense if it gets adopted in the UK only, needs to be enabled at least for USA + Canada + European Union countries to make any sense ! It's sort of like the Kyoto protocol.
It should apply only to widely know vulnerabilities. Stuff like an open dns server, open smtp server, accounts without passwords or very easy ones. Of course you can't require everyone to have a patch that was released yesterday applied to their systems... The problem is coding this into law... Only vulnerabilities that can be detected with an open service where the owner of the server can enter his valid ip and ask the service to scan for known vulnerabilities. There are way too many systems in the wild with stupidities like that.
Tesla has a setting, you tell the car what time to recharge. You come home, plug the car in and it waits for the specified time to start recharging. After midnight there's soooo much spare electrical capacity, even if 20% of the cars wen't electric overnight, that would be a non issue (as long as they went electric uniformly around the country), it would actually be a great favor to the generation and distribution companies, as it would help use all that baseline generation capacity that costs just about the same to run at 100% vs 50% (nuclear/hydro/coal power plants, and recently natural gas power plants are getting there too). But the point is rhetorical, there's barely enough EV / Plug in hybrid capacity to migrate maybe 1-2% of cars per year to electricity. By the time this gets even close to becoming an issue, we'll have cheap battery modules that can purchase all electricity you need in the wee hours and use it during the day, plus solar panels that can run your hour in summer/spring daylight hours too. We'll be able to use zero electricity outside discount power hours. Not to mention LENR electricity generation which will be taking over before 2020 for sure.
There hasn't been a single Generation III nuclear issue at all. Generation II plants were designed in the 70s for Christ sake. The biggest issue about nuclear is ignorance. If the general population were fully informed on the diferences between gen III and gen IV nukes vs gen II, almost everyone would be on board, and there would be a movement towards REPLACING all Gen II plants with Gen III, instead of the current plan of leaving them alone in general !
If you don't know what I'm talking about, notice 95% of active nukes are generation II plants, 40 year old designs, 25yr or older plants. The only instance I would let them be kept operational would be in places that has ZERO earthquakes, ZERO hurricanes, ZERO risk of tsunami.
Gen IV plants are so much more reliable than Gen II, it's like comparing a 1940s car with a 2013 Prius in safety.
The real issue about nuclear is cost. And subsidies. That's why I believe all subsidies to all forms of energy should all be killed, leveling the playing field. Then things can be compared apples to apples. Strategic (clean) energy should be given low/zero interest loans, that's it.
It all boils down to an govt Agency who's job is keeping secrets, and has a mandate to lie to keep them. And as long as the people funding it (the American people) don't get wiser, this will continue. I'm not talking about the average american slashdotter, I'm talking about the average joe six pack on the street, that is far more interested in drinking his beer after work than getting to the bottom of anything really important.
True for everything except for telecom. While it`s not viable to have more than 2 sets of power lines, water mains,... A single power line utility pole can house 6 or more telecom cabling systems. And that`s talking copper. Using only fiber, its viable to have a dozen telcos worth of fiber lines on a single utility pole. Here in Brazil, the telcos rent pole vertical space from the power monopoly. There`s ZERO reason for any telecom monopoly anywhere. It might be problematic to have a 20 telecoms in the same city, but 6-8 is perfectly doable, and great for competition.
I live in a country that has all USA problems, plus a bunch of extra ones... Brazil. Our population density is similar to the USA, at the same time, we have twenty metro areas with a million plus population (including on the the ten largest metro areas in the world, Sao Paulo, with the population of Florida in a single metro area about 40x40 miles) But here we have up to 6 triple play (either mobile+landline+broadband or landline+broadband+tv) providers in most metro areas. Even though wholesale internet costs 10x more than in the USA (1 Gbps of wholesale internet costs about what 10 Gbps costs in the USA), we can get 35Mbps broadband for US$ 40 (R$ 100), ftth started about 2 yrs ago. The main difference is we don`t have those per city, per state monopolies for telecom, we have them for power, water, gas, but not for telecom. Its usual to find utilities poles with wiring for 5-6 separate telecoms running along with the electricity poles. Bottom line, even with our rampant corruption/taxes/govt intervention, at least we don`t but this local monopoly crap. Total effective taxes over telecoms are at least 45% of gross receipts, with 35% taxes directly over gross receipts (regardless of profits/losses). Wake up USA, Obama is bad, but the Tea Party conservatives are much, much, much, much worse. Pure free market don`t work, the USA shows that. Even a heavily regulated market such as in Europe works better (although in many ways less regulation than Europe can be good). But what really matters is getting rid of political cool aid. When the average citizen can spot govt/lobby crap and call it bullshit right of the bat, everything works so much better. That`s the real problem.
