If you were to run for president in your country, what would your platform be?
I'm Brazilian, and personally (in the most radical, electability-indifferent and honestly meme-y campaign) would go for Bernie with the campaign finance and tax reform but with a platform for civical reform like putting STV as the nomination method for our chamber of deputies and supporting automating or funding new technologies to replace menial labor, like funding lab grown meat to replace all farming companies and labor now or robotics to automate large parts of the industrial and service sectors and use that money saved from not paying wages to people doing bad jobs to fund free universities and better schools/wages/welfare/infrastructure to the people once doing that work, along with adding civics and economics as subjects in school and always including notes as to where do you use the content you're learning, along with requiring subsidiaries to go independent or drop their branding. Clearly this isn't very realistic so feel free to expouse absurd policy.
I'm Canadian, here are my broad sweeping, heavy handed policies that go far beyond what is reasonable from the federal level:
There's so much that could be improved.
BRAZIL
I don't have a full platform, just a few ideas.
Economy
Drastic reduction in taxes for imported goods[1] that we cannot produce, like computers, electronic components, game consoles, smartphones, etc. The ridiculous taxes on technology make our companies and students less competitive and make it harder for our consumers to access culture.
Drastic reduction in taxes and bureaucracy for small businesses and businesses that generate more sustainable (good) jobs.
A national project to provide fast Internet to all citizens at reasonable prices — using boring, tested technologies. No reinventing the wheel!
Education
I would push for fewer hours in the classroom (our students spend up to 5 hours in classes every day. It's excessive and absurd), with much less content, fewer mandatory credits and more emphasis on electives and extracurricular activities.
On the other hand, at least two disciplines would make a comeback, and they would be absolutely mandatory: classical rhetoric and philosophical logic.
Private higher education facilities would face more rigorous supervision both to be created and to remain in operation, and the economical success of their students would be an important criterion.
Public universities would remain a source of excellence and innovation, but they would also be required to present similar outcomes as private ones. Funds for scientific research would be greatly increased. All publications would remain free and public, and a national portal would be created to further facilitate access. Graduate and post-graduate students would have the option of publishing a number of articles instead of humongous theses that nobody reads. And professors would have to face some kind of evaluation from the students. Right now the relationship between advisor ("orientador") and advisee ("orientando") reinforces the professors' superiority to such an extent that creates abuses and toxic relationships. In practice, the system rarely works and traumatizes many students.
I would create one large technical school [2] for each of the 50 most populous Brazilian cities. Those that already have technical schools would receive a great investment.
Healthcare
Many Brazilian doctors are like whiny children that make loads of money and are treated like gods. They can do pretty much everything they want without fear of consequences. They must be challenged.
We should:
Footnotes
[1] For amounts inferior to US$ 3.000, the tax is "merely" 60%. Anything above that can only be imported by an import/export company.
[2] In Brazil, technical schools are centers of excellence, with advanced practical courses on electronics, software engineering, chemistry, construction, pharmaceutics, etc. I don't know if the terms "trade school" or "vocational school" apply, because students from technical schools frequently rival the knowledge and competence of those from universities.
That's good thinking. You can't ascend on the world scene – politically, culturally, scientifically, technologically – without a strong populus backing. You can only get strong populus backing in any of those fields when you have educated population with easy access to tools that would allow them to further educate themselves.
What's the situation like for technology in Brazil? Do people have to share computers 'cause they don't have enough money for their own? @Kuromantis, feel free to answer as well.
I don't have experience in technology companies but worked a lot in video production. My first editing machine was the first Mac Mini, and it was a struggle to pay. A friend of mine used to edit for political campaigns. She made a lot of money. Her machine? The first Mac Mini. Of course, our work was affected by that.
Except for the government and very large companies, almost everyone pirates software in Brazil. This means our support is just a dude with a bag full of flash drives and CD-ROMS. Not ideal, especially when you have clients and deadlines.
Our financed films are being edited, mixed and mastered on last-gen MacBooks. Wanna do color grading? The
Apple Pro Display XDRis actually a good option since it is cheaper than any reference monitor. But, at 5000 US dollars, in Brazil it's about 60% of a brand new car, or2105% of the minimum wage[1]. Large companies can certainly afford this, medium to small, not so much.
