I stayed in Bletchley Park this weekend to see the both the code breaking museum and the computer history museum. It was amazing. There was hardly anyone else in the computer history museum while I visited. I was able to talk with the guys who restore the computer equipment and spent some time listening to the hams in the national radio centre talk about the hobby. The few other people seeing the museums were deeply into it, trying out the codebreaking challenges or asking for nuances on how they were able to break Enigma. I felt like I was with kindred spirits and I had a helluva time.
Venice even during the day when loaded with tourists is a maze of places unencumbered by tourists. I had loads of fun wandering around there, getting lost, discovering random small plazas, etc.
Is Barcelona like this at all or has the whole city been inundated with tourists?
Once we get near the peak we find an... amusement park!? And then just a bit further up finally the church, which is best from a distance, but had really great 360 views of everything else. All stoke, 0 tourists.
Last time I went, I visited those places, but I stayed in a tiny hotel in the gothic quarter and walked from there to Park Guell instead of using the tube, stopping to get ice cream or coffee, letting my four year old play on the park and so on. Step away, slow down and enjoy it.
the way to signal wealth now is taking ur yacht to obscure places and not telling people where these places are located to combat congestion.
This is already kind of a thing. See gap years, find yourself trips, etc.
Add digital nomadism, at least, in many of its forms.
The top 250 million adult Americans are richer than the top 250 million adults in Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa. So what are you talking about?
The median American is far richer - with a far higher income and disposable income - than the median in Europe, Asia, Latin America or Africa. It's not remotely close in fact.
The median in Europe for example, pegs you down toward an income of just $12,000 and a net worth of only a few thousand dollars.
The US is a country of 330 million people where the median person is wealthier than Germany or Sweden. The US is by a considerable margin the wealthiest per capita large population in world history.
I'm pretty sure this is due to some really poor surveys, not the actual state of things. There's a number of debunkings, too. [0]
> America might have the greatest level wealth inequality in the world.
According to Wikipedia, the gini wealth coefficient list (as of 2000) goes Namibia, Zimbabwe, Denmark, the world as a whole, Switzerland, and then the US. [1] Most people would not consider Denmark to be a particularly unequal country. For more recent numbers it seems that Russia, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil and China all have a higher proportion of wealth in the hands of the 1% than the US does. [2] That's as of 2016, and I don't think the US was able to 'catch up' that much in the past 3 years.
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribut...
2: https://www.statista.com/chart/6908/the-worlds-most-unequal-...
https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-house...
Just look at garages. They are often so packed full of junk there is no room to park a car (and then end up filling driveways and the street bumper to bumper). Once you start paying attention to this you notice it a lot.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/11/digital-n...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
About 3% of the US workforce seems way high not to be including a bunch of stuff one wouldn't expect.
There is also the possibility that electric planes will become a thing
There is also the possibility that people will spend half a year working in an exotic place to avoid travelling too much
Not all of them, can't do much more eco friendly than sailboats. Besides walking or cycling, but that won't take you across oceans/seas.
yeah bummer. what about balloons?
Of course, we've been becoming increasingly more efficient and we're not getting more time off, so you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.
Same goes with regulation - there are definite corners of society who would like that, but those who are in power, who are in power because of the people, clearly don't.
Just to be clear, I want these things, I just don't see society turning that way.
As far as unionization, there seems to be a trend of newsrooms organizing, I've seen a burger place trying to unionize where I live, and more and more people are talking about unionizing in the games space. With tech workers, we're not there yet, but efforts like the anti-ICE stuff could be a first step down that path.
As far as regulation, all the senators running for president support the Green New Deal, and so do a handful of congress members. And locally, several cities have passed laws providing paid sick leave, including in Texas.
These are frankly all pretty small, but taken together, I think they show that things could change.
Perhaps but that’s a minority of the tourist pop., so the problem will remain and only slightly diminished.
This is very much still a thing. Personal hunting trips in Africa, sailing through the artic, flying your private plane to islands regular jets can't reach, cruising your yacht across the Atlantic.
The best way is to buy your own island. That way nobody else can go there, the ultimate exclusive travel destination
Anecdata but I can see this already happening in my circle of Friends in a big German city. Friends telling of weekend trips by plane are increasingly met by snarkiness, and I personally dream of doing the Interrail trip I never did in my teens!
I try to sell to my spouse, family and friends that this is what we’re doing when I buy the 29” pitch seat flight tickets, but they’re not buying it.
I'm sure as hell not going to apologize for maximizing the limited time I have off work.
Apparently, in 2017, European Council researchers found 26.7 % of trips made by EU-28 country residents were trips outside of their home country, and of those, the average trip lasted 8.4 nights.
So, for Europeans traveling farther than domestically, trips averaged longer than a week. For domestic trips (73.3% of all trips), average duration was 3.9 nights.
Whilst the volume of tourists is a problem, the behaviour of booking a week (or less!) off work to fly halfway across the world and back is of course going to concentrate tourists around "hot" destinations.
I predict that long, slow, possibly "eco" trips will become fashionable as a new way to signal wealth (much in the way that travel to far-flung corners of the Earth used to).