We're always protesting about the small things. Not to diminish the effect of a bus fare hike over people's life. But even ending corruption is the wrong protest. Corruption is the result of a lazy, passive, go along, way too peaceful Brazilian culture (the sum of that is a permissive environment to corruption).
1 - District voting, that's one change that would be tectonic over the Brazilian political establishment. That's the thing worth protesting (not that half baked, for show sugestion the Brazilian Bar Association, OAB made).
2 - Require all govt expenditure details available online, down to the line item. No more hidden sweetheart deals to the ones paying for your political campaign and hiring services from companies owned by your relatives and friends.
3 - Make all govt workers subject to the exact same rules the rest of us are, no tenure, pay the same taxes, have the same retirement benefits, and make them ACCOUNTABLE to the people
#3 is particularly interesting because a good bunch of the protesters are public workers.
If the Brazilian law was followed to the letter, half of our issues with govt would be solved. I wish we could worry about what the law says. Those in power (political and economical) disregard our laws left and right.
In Brazil it's unfortunately common to pay telco employees with access to the legal wiretapping gear and get illegal wiretaps without bothering with the subject's phone or home. You don't need ABIN to spy on Brazilians. Just this week Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a two term ex-president criticized the habit of those in power leaking legal wiretaps fom political gains, that happens often. ABIN is sort of a laughing stock here. We never hear of them doing anything good or important. While the CIA and NSA can be blamed for abusing their powers, they have lots of positive accomplishments to show. ABIN has nothing. The biggest problem of the Brazilian govt isn't corruption, it's massive incompetence, it's massive laziness.
That's right. Very few states have elected a governor that ran on efficiency, hard work, a MANAGEMENT CULTURE SHOCK. Minas Gerais is kicking ass. In most states running for governor with a motto like that will get you nowhere. Minas went from being below average from almost everything, even with lots of industries and natural resources, to being much higher than average, on just 10 years. We need a MANAGEMENT CULTURE SHOCK at the Federal level. I say Brazil is not a developing country, it's a country stuck in between. With a MANAGEMENT CULTURE SHOCK at the federal level we can become a developing country again. Handing out money to the poor won't make us a rich country, it will just bankrupt the govt and cause inflation. At the same time programs that enable people to get a job, give the people education, skills for life, those are in dire need, but the PT culture is at odds with hard work and self sufficiency.
The problem with the north and north east isn't the money they get, it's the even lazier people that live there. Poor chums. Need to stop complaining and start working. Parts of Ceara, Pernambuco are showing heat and dry land is no excuse for not working. Go learn a thing or two from Israel. Brazil needs a lot more hard work.
A right winger will viciously attack all social programs the left implements. Those politicians in Brazil don't get elected. We have essentially nothing to the right of center.
The problem is they're all corrupt, they're there to get as rich as possible. Major scandals documenting incompetence, passive corruption (taking bribes), influence trafficking (a political gatekeeper inside the govt that gets paid to open doors for others), the good parties ask for 3-5% bribes on contracts, the bad ones is 15% and up. The problem is the people first needs to educate itself on the larger issues, then protest on those, with just three fundamental changes, the situation will improve hugely. 1 - Need district voting, just yesterday the Brazilian Bar Association offered a half baked idea that addresses none of our core political problems effectively, since very few of the protesters even knew about the importance of district voting, something that every educated American, Canadian, British, German, French, Swiss,... can explain us why it's so important. Another smart move of the powerful to do something that keeps the big parties in power, keep the most corrupt congressman and senators ruling, avoid the big purge that will happen should district voting be enacted 2 - Make govt workers live by the same rules as every other Brazilian, no integral retirement, no tenure, pay the same taxes, and be accountable. Federal Congressman that get elected 4x get a huge pension, as each term earns them a sizable life long retirement, and they just get stacked one over the other 3 - Make all govt expenditure 100% traceable by the people over the internet, down to the line item
Those fix some of the core issues that plague us, not some superficial, temporary band aid.
