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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Alternatively: It is not (and generally not even encrypted) and he just happened to be in contempt.

    Plenty of military-oriented and shady-business going in in there.

    There’s still the possibility that the authorities wanted to go after specific someones with a proper warrant and Durov blocked it. No country on earth goes for that.

    We’ll get to know the charges soon enough.


  • 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.



  • Well, those massive parking lots are a thing because 100% of the attendance comes in a car.

    It happens that in European cities, the majority of people go to those mega-events events by public transit or Taxi.

    Are you going to put parking lots just to burn up space? If that was the case, then no need for asphalt, trees absorb sound better than asphalt.

    Lisbon’s big arena is in a fast to reach part of the city that is surrounded by a lot of stores and offices and basically no housing. That’s the way to do it. Is a 3 minute walk away from the subway.


  • Freedom of movement never was and never will be a thing outside of countries with similar standings in economy and policy.

    There’s the obvious problem #1) People rushing to whoever maximizes their welfare. There’s this fine reason why plenty of illegal economic migrants do not settle for some first-world country that accepts them and keep going until they hit something like Germany.

    Then you have #2) Societies do not exist without a place and no society should be forced to accept people that undermines it. France is secular and yet it allowed in plenty of people that are not. I’m not saying you must be secular to exist; I’m saying that you should not be going to a society you fundamentally disagree with and much less start imposing. And yet we both know what would happen if borders were open.

    You also have #3) rich people can just buy out the nicest places and chop chop people the fuck out. A state putting up some barriers severely slows this process (which is happening anyway)

    A bunch more reasons like paperwork, criminal record, ecology, yadda yadda.

    With this said, if you fulfil stuff, you should definitely be able to get wherever you want. Ethnicity, social status ou whatever made up stuff should not be roadblocks. Even if it takes a year or two of screening and some sort of integration procedure.


  • I did not argue they didn’t, I did argue that this was not a mob but a protest.

    Did the cops approve the water things? They probably knew, just didn’t pronounce as they probably thought nobody would care much (they’re Spanish cops, not world cops, their cultural bias is what is considered harmful by Spaniards and those don’t see water as a harm).

    But if mob-things were to start happening (which could be the case if some tourist just started yelling something like “you should be thankful that I’m spending my money here”) cops would halt that pretty fast. I personally don’t see things escalating in any other way.


    1. From a legal standpoint, this was a protest. I can pretty much assure you that the authorities knew that this was going to take place and were close by. Illegal protests get done pretty quickly. Just the fact that they are walking banners in the middle of a road is a clear giveaway.
    2. The generality of what you said applies to both mobs and protests. You don’t seem to have a problem with it happening in protests. Don’t people get surrounded by protests? Don’t people in protests carry objects that can be perceived to be guns?

  • I think it’s fair to say that football hooliganism is not unique to any particular place, and is a specific and unique problem

    Yes, over-tourism and hooligans are disjoint problems. But if it is so cheap going to a place that you can just grab your fella drunkards and go you end up mixing them both in…weird ways.

    Britain is not that rich anymore (and we aren’t in 2011 anymore), however, during peak crisis (when the IMF rescued Portugal and almost had to do the same with Spain) we couldn’t do much besides accepting anything that was bringing money, no matter how little. For some reason, the brits got used to to go to Algarve as “their” vaction spot, so much that this predates the tourist boom, and at this point in time they just straight up bought everything. You can’t say no when your country is near bankrupt.

    The 2008 financial crisis was a major turning point for this massified tourism. The “lazy southern people that don’t want to work” had to accept any money that tourists could bring and accept any consequences. Partly due to this, there’s this culture that tourists are immune to everything. If you think that hooligans are bad in a place with functioning cops, imagine them in a place that, at most, says “please don’t do that” and lets you go, every single time. Even the Germans, which generally are strict rule followers, stop having any regard for simple laws.

    That very same “lazy southern people that don’t want to work” stereotype also got many people considering the northern Europeans to be entitled assholes. Not individually. There’s not all that much xenophobia when dealing with individuals 1:1, but when considering them as a group of people, there’s a lot of resentment. Germany, the UK and France being in crisis and facing the same problems we faced is giving some sweet sensation to a lot of people.

    There’s also the cultural idea that “when you’re not in your town, you behave”, even internally. People from Oporto have the same prejudice towards Lisbon people. “They come here and act like this is their place, chanting and whatever, twats” goes Portuguese to Portuguese, no need to add foreigners for that attitude to be a thing.

    There’s enough context to everything to write quite a few books. Nothing in these interactions are as simple as “people are annoyed at competition in their markets so they’re pointing water guns”.

    the local government for approving those businesses to set themselves up on that street

    There was the time period I just described where the governments could not have a say towards that + tragedy of commons. Every local government wants to have “the best behaved and richest tourists” so a race to the bottom it goes. Now it is a complete mess to fix the situation, especially since the Portuguese no longer own those places.

    As a local government you can’t go against the majority of your people, and the majority of people in Algarve are Brits and French. They own entire regions. Years and years of this environment cause that. Even in the Lisbon region, plenty of tourists buy properties because “wow, such nice weather, everything cheap”, which they end up treating as investment because why wouldn’t them?

    There was this particularly damning “golden visa” scheme during the IMF days where you’d get Portuguese citizenship and a myriad of rights if you invested 250k (?) in real estate. A whole lot of people started doing investment tourism due to that and they’re totally capitalizing on that.

    The way I see it, there are two major classes of tourist in here. The rich fellas which bought the entire property market, with the richest of them tanking our water supplies with their golf courts and lobbying against any changes. And the bingo-card tourist which sees “50€ on Ryanair, nice! Honey, let’s go to Portugal, it is a place in Spain that has some pubs just like home”. You have a few other classes like the guys that actually enjoy discovering cultures and whatnot, but my personal experience tells me that there aren’t all that many like that even though all of them will say that they’re doing just that.

    Now, none of this wall of text pointed at “firing water at people” as a solution; it just pointed a good deal of the context why other solutions are near impossible. However, in a way dissimilar to Portugal, Catalonia actually is a powerhouse. They can actually just limit the amount of people going there and succeed that way. But 1) business travellers are barely distinguishable from tourists 2) Madrid is a pain.

    The whole point is that this is a very hard to solve mess. Most people don’t know these details; they merely know that we have a “too many tourists; go away” attitude; they could be halfway decent and just respect it, unless they have some particular interest in the country. There’s a trivial way to distinguish. We actually love to see people trying to speak Portuguese; even if they utterly fail; because this is enough to distinguish them from the 99%. This is how desperate we are for people that actually value anything in Portugal but the pictures and weather.