And Trump's plan to build a skyscraper on Australia's Gold Coast was nixed a month or two ago because his partner on it bailed because of its "toxic associations".
Half of Albania is butchered like this, beaches and green being destroyed to make resorts for the tourists to come. Go see Dermi or Vuno and then go see Borsh how clean it is, with no excavations at all or resorts being build.
> Don't forget that resorts et al typically belong to international capital. What does the local economy get out of it?
Same goes for any natural resource. Oil, precious metals, water, etc. Globalization feeds this behavior, but that’s a conversation people don’t usually want to have
Most resorts secure favorable tax deals directly from the central governments before they invest, accompanied by public announcements in the media about success of government in attracting international investments.
So no tax the locals. During the construction phase there is some legitimate economy uplift (similar to datacenters). But after that nothing.
> Most resorts secure favorable tax deals directly from the central governments before they invest, accompanied by public announcements in the media about success of government in attracting international investments.
is this just pure old corruption. govt not working for ppl stuff.
This happens, publicly, in the US, all the time. Megacorps like Amazon regularly pit cities and states against each other for what you're calling plain old corruption.
"Big money" tends to extort the same sort of tax deals that American sports stadiums get: they get huge tax breaks and while the registers at the stadium look like they're charging sales tax, that money goes directly to the stadium owners, not the government. Sometimes these deals are called "special economic zone".
I challenge you to find a single example anywhere on earth where redistribution of foreign tax revenue significantly improved the economic standing of the existing general population.
Tax revenue, local jobs, and the possiblity for entrepreneurs to build businesses around that possibility of tourists leaving the premise.
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.
The Netherlands prides itself on its coastline and dunes but by the time mass tourism arrived the country was already rich.
The secret ingredient is always money. Spain looks the way it does because that country was desperate for foreign currency and jobs in the 60s and 70s. Economic development is hard and Albania does not have much going for it unfortunately.
Exactly, it’s why tourists flock to Manhattan, while the city isn’t getting dominated by that industry. Your trip doesn’t outcompete locals, but the local economy makes it a rather expensive trip.
such a stark contrast with all the hysteria over foreign tourists avoiding the US due to Trump that was posted here a few days ago. "Oh noes Trump is destroying the tourist economy!!!" vs. "only a few maids salary to clean up the tourist's shit"
We happened to be in Borsh beach around a week or so ago, and that will be a tourist wreck in 2 years. Multiple working sites, 70% of the beach already claimed by beds.
Quite laid-back in May / start of June, but I do not want to be there in the high season.
I simply don’t understand how American voters are fine with being robbed blind.
Many countries have far more corrupt administrations than the current U.S. one, but even in the most degenerate ones none of them are as open about it.
And it’s not just a political thing.
Consider how the Chinese owned Smithfield’s is polluting lakes and land all over the Midwest with their highly intensive (and incredibly cruel) pig farming that is causing high cancer and mortality rates for the people living there, and yet the locals tend to support whatever Smithfield wants.
It's a two party system in a big complicated country. Voting for a candidate you dislike and often disagree with is the norm. People vote against opposing candidates as much as they vote for something, especially in recent years.
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 we have to trust the ballot box more than opinion polls.
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.
Certainly there is very little granularity in both election outcomes and yea/nay approval rating.
That said, if people voted based on values or alignment for a candidate that said he would overturn civil service reform and conduct the bigliest deportation campaign in history, it'd be silly to think they'd reject the outcomes they voted for.
I think one of Trump’s greatest sleight-of-hands was convincing nearly every red triber that he represented their interests specifically, which is the ultimate goal of a populist. He was simultaneously a free market hero, while also highly protectionist. He was fair and sophisticated, while also highly retributive and humble. He became representative of their values, no matter what they were. I even still see it when talking to people who lean red - they’ll forgive Trump for nearly everything except what they view as being the important thing, which is a reflection of their own politics rather than Trump’s.
I mean, up until the election he was denying that he even knew what Project 2025 was, and now he’s bragging about how much from the document he’s accomplished.
Trump’s win was not a policy win, it was a culture war win.
No doubt, policy was completely absent in his campaign. His normal shtick does deal a lot in outcomes that are backed into policylike promises, "[literally anything] will make us/you the richest person/country in history, probably ever".
And you point out the single-issue voters that the GOP has farmed for decades. The culture war was there but since he protrays himself as elite, he couldn't do the blue collar charade. Instead it was a really half-assed demonization of trans athletes and, of course, immigrants.
The thing I think has to be mentioned is that he seems to have manipulated people's need to feel like they are on a team that is winning. I think that's why you see the cult of personality stuff like flags and tattoos - he's more of a college football team than an administrator.
