From a pure legal point of view Brazilian customs should offer the any visiting foreigner the same treatment (ie. visa requirements and so on) a Brazilian would get on the foreigner country of origin (the "reciprocity principle"). This is often ignored in practice, since it hurts tourism. Brazil fingerprinted Americans for a short while due to a judicial decision: someone who disliked the US immigration procedures complained the reciprocity principle was being violated. The decision was later overruled in a higher court. Recent agreements are easing visa procedures between the two countries, so the point is moot now.
After my experience with compulsory voting in my home country, I doubt it makes people more involved. Most seem to vote for almost random candidates, if not for reality show "celebrities" and other sort of scum. Heck, the fools even elected an illiterate clown in the last federal election.
That's pretty good euphemism. People who can only rely on public education and universal health care finish school without knowing how to read properly and die before they can receive an organ transplant.
Well, it's not that simple. There's a few outstanding public hospitals like the Sarah Kubitscheck Rehabilitation Network (Brasilia, Rio and Salvador, if I recall correctly) and INCA (Rio). HIV treatment is actually world class. The same goes for education, CAP/UFRJ, Colegio Naval are a few public schools that usually rank among the best schools in the country.
The biggest problem of SUS ("Unified Health System") is that is actually unlimited in coverage, but resources are limited. SUS is by law forced to offer even sex change operations, for example. Some plastic surgeries are also included. Reproductive medicine, too. In a world with limited resources this means that is actually stretched far beyond what it can accomplish. The best thing would be to scale back coverage and focus in essential needs.
Unfortunately this is impossible without a complete change of the Brazilian constitution and of the established legal practice. The concept of "direito adquirido", where if a person receives an entitlement for a good length of time it cannot be taken away, is widely accepted by judges. Any scaling back of social security benefits would be crushed in court. Brazil actually expends with social security, per capita, the same amount Sweden does. But the money is siphoned out of the system by corruption and by senseless benefits (a 20 years old married to a 80 years old is entitled to a life long pension after the 80 years old partner dies, even if the 20 year old is not financial dependent on the 80 years old.).
Another bad aspect of the Brazilian legal system is that the government is bound by law to "reduce inequality between states" which, de facto, means penalizing successful states with high taxes and expending an incredible amount of money in pork projects in the least successful states. Those pork projects are usually populist projects, allowing populist (and corrupt) politicians to gain votes. The same populist politicians will vote for more pork expending, perpetuating themselves into power.
The best for Brazil would be an all encompassing reducing of the scope of social benefits, driving populists out of the power, minimizing the amount expend on pork. Unfortunately no politician advocates that and the Workers Party administration is ever increasing the pork expending and government intervention on the economy. If things don't change soon, I'm thinking about just jumping ship and migrating somewhere else.
At least my former employer Manaus office is mostly manned by people from Southeastern or Southern Brazil but it's a software development company. I might be wrong today, since it has been a while since I was there. Industrial workforce it's probably most composed by natives. Anyway, skilled labor shortage is a serious problem. It became common to do some recruiting in Argentina or Uruguay since Brazilian salaries are way higher then theirs it's easy to hire, and there's no lack of skilled people in our Southern neighbors. I've seen some recruiting drives in Portugal and in Japan (mostly aimed at Brazilian expats).
Well, this kind of gold mining is not a common activity in Brazil. It's actually downright illegal but you can find a few miners doing this in remote areas, specially in the North, near the Guyana borders. I don't think the country is as bad as you seems to think it is. For sure, there's a lot of people living in the most abject condition, specially in North and Northeastern Brazil, but for most, it's just a normal country although a poor one. As a software developer I make more or less the same I'd make working in Southern Europe, for example.
Most of large electronics equipment manufacturers are located in the Manaus Industrial Park. I've had the chance to tour some facilities - both here and abroad - and safety conditions in most large Manaus employers are equivalent to what you expect elsewhere. Salaries are low, both so is the living cost. Work week is 44 hours and this is usually respected in industrial companies (overtime is common for professionals, almost everywhere in the world as far as I know). 30 paid vacation days per year, which is actually better than some other places.
The biggest problem, labor wise, in Brazil is law enforcement. The country is downright unable to enforce labor laws through the country. If you're working in a company that respects the law you're in a rather fine situation. If you don't have a job or have one outside "the legal economy" (like your friend family doing gold mining), then you're downright screwed.
Even then, there's universal health care and free public education everywhere. Quality is not that good, most middle or upper classes will have private insurance and schooling, but it's there including for everyone even expensive therapies (like HIV, or cancer, and so on) are included in the universal coverage.
