Proverbial

In typical fashion, a city councillor in Belo Horizonte - capital of Minas Gerais state - is proposing a statute (.br) regulating reasonable behaviour in movie theaters. Under it, movie trailers and advertising would be limited to a maximum of 15 minutes, theaters would be forbidden to change its programming less than 24 hours in [...]

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Slashdot might have jumped the gun a few days ago, but what was then an exaggeration is now reality: all backbone networks in Brazil have been notified by a São Paulo court to either shut down access to all instances of Daniela Cicarelli’s video on YouTube, or either block the site entirely.
So far, except for [...]

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In the last 24 hours, accounts have been popping up all over the Brazilian blogosphere about Brasil Telecom - one of the country’s largest ISPs - blocking access to YouTube. The story has been picked up by Boing Boing again, and they provide some help for those whose access is being blocked. A friend of [...]

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I really don’t understand why Google still tries to make business in Brazil. As if the continuous censorship of Orkut wasn’t enough, now a court in São Paulo has decided that access to YouTube should be blocked in Brazil as long as they don’t take down a video of model Daniella Cicarelli having sex with [...]

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And the breakdown on Orkut continues. According to Folha Online, the Tribunal de Justiça of Rio de Janeiro is calling for personal data (.br) of the owners of two communities in Google’s social network: “Sou de menor, mas sei dirigir” (I’m a minor, but know how to drive) and “Eu sei dirigir bêbado” (I know [...]

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Folha Online reports that at least two recently elected state governors have decided to halt hirings and biddings (.br) for, at least, 30 days. The idea is to review the processes in hopes of cutting expenses.
Now, am I the only one to find this a very bad way to begin an administration? I mean, aren’t [...]

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With the holidays, come the tourists. And some of them, like Tyler Cowen, have blogs, which gives us a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of how other people see our country. His post on the billboard ban in São Paulo is a great example of why I think more Brazilians should blog in English.
Not [...]

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It is no secret that this Workers’ Party administration has no sympathies for Varig’s problems. In fact, one might say that were it not for the Judiciary and the company’s judicial reorganization would never have gone through. Even after the auction, Anac (National Agency of Civil Aviation) stalled its homologation process and tried to strip [...]

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Scott Adams recently said he doesn’t really worry about “any problem that we can see coming”. For similar reasons, I’ve never really worried about Brazilians’ apathy toward politics, and their seemingly incapacity to hold elected officials accountable for their deeds. It always seemed like a question of time for people to realize that if, as [...]

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Here’s a great lesson for legislators and left-leaning pundits in general:
When the US government ended “welfare as we know it” in 1996, it handed responsibility for reform to the states. In so doing, it also created a real-world test of two competing economic strategies used to fight poverty. The results are in and the lessons [...]

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