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.

Debt is not part of the GDP directly but it does boost the GDP if it's used to create what the Official GDP defines as "values" (a significant slice of which, as I pointed above, is bullshit).

Of course the really fun bit is that in the modern age it's debt that creates most of the money in circulation (over 90%, at least in most countries in the West) - basically when banks make a loan, unlike in the old days when they could only lend depositor's money, in the era of "money is just a number in a digital ledger" they literally create the money they're lending, which they destroy when the loan gets repayed. All this is well recognized in Economics circles - you can read a Bank Of England's paper on this from 2014 called Money Creation In The Modern Economy.

So in practice non-existing money is used to create value (for example when a loan to a company is used to buy machinery that increases their production) which adds to GDP because people are doing work for nothing and goods are being exchanged for nothing, only it's not nothing, it's trade tokens created out of thin air and the whole thing works as long as everybody believes it in the value those trade tokens represent, just like at one point they did about tulip bulbs.

The point being that a lot of this shit is done on top of an ever "taller and thinner" house of cards and the present day official "success numbers" like GDP are tied to the whole thing keeping on going: any country that pulls back on Debt will see less "money" being created, circulating and being used to create the value that gets listed in GDP so GDP goes down or not as fast up, so opposition politicians claim the party in power is "bad for the Economy".

This thing then also feds into and out of speculative bubbles - for example a house "worth" more due to price speculation (i.e. with no improvement whatsoever hence no actual real value increase) when sold is neutral in direct money terms (money just moves from buyer to seller) but generally most of the money from the buyer to the seller is actually created from nothing in a loan so it not only do higher house prices incentivise more money being created but also, indirectly because buyers have access to more money to buy houses thanks to the availability of pretty much (there are some limits, such as bank capital requirements) infinite money for loans, more money for buying houses puts Buy-side pressure on that market which unbalances the Offer-Demand towards Demand hence house prices go up - in other words, it's a positive feedback circle (which goes a long way to explain why there are house price bubbles in almost all Western countries).

Of course, the really funny bit is that ever less of such loaned money goes into things that do create real value (like my example of machinery used to increase a company's production) and ever more goes into activities that destroy value (loans for consumption) or offsetting inbalances in the Economy (workers whose salaries are so low that need to get ever more in debt merelly to pay for food and shelter) and bidding up prices in speculative bubbles (for example, "realestate investors" using mainly loans to"invest" in properties or companies using debt to buy their own stock).

When this shit blows it's going to be something else.

In the GDP calculation, the Official Inflation figure is used to "deflate" (so, reduce) the Nominal GDP (i.e. in dollars, including inflation) into the Real GDP, which is the Official one and is supposedly free of inflation hence can be compared to previous years.

Now, if you're in the US (also in other countries, but the US seems to be extra bad in this) look around at the price of your weekly shopping (don't forget to include shrinkflation) and house prices and tell me that the inflation is really just 2.9%.

Even better, ask somebody old enough to remember how much their salary bought back in the 60s and then use some online inflation adjustment calculator and converts that salary value to present day value (using the official inflation figures over the years) and see how much it buys (hint: what was enough to support a family of 5 with a house and a decent car back then is barelly enough to rent a one-room appartment nowadays).

And this is just how the bullshit Official Inflations pumps up GDP numbers which in turn lets politicians loudly celebrate how much GDP "growth" there was under their administration.

Then go into how the Nominal GDP itself is created - for example house prices feed into GDP via something called "Inputted Rent" were a homeowner is treated as renting their own house from themselves, said "rent" being treated as adding to GDP. Not only is the notion that merelly living in your home actually creates wealth some serious bollocks, but also this process means that realestate bubbles (such as the one that regularly keeps on getting inflated) actually add to GDP - in other words that house prices going up driven by speculation somehow make the real value (i.e. in terms of what it provides to people living it, which how this GDP supposedly is "created") of properties go up even though those properties weren't improved in any way form or shape and are just worth more because they've become part of an "investment asset class".

All this to say that US GDP is complete total bullshit.

Same applies to most other Western countries, by the way, but the US seems to be one of the ones where such official numbers are extra fraudulent.

It's not just for China that one has to look at indirect indicators such as electric power usage to figure out what's really going on.

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 ;))

It's fucking foreign grifters, because in the present day you can make money from being an "influencer": all that fucking shit in the US has attracted every Techology savy, English-speaking scammer in the World because every fucking asshole with a computer and an Internet connection in his mother's basement in bumfuck shitty-shit town in frigging Romenia can make more money in a day as an "influencer" feeding prejudiced, socially inept, delusions-of-grandeur-holding Americans with outrage that they can in a month working whatever job is available for them in shitty-shit nowehere-ville.

(Ditty for American grifters, by the way)

It's targetting mainly the MAGAs because they're the less intellectually capable population segment in the US, hence make for much easier marks.

Populism-dominated America together with the ability for "remote work" on the Internet and how one can make money from views has led to a fucking freeding frenzy for every tech-abled scammer with an internet connection and decent English-speaking skills in the World.

I bet this whole phenomenon is mainly a "emergent property" of the rewards and access structures in place in Social Media and that the top-down organised ops from state actors are but a tiny fraction of this shit show.

Foreigners are just the "others" used by the elites to point the tribalist weak minded morons towards somebody else whilst the very much local elites pillage the place.

And this is not just done to the MAGA muppets: notice the whole bitching and moaning about "foreign interference" from the rest - guess what, the influence of the likes of Russia and even China have in countries like the US is fucking nothing next to that of the local traditional fatcats owning the Press and Tech-bros owning social media or even in relative terms that cultivated by the kind of Propaganda ops we see in action here in the most popular Lemmy.world forums.

Fuck, if you want to worry about Foreign Actors, look at how Israel got most of the West, especially the US, to basically destroy in non-aligned countries at least half a fucking century of cultivate image of being Rule Of Law abiding and Freedom Promoting, which amongst other things resulted in some of those now turning towards Russia or China - all this shit to protected the fucking modern day Nazis whilst they get off from murdering little brow children.

The supposed Leftwing of the US (but not really: in World terms the Democrats are a hard Right party, just ultra Capitalist Neolibs rather than Fascists) are just as much doing the whole "it's those scary foreigners" smoke and mirrors show to turn the mob eyes away from their sponsors as the Fascists, it's just that in their propaganda the cartoonish bad guys are "state actors" rather than "immigrants".

And all the fucking shit in the US (not just the propaganda but its use to distract the crowd from the pillaging by the likes of the Finance Industry, "realestate investors" and other parasites) is leaking to the rest of the World and accelerating the shitstorm elsewhere.

And you are totally right!