13 ms·

Bunkers in Albania

215 points by samclemens 2y ago

andrewfromx 2y ago
[flagged]
- alwa 2y ago
  I’m surprised at the length of this gag, drawing on what seemed to me to be a particularly robust Wikipedia entry. Is the point that the article strikes you as juvenile, or that you feel like it unfairly makes touristic spectacle of something more complex than the treatment here reflects? And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM? I’m curious because of the earnestly, completeness, and the slight flavor of “how do you do, fellow kids” in lines like “Talk about a plot twist!”
  - stordoff 2y ago
    > And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM? I suspect so, as ChatGPT generates a fairly similar output[1] from the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania". As an example (this was part of the first output it produced): OP: "Jake: So get this - there was this leader named Enver Hoxha who was super paranoid about getting invaded. We're talking an average of almost 6 bunkers per square kilometer. They're literally everywhere - beaches, mountains, cities, even in hotel gardens!" ChatGPT: "Jake: Okay, so get this: back in the Cold War, Albania’s leader, this guy Enver Hoxha, went totally paranoid. He thought everyone was gonna invade—like, NATO, the Soviets, literally everyone. I retried the prompt twice - the first time[2], "so get this" was used again, and the second time[3] used the name "Jake" again. Hardly proof of LLM use, but it'd be a weird coincidence if not IMO. [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcdaa-bda4-8011-a3a9-a5d03e7c9d47 https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcdaa-bda4-8011-a3a9-a5d03e7c9d... [2] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcf87-869c-8011-8727-8e370bde6f5f https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcf87-869c-8011-8727-8e370bde6f... [3] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcfd5-f87c-8011-b1ff-dca4dfd5eb56 https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcfd5-f87c-8011-b1ff-dca4dfd5eb...
  - andrewfromx 2y ago
    I started reading the wikipedia article and just couldn't get into it. It all read like blah blah blah to me but why was it on the HN homepage? There must be something interesting about it. I've used the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds" many times. The output I was able to read no problem and actually enjoyed it. Any sort of dry text this works wonders for my brain being able to comprehend it. But judging by the downvotes I'm guessing this is just me! It was https://claude.ai https://claude.ai pro plan.
    - bean-weevil 2y ago
      I thought the article was entertaining because of how absurd and obviously bad the idea of constructing the bunkers was.
    - alwa 2y ago
      See, now that seems like a pretty cool use case, I’m glad to hear this technique is serving you well! I guess it’s cases like these—where I’d be inclined to do the reverse, taking “20-year-old dialog” and asking Claude to give it to me straight—where the promise of LLM personalization shines… I suspect the downvotes have less to do with your good intentions here, and more a mix of confusion over the context and HN’s hostility toward LLM content (which tends to have a low effort-to-quantity ratio). Personally, I probably would have reacted more positively if you’d introduced your original comment with this explanation (although I’d suggest just leaving a link to the LLM conversation rather than pasting the whole thing). Thank you for engaging on it! But yeah, to me the LLM version strips out the most entertaining part: the pictures of these crazy things! Who but an autocrat could look at those and think “good idea”…
mastazi 2y ago
I love Albania, for reasons related to my job I used to travel there multiple times a year until around 2010. Those bunkers are absolutely everywhere, even right in the middle of nowhere (I guess that's useful if you happen to get lost in the wilderness while hiking). In towns and cities they have been sometimes repurposed, e.g. I remember seeing that someone created a small cafe on the beach using one of the larger bunkers. The problem with reusing them is that the vast majority of the bunkers are of the smaller type (mostly below ground level, and on the inside there is barely enough room for a couple of people) and it's hard to find a new purpose for those.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Japan has the famous "love hotels". If the bunkers fit two...
  - frereubu 2y ago
    "Love bunker" has a certain ring to it.
  - walrus01 2y ago
    'albanian concrete fuck hovel' could be a punk band name
  - dibujaron 2y ago
    Further down the wiki article, it mentions that the bunkers re indeed often used for this :)
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Public restroom Suicide booth
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  Same for me, I used to travel for work earlier (2002-2006) and I loved it. The only problem at that time was the language barrier, almost nobody was speaking English in the eastern part and just a few people in Tirana or Dures. In 2009 I tried to go there with a friend on a motorcycle trip, but we were unable to get in the country due to language barrier, I don't know what was wrong. So we went to Ohrid instead.
Spagbol 2y ago
