Imagine your town/city starts completely catering to people from richer countries coming there to get completely wasted and intentionally act crazy… that’s what happened to a huge portion of Spain.

That mentality is largely the result of overtourism though.

Spain is a country of under 50 million people which has over 70 million foreign tourists visit every year.

The US is 330 million people but only has 50ish million foreign tourists.

So imagine that the US has roughly 8x as many tourists per year (to match per capita) and imagine that a huge portion of these tourists were mostly coming from much richer countries and had the mentality of ‘let’s let loose in a cheap party spot’.

Just about everyone is in favor of some tourism, it’s just currently completely out of control in much of southern Europe. The numbers just completely dwarf just about anywhere else.

I’m sorry, but this is completely backwards with regards to the situation in Spain or many other poorer european countries. I’m much more familiar with the situation in Croatia, but this applies to most of southern Europe (including Spain).

Yes, the countries take in a sizable portion of their gdp from tourism, however this is generally at the expense of the average citizen. Tourism is notoriously bad at distributing any wealth it provides, while the average person living in these places gets all of the negative side effects. Tourists are generally coming from richer countries (USA, Germany, UK etc) and able to/used to paying much higher prices. So the local economy shifts to focusing exclusively on tourists (it’s where the money is) and locals get all of the negative externalities (inflated rents, inflated prices, crowding, poorly behaved tourists) with very little benefit.

Local and national governments focus exclusively on further investments in tourism (since it’s such an ‘important’ part of the economy!) at the expense of other investments (education, non-tourist infrastructure) which would be more beneficial to the overall population.

Not to mention, compared to just about anywhere else in the world, the number of tourists in Europe is absolutely overwhelming compared to locals. Croatia is a country of under 4 million people, but gets over 20 million visitors a year! The average salary is somewhere around $1000 A MONTH, so it’s no surprise that so much of the country is instead focused on the needs of tourists who can easily spend $1000 a week…

This isn’t the same situation as a tourism hotspot in the US, for instance (where I’m originally from). Yes, wages vary geographically in the US, but not nearly to the same extent. The areas often grew around tourism rather than being a normal functional city where families have been living for centuries before very recently turning into what is essentially a theme park which is largely unaccessible to natives.

Loading into World of War craft for the first time back in 2005 is probably the biggest.

Seeing all the people running around and doing their thing was incredible. It made me super excited to go explore the world.

Yeah that’s basically what I did too.

I just installed dash to dock and made the icons quite large, then rebound a button on my air-mouse to the super key (to bring up the dash). I also installed Just Perfection and used it to hide the top bar unless the dash is open.

90% of the time, I’m just using Firefox, so I don’t need anything too fancy.

I’ve heard that the focus is on the ARM versions (so maybe they are much more developed) but I tried the x86_64 version on my HTPC recently and it was super barebones.

In the end I found Gnome with a few extensions to be a better solution for my needs