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”

Who needs catnip when there’s thick sliced almost raw beef?!

And this is before considering the side effects.

The high real-estate prices and high cost of living mean high business costs and high personnel costs, so Tourism will actually push out or kill other Industries, even the kind that employs highly qualified people.

Choosing Tourism as the backbone of a country or city is choosing a 2nd World status of having a low value added Economy that employs only people with little or no specialization or formal Education (about 4 of years of high-school is enough to qualify for even a customer facing job in a non-English language country) - in other words, eternal mediocrity. That might be a dream come true if you’re a dirt poor place whose only product is natural beauty and were people were just fishermen or doing subsistence agriculture, but for a 1st World nation betting on Tourism as a pillar of one’s Economy is choosing to become worse rather than better.

To add insult to injury, Tourism is a highly variably industry prone to massive and very fast crashes - all it takes is some volcano to start spewing dust in the the athmosphere and stop flights, a Terrorist attack or just an Economic downturn and suddenly the number of tourists coming in collapse to near zero.

For starters, there are no cities “whose economy is entirely based on Tourism”. The closest to 100% Tourism are large resorts made specifically for that.

Further, this opinion of many locals about Tourism is from cities which used to have little or no Tourism and now have very large numbers of tourists.The reason for it is that, before Tourism became a large fraction of the local economy, such places used to have a far more diversified and robust Economy that didn’t just crash whenever some volcano in Iceland had a burp or something such, neither did they have the overcrowding, high prices and disneyfication of shops, restaurants and attractions that Tourism brings.

Unless you’re some third world shithole, without limitations Tourism lowers quality of life, makes everything more expensive (pushing out the locals) and destroys the vibe of a city - you don’t need to be that much ahead of 3rd World status for mass tourism to actually make the quality of life for the locals worse: Tourism brings gains to only a fraction of the population but the costs are borne by almost everybody, in a similar way to high polluting industries.

Further, Tourism is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - the side effects of too much Tourism destroy the environment that attracted tourists in the first place, at the very least over time reducing the quality of the tourists that do come (i.e. as Tourism degrades the place you get fewer high spending tourists interested in the local culture and culinary tradition, and more cheap mass Tourism) - and thus invariably those places where governments and local authorities bet heavily on Tourism are either places that used to be dirt poor (and thus have nothing to lose from even excessive Tourism) or are badly managed and thus, driven by pure greed and “we have found a silver bullet” delusions, never impose the kind of restrictions on Tourism needed to avoid the Tragedy part.

As it so happens, I live in such a place - Portugal - and come from a city which has suffered exactly what I describe - Lisbon. The government of an European country with high average levels of Education betting on a low value added industry which mainly employs people with low levels of specialization is literally choosing to stay at “just above 3rd World” level even though the population’s level of Education could yield far more than that, which is probably why Portugal has fallen back to being one of the countries with the lowest GDP per-capita of the EU as almost all countries of Eastern Europe have surpassed Portugal in the last 2 decades even though when they joined the EU their GDP per-capita was in average around 70% that of Portugal.

Tourism is great if you’re a 3rd World shithole because there no matter how much it becomes it will only make things better than before, but the more ahead a place is in terms of Education and Quality Of Life the lower the level of Tourism beyond which for the majority of people living there things actually become worse than before.

A decade ago a young an gifted software developer acquaintance of mine was going to work for Palantir and already back then I warned him of the kind of company he was joining.

After the Snowden Revelations it was already pretty obvious that Palantir specialized in data analytics of and overview interfaces for mass surveillance data - they made their money from helping authoritarian activities, including those in supposed Democracies.

It’s pretty obvious that a company doing that is built on the principled of having no Ethics or Morals.

Go to bed with the dogs, wake up with fleas.

I think it’s way simpler than that: this is the first generation since at least WWII whose prospect in life is to be poorer and with worse quality of life than their parents.

So of course they would rather the clock wound back to the time when people their age still lived with the expectation that things would just keep on getting better.

The Tech angle in this article is just a bit of cherry picking to avoid talking about the broader systemic issues of the collapse in social mobility, explosion in inequality and real economic growth (i.e. that calculate by real inflation numbers rather than the la-la-land official “inflation”) having pretty much ground to a halt in 2008 and whatever there is of it being entirely captured by the top 1%.

It’s never been this good to be a billionaire, but for the rest minus technological evolution things are the worse they’ve been since WWII.

Framework computers aren’t really targeted at the average consumer.

It makes sense that the kind of people who value hardware which they can easily and freely maintain and upgrade also value software which they can easily and freely maintain and upgrade.

For sure Linux being a free option vs Windows being a paid for one also helps.

What a wonderful murder meme!

It’s called Oligarchy and it predates Tech “Overlords” in America.

