Aceticon

This specific AGI wasn't really intelligent...

Almost all of the "Top 10 most replayable games" I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.

They're games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.

Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.

Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it's interesting to play such a game again.

If Price matched "Hours of Fun", almost all of the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.

Mate, I grew up in a highly touristic country - Portugal, specifically in Lisbon - which is now on its second wave of being "discovered" as a Touristic place, and the same kind of shit described by the previous posts which happened to Algarve (the region in the south) during the first wave that sold beaches & sunshine is now happening in the second wave that's selling culture & old-buildings in places like Lisbon and Porto.

I've also lived for almost a decade in Amsterdam and the exact same shit was starting to happen there when I left (and it became much worse before the locals rebelled and elected a city hall that cracked down in it).

I've also lived in London were the same shit was happening, though slowed than in the other cities (maybe because it's a much larger city), though they do have the worst housing bubble in the whole of Europe.

I've actually seen this shit happen before and am currently seeing this shit happen right now (I'm back in Portugal, though not Lisbon, but my parents still live in the outskirts of it), so am not just pulling wishfull thinking opinions out of my arse.

Methinks you've never seen first hand over a couple years how Tourism can destroy the character of a place as locals get kicked out to be replaced by AirBnBs, so old corner grocery-shops don't have enough customers and end up replaced by stores selling knick-knacks to tourists, how more broadly you see phenomenons like traditional local restaurants being replace by the kind of restaurant you find in international airports or theatrical "typical" restaurants and how all other industries start getting pushed out by Tourism because cost of living (especiallly housing) for people who work in that city is too high for local salaries and the rents of commercial premises get too high.

It's all fine and dandy when you're a cottage tourist destination and Tourism is mostly a side-show next to all the other Economic activity there, but when a place becomes a major tourist destination there are all manner of massive nasty side effects of it which amongst other things hinder all other economic activities (as everything becomes much more expensive there, most notably housing) and then your country is 20% dependent on it, ready to be fucked next time a vulcano in Iceland coughs up a proper ash cloud and stops most flights in Europe for a month or, more likely, a big world Economic downturn comes and people cut down on unecessary expenses such as vacations abroad.

As it so happens most tourists go to "major tourist destinations", which is were Tourism is most damaging, so that experience of the meme is indeed the most common.

Tourism sells local resources.

They just happen to be things like sunshine, beautiful views and old buildings..

Very little of what it sells is the products of people's work and the part which is the product of people's work doesn't require highly specialized skills and is low value, so like mining it can be done with just a fraction of the population and, like mining, by itself it won't get a country to become a rich country but its income is sufficient so that the local elites and politicians can make a lot of money without having to invest in the kind of activity that requires good management, a highly trained population and good infrastructure, so the tend not to do it.

The only way its better than mining is that it can't totally trash the local environment because tourists actually go there to enjoy said resources and thus are customers who care about said environment, whilst mining just ships the resources away so customers don't care about the destruction it leaves behind.

A reasonable level of tourism is good for everyone, but too much can obviously cause problems. [emphasys mine]

Yeah, well, that's why I mentioned the "Resources Curse" - when a nation mainly sells their resources and doesn't require local people to be invested in and well taken care of to extract said resources (be it oil, or sunshine), it's very rare for the people leading the nation to be content with merely "reasonable" levels of Tourism if they themselves, personally, stand to gain from even more Tourism.

I'm from Portugal, specifically Lisbon, and the country is heavilly touristic, now in a second wave. I saw what was done in the south of the country - Algarve, which mainly sells beaches and sunshine - during the first wave and how they overbuilt the place and did so on top of insufficient infrastructure (still now, literally every Summer there are incidents of the sewage treatment plants not being able to handle the inflow of sewage and having to discharge it directly), to the point that it now only caters to low value mass tourism that come over in the cattle-wagon class of low cost flights from places like Britain to get drunk during the night and go to the beach during the day.

Now in this second wave of Tourism in the country, they're selling the leftovers of grander times as city/cultural tourism, mainly Lisbon and Porto. I can tell you that certain areas of Lisbon which used to be a pleasure to go to are now an overcrowded mess, old traditional neighbourhoods have been pretty much emptied of locals and house prices have shot up so much that the capital city of a country with an average income of €1600 per month - 30th highest income in Europe - has the 7th highest rents (avg: €1700 per month) and it just keeps going up.

(Oh and the funny bit is that all this is actually destroying the specific vibe and cultural character of the place, which is what tourists supposedly come over to experience: instead of the real deal they're now getting touristified "experiences", so for example a lot of restaurants in the most touristic areas of Lisbon are now either the generic style you find in most international airports or they're overboard decorated as "typical" whilst selling overpriced haute cuisine "inspired" by local cuisine but which I can guarantee you is nothing my mother would ever cook or you actually get in a run of the mill restaurant)

Worse, problems like high house prices actually spread out from the heavilly touristic places (so, cities like Lisbon and Porto, as well as the whole region Algarve), so for example this year house prices went up 17% in the whole country.

