Third-world country? Brasil?

Somebody’s being unrealistic with their rating systems, and bequeathing this unrealismn to people like Ben.

Brasil is not perfect, but has out-engineered the USA in many important ways (Alco fuel, aircraft, AIDS drugs, etc ad infinitum), and has managed to untangle rights and reasons a good deal more clearly. Brasil was producing AIDS drugs to export to Africa, the USA DoT was leaning on them to stop — on behalf of the owner of a US drug company who also owns a large software firm.

Brasil hasn’t suffered the same military mass addictiom as the USA, but what they have works remarkably well, kilo for kilo, and again while the society behind this still isn’t perfect, they’ve already done relatively splendidy with what they were left with.

Their population is concentrated along the coasts for very simple reasons like “the rest is full of jungle/river/rocks/etc” rather than to make political capital somewhere, as is more typical in the USA.

For a country which has been invaded by Europeans (Brasil’s major language is derived from Portugese (plus Amerindian, African, Italian, whatever was useful including Portuñol); Brasil’s motto is “Ordem e Progresso” and the largest city is Sao Paulo) who were more interested in brutality and taking wealth &/| slaves than in building any sustainable civilisation, Brasil’s progress must be alarmingly good for Western economists. Then there’s items like the excellent people, food, clothing, machinery and so on to account for... Brasil has acres of primaryish and mechanical industries like seafood, nuts, mining, oil, gas, automobiles, aircraft and so on for a very long list as well, including complex & high-tech industries like plastic surgery and software like Linux.

In fact, they do so well that we hear of Chinese companies not wanting to be “their World Bank” and this is over a billion people worried about Brasil overrunning them financially... which ain’t so very 3rd-world sounding to me...