There's a third, pretend you're working on it, and let it die down, try to use violence only when they have an excuse. Typical Brazilian way of doing things. Avoid confrontation, pretend to care, do as little as possible, because they expect the people to give up and forget. And continue to be the fox in the hound, collecting bribes everywhere, and doing a fair amount of money siphoning as quietly as possible.
Here in Brazil he have lots of oligopolies, 5 to 10 companies that share the bulk of any given market, pretending to compete against each other, but they only compete for big and huge customers, like banks that bend over backwards for companies that generate tens of thousands of "boletos" per month, that in the US was handled as mailing a check to pay a bill. But charge individual and small business customers almost exactly the same thing for their services. Being a Brazilian and having lived in the US through the bulk of the Clinton administration, we have none of the aggressive competition the US has. The few exceptions "telecoms" are marked by a pattern of broken promises to get market share, and a race to be the lowest quality provider in the market.
Brazil has an extremely uncompetitive internal market, marked by high margin businesses, huge barriers to entry, lack of effective anti-trust, ethical business practices, and a very high taxes on almost everything. I work for a small telco that has dozens of signed contracts to purchase services from larger telcos that promissed activation in one month, 10 months latter, nothing, and if my employer sues the large telcos, none of the large telcos will every supply them with anything. And the regulation agency couldn't care less.
Brazil's population would benefit 1000x more to protest against those issues than for lower bus fares.
We usually protest on tiny issues, instead of the core issues that drag us down.
PT used to be left-wing. When they figured out a left wing party need to ally with corrupt/populist center parties, in order to win presidency, they slowly moved to the center, actually left center. But kept all of their commie ideology at heart. They kept most of the dictatorial side of communism, plus the irresponsible populism. But kept the private property and wealth as a fountain of money to feast from. And all you can eat corruption. If Brazil had more oil money, they would very likely at least tried to pull a Hugo Chavez style govt here. But they know they're slowing bankrupting out country as it is. But Brazil has a bit more electoral maturity than Venezuela, Equator, Bolivia and Argentina, just a bit. Fortunately.
I think you're wrong. The lower middle class started the protest. Then most liberal elements of the upper middle class got involved to some extent. If the poor actually got involved, there wouldn't be enough space in those venues to hold them, it would have been 10x the people. Most protesting earn 2-5x minimum wage. That's middle class.
The root of our problem isn't in the politicians, it's in ourselves. Brazil has a corrupt culture. Our lack of peaceful activism, extreme tolerance for what's wrong, indifference to crime, our habit of skirting the law instead of changing, of thinking the law is good until we're affected by it, of wanting the govt to take care of things that should be up to us, specially lack of political activism. The politicians are just a consequence of that. Go around the world the Latin world (Latin America and Latin Europe) and you'll find those problems are wide spread. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and to some extent France have most of those issues. Too much labor unions and too little individual responsibility. The main difference is they went through many savage wars that forced the population to pick up arms, that taught the population the need to fight both with words and with weapons as a last resort. Brazil needs less fun and more political engagement. I'm not sure how many of those protesters are actually willing to do what needs to be done, to continue this movement online for many years it will take to change Brazil enough. Our people have gone through quick protests, and quickly get tired of it. Hopefully the Internet will change it all.
Said an ANONYMOUS COWARD ! Funny ! We have been fucked for a while, what we're doing is rising against that. Anyhow, ANONYMOUS COWARD, I'm not going to curse you. I pity you.
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I remember congress preventing middle eastern interest from purchasing a couple of east coast ports.
If they can prevent sale of ports, then why couldn't they prevent sale of a company that produces ITAR protected equipment ?
If the US govt can't be trusted to step in, then it can't be trusted for launching their rockets.
1 - Lockheed Martin and Boeing aren't forbidden from participating in the new truly competitive launch market. They just need to truly compete, instead of resting on their laurels, innovating at snails pace.
2 - There's Orbital Sciences two.
3 - Doesn't ITAR prevents SpaceX from being sold to the Chinese or Russians ?
This looks like a bunch of goons paid by ULA to smear SpaceX.
And guess what, you're not succeeding.
Each Space Shuttle launch cost (wasted) US$ 1,3 billion.
SpaceX total cost to date was a little more than a single Space Shuttle launch, and they already did what 4 Space Shuttle launches couldn't do !
There's no national security if the USA is broke, buried in debt.
I look forward to Congress hearings on why ULA launches are soooo expensive !
There's nothing economical about United Launch Alliance. There's only United Launch Cartel in my opinion.
