claudiop

Aren't you figuring that we'd rather not have that? That money is mostly not reaching anyone but landlords, restaurant owners and rickshaws. We get poorer with tourism money.

The jobs that pay us more than 860€ (the minimum salary) disappear with mass tourism because 1) land values get too expensive 2) a lot of highly qualified people just emigrated away after being unable to pay rent.

People who attended STEM fields know that the way to get proper jobs is to leave the country, which is bloody unfair because we used to have them. Instead of 3k/mo white-collar jobs we get 860€/mo whipping simulators dealing with entitled tourists.

Ofc that not every job disappeared but since the economy is highly uncompetitive with it's tourism focus, you get the worst possible scenario for everything else.

Plenty of movements went on due to public pressure through protests. iIRC the Dutch pro-livable cities movement started that way, with protests against cars, half a century ago.

Also, you're giving to tourists a right while stripping it from ourselves. You forget that in a crowd you're going to have some that are going to break into private property, halt streets and do all kinds of dumb shit in the name of an Instagram picture.

Touristing and handling garbage can be seen the same way. You can think a bit about what bin to use and that takes some extra effort or you can just throw everything in the general because it is easier.

You're touristing in another countries for like 1 week a year. That means that the ratio of time you're touristing to the time you're not is like 53:1, assuming that everyone does the same (which is def not the case). So, a perfectly balanced town in this hypothetical reality has 1 person touristing for each 53 not doing it. In some parts of these cities the opposite happens. It is so massive that you get many times more tourists than locals and that is enough to get everything malfunctioning.

Barcelona just had to remove bus lines from Google Maps to let locals have a chance to ride them. How is this fair? And this is the authorities doing something as you just advocated for. They got called out for that as xenophobic and whatnot. So, tell me, if I live in a place with a nice environment, how to I go to work? And how do I keep a house and a job given the rent increases sponsored by the millions that want to prop up their Instagram? If we can't forbid them from coming, what exactly should we do that is not going to be called xenophobic? Tax it to reduce their numbers? That's also condemned by plenty as gentrification. What is the good solution exactly?

Most "beautiful" bits people visit are at least a century old, plenty of them like 5+ centuries old. I don't think that people back then were considering tourists.

I'm either case, weather and natural features play a big role for southern Europe. We didn't decide to have these.

Also, IIRC, we also didn't ask half of Europe to unbuild itself in this last century. WW2, cities for cars and fucking up nature were not decisions we had a say on.

It is silly AF to have a German/Brit/French/American/Chinese fuck their country up trough some industrialization and pro-productivity-but-anti-quality-of-life policies, get rich doing it and then proceed to go to a country that has opted to stay out if it to enjoy what they could have at home but decided not to.

When did locals consent to have their city taken over?

When the purchasing power disparity is too big, you create this imbalance where you can't just refuse them while at the same time you know that long term it fucks everything up badly.

Businesses will accept them given that they can now charge triple rate for everything. Politicians get extra tax revenue and benefit from bits of corruption here and there. Meanwhile the commoner has to figure another place to live.

The entire south of Portugal (so, not all that far from Barcelona) is now devoid of locals. If you go there in the winter you get to see almost-empty-towns that used to be major cities. Everyone moved to Lisbon. And now that Lisbon also happens to have grown to be an hot spot as well? You guessed it, people mass moving as well, this time for another countries.

A few years back, our PM literally told us to emigrate; that's how bad things got in here.

As for political parties that "want" to "solve this", it is basically a single party show; the far right.

Then you're not paying attention. Plenty of such protests-with-thousands in a few major places that were overwhelmed. Barcelona, Maiorca, Lisbon, Algarve, probably most of Greece, Italy, Southern France, etc...

It is not false that the government has blame, however, there's plenty of preverse incentive in here. Land prices skyrocketed and a lot of very well positioned individuals got very well in life.

At the end of the day, being a decent human being doesn't require laws. If you know you're competing with locals whose rents already are higher than their salaries, with their businesses that now can't support rents any longer and generally browsing fake-local-crap (and I assure you that most mass tourism is), then you're just making yourself unwelcome.

Even the "tourists are injecting money in the local economy" argument is in a good part bullshit. Ofc that some of it loops to everyone else, but the gains are generally very poorly distributed and many times negative as that money destroys homes and jobs.

If you go to some parts of Lisbon, you're not going to be able to hear one single word of Portuguese. Just yday I heard about a guy complaining that tourists attempted to forbid him from going into a waterfall near his home because... It ruins their photos and they waited in line to have them while the guy just "skipped the queue". Mass-tourists can't just figure that it is a country where people live and not a theme park, the "we paid to come here, we have rights" argument is heard plenty of times.