Unsurprisingly, our current Prime Minister has most of his wealth in realestate, so he just made 17% last year from his "investments". He loves Tourism as well as other measures (just recently spent billions of taxpayers' money on a "Help to Buy" scheme) that put Demand pressure in the housing market and "by an amazing coincidence" make the value of his 54 properties go up. Also unsurprisingly, over 1/3 of city hall members in Lisbon have "realestate investor" as their main source of income

Did I mention Portugal is number 30 from top in income in Europe but house prices are much closer to the top than that?

The problem is exactly that Tourism being kept at reasonable levels is highly unlikely to happen in most countries - you need something like Scandinavia-quality governments to have a chance of it - exactly because when relying on it politicians don't need to manage a country in a competent way when thay can just extract lots of money out of just selling the sights.

I mean, even Amsterdam turned into a shithole until recently (when the locals rebelled and ellected a city hall that cracked down on excess tourism) and The Netherlands still has one of the worst realestate bubble in Europe.

I grew up in a country which is weird: it's a mix of people from the old generation who mainly have basic education and then the next generation over has a high proportion of University educated (this, by the way, applies to my extended family).

The latter simply have a higher tendency for thinking before reacting (even though they're the younger ones) which is much rarer in the former. Doesn't mean the latter don't have emotion, it means they're less prone to unthinkingly react on emotion alone.

I've also seen a similar effect in other countries I lived in.

In my experience and as you say, Education doesn't negate emotion, what it does is make people more prone to first think (which might mean they stop themselves) rather than immediatelly react on emotion alone.

In addition to that it also gives people a larger based of information to, when they think, judge things in a more informed way.

So, repeating myself, the more highly Educated are not immune to being scammed, they're just more resilent to simpler scams because there's they have a higher tendency to think rather than just blindly react. If you want to scam people who tend to think and have a broader base of information, you have to be more subtle (hence, as I pointed out, using techniques like a lot of the "progressive" Press like The Guardian or the New York Times uses in their Gaza coverage such as subtly portraying Israel and Israelis as more important and trustworthy - they "are killed" and their authorities "say" - and Palestinians as less so - they "die" and their authorities "claim" - the kind of subtle manipulation anchored on modern psychology technique which you don't see in less highbrow media.

By the way, life experience (emphasys on "experience" - merelly being old doesn't count) confers the same effect of tending to stop and think before plunging into things.

That said, I've seen plenty of highly educated people react in stupid ways driven by emotion, it's just less likely.

People who have a higher level of Education and have to think for a living are less prone to fall for pure lies + strong displays of emotion and instead tend to fall for context/information-control scams + pushing of subconscious buttons, and as it so happens the Republicans tend to use more the former kind of scam whilst the Democrats the latter (none of which "my" "team" as I'm not even American).

As it so happens, outright lies and emotional raging are far more accessible for foreign scammers than the more subtle kinds of manipulation (which are more common in the Press: for example how in most of the Press in the Israeli Gaza Genocide, Israelis are "killed" whilst Palestinians merely "die").

I totally agree with the rest of your post. Widespread scamming is a natural thing in Capitalism.

The whole emergent property element is how, due to in the modern age external scammers that aren't even directly involved in US politics and thus don't gain from side A or side B being able to still make money from view alone, as a group they have had a systemic impact in the use politics - those individual actions of individuals who aren't actually organized (as they're not even in those political parties) combined to do (or at least accelerate) a systemic change in the politics of the US.

Maybe (probably?) scams around politics in Capitalism also do combine in an emergent way from bottom up to shape each nations' politics as a whole, but this is the first time a large fraction of the actors in that don't directly gain from being in politics or receiving political patronage, and instead merely gain from using rage to get attention (more specifically, clicks), and I believe that has caused something else to emerge from it at a systemic level than what there was before since these people care even less about the possible destruction that their actions might cause since they themselves will never suffer from it.

Por qué no los dos?

Oh, man...

I've lived in 4 different countries by now, visited even more countries than that and come from a very touristic country.

I can guaranteed you that you're not "experiencing other cultures" or "expanding your world view" by being a tourist somewhere - you have to actually live there for years in the way the locals do (rent or buy your own house, work there, do you own shopping, make your own food, have a car and/or month public transport pass, pay taxes, etc) and at the very least learn the local language to the point of following their news to start experiencing their culture and expanding your world view.

Tourists don't have to do even a fraction of the things locals have to do in their day to day, have zero of the worries people living there have, and pretty much only get to know local people whose work is catering to tourists and who thus just put on an act for the tourists.

