Incoming links: Favela
When Ciro was a teenager, he was extremely cheap e.g. for clothes, food and video games even tough his family didn't have bad financial conditions.
This was mostly to save the world by not wasting resources that other people in need could use, and to save money so he could have more money to do more of whatever he wanted without the obligation to work.
But Ciro admits that shocking people with the incredible level of low quality goods was also fun.
Ciro changed after he came to Europe, especially in regards to food, perhaps corrupted by the fact that now the best chocolates, cheeses and breads in the world were not much more expensive than the cheapest brand you could buy. He still hates clothes that are just to look good like costumes though.
Living close to a small favela, São Remo, the favela next to USP, helped Ciro get frighteningly cheap goods on the shop frequented by the favela neighbours.
One legendary story is that of when his flatmate dropped some past on the kitchen floor, and the bowl broke, but Ciro prevented the flatmate from throwing it away and ate some of it nevertheless. What spooked them out the most was Ciro's statement that the pasta now had a crunchy glass shard texture to it.
While in Brazil, Ciro Santilli used to walk through the outskirts of a small favela to get to university every day, the Favela de São Remo.
See the street view for: R. Catumbi - Vila Butantã Vila Butantã, São Paulo - State of São Paulo, Brazil, e.g. with this link.
To the left, the outer walls of a large police station, with concertina wire on top and all.
To the right, dudes selling drugs on the entry of a small corridor street, presumably to which they could easily escape to in case of need.
The cops could have identified the dealers with binoculars if they actually wanted to!!!
The drug sellers did keep the peace in their business area, and Ciro never got robbed, and would come back from university parties on foot late through the favela.
But Ciro's friends did say that things got much worse after Ciro left, for example a flash kidnapping was reported in 2015.
Wikipedia says that this favela started in the 60s and 70s as settlements of the builders of the University, and that many of the people there still work for the University.
This is consistent with the terribly old buildings Ciro saw when he was at university. They even had the building skills to build their own homes.
The state just has to either legalize those people, or give them houses somewhere else nearby. A world class University is the most important thing a poor country can have, and its image cannot be jeopardized like that.
The existence of that favela, right next to one of the most important universities in Latin America, puts Brazil's surreal social inequality into perspective. Especially considering that before extremely heavy university entry quotas were added, basically all students of the university (or at least of the courses that lead to high paying jobs) had attended private schools, and therefore were not of the poorer classes (see passage about 10 out 500 passage from Section "Free gifted education").
The janitors of the apartment block Ciro lived all lived in the favela. Yes, in poor countries lives are worth nothing, and some poorer people work by watching the entrance of buildings of less poor people 24/7 to guard it from other even more desperate poor people who might want to rob the not so poor inhabitants. They also do janitor jobs like cleaning common areas in parallel.
They were incredibly nice hard-working people, and Ciro spoke often with them. If only given the opportunity, those people could be amazing engineers or scientists obviously. Ciro was also glad to be their friends, and sat down with them quite a few times for several minutes after coming back from University parties, partly because he felt bad about them having to work at that time, but also partly because he just liked them. And they were always up to date on who had come back with a girl to the apartment or not. Ciro imagines that if it had been him, it would have been a perfect bragging opportunity ;)
They had "nothing" but were still happy. This is true wisdom, and a good reminder that all our non-transhumanist technical goals are nothing.
We must destroy social inequality.