101–110 of 311 posts
Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…
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> Why Florence struggles with Duomo and Venice struggles in general? Because they're famous all over the world for things they're struggle with. Everyone know about floating city of Venice, and Florence's Cathedral. Those things are being romanticised for centuries. There's a reason they've been "romanticised for centuries", even when there was not a "lure tourists" motive: they are beautiful. (Not that 90% of the mo…
> Those other places, not so much Are you arguing those other, less known places are not beautiful? I can't agree with that. There are perfectly valid reasons why Florence and Venice are tourist bottlenecks: they are well known because they are historically important cities, featured in famous works of arts -- paintings, literature, etc -- all over the world. So of course I want to see Venice and cities like it: they…
Well, yes. Milan or Napoli or Brindisi or whatever, is no Florence or Venice or Rome. And there are nice cities like Verona that are nonetheless not in the league of the latter.
You can find nice landscapes all around Italy, but if you want to visit cities, some are naturally more beautiful than others.
Like how Santa Fe is nicer looking than Oklahoma City.
>But they are not the only or even the most beautiful cities, they are just the most well known (again, for valid reasons).
Well, they are the most well known for their beauty. Part of it is totally objective reasons: they were huge wealthy patrons of the arts (Florence) and capitals of naval empires (Venice), so they have more major works (architectural, etc) built than others.
I read Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End the other day, good book, but what surprised me was his naivety in describing the 'perfect' world. Briefly, the book starts with aliens peacefully invading and enforcing peace and order, while bringing prosperity. He talked about how anyone could travel anywhere, and did, without ever reflecting that if you have a few billion people just travelling anywhere they wanted, it wou…
I found the quote “tourists go home, refugees welcome” quite funny. So what their basically saying is they would rather kick out tourists that bring in and spend quite a lot of money effectively boosting the economy in favour of some refugees the government will have to spend a large amount of money on... and you wonder why the contry's economy is in such a bad shape when the citizens advocate shooting themselves in…
Tourism dollars do a lot less for the local economy than one might expect. Tourist destinations like the Caribbean and Bali have some of the worst income disparity in the world. Tourism provides utility to the tourists, but nothing in return for the locals. Doctors and electricians get paid more to serve tourists than their home communities. Worst of all is that a lot of children are incentivized to sell things to to…
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It's interesting that the two comments that touch the overpopulation side are being downvoted. Why? Does the people downvoting care to explain? There's a huge contradiction here. Either you do "something" to control population or else all the measures to control climate change are stillborn. We are struggling with the current population!
I didn't downvote the GP, but my impulse to disagree with population control is due to the likelihood that, in my experience, it's not the population groups that have the largest adverse impact on the planet (highly industrialised, middle to high income societies) that are generally the target of this sentiment.
I won't argue about off topic issues, but I don't think mass tourism is killing any sights. Ignorance kills natural sights, over advertisement kills human created sights. Nearby Venice there's so much interesting stuff and small cities, a bit further are big cities. None of them really struggles with tourists as much as Venice. Maybe you'll see a huge line for Firenze Duomo but that's it, streets and other sights are…
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So... it's not all about money. You can refuse to accept money from sources which are really not all that cracked up (because the margins in tourism are not great actually) and accept people for humanitarian reasons. If you're not 14 or completely driven by greed you can understand the reasoning behind this.
On the other hand, you also have to understand that humanitarianism must have limits. The resources of nations are not infinite and individuals that are unable to provide for themselves are a tremendous burden on society. And when you accept people that fail to integrate you risk imperiling the very policies that you hold to be worthwhile. For instance, Sweden will be a phenomenal test case. The Globe and Mail ran an…
The US has had multiple waves of immigration from most of the world, over the last few centuries. And there has been similar pushback from nativists over and over again. If that long history is any indication, Sweden will be fine.
Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…
At least a few of those have evolving technical solutions. We can all travel in a more sustainable way if we can do full body VR immersion wherever we want to go. We don't need cars if we have fleets of autonomous vehicles to pick us up and drop us off wherever we want to be on a whim. We can all live in the country if you don't need to commute either yourself or property to and from where you live (the infrastructur…