“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”

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.