Let's see it for what it is, a cartel and a jobs/pork barrel program.
This isn't so much about spam anymore, but about massive DDOS attacks.
I even admit I had a few systems with wrongly configured DNS servers, there were used in DNS amplification attacks, and I would have loved to know about it before they were used for that. All fixed now.
DDOS attacks are reaching 100Gbps for christ's sakes.
If this prevents large sections of the Internet from griding to a halt, I'm all for it.
Of course, this makes NO sense if it gets adopted in the UK only, needs to be enabled at least for USA + Canada + European Union countries to make any sense !
It's sort of like the Kyoto protocol.
It should apply only to widely know vulnerabilities. Stuff like an open dns server, open smtp server, accounts without passwords or very easy ones.
Of course you can't require everyone to have a patch that was released yesterday applied to their systems...
The problem is coding this into law...
Only vulnerabilities that can be detected with an open service where the owner of the server can enter his valid ip and ask the service to scan for known vulnerabilities.
There are way too many systems in the wild with stupidities like that.
Tesla has a setting, you tell the car what time to recharge. You come home, plug the car in and it waits for the specified time to start recharging.
After midnight there's soooo much spare electrical capacity, even if 20% of the cars wen't electric overnight, that would be a non issue (as long as they went electric uniformly around the country), it would actually be a great favor to the generation and distribution companies, as it would help use all that baseline generation capacity that costs just about the same to run at 100% vs 50% (nuclear/hydro/coal power plants, and recently natural gas power plants are getting there too). But the point is rhetorical, there's barely enough EV / Plug in hybrid capacity to migrate maybe 1-2% of cars per year to electricity.
By the time this gets even close to becoming an issue, we'll have cheap battery modules that can purchase all electricity you need in the wee hours and use it during the day, plus solar panels that can run your hour in summer/spring daylight hours too. We'll be able to use zero electricity outside discount power hours. Not to mention LENR electricity generation which will be taking over before 2020 for sure.
There hasn't been a single Generation III nuclear issue at all.
Generation II plants were designed in the 70s for Christ sake.
The biggest issue about nuclear is ignorance.
If the general population were fully informed on the diferences between gen III and gen IV nukes vs gen II, almost everyone would be on board, and there would be a movement towards REPLACING all Gen II plants with Gen III, instead of the current plan of leaving them alone in general !
If you don't know what I'm talking about, notice 95% of active nukes are generation II plants, 40 year old designs, 25yr or older plants. The only instance I would let them be kept operational would be in places that has ZERO earthquakes, ZERO hurricanes, ZERO risk of tsunami.
Gen IV plants are so much more reliable than Gen II, it's like comparing a 1940s car with a 2013 Prius in safety.
The real issue about nuclear is cost. And subsidies. That's why I believe all subsidies to all forms of energy should all be killed, leveling the playing field. Then things can be compared apples to apples. Strategic (clean) energy should be given low/zero interest loans, that's it.
It all boils down to an govt Agency who's job is keeping secrets, and has a mandate to lie to keep them.
And as long as the people funding it (the American people) don't get wiser, this will continue. I'm not talking about the average american slashdotter, I'm talking about the average joe six pack on the street, that is far more interested in drinking his beer after work than getting to the bottom of anything really important.
True for everything except for telecom. While it`s not viable to have more than 2 sets of power lines, water mains, ... A single power line utility pole can house 6 or more telecom cabling systems. And that`s talking copper. Using only fiber, its viable to have a dozen telcos worth of fiber lines on a single utility pole. Here in Brazil, the telcos rent pole vertical space from the power monopoly. There`s ZERO reason for any telecom monopoly anywhere. It might be problematic to have a 20 telecoms in the same city, but 6-8 is perfectly doable, and great for competition.
I live in a country that has all USA problems, plus a bunch of extra ones... Brazil.
Our population density is similar to the USA, at the same time, we have twenty metro areas with a million plus population (including on the the ten largest metro areas in the world, Sao Paulo, with the population of Florida in a single metro area about 40x40 miles)
But here we have up to 6 triple play (either mobile+landline+broadband or landline+broadband+tv) providers in most metro areas.
Even though wholesale internet costs 10x more than in the USA (1 Gbps of wholesale internet costs about what 10 Gbps costs in the USA), we can get 35Mbps broadband for US$ 40 (R$ 100), ftth started about 2 yrs ago.