Go a little back and look at the prediction made in 1949 for the future, written in a book with the title “1984”.

Sure, it came a little late than forecast, but a lot of it came true.

Today’s society has been pretty predictable for quite a while:

• Political and social environments like now have been pretty common recurrences througout History, with the rise of Fascism in the early XX century being the previous time it happened (incredibly similar to nowadays, not just are most propaganda techniques and discourse used by the rightwing almost exactly same, but we even have a XXI century version of the NAZIs called Zionism doing pretty much the same thing as their predecessors did in 1930s Germany). Society and Economics seem to follow a grand-cycle with a period of around 100 years and we’re back at the point of the cycle of “Highest inequality and the Elites diverting the discontentment of the populus away from them by funding Far-Right politics scapegoating foreigners and using tools of authoritarianism in power” hence why this shit ressonates so much with the 1920 - 30s.
• The extreme desire for surveillance of open authoritarians and those with covert authoritarian leanings (lots of those in Europe plus the previous regime in the US was already the latter, though now it’s the former) and the forms it could take were pretty predictable by observing the secret police of the Fascist regimes in Southern Europe that lasted until the 70s and 80s as well in the Eastern Block, most notably the Stasi in Germany. It’s quite linear to map what Stasi would do with today’s technology and come up with using smartphones as mobile surveillance devices with the complicity of the Tech companies that control them (predictably so if you look at, for example, how IBM helped NAZI Germany), surveillance of citizen’s use of the Internet and modern digital communications (already done by the 7-eyes for ages and explaining things like the repeated attempts at imposing Chat Control on EU citizens) and the increasing automation of mass trawling surveillance made possible by ML to allow far wider civil society surveillance levels than were possible for the Stasi.

Sure, people used to think “Democracy” and thus “This time is different”, but it turns out politicians and elites under Democracy still operate per the very same principles of Power as in the early XX century, they just managed over the years since then to get the populace to stop thinking and talking about Power itself and instead think only in terms of Politics all the while making sure Politics was subservient to older forms of Power, most notably Money.

Personally, ever since I observed how governments in the West reacted to the 2008 Crash, most notably who they chose to save and who they chose to pay for it, that I realized that the power of Democracy (specifically, the control of Citizens over how countries are managed by chosing who manages it using their Vote) has been made almost entirelly subservient to the power of Money, which is why it looks so much like we live in Oligarchies with theatrical Voting that changes only that which Money doesn’t care about (hence the loud Identity Wars in the Moral plane between the dominant parties) rather than real Democracy.

My cash worked fine getting some extra groceries at the store when there was this Iberian Peninsula wide (so Portugal + Spain) daylong blackout the other month.

People without cash were screwed. Some were complaining of having no drinking water (because without power the water from the utilities was soon out as they couldn’t run their pumps) and not being able to buy any because they had no cash to pay for it.

Also worked fine when we got hit by a freak storm that trashed lots of trees and plenty of roofs and took power down for 4 days, and I’m in a small city where utilities quickly got fixed - some people out there in small villages were still without power almost a month later.

Mind you, people paying by phone would be even worse - most phones run out of power in a day or two unless you have an external power bank to charge the phone (which I do, but most people don’t).

None of this event was some giant deadly thing - the first was a loss of control on the Spanish side ofthe power grid that cascaded into a massive blackout as almost all powder generation ended up switched of and had to be brought up slowly block by block whist keeping generation balanced with consumptions and the second was a strong geographically very focused storm effect with high speed wins during the night that brought down power poles, including the high voltage power distribution ones.

There were no floods or more than a handful of deaths, just lots of topple poles and trees and roofs that lost tiles, so there weren’t really any much more pressing issues than having no power and hence no water, with the former leading to unecessary extra problems for people who had no cash to buy groceries with (and because this was a highly focused storm event, there were no problems supplying the place with goods).

And this is far from the only situation were you’re stuck without cash: for example banking systems going down means you can’t pay with debit cards linked to accounts in that bank (a problem I’ve seen happen several times both here and when living abroad) and the banking payment system going down means you can’t pay at all. The mobile network going down is also a problem because most electronic payment point of sale systems use it rather than landline. Beyond that there are all kind of issues linked to relying on a 3rd part entity for payments like the guy at the supermarket the other day whose just received replacement card wasn’t activated so he he got to the till to pay a trolley full of shopping and couldn’t.

In Engineering terms, cashless payments have a lot of external dependencies that cash payments do not, plus there is a natural “buffering” with cash (which you yourself can make deeper by having some cash at home) which doesn’t exist with digital payments, making cash way more robust than digital payments when doing physically-present payments.

“Bullshitting” is probably the strongest capability of LLMs.

You’re assuming I’m using my domain to send spam or am operating the e-mail server myself. That’s a pretty wild assumption.

