This is why you don’t make a deal with Trump: he’ll invariably break it whilst spewing some bullshit about how “it’s your fault”.

Mind you the EU Commission is so sold-out, kept under control with kompromat and/or just plain incompetent that not only did they rush to “make a deal” with Trump when he first pushed the EU with Tariffs, they’ll compromise with him now and will do so again, again and again every time he pushes some more.

In the EU we need to get rid of these crooks and that specific dysfunctional anti-meritocratic structure and put more power in the EU Parliament directly or at least have it chose and elect the entire Commission rather than the “behind closed doors” way the EU Commission members are chosen at the moment - whilst the Parliament is directly elected via Proportional Vote, the Commission is just used by politicians in government all over Europe to reward their politician mates or quietly get rid of their most incompetent *cough* von der Leyden *cough* colleagues.

When one of the Pillars of Democracy is subverted the result is the breaking down of Democracy, which certainly explains why most of the West has morphed away from Democracy towards Oligarchy and even further towards Fascism.

“It’s not me, it’s you”

Ever since a nephew of Freud introduced concepts of Psychology into the Marketing world back in the mid XX century that advertising has shift mainly to work via psychological effects.

Perfect examples are perfume TV adverts (all about associating a perfume with sex and feeling sexy) and Car TV adverts (generally about associating a car with freedom, success and sometimes power).

So yeah, most of that shit is meant to just reside in your subconscious and subtly prod you towards a certain product or service at the right time, even if only because a certain brand name feels “familiar” or even “trustworthy” when you have to make a choice about a kind of product or service you don’t usually buy.

The pretty much got the biggest idiot possible and gave it the keys of whole damned castle of cards.

I XOR all the bytes of my data and write down the resulting byte value on a post-it as our backup.

Saves tons of space, it’s fully offline and I never had any problem with it.

Thus completelly eliminating all bugs and data incorrections in Production!

That right there is the sweet smell of Victory!

Plot twist: They’re gonna double down on vibe coding it.

Same reason why somebody won’t tell somebody else “you should use that specific bathroom stall” but they will “don’t use that specific bathroom stall”.

We’re watching the Gileadification of America in realtime.

As much as possible I chose to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.

Most modern day problems are mainly systemic, which is why I ALSO end up involved in Politics in most countries I live in.

“Don’t be part of the problem” isn’t a solution for systemic problems, it’s just living according to one’s principles but won’t actually shift the entire system in any meaningful way unless one is a billionaire or a famous personality.

Welcome to post-Empire!

Portugal is incredibly badly managed and corrupt for an European nation, and this is actually an improvement over the first 3/4 of the XX century when the country was ruled by a Fascist dictatorship and so stupidly poor that it even received Food Aid from other countries in Europe. The country had a marked improvement following the Revolution which overthrew Fascism and another when joining the EU, but it’s been going backwards for at least a decade (roughly ever since the Euro came to be, which coincided with the neoliberalization of mainstream politics here as the short period of genuine idelogies for the common good in Politics ended and was replaced by “greed is good”).

Look around at almost all the imperial nations of 100+ years ago (for example Portugal, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Italy) and they’re all at best mediocre. Look at the direction of travel of the UK and the US and the same destination can been seen in the distance (and specifically for the UK, it’s pretty noticeable how they’re burning the wealth and institutions built/pillaged during grander years whilt not in fact creating any grand anything anymore).

Imperial nations rot from the inside and I suspect that once the culture and way of exercising Power shifts to the kind of parasitical behaviours that is only possible when “living of the wealth created/stollen in past times”, it’s very hard for it to shift back to whatever mindset created an empire in the first place.

3rd world places which aren’t shitholes either don’t need Tourism or don’t make it the entire pillar of their economies.

It’s only the badly ruled places that are shitholes.

Not focusing on culture wars would mean having to talk about wealth inequality, quality of life, low salaries, high housing prices and so on, which wouldn’t please the Owner Class who amongst other things also own the party.

By doubling down on ICE and ultra expensive penis replacement “trucks” the Auto Industry and it’s paid up politicians there are basically committing suicide, so sooner or later there will be plenty of room in that market for auto makers with friendly priced electric cars.

Agreed: the culling of big game hunters sometimes is necessary and awesome.

/me *Smugly looks on after having boycotted Sony for over 2 decades*

Oh, there are places like that in Portugal too - for example Albufeira in Algarve.

They’re never large living cities which transformed into pure touristic cities but rather custom made from the ground up Tourism places or places that started as small villages with some small-size primary sector activity (fishing villages being quite common) and were discovered by tourists and just exploded in size catering to Tourism, crowding out the original economic activity of the place.

Personally I see them as basically Large Resorts (since either there was not even a village there originally, or the built-up area for Tourism vastly exceeds the are of what was originally there), but I’ll grant you and @criticon@lemmy.ca (who mentioned Cancún) that it makes sense to call them cities, in which case I explained myself incorrectly in the first paragraph of my post - what I was really thinking was that there are no places which were originally cities that turned 100% to Tourism and that’s not what I wrote there.

Well spotted!

I hadn’t noticed that incoming Tourism shitstorm yet.

Who knows, maybe house prices in Portugal won’t go up 17% for two years in a row…

In other words, a “large resort made specifically for that”