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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • 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.







  • 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.





  • 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.