In the end, I'm pretty sure that there are way better places to be. But it is not bad like you seem to think, and most people have way better conditions than being an almost slave in a Foxconn factory.
I think most cities with a large population have some form of a command center. I know where I live (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) the local government runs an "operations center" developed by IBM. See Smarter Cities and IBM Intelligent Operations Center. If I recall correctly, Dublin runs more or less the same solution.
Is there any good alternative to CyanogenMod ? I have a Samsung Galaxy Europa i5500 and I've been thinking about modding it just out of the desire to tinker with it. The phone was cheap enough (even without a contract) that if I brick it I can just buy another.
The Saudi royalty, seeing the Kuwaiti royalty now living in the Saudi royalty's hotels after narrowly escaping from Kuwait, decided that perhaps they'd rather have real armies to defend them instead of a group of poorly armed rebel freedom fighters.
Since I'm not American I'd normally refrain from making political commentaries on a 9-11 story but just for the sake of correctness I'd like to point out that the American presence in Saudi Arabia is far older than the Gulf War. From the beginning of oil exploration in KSA the Americans have run the show, Aramco used to be exclusively run and manned by Americans. It's employees used to live in enclaves modeled after American suburbs. The company was later nationalized (it became the Saudi Aramco) and the "Sauditization" of management began. It still hires a lot of expats, including Americans, but the Saudi run the show now. This fact, that the major oil company was manned by foreigners, was a really complicated issue for the Saudi and probably was a source for trouble.
The American influence used to be way greater in the Kingdom many decades ago than now. Western way of dressing was more common, for example. Popular protests against the Western influence in 1979 and 1980 made the government adopt a more religious conservative instance. One of the most important was the seizure of the Grand Mosque. There's some talks that the Bin Laden family incentived and sponsored the protests. For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_Seizure
One of his first actions as president was go to New York and tell the international banking cartels that the debt run up by the earlier military dictatorship was unmanageable and they were only going use X-percent of the country's export earnings on debt service and the rest on improving the lot of the majority.
Or he could, like Fernando Henrique did in Brazil, implement structural reforms, lowering the country interest rate on it's debt, perform credit swaps, lowering the cost of debt. But the long and hard way, respecting contracts, is out of mind in Latin America. For the rest of your post with a conspiracy theory, I won't even bother to answer. It's akin to believing in the moon landing hoax, I'm sorry. If you're interested in the subject and would like to see more about my point of view I'll gladly point out references in the academic literature.
If you did this and eventually rose to a position of power (where you could implement the program on a national scale) you would have been assassinated or had a coup carried out against you.
Explain South Korea. They rose from a very poor country after the war to a great country today. Or Brazil itself carrying a mildly successful import substitution program from late 40s to the 80s.
García is a good example of about what everything is wrong in Latin American politics. He was able to soar Peruvian inflation to 7,649% (yes, seven hundred six thousand nine per cent, annually), reduce Peruvian GDP by 20% and increase poverty by about 13% and people voted he back in the office again! Or the fascination people feel with Chavez, Lula and other current populist leaders.
The English grabbed a gun and forced the Brazilian government to take the money? The government promptly accepted it. The deal benefited the English - who lent the money - and Portugal who received it. And remember that Pedro I was also the heir to the Portuguese Crown. The deal transferred money between Brazil and Portugal, it was all family business to him. The people who accepted a Portuguese King as the Brazilian government are at fault. It's not a fault of the English, who were just opportunistic, or the Portuguese who got a good deal without even trying.
And saying that the "first world" bore no responsibility for the faith of Brazil is to just simply ignore that even after we proclaimed independence (and we were not just "given" independence) we were still stuck in a deep hole of debt with most of the GDP flowing out of the country before any of it could even reach the federal reserves. Not to mention wars with neighboring countries.
Brazil first borrowed money after independence to pay "reparations" for Portugal. It could have started it's life without a single dime borrowed if it kicked the Portuguese ass all the way back to Europe. The Brazilian independence is nothing more than a coup d'etat from Dom Pedro I, which later let the Crown to his son since he wanted to meddle in Portuguese politics again. Paraguay War was a defensive war and justified. The bad state of finances of the Brazilian Empire at the time was hardly the cost of the war: the Empire was already hemorrhaging money sustaining a useless monarchy and bureaucracy.
We didn't fight for independence for a long time because it wasn't even remotely in the interests of the people who could make it happen.