The main difference is we don`t have those per city, per state monopolies for telecom, we have them for power, water, gas, but not for telecom. Its usual to find utilities poles with wiring for 5-6 separate telecoms running along with the electricity poles.
Bottom line, even with our rampant corruption/taxes/govt intervention, at least we don`t but this local monopoly crap. Total effective taxes over telecoms are at least 45% of gross receipts, with 35% taxes directly over gross receipts (regardless of profits/losses).
Wake up USA, Obama is bad, but the Tea Party conservatives are much, much, much, much worse.
Pure free market don`t work, the USA shows that. Even a heavily regulated market such as in Europe works better (although in many ways less regulation than Europe can be good).
But what really matters is getting rid of political cool aid. When the average citizen can spot govt/lobby crap and call it bullshit right of the bat, everything works so much better. That`s the real problem.
We're always protesting about the small things.
Not to diminish the effect of a bus fare hike over people's life.
But even ending corruption is the wrong protest. Corruption is the result of a lazy, passive, go along, way too peaceful Brazilian culture (the sum of that is a permissive environment to corruption).
1 - District voting, that's one change that would be tectonic over the Brazilian political establishment.
That's the thing worth protesting (not that half baked, for show sugestion the Brazilian Bar Association, OAB made).
2 - Require all govt expenditure details available online, down to the line item. No more hidden sweetheart deals to the ones paying for your political campaign and hiring services from companies owned by your relatives and friends.
3 - Make all govt workers subject to the exact same rules the rest of us are, no tenure, pay the same taxes, have the same retirement benefits, and make them ACCOUNTABLE to the people
#3 is particularly interesting because a good bunch of the protesters are public workers.
If the Brazilian law was followed to the letter, half of our issues with govt would be solved.
I wish we could worry about what the law says.
Those in power (political and economical) disregard our laws left and right.
If it were only that easy.
The biggest problem of the Brazilian govt isn't corruption, it's massive incompetence, it's massive laziness.
In Brazil it's unfortunately common to pay telco employees with access to the legal wiretapping gear and get illegal wiretaps without bothering with the subject's phone or home. You don't need ABIN to spy on Brazilians.
Just this week Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a two term ex-president criticized the habit of those in power leaking legal wiretaps fom political gains, that happens often.
ABIN is sort of a laughing stock here. We never hear of them doing anything good or important.
While the CIA and NSA can be blamed for abusing their powers, they have lots of positive accomplishments to show.
ABIN has nothing.
The biggest problem of the Brazilian govt isn't corruption, it's massive incompetence, it's massive laziness.
That's right. Very few states have elected a governor that ran on efficiency, hard work, a MANAGEMENT CULTURE SHOCK.
Minas Gerais is kicking ass.
In most states running for governor with a motto like that will get you nowhere.
Minas went from being below average from almost everything, even with lots of industries and natural resources, to being much higher than average, on just 10 years.
We need a MANAGEMENT CULTURE SHOCK at the Federal level.
I say Brazil is not a developing country, it's a country stuck in between.
With a MANAGEMENT CULTURE SHOCK at the federal level we can become a developing country again.
Handing out money to the poor won't make us a rich country, it will just bankrupt the govt and cause inflation.
At the same time programs that enable people to get a job, give the people education, skills for life, those are in dire need, but the PT culture is at odds with hard work and self sufficiency.
The problem with the north and north east isn't the money they get, it's the even lazier people that live there.
Poor chums. Need to stop complaining and start working. Parts of Ceara, Pernambuco are showing heat and dry land is no excuse for not working. Go learn a thing or two from Israel.
Brazil needs a lot more hard work.
A right winger will viciously attack all social programs the left implements.
Those politicians in Brazil don't get elected.
We have essentially nothing to the right of center.
The problem is they're all corrupt, they're there to get as rich as possible. ... can explain us why it's so important. Another smart move of the powerful to do something that keeps the big parties in power, keep the most corrupt congressman and senators ruling, avoid the big purge that will happen should district voting be enacted
Major scandals documenting incompetence, passive corruption (taking bribes), influence trafficking (a political gatekeeper inside the govt that gets paid to open doors for others), the good parties ask for 3-5% bribes on contracts, the bad ones is 15% and up.
The problem is the people first needs to educate itself on the larger issues, then protest on those, with just three fundamental changes, the situation will improve hugely.
