I realize this, even so, for Amsterdam it was a very much needed reprieve.
Kinda counterproductive, no?
Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly.
Any business not related to tourism is basically discouraged, because it could "change the character of our lovely paradise".
Basically, unless you're rich and have business in tourism, tourism is not that great. Yeah, it puts food on the table when you're poor, but so other jobs that you could have if it were not for the damned tourists that make you a second class citizen in your own place of living.
We see this happen in the US, too, when a handful of billionaires buy up small town property and turn it into a resort town, driving out the locals. Some of my friends in that situation got "servant" level jobs as teenagers and really think that, somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
> somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
That's the stance I fully despise. My country (Russia) has suffered tremendously (and still does, 100 years later) because people sharing such ideas took power, killing dozens of millions in the process.
If the solution is that then why the rich oppose the increase of minimum wage? What should be the solution to making workers wealthier without touching the bosses? The stock market? After all the crashes and wealth theft of funds? Do you guys ever connect the brain before typing?
Most of the time minimum wage increases just result in cost push inflation at the bottom of society. Yes, that means the middle class and above will have to pay more for services provided by minimum wage workers. The upper classes aren't hurting for money so they actually end up paying those wages anyway.
(My guess is based on the amount of a plundering socialist rhetoric in your comments)
That’s completely false. While they were at one point two blocs in the same party, the dispute was never resolved, and it split into two different parties before the overthrow of the monarchy, and continued to have conflict through the revolutionary period culminating in the Mensheviks being banned by the Bolshevik-led regime in 1921, and a supposed attempt to restore the party was the notional basis for one of the earlier of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.
Where is the 'battle' thing in all these events? Bolsheviks took power, and Mensheviks never had it, and were never a force in the subsequent civil war. They were just banned and later former members were mostly purged.
From this, we can logically conclude that poster would be most happy if rich people get plundered, deprived of their property and possessions, tortured, raped and killed, because these things are the worst that can happen to a person.
I can hardly interpret it as a call to introduce some fairness to the market.
And as far as I'm seeing, their bargaining power is only going up, workers can survive without their bosses, it's the bosses that get richer by thieving wealth from their workers
But we should stop thinking about the past and think about the current situation and how to fix it
I've read a bit and I think the problem with russia was not the communism, it is cultural, it sucked even before when the tsars were burning books and limiting the expression possibilities, including the fact that Russia and the eastern europe has never been through the renovation process of western europe and the liberal movements never took place there, I would hardly use russia as an example for anything, so please stop using russia as a background to don't add anything useful to principle exposed, we fought fascism which was on-par with the totalitarianism of tsarism and communism, and created a fair society that lasted for few decades, which now needs help in order to get better, if you guys decided to suppress a totalitarian government with a worse one, it's not the fault of ideas, it's just your culture and/or approach that is wrong
I'm sorry to come off as harsh but it's been all day that you wanted to use Russia as an example ignoring that you have had the same issues of lack of freedom, redistribution and fairness even before communism was even an idea
You've read the wrong bits. Before the WW1 Russia had a booming cultural and scientific spheres, was undergoing a rapid industrialization and had a lot of philosophical schools and movements. All was hampered by an ineffective and inadequate authoritarian rule, but the human capital was there and rapidly closing the gaps to leading economies. In fact, the seeds planted at that time allowed Russia to quickly rebuild and industrialize after the revolution, withstand Germany in WW2 and emerge as a leading world power on par with the USA, maintaining this status for many decades, doing all of this despite the ineffective socialistic rule.
Now, the reds came to power only after they have staged a successful coup late in 1917, toppling the interim government that was in power after the Tzar abdication. After the coup the Reds won the brutal civil war, chanting those very slogans you are repeating. I believe that if not for this unfortunate event, Russia would peacefully transition to democracy and by now would be one of the leading European economies, with twice the population it has now. The world could have learned a lesson from all of this, but the ideas of equality and justice are sounding so seductive to unlearned audience. If only they knew that equality means mediocrity.
Oh, and Tsars never burned books, that was what Nazis did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Censorship_(Russian_...
But even seeing at what's happening now, you have a rogue state, made of oligarchs, killing journalists, and I guess it's hardly communism to be blamed, I think happening in Russia was the worst thing that could've happened to the communist ideas
It’s morally and intellectually equivalent to neo-Nazism.
I suppose the Nazis were defeated in 1945, and the bulk of the Communists in 1991, so maybe we just need a few more decades for the cancer to die out.
