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by somewhereoutth 42 days ago
Right, however over-tourism is a real problem.

Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators. It distorts property markets and sucks the oxygen out of other kinds of business. About time the Med weaned itself off of it.
4 comments
jzb 42 days ago
This doesn’t sound like they’ll be weaning off it, though: it’ll be cold turkey. That’s going to let wealth holders pick up more property at depressed prices and drive down wages.
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cucumber3732842 42 days ago
>Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators

No. It's worse than that. The transient customer base rewards the worst people. The people who make the most money and have the most influence are basically scammers who manage to stay one season ahead of the bad reviews. They're screwing customers, shafting suppliers, employees, business partners, etc, everybody. By the time the 1-star reviews are pouring in they've pivoted, sold the businesses, under new management, etc, etc, and are on to the next venture.

So over time these people get rich you basically wind up with these sorts of people running everything including the government and it's all just shit.

And it permeates everything. Everyone starts screwing everyone and being scummy by default. And the time and money and effort of having to hedge against in literally everything makes everyone all substantially poorer

Source: Grew up in it. First world white people too, so spare me some patronizing BS about low trust societies or whatever

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somewhereoutth 41 days ago
Right! I am currently living in a (relatively poor) Western European country that has recently experienced a tourism boom, and although the money pouring in has been nice for at least some, it has wrecked the existing social fabric in many ways - starting with housing.

On the flip side, at least the beaches are kept clean. In the UK (where I'm from) there is a big problem with sewage outflows. Meanwhile here an entire beach got washed away by the winter storms - so they are putting it all back! Maybe 100 000 m3 of sand!

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bawolff 42 days ago
Relative to what? Its certainly better than resource extraction (oil).
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anamexis 42 days ago
The obvious question is, what jobs will replace them?
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