The Inconfidentes were the Brazilian elite and the middle class at the time. They did nothing besides producing useless literature and manifestos. Their American counterparts grabbed weapons and fought for their soil.
Our consumption of their resources is *why* they consume less. You are the cause of their resource scarcity.
No.
This is one of the most retrograde ways of thinking available to the third world. A good deal of the Left in Latin America adopt this thesis (read Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan author, for an example). But the third world is sucks because it's own failings. I'm a citizen of Brazil so I'll take the examples from here since I know it's history better.
Back when Brazil was a Portuguese colony it showed an amazing period of growth when gold as discovered in the current Minas Gerais state (indeed, Minas Gerais means General Mines). Since the gold industry created a small middle class, a small number of industries (textiles) and trade (food, from southern Brazil and leather from northeastern Brazil) was developed internally. This could be the seed for Brazil starting it's own industry early on it's history. By 1785 the Portuguese taxed us to hell (the "derrama", a full fifth of all gold profits besides normal taxes) and then prohibited the industry at all to be developed in the colony. Besides a few angry manifestos, the Brazilians did nothing. It should be noted that Brazilians had no representation in the Portuguese Cortes.
Ten years before the Americans fought their independence war. It was the time for Brazil to do the same. We didn't. We never did, actually. Brazil stopped being a colony after Portugal was invaded by Napoleon and the royal family fled to Rio de Janeiro. Brazil was then elevated to the status of United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and Algarves. By 1822 a royal prince "gave" the Brazilian independence and took the crown to himself. As part of "reparations" Brazil gave (a lot of) money to Portugal and promised not to conquest the other Portuguese colonies. Instead of kicking their asses back to Europe, like the Americans did to the English.
My country own history is similar to much of the history of Hispanic America and Africa. The third world is shitty because of it's own failing and nothing else. Of course, the first world did nothing to help but it's not it's responsibility. It's a dog eat dog world and countries should look for themselves.
Is the kind of software that comes out of Accenture and other body shops - that usually win large government contracts - the more capable software? Your standards are probably way different than mine.
you engineer a road, a bridge, an engine, a power plant, some real thing made.
I'll call my former professor of engineering economics and let him have a few words with you:) Industrial engineers, for example, don't build a thing. Transport engineering also don't build roads but optimize them. Petroleum engineers don't create petroleum (unless you compress a bunch of them and wait for some long time, I believe) or their own equipment, for that matter, but rather take care of operations and reservoir engineering (a few other things too, but that's enough for an example).
Are you suggesting we would be better off as a society if fewer people were seeking more education?
Seeking more education != a University degree.
Back when I still had industry ties, it was pretty impressive the lack of specialized human resources. A specialty welder (like TIG or MIG) has a perfectly good middle class income. Other professions in the industry also command good incomes and are lacking qualified workers. There's also plenty of positions in the service sector where a vocational technician degree would be perfectly acceptable instead of a BSc, many programming positions among them.
The world just doesn't need that much people with a tertiary education. Instead of facing this reality, we have people with humanities degrees ("media studies" and other useless bullshit) serving coffee in Starbucks. And serving coffee is a perfectly honorable profession (way more honorable than being a politician, for example:)) but people don't need a degree to do that.
Back in the day when my home country was a giant coffee farm (Brazil) a few guys in the government, backed by a half decent administration, imposed high tariffs on imports and incentives to locally produce the imports. This simple strategy was know as "import substitution". This simple strategy turned the country from a gigantic coffee farm in a industrialized country. In the 90s some funky guys who were born here and studied in the US, maybe after reading too much Ayn Rand, got in the government and started saying making international trade agreements. Now we have less industry and a bigger service sector. Less auto makers and more management consulting companies. Those same bright guys though this was good. They say: "Look, the same happened to the US! Brazil is becoming a developed economy!".
Bullshit. Damned cargo cult.
Import substitution is good. Trade agreements usually sucks. Want a country to stop importing all shit from country? Raise import tariffs, give incentives to local production. More industry, more jobs for poor people. Maybe there won't be many shiny gadgets as today, but who really cares about that?
Slashdot Mirror
From a pure legal point of view Brazilian customs should offer the any visiting foreigner the same treatment (ie. visa requirements and so on) a Brazilian would get on the foreigner country of origin (the "reciprocity principle"). This is often ignored in practice, since it hurts tourism. Brazil fingerprinted Americans for a short while due to a judicial decision: someone who disliked the US immigration procedures complained the reciprocity principle was being violated. The decision was later overruled in a higher court. Recent agreements are easing visa procedures between the two countries, so the point is moot now.
