Google is the Brazil of customer service

And anyone who's read this blog will know that's not meant as a compliment. This post could ramble on for ages so I'll try to keep it short and to the point.
1. This blog comes courtesy of Google as well as myself, showing that I am still a Google junkie and will require much effort if I am to wean myself off it.
2. Years ago I was evangelistic about Google and would happily have paid an annual fee just for using its magical search engine. I began to drool about Google taking over my life. Just imagine: Google email, a Google calendar, a Google computer, a Google phone !

Memory lane ?

It's easy to be neutral about a place when you don't live there. But rants such as this, followed by endless pages of comment and debate, do tend to make me shiver with recollection. 

What do you do ?

The next time someone tells you they are "in property," remember what that notorious anarchist Winston Churchill said:

"Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived."

Read the whole piece here.

Little local difficulties

"But at least tourists and foreign football fans are going to 'suffer' with such high prices just for one month. Brazilians will have to wait a long time before all these problems can be solved and we can get our prices right."

Where were these kind of articles when I lived in Brazil 2.5 years ago ? Only to be found on a few invisible blogs. Such realism didn't seem relevant to the bandwagon of foreign "investors" in Brazil.
(HT: Jonathan E)

Luiz Ruffato

This Brazilian author has some damning comments about his country.
(HT: Jonathan E)

"They don't have any humanity. They are not humans."

Another day in China, another forced abortion of the most horrifying nature. Thanks to global news, the woman and her husband were somehow able to get their story out to the wider world. The words I have quoted are from the mother. Just as significant are the words of a nurse in the hospital which committed the crime. When asked about it by a Sky News reporter, she replied: "I don't know the specific reason for this case and it's not my place to care."

Brazilian car crash

The news has been full of appalling train and bus crashes in Europe, but my eye was drawn once more to a Brazilian car crash: the revelation that former squillionnaire Eike Batista is now almost wiped out because of his massive debts. Only a year or so ago Batista had claimed to be within a whisker of becoming the world's richest man. His conglomerate was supposed to exemplify the new BRIC powerhouse that was Brazil.

Out of the mouths of babes - part 2

The "Arab spring", so-called, has failed to live up to expectations because there was no real infrastructure for democratic discourse in that part of the world. The region continues to gyrate between various forms of secular and religious dictatorships.

And yet there are some truly magical sparks of light floating around in the gloom. First, the Egyptian boy (see post before last) and now this beautiful, intelligent and brave little girl in Yemen. Thanks to the internet's magic carpet, both wise young owls have had their desperately important messages transported around the world. If they are in any way representative of a new generation of Arabs, there is much cause for optimism. May these and other children teach their elders what it means to live in a decent, compassionate, free society !

Visual dissonance, Brazilian-style

After the bizarre sight of a barely pubescent Egyptian boy showing infinitely more maturity than his political elders, now we have an attractive young Brazilian woman smashing stereotypes and decrying her country's economic recklessness, as exemplified by the upcoming 2014 World Cup.

Out of the mouths of babes

It's a surreal experience watching this 12-year-old Egyptian boy speak truth to power. I say vote him for President, since he clearly has an older and wiser head on his shoulders than 99.99% of all existing Egyptian politicians !

Freedom needs "capitalism" more than "democracy"

Last week Brazil, this week Egypt, and both just the tip of a global iceberg. This article talks about deep-rooted problems in the Arab world and says the West is wrong to obsess about "democracy". What Arabs want - as do the "little people" everywhere - is simply the right to go about their business without being crushed by corruption and bureaucracy (too often the same thing).

Serious fun

In this interesting conversation with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (March 2006, hat tip: P), the man who did most in recent times to improve Brazil's economy touches on the two faces of Brazil: a commitment to ideas and hard work, open to the world, seriousness of purpose; versus a certain 'clownishness" and "frivolity" which at times appears to make the country "ungovernable".

Where next ?

My son will, in August, be travelling back to the land of his birth for the second time without me. I expect the riots will have blown over by then but perhaps not. Maybe this "uprising" will be something unprecedented ?

Although in my last post I said I wasn't going to comment further, the fact that Brazil has been in the headlines this past week or so, and hearing the typically ignorant commentators in the UK, has provoked me to say a couple more things.

And lo, it came to pass

I have resisted posting any "I told you so's" about the Brazilian economy. I will continue to resist .. apart from this one. Today I read: "But stagnant growth is now hitting Brazilians in their pockets. After successive wage rises, this year’s pay deals barely outpace inflation. Already indebted, households are reining in their spending. Consumer confidence is falling and more people say rising prices are their biggest economic worry."

Two and a quarter years ago, in my first blog post, I wrote: "On a related note, all the excited chatter about Brazil's swelling middle class must be taken with a big pinch of salt. There's no way that the average salary allows for the kind of disposable income which economists and sociologists generally assume when they talk about the middle classes in developed countries. In fact a good chunk of the Brazilian middle class has been hit hardest by Lula's Robin Hood politics, seeing their wages stagnate while the cost of living rockets."

Business or pleasure ?

To speak, perchance to dream ..

Invariably, "live chat" with a customer service person or thing on a website results in anything but liveliness. Deathly boredom or utter frustration is more like it. But not today. The following "conversation" has just taken place with a chap at a new company called Nutmeg, which is taking the low-cost, self-service model of a Zopa to the fat-cat, fusty old fund management industry:

Love-haytch relationships

In my day, when I were a nipper, where I come from, etc. etc. the number of people who pronounced the letter H as "haytch" was small. All right-speaking folk knew it was "aytch". So who'd've thunk the day would come when I too became a haytcher ?!

The reason is simply that "aytch" is not quickly enough and easily enough understood over the phone, where we spend so much of our semi-automaton lives these days, repeating ad nauseam our personal letters and numbers. Aytch can sound too close to "eight".

I related this life detail to the woman from M&S Bank this morning, as I robotically spelled out my postcode for her, complete with a penultimate "haytch" and she said: "Ooh, I do that too, never used to, think it's for the same reason as you." The ghost of a journalist in me said, Aha, me-plus-one-other-person-changing-our-verbal-habits-equals-an-important-new-social-trend.

My beef with "meat" !

Alt. titles: So hungry I could eat a horse .. Don't ask, don't tell.
Growing up in Britain as a sort-of-kosher Jewish person I would often ask hot dog sellers: what kind of sausage is it ? Ditto with pies or stews or any other form of non-distinct carnivorous fayre. And invariably they would reply: "It's meat", as if I was a moron. Unfailingly, this "meat' turned out to be pork and thus off my menu. It was a revelation, arriving years later in New York, to find that their sausage "meat" usually turned out to be not just beef but also kosher.

Fry me to the moon

Just watched a charming Wikipedia promo video, showing some of the multinational good eggs who volunteer their efforts to keep it running. As one of the small contributors to Wiki's latest appeal, I salute their work.

But I also couldn't help noticing the stark contrast between the voice of the New Jersey woman and the voices of the other women from places like Poland, India, Italy, Russia, Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Iraq. All except Miss New Jersey had pleasant voices. The US young female, however, suffered from what's known as "vocal fry", although I keep calling it "vocal croak". It's a way for mostly young, deluded females to sound what they imagine to be sophisticated, worldly and / or businesslike. The result is aural torture.