Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'

So no tax the locals. During the construction phase there is some legitimate economy uplift (similar to datacenters). But after that nothing.

With all that being said, I still think that overreliance on tourism is bad for a place in principle. Those places fossilize, the wealth of tourists overwhelmes local culture, it will create wrong incentives, draw in junk vendors, pick-pocketers, and AirBnB vultures making life more miserable for the locals. One can also be certain that the local hospitality operators will try to pass the least possible amount to locals by finding even cheaper employees from god knows where.

In the particular case of trump, the less one knows about politics and governing the more likely they are to support him. The US is full of people who don't care much about how government actually works, which is not an unreasonable position for the most part, but can get hijacked by an effective conman.

I think voting trends are a pretty poor signal of voter values, but a much stronger signal of voter “alignment”, especially in first-past-the-post systems.

They see the checks and balances that we used to have, and assumed those structures would constrain the administration to mostly tow the line.

On the one hand, it’s true they came from places with weaker institutions. On the other hand, they’re used to leaders that face real threats of coup, asset seizure, assassination, etc. The current US administration has publicly stated it is permanently above the law, and it has also dismantled most checks and balances.

In my area which is over 1/3 retired people this is where the majority of their investments seem to lie. Those who are simply relying on 401k or other investments are also at risk due to the lack of diversification. Since their investments are tied to those 3 things.

If any of the legs of the stool go out...the whole thing goes down.

Those cold war bunkers only had one purpose: to keep high ranking government and military peeps alive just long enough (up to 2 weeks or so) to make sure that mutual destruction is actually 'assured'. They were not meant as some sort of cradle of a new civilization or as a safe haven to survive a nuclear war (because there would be no place to return to anyway).

Look at what happened to Ceaușescu for example. He went from being confident in his rule to dead 24 hours later.

But hey, I enjoy fake AI content on social media sometimes too!

But what has happened before is that:

The government gives free/cheap/exclusive public land to someone to build apartments/villas. They sell these to whoever wants to buy before starting construction. At the end of construction, with the profits, they build nice hotels at the frontline and keep for themselves without investing any of their own money in anything.

So they will most likely build apartments in Narta, sell them to the populace, and keep Sazan for themselves as luxury resort.

Something worse than this has started happening for high rises too, where they start selling before getting the permit even. So they don't invest their own money even to get the initial permit to start building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest

It's too luxury, most likely will pay no taxes for years, you can import workers from elsewhere, etc etc.

It's not the first time this kind of thing happens in Albania and we've already seen results.

Normal people will just never be able to go there again. People in power will either get millions or 1+ free apartment/villa, or heavily discounted price (depends on how much power you have).

I was literally kitesurfing when they came and added fences to the road to block access to the beach.

(Or if you prefer because you are unable to compute that, the price is upfront $70,000 trillion (2025 prices) - cash only)

In this case it's the use of denunciatory rhetoric that fries any element of curious conversation that the comment might have contained. The combination of snark and fulminatey pejoratives is the kind of internet discourse which, however popular, is destructive of what we're trying for on HN.

(Secondarily, there's also something about the combination of "His kind [...] alien [...] paraistic [...] depraved" which has overtones that I can understand why other commenters were objecting to. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but such language does have history and the imprints of that history are still active.)

There's a phrase in your reply here which I think touches on the core and that's "calling out". Denunciatory rage and the shaming process are natural social responses to bad behavior. But it's really not what HN is for, and this isn't just a matter of taste because we can't have both forms of discourse at the same time.

Past explanations about this in case anyone is interested:

calling out - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

shaming: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This is in no way to deny or defend bad behavior of course. It's just trying to preserve HN for its intended purpose, which is fragile and forever in danger of getting trampled by the much stronger default forces on the internet. We're simply trying to stave that off for as long as we can (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and since it's more or less a battle with entropy, it takes a lot of energy.

Which I don't think is the intent of anybody in this thread. We're just talking about them being privileged and rich.

I do think it's important to avoid accidental or deliberate anti-Semitism when talking here though. Epstein and Kushner being Jewish has zero to do with their vileness, but for a segment of the population it's all too easy to unconsciously (or worse, consciously) make a linkage between old vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Rothschilds or whatever.

I raised concerns about your framing, and I think you'll find I'm not a green account. By far.

Please don't drag this forum down. With my own opinions... I wouldn't complain about "Class War" language, but your posts concern me.