If you don't own a car but need to travel quite likely a rental care and gas is a lot cheaper than a plane ticket.
Is that true in the US? Where I live rental+gas would be way more expensive than an airline ticket (even for regional flights).
I never heard of it and I've been living in Rio since 91.
Posting to undo wrong moderation.
After my experience with compulsory voting in my home country, I doubt it makes people more involved. Most seem to vote for almost random candidates, if not for reality show "celebrities" and other sort of scum. Heck, the fools even elected an illiterate clown in the last federal election.
Can't your friends or your family just transfer some money from their account to yours? You know, using the bank website.
I thought Google Code Search was going to be shut down.
That's pretty good euphemism. People who can only rely on public education and universal health care finish school without knowing how to read properly and die before they can receive an organ transplant.
Well, it's not that simple. There's a few outstanding public hospitals like the Sarah Kubitscheck Rehabilitation Network (Brasilia, Rio and Salvador, if I recall correctly) and INCA (Rio). HIV treatment is actually world class. The same goes for education, CAP/UFRJ, Colegio Naval are a few public schools that usually rank among the best schools in the country.
The biggest problem of SUS ("Unified Health System") is that is actually unlimited in coverage, but resources are limited. SUS is by law forced to offer even sex change operations, for example. Some plastic surgeries are also included. Reproductive medicine, too. In a world with limited resources this means that is actually stretched far beyond what it can accomplish. The best thing would be to scale back coverage and focus in essential needs.
Unfortunately this is impossible without a complete change of the Brazilian constitution and of the established legal practice. The concept of "direito adquirido", where if a person receives an entitlement for a good length of time it cannot be taken away, is widely accepted by judges. Any scaling back of social security benefits would be crushed in court. Brazil actually expends with social security, per capita, the same amount Sweden does. But the money is siphoned out of the system by corruption and by senseless benefits (a 20 years old married to a 80 years old is entitled to a life long pension after the 80 years old partner dies, even if the 20 year old is not financial dependent on the 80 years old.).
Another bad aspect of the Brazilian legal system is that the government is bound by law to "reduce inequality between states" which, de facto, means penalizing successful states with high taxes and expending an incredible amount of money in pork projects in the least successful states. Those pork projects are usually populist projects, allowing populist (and corrupt) politicians to gain votes. The same populist politicians will vote for more pork expending, perpetuating themselves into power.
The best for Brazil would be an all encompassing reducing of the scope of social benefits, driving populists out of the power, minimizing the amount expend on pork. Unfortunately no politician advocates that and the Workers Party administration is ever increasing the pork expending and government intervention on the economy. If things don't change soon, I'm thinking about just jumping ship and migrating somewhere else.
At least my former employer Manaus office is mostly manned by people from Southeastern or Southern Brazil but it's a software development company. I might be wrong today, since it has been a while since I was there. Industrial workforce it's probably most composed by natives. Anyway, skilled labor shortage is a serious problem. It became common to do some recruiting in Argentina or Uruguay since Brazilian salaries are way higher then theirs it's easy to hire, and there's no lack of skilled people in our Southern neighbors. I've seen some recruiting drives in Portugal and in Japan (mostly aimed at Brazilian expats).
Did you try buying Dell? Or HP? Or just walking to the nearest corner computer store? That's how I usually do it...
Market protection for computer products was abolished in the early 90s... someone is screwing you, but it's not the government :)
Well, this kind of gold mining is not a common activity in Brazil. It's actually downright illegal but you can find a few miners doing this in remote areas, specially in the North, near the Guyana borders. I don't think the country is as bad as you seems to think it is. For sure, there's a lot of people living in the most abject condition, specially in North and Northeastern Brazil, but for most, it's just a normal country although a poor one. As a software developer I make more or less the same I'd make working in Southern Europe, for example.
Most of large electronics equipment manufacturers are located in the Manaus Industrial Park. I've had the chance to tour some facilities - both here and abroad - and safety conditions in most large Manaus employers are equivalent to what you expect elsewhere. Salaries are low, both so is the living cost. Work week is 44 hours and this is usually respected in industrial companies (overtime is common for professionals, almost everywhere in the world as far as I know). 30 paid vacation days per year, which is actually better than some other places.
The biggest problem, labor wise, in Brazil is law enforcement. The country is downright unable to enforce labor laws through the country. If you're working in a company that respects the law you're in a rather fine situation. If you don't have a job or have one outside "the legal economy" (like your friend family doing gold mining), then you're downright screwed.
