Our biggest problem is a political system where both sides are absolutely atrocious.

The right actually moves the country forward because they are usually competent, but only while also milking as much money from the public before they are kicked out of office. The left is worse since they want unbridled socialism without any real investment in things that help the country complete globally and make the country wealthier. Furthermore, the left appoints public servants to positions for which they have absolutely no competence. The presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso was excellent, and under his leadership lots of really capable people set us up for almost a decade of prosperity.

The Lula administration was somewhat reasonable, but set the foundation of appointing civil servants with no qualifications beyond knowing the right people. Only under the Dilma administration was this taken to its extreme, with most appointees having no capacity to do the jobs with which they were entrusted.

At the end of the day it all comes down to education (both in Brazil and pretty much every country). The country grossly under invests in education. People will elect the politicians they deserve and if they are under-educated, they tend to make atrocious voting decisions.

I was there from 2007 to 2011 and things were going pretty well, but it's gone to total shit since 2010. It's really a shame what has happened.

Native of Rio, spent my life around the world - Iran, Japan, US, France; had a "national identity" crisis, came back to Rio in my mid 30's and became very disenchanted with people's lack of civility, exorbitant prices being charged for low quality public and private services, and the omnipresent violence.

In the mean time, I am working on my online data ETL company and I'll be getting the hell out of here on 9/7/2014,the country's independence day.

Bye Bye Brazil!

This is typical for many developing countries. I still wonder why, while we have Facebook, Twitter, Kickstarter and so on, we do not have successful online systems that would allow societies to organize and fight corruption and kleptocracy through participative democracy, crowdsourcing legislation, crowdsourcing social innovation, and so on.

This sounds exactly like Lebanon - Materialism like I have never seen on top of a careless attitude towards drugs. It's frightening.

I can confirm almost everything written in link. And here it's me trying to find my way out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7412930

NYC startup focusing on Brazil, based out of Ny. where are you going the party was just starting !

I chose to stay and make a little difference.