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Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

> “Tourists who stay for longer periods of time redistribute their money in the value chains generated by tourism,” Segura said.

Well that's not true. All this will do is further commoditize the housing market and price locals out of the very neighborhoods they grew up in. Digital nomadism aims to turn the whole of the global south into a company town for the benefit of the owners of Intellectual Property in the global north (plus the politicians who helped create these horrific Intellectual Property systems and laws), as well as the privileged knowledge laborers who work for them.

In other words; without access to the firewalled and 'IP protected' networks of scientific knowledge (the sum total of all human progress) the global south is perpetually blocked from growing, and has become a plaything of the global north elite, to be used and abused and plundered at will.

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These well-to-do nomads tend to live in well to do immigrant ghettoes. They don’t compete with the housing stock locals use.

In the north people always tout the benefits of having immigrants come in —especially the high income highly educated.

But here you’re doing the opposite and saying high income immigrants are bad for the locals. Is that the case only in one direction?

If you want someone to blame for the poor economy, blame local politicians corruption and graft endemic locally.

Compare Argentina to New Zealand. One has many more resources and many more people, both in the south but one has corruption and the other doesn’t. One does well and the other perpetually defaulting and getting nowhere.

Before you blame it on the past dictatorships keep in mind past dictatorships in s Korea, Taiwan, Japan even, have not kept those countries from becoming economic dynamoes. You do have to do the hard work of getting your house in order, instill education and entrepreneurship and a dream to succeed (corruption might favor incumbents for example).

In bad housing markets like Toronto and Vancouver people don't tout the benefits of wealthy foreigners (immigrants or just investors) buy houses and making the area unaffordable to the locals.

Canada had a more or less total stop to immigration until recently, and despite that Toronto managed to have another crazy housing rally earlier this year before vaccines were widely available. Before that, the 15% Non‑Resident Speculation Tax caused a brief scare until the market realized that it can rally just fine with bona-fide residents.

I'm not buying the "wealthy foreigner as the main culprit" story. Surely they add to the existing demand and it's always nice to have an external scapegoat, but there's clearly something bigger going on than just foreigners. I'm thinking continued difficulties to build housing without going through multi-year permit processes, most of the city still being NIMBY'd into low-rise SFH zoning, and the sizeable number of millenials both getting wealthy enough to buy into housing as well as getting FOMO from continued price appreciations.

But it's always nice to have a plausible explanation for why the innocent locals aren't at fault.

I agree, there is a ton of local demand and not enough building of medium density stuff people actually want. I was just saying that people don't want wealthy migrants buying homes, regardless if they are the true driver of the prices skyrocketing. Maybe wasn't the best example.

But that's already happening. In addition the global north currently brain drains the rest of the world who reared and educated their most precious workers. If anything this will allow them to go back, with all the positives that brings

Think of the big picture, more income in these locations means more local spending on infrastructure and schooling, it is a long process, but it is possible.

Studies have found that income inequality decreases with improved worker mobility.

I agree with your critique of the "intellectual property" system, and certainly it is true that it serves as a new form of colonialism, extracting rents without providing the supposed benefits for which it was established. And I don't know what the overall social effects of "digital nomadism" will be. But overall I think your comment lacks coherence.

I think sci-hub is blocked in a bunch of European countries but very little of the so-called global south.

I'm not sure you know what a company town is. In a company town, a single company owns the whole town, trapping the inhabitants in a cycle of buying overpriced goods at the company store and renting overpriced housing from the company, so they can never save money. Mr. Peabody and his privileged knowledge laborers didn't move to a company town or even a quasi-company-town like Pawnee; he moved to Hinsdale, a wooded suburb of Chicago, where he'd grown up.

My experience with the so-called "global south" is that usually the local elites have a great deal more influence than overseas companies, and they use it to consolidate their own power, preventing economic development. But generalizations are misleading; the peripheral countries in the world economic system are extremely diverse. The problems in Nigeria are not the same as the problems in Argentina, which (fortunately) are not the same as the problems in Venezuela, and Micronesia has totally different problems (and is largely controlled by overseas politicians).

International investment, including tourism, is in general the fastest way a country can improve it's standard of living. Of course, it's not guaranteed since corruption can easily eat away at the gains but baring that it works rather well. The alternative is a very slow and long grind to improve the economy while every other country is improving even faster since they have more money to throw at it.

Here's the dark secret: these countries are already the playthings of other countries and effectively irrelevant and powerless. The question is how they stop being that and not they avoid becoming it.

That's quite a narrative you're asserting. Curious what facts you have to support it.

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