Even then, there's universal health care and free public education everywhere. Quality is not that good, most middle or upper classes will have private insurance and schooling, but it's there including for everyone even expensive therapies (like HIV, or cancer, and so on) are included in the universal coverage.
In the end, I'm pretty sure that there are way better places to be. But it is not bad like you seem to think, and most people have way better conditions than being an almost slave in a Foxconn factory.
I think most cities with a large population have some form of a command center. I know where I live (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) the local government runs an "operations center" developed by IBM. See Smarter Cities and IBM Intelligent Operations Center. If I recall correctly, Dublin runs more or less the same solution.
Is there any good alternative to CyanogenMod ? I have a Samsung Galaxy Europa i5500 and I've been thinking about modding it just out of the desire to tinker with it. The phone was cheap enough (even without a contract) that if I brick it I can just buy another.
but we're entering an age where we will be able to perform selection before a person is born.
You know the hipsters will want organic kids, don't you?
The Saudi royalty, seeing the Kuwaiti royalty now living in the Saudi royalty's hotels after narrowly escaping from Kuwait, decided that perhaps they'd rather have real armies to defend them instead of a group of poorly armed rebel freedom fighters.
Since I'm not American I'd normally refrain from making political commentaries on a 9-11 story but just for the sake of correctness I'd like to point out that the American presence in Saudi Arabia is far older than the Gulf War. From the beginning of oil exploration in KSA the Americans have run the show, Aramco used to be exclusively run and manned by Americans. It's employees used to live in enclaves modeled after American suburbs. The company was later nationalized (it became the Saudi Aramco) and the "Sauditization" of management began. It still hires a lot of expats, including Americans, but the Saudi run the show now. This fact, that the major oil company was manned by foreigners, was a really complicated issue for the Saudi and probably was a source for trouble.
The American influence used to be way greater in the Kingdom many decades ago than now. Western way of dressing was more common, for example. Popular protests against the Western influence in 1979 and 1980 made the government adopt a more religious conservative instance. One of the most important was the seizure of the Grand Mosque. There's some talks that the Bin Laden family incentived and sponsored the protests. For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_Seizure
One of his first actions as president was go to New York and tell the international banking cartels that the debt run up by the earlier military dictatorship was unmanageable and they were only going use X-percent of the country's export earnings on debt service and the rest on improving the lot of the majority.
Or he could, like Fernando Henrique did in Brazil, implement structural reforms, lowering the country interest rate on it's debt, perform credit swaps, lowering the cost of debt. But the long and hard way, respecting contracts, is out of mind in Latin America. For the rest of your post with a conspiracy theory, I won't even bother to answer. It's akin to believing in the moon landing hoax, I'm sorry. If you're interested in the subject and would like to see more about my point of view I'll gladly point out references in the academic literature.
If you did this and eventually rose to a position of power (where you could implement the program on a national scale) you would have been assassinated or had a coup carried out against you.
Explain South Korea. They rose from a very poor country after the war to a great country today. Or Brazil itself carrying a mildly successful import substitution program from late 40s to the 80s.
García is a good example of about what everything is wrong in Latin American politics. He was able to soar Peruvian inflation to 7,649% (yes, seven hundred six thousand nine per cent, annually), reduce Peruvian GDP by 20% and increase poverty by about 13% and people voted he back in the office again! Or the fascination people feel with Chavez, Lula and other current populist leaders.
who architected the debt
The English grabbed a gun and forced the Brazilian government to take the money? The government promptly accepted it. The deal benefited the English - who lent the money - and Portugal who received it. And remember that Pedro I was also the heir to the Portuguese Crown. The deal transferred money between Brazil and Portugal, it was all family business to him. The people who accepted a Portuguese King as the Brazilian government are at fault. It's not a fault of the English, who were just opportunistic, or the Portuguese who got a good deal without even trying.
And saying that the "first world" bore no responsibility for the faith of Brazil is to just simply ignore that even after we proclaimed independence (and we were not just "given" independence) we were still stuck in a deep hole of debt with most of the GDP flowing out of the country before any of it could even reach the federal reserves. Not to mention wars with neighboring countries.
Brazil first borrowed money after independence to pay "reparations" for Portugal. It could have started it's life without a single dime borrowed if it kicked the Portuguese ass all the way back to Europe. The Brazilian independence is nothing more than a coup d'etat from Dom Pedro I, which later let the Crown to his son since he wanted to meddle in Portuguese politics again. Paraguay War was a defensive war and justified. The bad state of finances of the Brazilian Empire at the time was hardly the cost of the war: the Empire was already hemorrhaging money sustaining a useless monarchy and bureaucracy.