I'm generally not a fan of the word "sustainable" so I won't use the phrase "sustainable tourism", but it behooves cities (and countries) to find a balance between making themselves attractive to tourists and making sure that the costs of tourism don't exceed the benefits.
Tourism should allow tourists to experience a different place and everything that it's home to (the people, the food, the culture, etc.). When places fundamentally change in an effort to serve tourists, you basically have what I like to call "Disneyland syndrome". They become artificial destinations and the interests of the people who live there are sacrificed to create an optimal experience for the guests.
Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies.
I always said this. Italy is addicted to tourism, an addiction that so far has only benefitted a few, while impacting negatively the majority of the population.
As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends.
AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc).
It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.
The thing is that as a tourist/traveler, it's not all about you (or me). You need to consider and be respectful of the impact your experience can have on the very locals you want to live like.
Your desire to have a kitchen is reasonably not more important than a local's desire to not see the apartment next to them converted into a illegal short-term rental where random strangers routinely come and go, or to be priced out of the market because it's more profitable for landlords to convert properties into illegal short-term rentals.
Incidentally, "living like a local" is about more than having a kitchen and this is in my opinion one of the most overused terms among the nomad set, but that said, if you really want to stay somewhere longer term and have a visa that lets you do so, you can try to rent a property legitimately. In fact, finding a legitimate rental, meeting a landlord, signing a lease, etc. is a perfect opportunity to "live like a local".
> Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
As you said, some places don't even have regulations because they don't see many tourists. It's one thing to show up in a town that's off the beaten track and be introduced to someone who will rent you a room for a few nights. It's another to have property owners interested in maximizing their earnings advertising their property to every Tom, Dick and Harry using the internet.
How are you not Tom, Dick or Harry? When I first started traveling, I believed the "I'm different" thing too, but it's a bit hubristic. Tourists come in all shapes and sizes these days and there are a lot of location-independent folks ("nomads") who will move around every few weeks or months, not days.
In my experience, most "off the beaten path" places that have Airbnb listings almost always have at least one legitimate hotel, hostel, or homestay. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that most places that have Airbnbs aren't nearly as "off the beaten path" as you're telling yourself.
I think that's kind of my whole point, to some degree. In the Age of the Internet, the world is more connected than it has ever been before, which means the path is less beaten by roadways than it is by wires and signals from wireless towers. If a place has any form of reasonable Internet connectivity, it's probably not really that far "off the beaten path", but that's also essential as a basis for any reasonable accommodation. So, no, I'm not visiting remote tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but I also wouldn't for many reasons including ethical considerations. Visiting a rural village in the countryside of a country not known for tourism, but that nevertheless has broadband Internet, is not as far off the beaten path, but it is still outside the awareness of typical tourists.
The world being more connected is generally a good thing, and I'd say a net good, but it's not all roses and cherries, and in fact there are many negative externalities to this connectivity as well. AirBnB provides people a way to arbitrage those externalities, but it's not wholly evil either, it also has positive attributes that can benefit both parties.
On the whole, Airbnb is a parasite. Those "off the beaten track" places we're talking about (where, again, legitimate hotels, hostels and homestays are typically available as well) almost certainly account for a very small part of Airbnb's listings, bookings and revenue.
The high-volume locations (think cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam) have experienced significant damage as a result of Airbnb.
Why wouldn't we want to continue have mobs of drunken British yobbos throwing up in the streets? (Note: I'm British for a little bit longer, so I can say such things.)
And we're seriously thinking of banning cruise ships here in Amsterdam - against, too much hassle, not enough revenue, lot of pollution. If that happens, they will raise the bed of the river IJ 4 meters and put a bike tunnel underneath it!
Tourists are good for certain local business. Mostly low quality bars, restaurants, shops. Anything more upscale doesn't benefit from an endless stream of people who seem to have nothing better to do than just walk around.
Without tourists, buildings would quickly fill with residents. Bars, restaurants, and shops have to up their game to sell to local people.
Obviously, there is no reason to get rid of all tourists. But restricting the number of tourists to avoid an overcrowed center is a good idea.
Visitors here are always surprised that the locals don't all seem to be weed/cocaine/whatever using junkies. Pointing out that the bulk of the tourists does not come to Amsterdam for the architecture but for the dope and the red-light district usually doesn't go down well because they are not that kind of tourist.
The very last thing we should work hard to achieve is turning cities into major tourist destinations.