1 - Need district voting, just yesterday the Brazilian Bar Association offered a half baked idea that addresses none of our core political problems effectively, since very few of the protesters even knew about the importance of district voting, something that every educated American, Canadian, British, German, French, Swiss,
2 - Make govt workers live by the same rules as every other Brazilian, no integral retirement, no tenure, pay the same taxes, and be accountable. Federal Congressman that get elected 4x get a huge pension, as each term earns them a sizable life long retirement, and they just get stacked one over the other
3 - Make all govt expenditure 100% traceable by the people over the internet, down to the line item
Those fix some of the core issues that plague us, not some superficial, temporary band aid.
There's a third, pretend you're working on it, and let it die down, try to use violence only when they have an excuse.
Typical Brazilian way of doing things. Avoid confrontation, pretend to care, do as little as possible, because they expect the people to give up and forget. And continue to be the fox in the hound, collecting bribes everywhere, and doing a fair amount of money siphoning as quietly as possible.
Here in Brazil he have lots of oligopolies, 5 to 10 companies that share the bulk of any given market, pretending to compete against each other, but they only compete for big and huge customers, like banks that bend over backwards for companies that generate tens of thousands of "boletos" per month, that in the US was handled as mailing a check to pay a bill. But charge individual and small business customers almost exactly the same thing for their services.
Being a Brazilian and having lived in the US through the bulk of the Clinton administration, we have none of the aggressive competition the US has. The few exceptions "telecoms" are marked by a pattern of broken promises to get market share, and a race to be the lowest quality provider in the market.
Brazil has an extremely uncompetitive internal market, marked by high margin businesses, huge barriers to entry, lack of effective anti-trust, ethical business practices, and a very high taxes on almost everything. I work for a small telco that has dozens of signed contracts to purchase services from larger telcos that promissed activation in one month, 10 months latter, nothing, and if my employer sues the large telcos, none of the large telcos will every supply them with anything. And the regulation agency couldn't care less.
Brazil's population would benefit 1000x more to protest against those issues than for lower bus fares.
We usually protest on tiny issues, instead of the core issues that drag us down.
PT used to be left-wing. When they figured out a left wing party need to ally with corrupt/populist center parties, in order to win presidency, they slowly moved to the center, actually left center.
But kept all of their commie ideology at heart. They kept most of the dictatorial side of communism, plus the irresponsible populism. But kept the private property and wealth as a fountain of money to feast from. And all you can eat corruption.
If Brazil had more oil money, they would very likely at least tried to pull a Hugo Chavez style govt here. But they know they're slowing bankrupting out country as it is.
But Brazil has a bit more electoral maturity than Venezuela, Equator, Bolivia and Argentina, just a bit. Fortunately.
I think you're wrong.
The lower middle class started the protest. Then most liberal elements of the upper middle class got involved to some extent.
If the poor actually got involved, there wouldn't be enough space in those venues to hold them, it would have been 10x the people.
Most protesting earn 2-5x minimum wage. That's middle class.
The root of our problem isn't in the politicians, it's in ourselves.
Brazil has a corrupt culture. Our lack of peaceful activism, extreme tolerance for what's wrong, indifference to crime, our habit of skirting the law instead of changing, of thinking the law is good until we're affected by it, of wanting the govt to take care of things that should be up to us, specially lack of political activism.
The politicians are just a consequence of that.
Go around the world the Latin world (Latin America and Latin Europe) and you'll find those problems are wide spread. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and to some extent France have most of those issues. Too much labor unions and too little individual responsibility.
The main difference is they went through many savage wars that forced the population to pick up arms, that taught the population the need to fight both with words and with weapons as a last resort.
Brazil needs less fun and more political engagement. I'm not sure how many of those protesters are actually willing to do what needs to be done, to continue this movement online for many years it will take to change Brazil enough. Our people have gone through quick protests, and quickly get tired of it. Hopefully the Internet will change it all.
If they do that to arrest the less than 1% of thiefs and violent bullies that mix amongst our ranks, than it's all good.
As long as they don't hack into people's e-mail accounts without court order.
So far the govt has only reacted when things got violent. Disproportional responses but only after it got violent.
Those events are an interesting opportunity to catch criminals that are hard to find.
Said an ANONYMOUS COWARD ! Funny !
We have been fucked for a while, what we're doing is rising against that.
Anyhow, ANONYMOUS COWARD, I'm not going to curse you. I pity you.