Same. It allowed me to create an account with just an e-mail address, but soon after the account was suspended for "unusual activity" and the only way to unlock it was with a phone number. At this point I gave up.
Yes. Low corruption, low taxes (zero corporate tax for income received from outside the country), and you can even open bank accounts in foreign currencies.
When I was in Argentina a few years ago there were money changers peddling dollars on every corner in downtown Buenos Aires, at a time this was illegal (Cristina was president).
This country should have never normalized favelas. Just 50 years ago, places like Singapore and Seoul used to have slums that looked a lot like Brazilian favelas. But they invested in public housing and now look like sci-fi cities from the 25th century, while we were singing "quem mora no morro vive pertinho do ceu".
This is really cool, would love to see this sugar cube running Doom. But unless I'm missing something he doesn't say anything about how to go about building this thing?
> But it's not the sweeper service that will make the city beautiful
Sure, but you can't force by law those decrepit buildings along the Minhocao to renovate. At least with advertising income they would be able to afford a paint job.
> how does advertising relates to development?
Everyone hates advertising, but it's an important driver for competition. A new business has no chance of breaking into an existing market without advertising, for instance (though I guess the internet has made outdoor ads less important). Not to mention the direct jobs that were lost with Cidade Limpa.
The solution should be simple: allow billboard ads, but tax them based on surface area. Use the tax revenue to hire more street sweepers. This shouldn't be hard to implement, as the city is already quite effective at fining businesses that do not comply with Cidade Limpa. Want to turn a building facade into a giant LED billboard, Shenzhen style? Fine, just pay up. Everybody wins.
This kind of policy would make sense for a quaint old European town, but here we're talking about the largest city in a developing country. Generally as a developing country your first priority should be to, well, develop. The last thing you want to do is stifle economic activity.
Highly debatable whether the policy has achieved its goal of a "clean city". The city is uglier and dirtier than ever, especially downtown. A least billboards covered the decay (and were a source of income to buildings).
Many developing countries go through a phase when fertility/mortality rates start to decline, and for a while they'll get an economic boost while the working-age population grows at a faster rate than the non-working-age population. That's when East Asian countries laid the foundation for their economic growth.
Yeah, I think we switched to coke during the Industrial Revolution not because it's a better fuel than charcoal, but because we were running out of trees.
The last time I looked into this it required a security deposit in BTC.