231–240 of 261 posts
Its stupid and hilarious when someone in Rio does it; when a techbro in silicon valley does it they get VC funding, a maserati and an entry on the 30 under 30 list.
Ah, yes, the Nobel Prize for Fraud.
(I'm seriously kind of amazed they're still publishing those.)
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Parent was referring to the cost of hardware. I've had colleagues from brazil visit the US and go absolutely crazy at best buy to grab as much hardware as they could (laptops, nintendo switch, etc), because it's prohibitively expensive for them to buy that at home.
It's not "prohibitively" expensive if they managed to pay for flights to the US, hotels and then buy several pieces of hardware. They definitely had more than enough money to buy whatever they wanted in Brazil. It is, however, much more expensive than it should be, which leaves a bad taste in our mouths and means people will find other ways of acquiring some items.
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Yes, when they do so proportional to what they take, especially as compared to individuals and their tax liabilities. You'll have to let me know when that finally happens, because that ain't now.
Sorry, I've no idea how to read your first sentence. Your second one - that's how everything public is paid for. Private individuals pay tax, either through their corporations paying corporation tax or the tax bill on top of their wage bills, which a) drives up prices of the goods and services they offer, or depresses wages, and b) funds all the public sector employees and orgs that don't pay tax (orgs) or don't pay…
The point of my first sentence is; private individuals and small businesses generally pay their fair share. Larger corporations emphatically do not.
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Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language. What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to ge…
> extremely high taxes I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.
The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics.
One for you, one for the government.
And it's getting worse. Tariffs on computer hardware were raised only a few months ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language. What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to ge…
Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.
The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government.
That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Brazil stacks social security tax, payroll taxes and a yet more taxes embedded in every single purchase. If you calculate all of this you can figure out something like up to 70% of a brazilian's income can flow to the government.
You say swedish companies pay 70% taxes. Well, swedish citizens get excellent services and a generally functioning country in return. Brazilian citizens pay 70% taxes and they get... Brazil.
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> extremely high taxes I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.
Parent was referring to the cost of hardware. I've had colleagues from brazil visit the US and go absolutely crazy at best buy to grab as much hardware as they could (laptops, nintendo switch, etc), because it's prohibitively expensive for them to buy that at home.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I've no idea how to read your first sentence. Your second one - that's how everything public is paid for. Private individuals pay tax, either through their corporations paying corporation tax or the tax bill on top of their wage bills, which a) drives up prices of the goods and services they offer, or depresses wages, and b) funds all the public sector employees and orgs that don't pay tax (orgs) or don't pay…
Not surprising. The point of my first sentence is; private individuals and small businesses generally pay their fair share. Larger corporations emphatically do not.
Larger corporations pay loads of tax. Shed loads. They pay all the employee and income tax, as well as corporation tax and their sales generate VAT. Small businesses are the ones most likely to have softer tax burdens due to progressive taxation.
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Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.
Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes. The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government. That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Braz…
I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses.
We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment.
This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes. The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government. That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Braz…
This is very misleading. My salary in Brazil is on the very top end (with most of my income in the 27.5% bracket), and my average effective income tax rate in the last 5 years has been about 16%. I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses. We do have high import tariffs for ind…
It's your comment that's misleading. I was trying to account for the numberless taxes that exist and get applied to every single transaction. You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top.
> tax deductions
Discounting deductions from the nominal tax rate doesn't change the fact those taxes are high, nor does it change the fact you max out your tax bracket at middle class incomes.
Deductions are actually the bare minimum. If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights. Not deducting these expenses would be robbery. The fact most brazilians have plenty of deductions at their disposal is only evidence of how absurdly tax inefficient this country is.
These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.
Finally, other countries no doubt have deductions too. I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.
> This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism.
What a dismissive comment.
US government just banned Fable for foreign peasants like us. If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.
If you think having some degree of sovereignty over our computing is "worshipping consumerism", then I don't know what to say to you.
Europe is currently fighting tooth and nail to develop some technological independence. China is creating Manhattan projects to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing and kick them out of their supply chains. If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.
Brazil taxes foreign products in order to "protect local industry", then it taxes the local industry as well, which means pretty much nothing higher up in the value chain gets made here. Brazilian efforts at creating national computer technology date back to the military dictatorship, to the import substitution policies. The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact. What have we been doing since then? Nothing. Don't have our own industries, and we can't really buy the products produced by other nations either. This is why people leave: Brazil combines the worst of both worlds.
I have no affiliation with them but here's what I think happened: 1. They claim the official model is based on Qwen 397B. It's likely they didn't disclose Nex Pro at all because Nex itself is based on the same base model (not saying they shouldn't). 2. The improvement would come from merging the weights PLUS on-policy distillation. The confusion is that the uploaded model didn't have the distillation at all. 3. It's…
It seems to me this is clearly a mistake. They would not even have the resources for it as far as I know and I think they are not even on a position to such bold claims.
That's what makes this hilariously sad. Brazil could have done some good work here, but it just didn't. Brazil merged two models on a workstation.