Shit man, I've lived for over a decade in a foreign country and almost a decade in another and even then there are tons of local cultural elements I never experienced (and some of them never could have experienced since my familiy wasn't from there and I did not grow up there).

As for "expanding your world view", IMHO you get more of that from being good friends with somebody from a different country were you live than from merelly meeting people whilst travelling abroad, especially if you're going to a place with the idea that you live in a better (in the sense of superior) place than they do (which in my experience is a common thing with American and British tourists) - in other words having the modern day version of the "enlightned white man amongst the savages" spirit.

Try going to live in another country for a year or more and you'll see just how deluded is that idea that being a tourist is "experiencing other cultures".

The problem is that Tourism enables all that shit.

Also beyond that, it lets politicians get away with mismanaging a country because you don't need a highly qualified population with a good standard of living to sell the sights to foreigners.

The problem aren't the tourists individually, it's the systemic changes that their presence in large number innevitably leads to, especially in places were politicians are corrupt, refusing to take measures to at least stop the worst abuses and instead profiting from it themselves both directly and indirectly.

It's getting tiresome to constantly explain this shit...

Tourism is almost always an extractive activity, kinda like mining only it sells a place's natural beauty and/or culture built by previous generations rather than whatever is dug out of the ground, and like mining it suffers from it's own version of the Resource Curse:

• Most of the population isn't needed to extract that "resource" and there's no need for those who work in it to be highly educated or have much of a quality of life
• Most of the gains from Tourism end up in a small number number of hands and don't really trickle down
• Tourism has all manner of destructive side-effects, from actual natural environment destruction and overcrowding to massive realestate bubbles that push out the locals.
• It's kind of a silver bullet for politicians, especially for the crooked ones, since they don't really need to invest in the broader population and their welfare to get themselves lots of money from Tourism, be it from thankfull Tourism Industry companies or from the value of their own realestate investments going up thanks to the realestate prices going up as the Demand for space (and, in the era of AirBnB, the actual residential units) from Tourism adds up to the normal demand from people living there, pushing prices up like crazy.

Tourism can be a good thing for most people in the kind of place like a little village in a developing nation with mainly primary sector industries at a subsistence level, because it brings better jobs than subsistence farming or fishing and which reward some level of education (enough to read and write in English), plus it brings money from people from much richer countries, but it's a totally different thing when we're talking about established cities in nations which are supposedly developed because there it brings jobs which require lower educational qualifications than most people there have, because of the side effects of Tourism (such as the above mentioned realestate prices and overcrowding) which make it hard for the existing Industries already present there to profitably operate and finally because it isn't even a path towards becoming a richer nation since the kind of customers it has to attract are those from already rich nations which aren't crazily ahead in the income scale, so it has to remain cheap enough to attract them hence it's wealth production abilities is in the main capped because of having to stay below that of those nations - you're not going to build a modern and advanced powerhouse nation with an industry that sells sunshine and old buildings to foreigned from modern and advanced powerhouse nations whilst employing people with mid-level or lower qualifications: you can bring a developing nation up with it but you can't use it to push a developed nation all that much up from poor developed nation with Tourism.

People inside the Tourism Industry love it because they personally make money from it and Politicians love it because their "generous friends" make money from it, they themselves indirectly make money from it and they can be completelly total crap at managing a country and Tourism still keeps on generating money because it mainly depends on natural beauty and/or ancient buildings and people with low and mid levels of Education that don't even need to be locals so the fatcats in nations underinvesting in their people still make lots of money from Tourism.

Basically Marxism says that to reach Communism one must first have to go through the Revolution Of The Proletariat where amongst other things they Sieze The Means Of Production.

Whilst Communism itself needs not be authoritarian, no nation has actually ever been Communist and all nations over the years claiming to be "Communist" were just nation that took the Marxists path to Communism and never went the authoritarian stage of the Marxist path to Communism.

This generates a lot of confusion in those who learned about Communism mainly from Propaganda (from either side: that in places like China is no more honest than that in places like the US, just with a different spin).

The entire area is great for hiking, especially if you can take multiple days to do it (I did an entirelly different one that took a week and ended in Aquas Calientes - the town at the foot of the mountain on top of which Machu Pichu sits - and then we just took the bus up to Machu Pichu the next day).

There are a number of companies in Cusco which do group hikes in that area, not just the traditional Inca trail to Machu Pichu but also other longer or shorter trails (the one I did passed a number of Inca ruins that at the time weren't really easilly accessible to turists, though apparent nowadays - almost 2 decades later - some are more easilly accessible and known to tourists).

It's a great experience if you're in half way decent shape (I wasn't at the beginning of that one week hike, but was at the end ;))