There still are cars being sold without much of new "technology", I daily a MY2024 Abarth 595 that still doesn't have start-stop, ECall, auto braking, telemetry, lane-assist, the infotainment is replaceable by a standard third-party box without messing with the rest of the car and still has a traditional ignition key. It's a basic turbocharged FIAT FIRE engine, so maintenance is stupidly cheap and anyone can do it.
I checked the Portuguese content available and you should clarify it's Brazilian (and change the flag to the Brazilian one so it doesn't induce in error).
Portuguese here, yes we most definitely are. It’s been of the arguments to support immigration by the previous government since they usually are always net contributors to Segurança Social (Social Security).
It's not because a politician say something that it's true, you should know better ;).
The reason why governments promote immigration is because they want to increase the workforce (and in the case of Portugal, replace all the emigrants from Portugal). As the population is aging, if you want to keep cheap labor you need new arms to work, no matter who pays for the pensions.
If you have pension funds that invest on the global financial market, then pensions are being paid by workers worldwide through the companies profits. So the amount of money you get for pension can remain or even increase even if your national population collapses.
But the supply of workers needed to provide the basic goods your aging population needs (including healthcare) shrinks and if you don't accept immigrants you end up with labor shortage (Or you raise the salaries for these jobs, but then the rest of your economy disappears because there's no one working there anymore).
"My takeaway is, to put it very bluntly, that the average Portuguese person is quite ignorant. They either don't know a lot of important things, or they know a bit but don't care (because they don't know why it's important). It feels like time stopped here in the mid 1900s."
This is quite true, we are ranked very low on things like financial literacy, and most people here don't care why things are the way they are.
By the end of my time with it, my 307 headlight stick would also trigger the horn whenever I turned on the high beams, the AC would stop working at around 90 KM/h, the air intake pipe to the turbo had at least two tears glued down and I had to carry a 5L jug of water replenish the radiator on hot days. I sold it with 340k KM and AFAIK it's still being driven, refusing to die.
