An expensive country to live in

I saw yesterday an announcement saying that the PS4 Brazil edition (Sony)  is the most expensive worldwide. Why is that? It is well over twice the US price so it's cheaper to fly to the US and buy it there (which they know). One thing I realized when I checked the distribution of IP filled in the country: on top of being the lowest of the BRICS countries,  80% of IP filled is non-resident. Now I'm going to debunk that briefly for those who are not familiar with IP notion.
IP (intellectual property) is a protection of an idea, it's the patent (all the buzz from Apple for example,  patenting anything that moves within the office!). When the IP filled in a given country is non-resident it means that whoever filled it is fiscally based in the country but the country of origin is foreign.  It might not even be compulsory to have a fiscal HQ in Brazil to fill in for IP. So what is patented in Brazil is technology from abroad applied in Brazil. As there is too few brazilian innovation it keeps competition away. Now companies are using the consumism habit brazilian got since money started to flow and price their items as high as brazilian would allow it to. Now that would have probably worked without the innovation, but it kills the innovation spirit in Brazil and force the country into a foreign innovation dependant consumism. That is dangerous for technology independance.

Now that is only one aspect. I probably should mention that the country needs 200000 more engineers to function properly.
There is a lack of proper logistical infrastructure, no train, only air, sea and roads. It create delays in delivery when there is a delivery (trucks have accidents). Roads are overloaded, dangerous and not maintained. So for example farmers can loose entire production when the transport is not coming in time to pick up the goods (price increase reduction in efficiency for the same amount of goods products).
The Value added per brazilian inhabitants is half of USA inhabitants,  logically the price follow an opposite tendance.
Brazilian production has not increased since the 90's but consumption of good increased dramatically since the middle class exploded.
Moreover the government applies importation taxes in the name of protectionism but nothing is done to increase the national production (to be fair there are actions taken but it started this year only).
So to conclude this, yes Brazil is one expensive country to live in.

Big Oil is the only one to effectively set up a carbon tax

I have been quite active in reading the advancement on carbon dioxide management and plans to emission reduction. To resume we can compare it to a tide, moving back and forth but always staying at the shore; in a word: status quo!
Now my analysis of that never-ending story of "let us go forward!" and then "errr na, finally we keep on hiding" was that governments were either too short-term focused or too powerless to move forward and that the environment issues would be embraced by the industries as a survival reflex from an observation that in the long term they would not survive the changes Humans force into Mother Earth. (digression) An ecologically stable Earth is much more profitable to a healthy economy in the long term (end of digression).
I already saw some moves made by the Oil and Gas industries starting to be really concerned, simply because (this time thanks to the governments) environmental accidents could potentially be financially unbearable. A couple of months ago I saw on the news that the proper OPEC is preparing to enforce a tax on Oil consumption. Governments are currently on heavy back-down of CCS projects, when not shut down (^-^) and on the contrary private sector is growing more independent due to internationalization (e.g. staying in the US to re-inforce the contrast, US is to become the first oil producer in 2014, thanks to unconventional production). No wonder that this idea I emulated almost a year ago but I never could quite finish (lack of time) is already been voiced out loud.
To conclude in a light note, Daniel C Bennet in many of his books explains how an idea or a meme is like a Been which purpose is to reproduce and survive (the original expression of the meme before the internet took it over as some funny-ish images cartooning your feelings of a particular event). A bit like a virus: protein shell, single DNA string invading your body to reproduce and move forward to another one. It can also create some physiological disturbances (if the idea is a strong one!!). I guess the idea I am mentioning in this post is a good example.