Minimum 18 hour flight to Brazil out of Miami,
What? Minimum 18-hour flight? It's eight and a half hours from Miami, and a little over nine and a half from Atlanta, Boston, and New York.
Sau Paulo is like Chicago in Prohibition days, it's a City ran by the Mob. Most of Brazil is, but that City is like the center of it all.
That's just so fact-free and incorrect that I don't know where to start. There are militias and other armed factions around Brazil, but the idea that they run São Paulo is just silly. I'm now trying to imagine what you would have heard, and what group the misinformers were trying to say is in charge of the city.
Guys can get in trouble there quickly if out and about
That's completely true and correct.
It may have improved some since I was there but Imagine everyone packing and a 1870's mentality with 1960's technology or later outside of the Metropolis.
Huh? I don't see the "1870s mentality" much, and I've lived here for close to 24 years.
I
do see some 1850s mentality among the "ruralistas." Let me make the reference explicit: there are wealthy farm-company owners and politicians in their pockets, mostly from states whose main business is agriculture, who would very much like to re-legalize slavery.
But a "Wild-West" attitude? Very little of that. On the contrary, there's a major authoritarian political movement, largely driven by Evangelicals, that in late 2022 came closer than I would have thought possible just a decade ago to staging a coup and introducing a new dictatorship.
And 1960s technology? I'm trying to imagine where you could get such misinformation.
You can't be talking about consumer technology. Even people in tiny towns out in the sticks have latest-generation smartphones, tablets, and "smart" TVs. I may be the only person in Brazil who wanted a non-"smart" TV, and the only way I found of doing that was buying a "smart" TV and just not connecting it to any networks, so it's just the big, dumb, cheap screen I wanted.
You can't mean communication tech. I've got internet service that's fiber-optic all the way from the backbone to the router in my apartment. My phone is connected to 5G networks more frequently here than when I'm in the USA.
I can't imagine you mean business tech either. Brazil has one of the most advanced banking-tech systems in the world, and since the late aughts, a country-wide universal system for completely electronic invoicing.
I don't think you can mean aerospace tech either. Embraer was eating Bombardier's lunch so thoroughly in the early aughts that the Canadians invented some BS about Brazilian beef having "mad cow disease." It was, of course, quickly disproved.
I guess you could be talking about transportation tech, but it would be a gross exaggeration even to say Brazil has from-the-aughts tech. Brazil is behind the USA, but not by that much, much less the difference between now and the 1960s. Just about every combustion-engine car sold in Brazil since the mid-aughts has a "flex" motor that'll burn ethanol, gasoline, or any mixture of the two you want. Ethanol is almost always a good deal less expensive, but gasoline gives the car more power. Brazil is well behind the USA in electric vehicles, especially the availability of charging stations, but there are electric cars here, a bunch of gas-station chains have charging stations, and the infrastructure is being improved.
I'm totally against these stupid NFL games on continents other than North America. But there are good football reasons to oppose them without having to resort to nonsense stereotypes and misinformation about the countries where the games are being held.