Donald Trump was re-elected because too many voters who voted against him the last two times stayed home. That they don't approve, yet did not go vote, is the textbook definition of fine with it. America does not have a wellspring of anti-Trump voters just waiting to be awakened.
I don’t get it either. I think it is a combination of the two party system, and short attention span / tribalism.
Look at the California primaries. In every race I can name, the right wing (like funded by the same people as Trump levels of right wing) and the republican token candidate are advancing to the general election.
We have open primaries, so, in theory, there could be a corporate democrat vs. a populist/progressive democrat in the general elections.
I say “token” republicans because they are clearly sending the B team. One ran on “too many dogs get to vote” and another (who advanced) on a transphobic platform.
Typical breakdowns of California primaries in Silicon Valley, translated to European norms: 5% left, 15-25% center left, 30-35 moderate to hard right, 35-40 right wing nationalist.
In the general, the first three categories will collapse, and the moderate to hard right democrat that gets elected will claim they have a mandate from the voters.
Edit: The narrative dominating the news cycle is Trump’s claim the elections are rigged because the results were so far to the left. I guess he wants two republicans facing off in every general election race, despite the state being overwhelmingly blue.
Also, on ballot initiatives, the state overwhelmingly votes left, not moderate right, so, when presented with an actual policy decision, they vote completely differently than they do when given a choice of candidates.
My theory is that the US isn’t really a democratic society anymore. Immigration has changed the fabric of the country so much that a lot of newer Americans still haven’t fully assimilated into American culture yet.
Most people in my social circles that do not feel the US is in an existential crisis are first generation immigrants.
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.
I basically have the opposite reaction from my first gen immigrant social circle ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Also, unless they're ignoring/ignorant of the checks & balances falling apart, I'm not sure this bolsters OPs implied point.
> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families
> The protests, which civil society and international media have called the Flamingo Revolution, have grown well past their environmental starting point into a challenge to Rama himself
(because of accusations he's bending regulations for Kushner that exist for other companies).
> On 30 December 2024, a Strategic Investment Committee chaired by Rama granted strategic investor status to Atlantic Incubation Partners, a firm affiliated with Kushner's Affinity Partners ... Reuters, which saw the written decision, reported .... the terms include no tax during the construction phase while the Albanian state underwrites the water, electricity and sewage infrastructure.
Yeah, forgive me if I don't exactly see his opinion as unbiased.
Every time you hear about some corpo or another getting to "play a role in the development of $nation" it's pretty much always going to be some kind of bullshit that will employ a lot of locals for shit wages to provide a product or service to residents of the Global North.
There are exceptions of course but the vast, vast, vast majority are tourist trapping and wealth extraction.
The resort would destroy lots and lots of species and nature:
"Conservationists describe the wider zone, the Pishe Poro-Narta protected landscape, as one of the Mediterranean's last largely intact coastal wetlands, home to flamingos, more than 200 migratory bird species, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting loggerhead sea turtles."
Protected environmental zone != normal tourist area. Crazy to post Fox News though, it is legally entertainment so has no obligation to report the facts.
> What is wrong with building a resort in Albania? OP's link is down but it looks like they're building a pretty normal resort in a normal tourist area. This is a very boring story
I'm not sure if you are trolling.
From the article:
> Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of Albania Land Development, the company that bought beachfront plots for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, as national protests against the project entered their seventh consecutive day. The preventive seizure was ordered by SPAK, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, as part of a property-fraud investigation into how land titles in a protected coastal wetland were acquired and how the area was stripped of its protected status.
Furthermore.
> In 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed special legislation reclassifying Sazan and the Pishe Poro-Narta area to permit large-scale development, the move that made the strategic investor designation possible; opposition parties and environmental groups argued the changes were written to accommodate Kushner-linked investors. One administrator of Albania Land Development, Redi Struga, has reportedly been subject to searches.
And of course the old beaten down excuse.
> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families, claimed the anti-corruption and land defence campaign was being pushed by opponents of Donald Trump.
The only people this is relevant to are Albanians. I don't expect an Albanian to know about data centers being built in Texas. Hell, I don't expect Michiganders to know about them.
> The only people this is relevant to are Albanians.
That's a short-sighted view. Nature destruction is relevant to people everywhere. The locals might not even care much (unlike in this case, fortunately).
What if this construction project would wipe out animal species x, y or z? That's a permanent, irreversible loss for the world as a whole.
What if some species loses its breeding ground, decimating a population elsewhere? Or takes out a stop halfway a migration route?
Destruction of nature always has 2nd order effects. Don't ignore just because you don't live there.
Maybe it’s naive, but there’s something incredibly hopeful that there are folks not only protesting this kind of corruption, but also that there’s a government actually responding to the voice of the people. That the EU’s own legal frameworks might positively (if indirectly) affect things is even better.