For my last short film, I had to use After Effects for a very simple composition. Using After Effects in a machine without 64GB of RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro is kinda like computer programming: you click, you wait a bit. You click, you wait a bit. You have to imagine the effect you're creating beforehand. Then you tell After to generate a preview, which is effectively a render job. After a bunch of minutes, you see the result. Of course, this affects my creative process: I'll be less likely to employ certain graphical effects that could elevate the product.
Extrapolating from that (and ignoring a bunch of stuff): the cost of processing power in Brazil is most certainly a factor against the creation of a national animation industry.
[1] The
Raspberry Pi 4 Bis selling here for about 500 BRL. That's about half the minimum wage.Yeah. I personally blame the Real (Brazilian currency) being about 22 us cents, meaning anything made outside brazil (Read: everything of value,since the majority of our exports are basic, agricultural goods (article in portuguese, scroll down for a chart.)) is aroud 4.5 times more expensive here than in the US, which has horrible implications for technology, since mobile phones end up costing at least 1000 R$, or a full minimum wage (At least if you work in a registered company, if you're self employed, there is no minimum wage, which is how 30% of the population earns less than the minimum wage.) and good phones cost 5000 R$ or more, which forces us to use chinese phones (which are good,but at what cost), boosting their brands, at whatever cost may that dependence in China come at later.
This means most poor people havent bought any new tech products past gizmos like headphones and phone covers since somewhere around 2015, when the Real went through the inflation that mostly brought it to being around 22 us cents (although between late 2017 and mid 2018 it still hovered around 30 cents) thanks to operation car wash revealing that Petrobrás and an absurd amount of politicans across multiple countries were involved in a massive corruption ring which later got former president Lula in jail, and another former president Dilma impeached, which doubled as an economic crisis thanks tho the fact that Petrobrás is a government-owned company, so many public programs were being funded by that money, which was gone and those programs were cut and their workers laid off.
More on topic though, since phones cost thousands of dollars noone buys phones upfront, only in parcels, maybe in 10-20 months like if you were buying a car in the US if you're poor enough. Since phones are so expensive and PCs even more so, people either take care of their phones religiously, pass them on to the next member of family in order to not buy a new phone tolerate massive amounts of cracking in their devices and do not replace them until they become completely unusable or improvise ways to keep using them regardless, or just pirate it. (Case in point being me, I'm typing this from a 11 year old Windows Vista turned pirated Windows 7 with half a gig of ram, without a speaker so I can't watch videos in it without a headphone, without it's monitor so my father plugged it into the TV to keep using it. I'm not typing from my phone right now because the phone my father used, a 5 year old galaxy young with 4 gigs of space that my aunt gave after she bought a new phone, broke and now my father is looking for new phones to buy on my phone a galaxy J3 with 8 gigs of storage, which was my mother's phone until she bought a new phone, a galaxy J5 with only 32 gigs of storage.)
The currency is another factor but it’s a more complex one so I avoided it. As President I would probably have a more direct impact on taxation. And a weak currency has its benefits.
I wish more people thought like you. Here in the U.S. 7-8 hours is the norm for high school students, not including homework and the like, which can bring up the daily workload to around 10-12 hours. I would kill for a 5 hour school day.
Wow, that's preposterous! Not even adults should work that much.
And what about, you know, living and having experiences?
On addition to STV I'd want a citizens assembly with legal powers rivaling the legislature. A citizens assembly is basically a randomly chosen jury of people. This "sortition" method of representation is essentially near perfect porportional representation.
Citizen assemblies have been used to make great decisions in Ireland, Canada, etc, even if politicians or the public do not ultimately adopt their proposals. For example citizen assemblies played a large role in legalizing abortion and gay marriage in Ireland.
Ideal assemblies make decisions with a learning phase, a public comment phase, a discussion phase, and a decision making phase. In Canada, a Citizens Assembly for example reached the conclusion that Single Transferable Vote was the best voter reform method that ought to be adopted in British Columbia. Unfortunately voters and politicians did not agree.