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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

Brazil is arguably on a trend to become more stable, not less. Argentina is a bit of a tossup, but if Milei pulls off what he's trying to do, it could come out a lot stronger. Or it could all collapse, but I wouldn't say it's right now less stable than it was four years ago. Mexico might have cartel issues but as a whole the country is on a huge economic upswing.

Somewhere like Singapore is a stable option as well. Australia and New Zealand.

China might be authoritarian, and the language is hard, but if someone is willing to conform and defer to the Party they can do well there. And if a person's thesis is "I am leaving the US because it is losing its status as a world power", China is the logical country which will be stepping into that vacuum.

In the past, the languages that "everyone spoke" to do business were first Latin, then French, now English. In the future it will be Spanish and Chinese.

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> And if a person's thesis is "I am leaving the US because it is losing its status as a world power"

I think for more people it is “I am leaving the US because it is becoming a much worse place and the government is self-destructing, and it is sabotaging all of its allegiances.”

Literally everybody I know in Brazil - and I know dozens of people there - would disagree with the statement that Brazil is getting more stable.

Could you elaborate? The people you know in Brazil think that the prosecution of Bolsonaro represents less democratic stability than the leadership of Bolsonaro?

I don't know details because I don't ask. I just hear them complaining about how the current administration is contributing to the country's ongoing decline. Not once I heard "things are getting better now".

The current president is governing for the 3rd time already. I understand this is allowed by Brazil's constitution and he was technically elected democratically but doesn't inspire a lot of confidence regarding Brazil's democracy. I believe he also had a woman president (Dilma?) as his proxy for 8 years. Sounds too similar to the kind of thing you see in Russia.

This is just my take when looking at it from the outside.

> The current president is governing for the 3rd time already. I understand this is allowed by Brazil's constitution and he was technically elected democratically but doesn't inspire a lot of confidence regarding Brazil's democracy.

I don't understand why this doesn't inspire confidence for you. Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany for four terms, do you feel similarly about Germany's democracy?

I'm not saying Brazil's government is perfect or corruption free by any means, but when I ask for examples of what's wrong with it, "the president has served a number of terms less than or equal to the maximum permitted by law" doesn't seem like a good primary criticism...

Granted, Lula's approval rating is not great.

Lack of term limits is a problem for any democracy. This isn't as much of an issue for parliamentary systems where the head of government is under continuous vigilance and can be quickly removed; that's not what Brazil has as far as I know.

The next lingua franca won't be Mandarin. Most other asians refuse to learn it for "reasons," and it's hideously hard for others not exposed to tonal languages to learn.

Both those factors may change if China becomes sufficiently economically dominant on a global scale. Certainly they remain on an economic upwards trajectory, for now.

They may be staring down the barrel of a demographic crisis and a real estate collapse. Will those happen, at sufficient magnitude and proper timing to prevent their global economic dominance? Hard to say. We'll have to wait and see.

Mandarin is already on its way to becoming the lingua franca of electronics manufacturing. Many devices don’t have datasheets in any other language. I expect that to happen in other fields that China is taking over like biotech, especially with the US committing science-funding suicide. People learn a lingua franca out of necessity, not want.

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