The rich are getting too openly greedy and complacent again, they're slowly forgetting about history, can't wait to see how it pans out in the next decades.
She was in Jewish underground resistance after she escaped the ghetto, and that movement was responsible for saving a lot of lives. Sure, not a shockingly unique story in WWII, but she did better than these upward fail sons.
well a legend he is, if we are to believe what former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said about what the pardon was for: "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he ever prosecuted as U.S. attorney.
Real estate, Crypto and AI make up the 3 legged stool of US investment (from my perspective).
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.
All the great art should teach us that we can't take riches to the grave, it's too bad that this is being forgotten.
Then again, may be they already figured out how to make their lives meaningfully longer. I often think what drives 80 year old Bidens and Trumps to live the stressful POTUS life.
And I can think of only one incentive. Weird thoughts, but otherwise the dots just don't connect.
Different people are driven by different things. Some people genuinely want to serve their nation and being a president is a huge honor to the family. You become part of history.
Others may be serving their own interests as it gives them access to all information.
What is this news source? I've never heard of it before and there are no names associated with it on their site. Two of their social media links are broken. Their YouTube channel was only active for like a year, 4-5 years ago. It all feels strange.
This led to the greatest trolling of an individual ever when they deliberately stuck a windfarm directly off the coast of his new golf course. He's spent a couple of decades spending countless millions in losing a bunch of court cases, and of course, to this day, constantly moans to anyone who will list about "windmills".
As far as trolling goes, it's one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind.
unfortunately this trolling has caused trump to try to halt all large offshore wind projects in the United States in federal land grants. it's terrible.
> Scottish people formed a Tripping Up Trump Campaign to make it more difficult to transfer the title to the land, and hundreds of people bought small interests in Forbes' property and became co-owners.
Continued in another article[1]:
> When it emerged at the end of January 2011 that Queen guitarist Brian May had agreed to the use of the band's song "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a film highlighting the plight of the families, Trump appeared to deny in a media statement that there had ever been an eviction threat, declaring "we have no interest in compulsory purchase and have never applied for it."
Albanians should realize that $4B will not change their lives a bit, but they will look like submissive sheeple. I hope they prove to be brave and determined. Their president is a total madman - I'm not sure why they elected him, which makes me think Trump's corrupt family will get what they want.
This island was a Russian naval base in the cold war with hundreds of underground nuclear bunkers.
Kushner apparently wants to build a billionaire resort with the protections required to insulate billionaires from their actions. Maybe UAE is too dangerous now.
Here is another article. Try not to be put off by the Rothchild connections, they are mostly irrelevant and based on Kushner's own statements:
If things ever get bad enough that the wealthy need underground nuclear bunkers, the underground nuclear bunkers aren't going to be enough to protect them. The ordinary people who did the electrical, plumbing, security, etc. know where you are, and no level of security will protect you from an angry mob with nothing to lose.
> The ordinary people who did the electrical, plumbing, security, etc. know where you are, and no level of security will protect you from an angry mob with nothing to lose.
Governments around the world already keep many locations/facilities secret and hidden from the public.
They will simply arrest you, or worse, just kill you.
> Governments around the world already keep many locations/facilities secret and hidden from the public.
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).
I once saw a news article with interviews of anonymous bunker tenders; essentially, there is a small industry of former special ops folks that are paid to live in the bunker and maintain it.
The main point they made during the interviews: If things ever get bad enough for the owner to want to move into the bunker, the #1 priority of the guards will be to neutralize the owner. They worked out detailed contingency plans while twiddling there thumbs and rotating cans of caviar.
It turns out you cannot eat electronic money that’s sitting in the middle of a bank’s bombed out business continuity vault.
Maybe they have human shields on one end of the island and the billionaire reservation on the other. Also, note that Kushner, like Trump, is always lying. We'll only know what is actually built after it is done.
Out of curiosity, do you have a similar example of a Democrat doing something like this?
Most left leaning people I know aren’t exactly happy with Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading activities and are in full support of outlawing Congress from actively trading and are willing to hold Dems accountable for other unscrupulous actions.
You listed a bunch of names, in response to an article that contains factual reporting and sourced information to support the allegations that are being made. Excuse me for not being impressed.
Whereas I recognize many of the names, the only one whose transgressions I am familiar with is Robert Menendez. He is in jail.
The burden of proof rests upon the person who makes the allegation. "Do your own research" lol.
I hate these rich motherfuckers so much. They are openly corrupt, and move through the world with impunity on a magic carpet of wealth. Not only must the individuals be stopped, but the systems that allow nonstate actors to wield effectively unlimited funds must be rebuilt.
The T family acts as everyone expected and warned, they are not stopping, and they are even accelerating. I'm not sure what is the conclusion from this.
There are 2 projects here. And there is a lot of missing details from both.