Further, I don’t live in the US nor do I have assets in the US, so that act means shit for me.

You can pay a company that hosts e-mail to do it for you, and pretty cheap too.

Which I do.

Like the registar, one can change that provider too, and if do that I get to take the e-mail address with me as well as all my e-mails (all data is fully exportable), unlike with Google were the e-mail address is theirs, not yours.

Try again.

Literally the worst that can happen to me if I’m really really unlucky is end up tied down to a single provider, same as you.

There were already 100s of registars back then (and as of 2024 there were over 2000) along with a standardized process for moving a domain to another registar, all regulated by an international regulator, ICANN.

Given that ease of migration is guaranteed by ICANN, making the market highly competitive, the only real risk that this entire system end up “consolidated” is if ICANN is totally subverted, a pretty tall order considering it’s in the interest of every single country in the World and millions of businesses (who also have domain names) that it is not, so that’s highly unlikely.

Meanwhile Google is just one and has always been just one. From the very start there was NEVER any perspective of there being more than one provider of gmail addresses so there was NEVER any perspective of being able to move away from Google and still keep your e-mail address if Google screwed you in some way. As for all your e-mails, those were always freely accessible to Google and they could always do whatever they want with that data.

In simple terms, you chose to be Google’s bitch and hope that they don’t screw you over too badly, whilst I, maybe, if I’m really really unlucky and an entire international system for domain name regulation is subverted against the interests of all countries in the World and most businesses, might one day at worst end up in the same situation as you.

I’m afraid your face-saving risk “analysis” on this is hilariously bad.

Not the previous poster.

A simple ESP8266 module from AliExpress is less than $4 (an ESP12F module - which is the FCC certified one with most I/O ports available - is $2), can be programmed with Arduino, has WiFi and that is more than enough for wireless home automation peripherals that are not supposed to do lots of processing (it will still easilly fit a REST interface for automated control and even a web interface for user control alongside it).

That said, in order to power it unless you can somehow draw 3.3v from the device it’s attached to, you actually need more parts and that’ll add up to more than $4 unless you’re doing it with batteries (and design and assemble your own voltage regulator circuit which is not that hard and is cheap, or maybe get a slightly more expensive ESP module that comes with voltage regulation) - this works fine if your device sleeps most of the time and just wakes up once in a while to check some data from a server holding instructions for it. For an always one device, best IMHO to use a 3.3V wall power adaptor, which will cost at least $6 from AliExpress.

The power considerations apply exactly the same for ESP32s.

Exactly.

My first personal e-mail way back in the 90s was with my ISP. Then I changed ISPs and saw the problem with that. So I moved to Yahoo.

Some years later, in the 00s I just decided to get my own, paid for, Internet domain and have my e-mail there, even though I could’ve carried on using Yahoo or get Google Mail (very popular amongst techies back then) for free. The main reason was that I realized I must made sure the e-mail address was MINE, not actually owned by somebody else with me allowed to use it under their conditions.

Twenty years later and guess it was pretty wise to not have my e-mail in the claws of “Definitelly Do Evil” Google.

Experience using and living with Tech, mainly once your understanding of it reaches the level of understanding systemic elements, naturally informs ones choices in Tech, and that often means chosing something else than the mass marketed “popular” stuff that’s designed to lock you in, sell you stuff or sell your attention to others and eavesdrop on you and sell your data.

I’m making the bet that if the government changes, I will have time to adapt. (Yes, I could be wrong.)

The thing with data is that once it’s out, it’s out.

If tomorrow whatever you do today starts getting deemed a perversion or even a crime, the data related to you doing sent out today will at the very least put you at the front of the list of people to be investigated for it.

Best to have as little as possible about me and my activities (no matter how innocent) out there in an easy to access form, IMHO. If I have to trade a bit of convenience for it, so be it.

I’m an European (specifically from an EU country). I was born still in a Dictatorship, before the Revolution which brought Democracy, and I grew up hearing the stories of Censorship and the Political Police arresting people for criticizing the local Dictator.

I don’t know who your “we” is, but it sure as hell ain’t me or most of my countrymen.

A mandatory Government app on your phone is the kind of thing that rings alarm bells in people’s minds around here because it stinks of Dictatorship and is a wet dream come true for a Political Police.

I lived elsewhere in Europe, so I can understand that people in countries which have long been stable and Democratic (say, The Netherlands and all of Scandinavia), have no memory of Authoritarianism and think that the Authorities only ever act for the greater good (which is why, for example, Swedes have zero concerns about every single payment they do ending up in a database), but pretty much everbody from Southern and Eastern Europe have either direct memories or heard the stories of just how bad the Authorities can be and just how bad it is to let them know what you’re doing.