Hacker News Reader

Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

I believe that I covered this in my comment.

> We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition (e.g. cars devolving into gridlock, tourism devolving into queues and displacement, ...).

Specifically, the last part. If everyone is a tourist, what it means to be a tourist is very, very different.

Consider:

We strictly have enough jet fuel and aluminium and so on to fly everyone about all over. What happens if we actually do that?

Venice is bloody underwater, that's what.

That said - I'm an optimistic physicist and engineer. Let's fix this, shall we?

Right, I've invented and scaled electric aeroplanes and fusion power.

Let's try again. What happens if we actually do that?

Venice has more tourists than people.

Bugger.

View on HN

Do people go to see Venice, or to see Venetians?

The easy, facile answer is to move all the residents out, turn the old city into Historic Venice Amusements District, build a commuter transit line out to New Venice (with no tourist attractions), and all of its civic services are then paid for by income from the tourist trap. Everyone has ready access to service jobs in the tourism and public safety sectors. If tourists want to see real Venetians, they pay to bring some in on the train, to be photographed in a nearly-authentic setting.

"Nobody goes there anymore--it's too crowded."

You shouldn't curse your own success. Plenty of cities would dearly love to have throngs of visitors that seek only to look around, have fun, eat, drink, and otherwise spend their vacation money. I know of one in Florida that was specifically built, from the swamp up, for that single purpose.

If you don't want all tourist attractions to become Disneyworld, you have to visit places that aren't yet well on their way to that endpoint. There are many places on this planet that are fun and interesting for visitors. I can very easily choose to no visit locales that have been overrun and ruined by overtourism. It's not difficult. If an underemployed local is trying to sell you discounted show tickets or pass out ad-laden maps of local attractions, you're in one. If your hotel has posted a warning about pickpockets, you're in one. If you can't discern the boundary line between the gift shop at the exit to the last attraction and the gift shop at the entrance to the next one, you're in one.

I recently visited Carcassonne, France, and this is how it basically works. The old city is dedicated solely to tourism, and the new city is where all the actual residents live. The old city was abandoned before it was restored, so this situation ended up occurring naturally.

My girlfriend and I stayed at a bead & breakfast in the new city. Most of the tourists are locals from France, but enough people speak English that communication is not a problem.

I don't get it. You're describing Venice as it is today.

Do people not know what they're getting when they go to visit Venice? I don't need to go there to know that I wouldn't want to go there. The Venice people actually might want to visit hasn't existed for hundreds of years. You can't go to that one. You can only go to the ersatz tourism version of it that happens to be co-located geographically.

If demand were high enough, someone could build a replica out in the deserts of southern Nevada or northern China.

I'm not very keen on tourism in general, if you couldn't detect my tone. When it's not part of a parting-cash-from-visitors industry, tourism can actually be quite inexpensive and enjoyable, but all the incentives are for locals to establish such an industry once the numbers rise high enough. The only way around it is to not visit the same places (away from home) too often, and to not go anywhere with too many visitors. Once businesses start to differentiate between those serving locals and those serving visitors, the slope starts slipping.

One of the greatest enemies of economic reasoning is the engineering mindset. The engineer models after particles and atoms with discrete interactions and fails to account the organic element of humans trading with each other.

Human kind is exceptional at finding substitutes and while not everyone on earth can get a turn to go to Venice, there are literally thousands of alternative options, and the basic economic interactions will make the available to all.

You could take another method of transport instead of a plane. Bus, train, bike, boat

Pretty much none of those things will make it reasonable for someone from, say, Central African Republic to visit Venice.

Why?

Let's assume you're from N'Délé, in the North Central portion of the country. Let's also assume you've got twice the national average in wealth, or about $800 USD.

Which of those methods is "reasonable" for you to use as a tourist. The bike is clearly out. You can take a ferry across the Mediterranean once you get to it, but that's a whole thing. There is no train and buses would be...a lot. A straight car ride is 104 hours, or just over 4 days each way. And again, you make $804 USD/year.

Is OP's example helpful to the conversation: IDK, possibly? But the idea that it's reasonable for a tourist might be a bit much. IDK, who am I to say what's reasonable for people who make less in a year than I do in about 3 days.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/n'd%C3%A9l%C3%A9/venice/@25....

You're using today's economy and infrastructure to make an argument of the inherent impossibility of using alternative modes of transport to flying in an argument about a possible future where everybody is rich enough to be a tourist.

...Consider that you can travel from Moscow to Beijing on a single train (or Paris-Beijing with a single transfer), it seems that traveling long distances by rail aren't inherently impossible.

>>NegativeLatency 4 hours ago You could take another method of transport instead of a plane. Bus, train, bike, boat

>>InitialLastName 4 hours ago | Pretty much none of those things will make it reasonable for someone from, say, Central African Republic to visit Venice.

>>onanbatt 2 hours ago Why?

No I wasn't. I was answering "why" in this response chain. That's a whole other conversation going on elsewhere.

Momentary inconveniences of todays technology and productivity. In our lifetime we will see people go to space with private funds, that not the wealthiest person on earth could have achieved 50 years ago.

Sure. Cool story. How are you getting that guy from the CAR to Venice using one of the methods you mentioned in a reasonable way?

I'll wait while you address the actual line of conversation I was involved in instead of making up sci fi stories about how cool 2050 is going to be.

Not the OP, but wasn't the purpose of this a thought experiment in whether or not it is possible to increase the global standard of living. If so then of course we are talking about what's theoretically possible in a hypothetical future.

I don't think anyone was making the claim that it was reasonable to get the average person from CAR to Venice today.

If your point is how to get one guy today that makes 800 dollars a month with a car from where he is in central africa to venice and allow for a middle-class tourist vacation, the answer is 'its impossible'.

What a narrow point that is! Useless to make any decision whatsoever.

Cruise ships are already an environmental nightmare. We don't need more of that.

When Venice has more people that go there for tourism, people who wanted to only go to Venice a little will decide to go somewhere else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com