We didn't fight for independence for a long time because it wasn't even remotely in the interests of the people who could make it happen.
The Inconfidentes were the Brazilian elite and the middle class at the time. They did nothing besides producing useless literature and manifestos. Their American counterparts grabbed weapons and fought for their soil.
Our consumption of their resources is *why* they consume less. You are the cause of their resource scarcity.
No.
This is one of the most retrograde ways of thinking available to the third world. A good deal of the Left in Latin America adopt this thesis (read Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan author, for an example). But the third world is sucks because it's own failings. I'm a citizen of Brazil so I'll take the examples from here since I know it's history better.
Back when Brazil was a Portuguese colony it showed an amazing period of growth when gold as discovered in the current Minas Gerais state (indeed, Minas Gerais means General Mines). Since the gold industry created a small middle class, a small number of industries (textiles) and trade (food, from southern Brazil and leather from northeastern Brazil) was developed internally. This could be the seed for Brazil starting it's own industry early on it's history. By 1785 the Portuguese taxed us to hell (the "derrama", a full fifth of all gold profits besides normal taxes) and then prohibited the industry at all to be developed in the colony. Besides a few angry manifestos, the Brazilians did nothing. It should be noted that Brazilians had no representation in the Portuguese Cortes.
Ten years before the Americans fought their independence war. It was the time for Brazil to do the same. We didn't. We never did, actually. Brazil stopped being a colony after Portugal was invaded by Napoleon and the royal family fled to Rio de Janeiro. Brazil was then elevated to the status of United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and Algarves. By 1822 a royal prince "gave" the Brazilian independence and took the crown to himself. As part of "reparations" Brazil gave (a lot of) money to Portugal and promised not to conquest the other Portuguese colonies. Instead of kicking their asses back to Europe, like the Americans did to the English.
My country own history is similar to much of the history of Hispanic America and Africa. The third world is shitty because of it's own failing and nothing else. Of course, the first world did nothing to help but it's not it's responsibility. It's a dog eat dog world and countries should look for themselves.
software is purchased by capability first
Is the kind of software that comes out of Accenture and other body shops - that usually win large government contracts - the more capable software? Your standards are probably way different than mine.
Just out of curiosity, why gum is illegal there?
you engineer a road, a bridge, an engine, a power plant, some real thing made.
I'll call my former professor of engineering economics and let him have a few words with you :) Industrial engineers, for example, don't build a thing. Transport engineering also don't build roads but optimize them. Petroleum engineers don't create petroleum (unless you compress a bunch of them and wait for some long time, I believe) or their own equipment, for that matter, but rather take care of operations and reservoir engineering (a few other things too, but that's enough for an example).
Are you suggesting we would be better off as a society if fewer people were seeking more education?
Seeking more education != a University degree.
Back when I still had industry ties, it was pretty impressive the lack of specialized human resources. A specialty welder (like TIG or MIG) has a perfectly good middle class income. Other professions in the industry also command good incomes and are lacking qualified workers. There's also plenty of positions in the service sector where a vocational technician degree would be perfectly acceptable instead of a BSc, many programming positions among them.
The world just doesn't need that much people with a tertiary education. Instead of facing this reality, we have people with humanities degrees ("media studies" and other useless bullshit) serving coffee in Starbucks. And serving coffee is a perfectly honorable profession (way more honorable than being a politician, for example :)) but people don't need a degree to do that.
Back in the day when my home country was a giant coffee farm (Brazil) a few guys in the government, backed by a half decent administration, imposed high tariffs on imports and incentives to locally produce the imports. This simple strategy was know as "import substitution". This simple strategy turned the country from a gigantic coffee farm in a industrialized country. In the 90s some funky guys who were born here and studied in the US, maybe after reading too much Ayn Rand, got in the government and started saying making international trade agreements. Now we have less industry and a bigger service sector. Less auto makers and more management consulting companies. Those same bright guys though this was good. They say: "Look, the same happened to the US! Brazil is becoming a developed economy!".
Bullshit. Damned cargo cult.
Import substitution is good. Trade agreements usually sucks. Want a country to stop importing all shit from country? Raise import tariffs, give incentives to local production. More industry, more jobs for poor people. Maybe there won't be many shiny gadgets as today, but who really cares about that?