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.
In NYC, Trump did something similar. He built condos, then sold them way above market to Russian oligarchs, who then immediately resold them at market value to people that were not laundering money.
Very hard for the general public to gain things though.
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.
The evidence so far hints more at Albania’s weak rule of law/property/environmental governance and ugly conflict-of-interest more than Kushner being part of some evil conspiracy.
YES! More of this. Such places and people are not for sale. What kind of sickos think they can just see a place and say "I've got money, these know-nothing-barefoot-fools will take our money and let us rape their lands!"?
And on top of that it's Trump kids, yeet them into the sea.
The USA is currently run by oligarchs. They try to buy their way
into other countries via corruption. How much kickback did the
government of Albania get already? It is highly suspicious how
supportive they are of Trump.
Incompetent oligarchs. If you can't even successfully bribe the Albanian or Serbian government, you are just really bad at corruption. Those are (sadly) among the most corrupt countries in the world.
edit: the governments appear to be supportive, but obviously aren't as supportive as they could be. Probably taking the bribe and not doing as much as they could.
Unlike most places in Europe, America has never had a revolution where they deposed the ruling class and those with political power. Americans tell themselves they live in a free country with a government run by the people. It is increasingly obvious that that is a lie.
we regularly depose those with political power. In elections.
And the wealthy die or stop participating within around 30 yrs of becoming wealthy normally. And compete themselves across idiology. Soros, Koch, Musk and Moskowitz all have very different packages of political beliefs they advocate vs each other
I always point this out too. They had a war of independence, the main goal of which was so the elite slave owning class wouldn't have to pay tax. Yet they call it a revolution.
They have never had an actual revolution akin to French revolution and the July revolution.
except the courts are somewhat functional, and the law has a lot of pro-privacy and pro-consumer basis. It is not so simple as "lie" but, the clay feet of the idol are showing today.
His kind are like alien vampire squids that in sci-fi books/movies descend from space to harvest earth's resources and terraform the planet for their parasitic use, as famously described in The War of the Worlds.
Epstein island 2.0 is required in order to fill the pipeline of depraved and pliable, corrupted power puppets.
I get that the guidelines are just about the most subjective black hole you could drive a quasar through, but what exactly is the offending aspect? Is it the “Epstein island 2.0”? I mean, who believes that these types of people will not be trying to rebuild that same kind of capacity in some other place by some other, albeit similar means?
If I were tasked to do it, the Albanian coast would be a top choice for me too; it has near perfect conditions for such an enterprise.
Don’t we discuss viruses, exploits, dark patterns, scammers and fraud when it comes to other things? Why would it be objectionable to call out the top civilization hackers and scammers and exploits? Everyone can talk about meaningless scams and exploits. Is there any bigger, worse exploit and hack than hacking a whole country and civilization and extracting trillions in sum?
HN's guidelines are subjective in the sense that they involve interpretation and no two people (including tomhow and me) interpret them identically. But they're not arbitrary, in the sense that every moderation call is just a whim. Most aren't borderline calls, and the one here certainly wasn't.
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:
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.
Mostly anti parasitic, all shared common traits between all the sociopaths in charge of big companies/institutions not my problem, it's a good line of defense I admit, but I fear it works less and less since people see through the bs more easily these days.
You may want to pick a broader range of samples for your examples then, since both Zuck and Kushner being Jewish and you choosing those two names specifically...
I sincerely apologize to any cephalopods I may have harmed or emotionally injured with my irresponsible association with the Kushners and their ilk. I hope to mend the trust and friendship with all my fellow creature on earth that are all equally a victim of the Kushners and their like.
I think parent poster is implying that the language is directed at or about Kushner's Jewish ethnicity.
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.
You mean the talk that got us all out rights and freedoms? You know, like what started 250 years ago this year, and everyone has taken for granted to the point that it’s all just quietly being slipped out from under people who have no understanding for the value and contract of things??
Criticise a jewish person for something completely unrelated: infinite amount of green accounts created on the spot come in and start vaguely referencing "ThE DaRkEsT TiMe In HiStOrY".
It would indeed be surprising to hear people say this if you completely ignore the words and actions of the Epstein class and the overwhelming amount of pain and suffering they afflict on everyone else.
This is off topic and I understand we’re not supposed to comment on such things, but was anyone else mystified by the decisions that went into the scroll progress bar up top (on mobile)? It seems to be two part, where part of it would accurately reflect your scroll state, while the other had some weird latency associated with it. And then it ended up hidden behind the top of page blur unless you scrolled very aggressively, to the point where the blur could not keep up.
It works for me. I didn't dismiss the first dickover, but did dismiss the second dickover. Scrolled all the way to the bottom smoothly (minus the pause for the second dickover).
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/17/serbia-trump...
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