Nope. At least in Lisbon (which is probably just the same as Barcelona) the vast majority of them go straight at the tourist traps. They barely get any contact with the culture beyond having some foreigner guide pretend he knows about the city point at things while driving their rickshaw in the most annoying possible way. At the end of the day they end up eating whatever sounds foreign while listening to foreign music. This is an actual common complaint people have in Lisbon, that it is not Lisbon, it has been pretending it is Disneyland for the last 10-15 years.

There are places where people do that kind of tourism you're describing. Barcelona, Lisbon and a few more popular places, for the vast majority of tourists, is not.

As for the "support" argument, they mostly support low-wage low-qualification boss-owns-50-other-places businesses while, collaterally, raising the expenses of every other business, prompting those to just close the doors and move elsewhere. If you are qualified in basically anything, the job market in Lisbon is a mess. Plenty of people do lie about their qualifications to state them as lower than they are, just in order to get these crap jobs. The purchasing power fell, locals are actually much poorer since the mass tourism wave that started when the world rebound from 2008. The median salary in Lisbon is like 1000€ while a rent for a cube starts at like 800-1200€.

As for the "yell at the government", I don't know about the situation in Barcelona, but in Portugal, the far-right just received 20% of the votes because they are the only ones addressing those problems (in a very "close the doors" kind of way). Some municipalities straight up started not giving a damn at as they cash in more from the tourists than from the local's taxes. Oeiras and Cascais, two kind of famous tourist destinations next to Lisbon straight up are renaming official stuff to English in order to appease their real clients (eg. Not the people who live there).

You can't encrypt anything without a key. This is the key. If it wasn't in plaintext then it would be encrypted. Then you'd need a key for that. Where do you put it?

Phone OSs have mechanisms to solve this. Desktop ones do not.

It very much is plausible. Source: I live in a country that has been considered the "safest country on the world" a few times (that's Portugal if you're curious).

You can get into fist fights in the night zones et all and police officers are not going to care about it. Unless someone is caught in the act, nobody is going to do much as long as nothing is anywhere near lethal.

But the moment anyone has a knife, that's going to be a trip with the officers and ends up on record. Being caught with a gun without a very good excuse is the end of the line. High chance you get to serve time over it, just for having a gun. Or anything else really.

Knuckles? Pepper spray? Stun gun? You're likely to serve time over that. Very least, community service.

And it... Just... Works? Every time anyone annoying comes by asking for anything you can just carry on, completely ignoring the person. What exactly can they do?

A good part of those annoying fellas do so because of tourists. They know that if they sound threatening to tourists, some of them will think that they're being robbed. They're not. Just carry on with your life that you're fairly guaranteed that there no such thing as a weapon anywhere close.

I'm not so sure that standard human nature is that prevalent in some countries, independently of guns.

In Switzerland everyone has guns and weirdos are not much of a thing. People aren't even carrying them. It would be a weirdo has gun Vs you have no gun. However, given that it is publicly known that any misuse of the said guns is gravely punished (and that they treat properly people with mental health issues) that's not a common thing.

You say you prefer relatively less armed weirdos. However prefer the solution where both of you can have lethal weapons and have to provide no justification whatsoever to carry them.

You: "Mr. officer, That hat guy, he tried to assault me, he has a gun".
Off: "Did you?".
Guy: "Nope".
Off: "Do you have any proof or witnesses?".
You: "Nope".
Off: "Both free to go"

In a no-guns country it goes like You: "Mr. officer, That hat guy, he tried to assault me, he has a knife".
Off: [checks for knife] "Come with me"

And how come the crazies exist nonetheless and do all that kind of stuff somewhat independently of other people being armed?

Also, these same crazies, in other countries, tend to be unarmed (besides kitchen weapons). Would you prefer to defend against one with a gun or one with a knife?

If someone in those countries is caught in shady circumstances carrying any sort of substantial blade, that person is in trouble. If someone in a "freedom country" is caught carrying a gun under the same shady circumstances, that person walks free as that's not illegal by itself.

So, if you want to have any sense of a service respecting you, it should be hosted on a server you can control?

No difference at all between the server of the world's biggest advertiser and a server by a company that opens itself for audits and is in a country whole laws require no bullshit? Are you sure those two are the same? All or nothing?

These last year's of fighting were not exclusively done by volunteers and patriots at all.

Source: Gave a place to stay to a men (28yo) dodging the draft, weeks after the war started. He told me that his friends were either hiding in some grandpa house, pretending that they never knew about any draft invite, or straight up ran to some other country (some of them bribing border guards in the process).

These situations happened in 2022, not now. You can probably imagine that this is far from "with volunteers". A lot of these were caught (or didn't hide in the first place) and were sent to some army outpost.