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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I obviously do not support this application of martial law. I pointed at a mask mandate because it fits your dictatorship vision.

    I also didn’t say a thing about kidnapping. Telling people to “get off a plane” without a justification is not kidnapping. If you say “get off this plane, we think it has a bomb on it” things wouldn’t fly any better with people freaking over and having panic attacks. You can do the explaining once people are out of the plane.


  • So, you can’t accept the idea that in very specific circumstances it can be a good thing for cops to tell you to do something without having to reach for a court order? Like an emergency evacuation order that needs to be secret during that very same hour for whatever good reason or the checkpointing of people in a region where you know that a major prison break just happened?

    Not talking about the random pig just thinking “hmm, I’m the boss now” out of nowhere; I’m talking about someone like the head of the police forces giving an order indiscriminately that is limited to a temporal scope.

    Even things like “masks are mandatory” can be seen as a “muh freedoms” violation.

    If you take things to such extremes, can we have the freedom not to have such freedom? Apparently is what the entire world wants except for a few thousand internet folks







  • What you are trying to point is that in the United States of America (and maybe Canada) you people have coffee that’s so expensive that two of them pay for YT premium. You’re only missing out on most of the internet (eg. Not the US).

    Starbucks is notoriously expensive and nobody refers to it as coffee round here. Starbucks in my first world country is considered something for hipster digital nomads. You can’t find them outside areas with tourists as everyone else is happy with “regular” coffee that’s literally 10 times cheaper.

    Saying that two coffees equate to YouTube premium while using Starbucks as a metric is like saying that a car only costs a watch or two while using a Rolex as the reference watch. If you consider a Rolex to be your reference watch, cool, you’re a privileged minority.



  • Did you even consider that your formula doesn’t even work for 90% of people? 6 figure salaries are a US thing, everywhere else you get taxes to pay for irrelevant shit like health. Part of those taxes are for retirement. Those are not optional and scale with the salary from like 10% if you’re poor to like 70% if you’re rich.

    At whatever age retirement is, you get a payout that’s (not linearly) proportional to how much you paid in taxes. That’s the whole of Europe. Probably more complicated or anarchic elsewhere.

    Even with a top 5% salary, you’re not going to pile up all that much.

    The problem is not this scheme. Is that there are not enough young people to support the elderly.

    Also a curiosity about Portugal: A lot of people are starting to lie about not having a degree when they do so that they can get shit jobs more easily. Too many degrees around. (Most people go to college, even if they fail)



  • As for the “no system is foolproof”, you’re thinking of implementations, not algorithms. An algorithm can indeed be something-proof. Most “known” algorithms are built on top of very strong mathematical foundations stating what is possible, what is not and what is a maybe.

    As for the ads thing, Mozilla is not making a dime off this. It is not monetizable. They’re basically expecting that by giving advertisers a fairly “benign” way to do their shenanigans they will stop doing things the way they currently do (with per-individual tracking).

    The absolutists might say that there’s no such thing as benign ads, however truth is that the market forces behind ads are big enough that you’d get website-integrity-bullshit rather ad-free web. Having tracking less ads is better than having a “this website only works in chrome” or “only without extensions” internet.

    Is there any other possibility? Maybe. Is is reasonable to think that the moment tracking starts getting blocked em masse, we risk a web-integrity-bullshit +wherever-said-tracking-can-exist-only internet? I think so.




  • assaulting

    Keep muttering that word. Whatever.
    Their Rickshaws and boats are fucking the air as well. Can I also say I’m being assaulted? I’m objectively being harmed.

    Plenty of people over here are considering way less nice things that spraying water. You have some actual assault going on in places (as in, punching tourists in the face) and vandalism to drive them off, but yeah, let’s pretend that the 5ml of water are the real harm.

    strangers who have done nothing

    Knowingly going to a country suffering from overtourism? Going for AirBnbs instead of hotels? Blocking locals from being able to go to work because whatever route they pick looks scenic? Not bothering to learn like three words or whatever to be able to say hello or goodbye?

    That’s a “I’m going to throw 500kg of glass in the general bin” kind of done nothing. They know they’re being asses to the locals. Is it legal? Yes. It is also legal not to recycle.

    They’re dehumanizing us because “they paid” but 30 seconds of slight moisture is the real crime.

    The 200€ of flights (which has plenty of negative externalities), 100€ for the AirBnb (which not only was someone’s eviction but also likely dodged taxes), 100€ for random food (which likely dodged taxes) and 100€ in some random tourist trap (which many times dodge taxes). Those crimes do not count because they were intermediated by someone else? The thousands who get trespassing tourists? The littered nature? No, those do not count; what really counts is the bloody water.

    The bulk of the tourism money doesn’t come from the 90% of clueless asses filling the streets. Comes from the rich ones. But if the law was such that it only allowed the rich to come it would also be bad. So, like I asked you before, what’s the actual solution? Just pretending that nothing is happening?

    And FYI, every single one of these countries has not-that-far-places that are more than pleased to see tourist activity. You have like ecovillages & such where you get to participate, appreciate nature and do rural tourism, all while enjoying the Mediterranean weather they came from. But no, people really must take the 1000000000th picture of the Sagrada Familia so that their travel-ego fills up. And yet you think that we should have empathy over that? Housing and jobs disappearing because random twats want to take pictures. Oh noes, the moisture. Right…


  • Downplay it all you want but it’s still assault

    Words aren’t black and white things. The cashier not issuing a receipt is financial fraud but we’re talking about gum; they dodged 5 cents in taxes.

    Especially when acid attacks are not unheard of

    I personally haven’t heard of those one single time, but even if they were a thing every now and then, are we going to assume that anyone spraying a few ml of water might be throwing acid just bcuz? The point of these protests is to raise attention to the problem, not to harm tourists. If someone goes that “extra mile”, throw them behind bars, this instead of assuming that the thousand others might be trying to seriously injuring someone when they’re, very likely, doing something that goes away after 2 minutes in the local weather.

    It is not a secret that a few cities across southern Europe very pissy about the treatment they’re getting. I’m not into victim blaming, but it is strange to think of these tourists as surprised when they got confronted with some sort of protests or message of disdain. In Portugal those are all over the place. From graffiti to protests. And sure, most of those do not involve any sort of physical touch with the tourists, however, if I was a tourist I’d be way madder at some of the protests I see over here than over taking a minuscule spray of water and those you wouldn’t qualify as “assault” only as “speech”.


  • It doesn’t justify assaulting (albeit calling 3ml of water in the Mediterranean summer an assault is a bit of a stretch), but that was not the only thing you said. You were isolating Barcelona as a special case. I simply said that it is not isolated at all, that every popular region along the entire Mediterranean coast is suffering from the same.

    London’s situation is bad but 1) 6 times more population dilutes tourism way better 2) London’s tourism is “going there, taking pictures, famous Harry Potter things, giant ferry wheel, bye” instead of “I like this weather and everything is cheap; I think I’ll stay here for as long as my visa allows” 3) the richer you are the least affected you get as tourists can’t compete with you all that easily 4) London has that other phenomena, which is not quite tourism, called mass immigration, and the last time I’ve heard about citizen actions towards the problem they were following the “we no longer want to participate in anything with out neighbors” path which is IMHO a bit more extreme than just being mad en masse with a relatively harmless protest.

    From a political standpoint, Madrid is an oppressive mess. Catalonia is in the podium for the most productive region and this is killing it slowly (as it did with Portugal and parts of other countries). You can’t quite say the same about London. In London you might end up living far from the city center but your economic woes do not come from the thousands of immigrants nor the tourists all around.


  • 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.


  • 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).