I had never heard of Enver Hoxha until I listened to the episodes about him on the Real Dictators podcast. Very wild stuff. I find it really fascinating and rather sobering that these invasive authoritarian governments can one day take root and control most or all of the rest of your life. I fear that people's complacency or thoughts that "surely it can't happen here" are part of what lets them rise in the first place, and I wonder just how quickly you can find yourself inside of one.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Well, let's look at what was happening in Albania. Since forever: Ruled by ottoman empire ...along comes the 20th century... 1912: We declare independence! 1914: Let's pick a king... 1925: Let's pick a new king... 1939: I guess the Italians are king now... 1944: Communism, we're all kings! 1946: Hoxha is the king of kings
  - thih9 2y ago
    1991: nope, let’s elect a parliament 1997: one more time and without pyramid schemes[1] 2009: nato 2014: official eu candidate [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
    - vasco 2y ago
      The pyramid scheme one is scary, I wonder what will happen when crypto collapses. It's gotten so big that it infects the rest of the financial system in a big way already - globally.
  - Yawrehto 2y ago
    "Everyone is a king, but some kings are more kingly than others." Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with. [1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-losses-during-the-holocaust-by-country https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los... [2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them. [3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.
matznerd 2y ago
Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant... I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro). Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc... The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania. Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state. So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc. But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans... Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.
dzink 2y ago
The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.
- treyd 2y ago
  This is why a lot of the academic work on economic planning over the last ~30 years has been on shifting the coordination and decision making down on the hierarchy closer to where it's relevant and where the people impacted by some decision have the most to say about it, and instead aggregating statistics and issues upwards for high-level visibility (instead of taking a "top down" approach to planning). This naturally involves leveraging the communication infra and analysis tools we have today that just didn't exist in the past.
  - rapsey 2y ago
    Academic economics is cargo cult science.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Being an industry full of people who's mostly worked their whole careers in centrally planned institutions I have full faith that they'll screw it up. Academia has (to use a broad brush) been lusting after various flavors of central planning for a century. Why would they stop now? (That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
- euroderf 2y ago
  > The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.
bruce511 2y ago
I've not been to Albania yet, so I can't comment from observation, but I'm surmising that most all off these bunkers would be pretty useless militarily anyway. A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use. Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.
- esperent 2y ago
  > would be pretty useless militarily anyway There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection. I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Today bunkers could be operated remotely (using deeply buried optical fiber) or they could be even autonomous, so this would no longer be a problem.
- szszrk 2y ago
  Ok, but wouldn't that be also true if you substitute every "bunker" and "defence" word with "tank" and "attack"? I don't see a goal of your comment.
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    Tanks, unlike bunkers, can move. Fairly quickly, in fact.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      They can move. They can be repositioned. They can congregate to provide mutual support. More significantly they can be used in attack as well as defense.
qez2 2y ago
My dad was a military analyst in the Balkans in the 90s. I am telling this story second-hand, but I'll try to get it correct. While in Albania, my dad shared a taxi with an older Albania gentleman. The man recounted his time working in the Albanian military in the 60s. His platoon had constructed a large number of bunkers, more than any other platoon. The dictator Enver Hoxha was slated to visit, to give them an award for building the most bunkers in the whole country. When Enver arrived, he walked around, and looked at a bunch of the bunkers they had constructed. He pointed at the bunkers. "Look! You have not used enough rebar! Obviously, you are trying to jeopardize the security of our nation, by neglecting to use enough rebar! You are traitors to Albania!" He swiftly sentenced the entire platoon of young men straight to 30 years in prison, which they approximately served. This man, after serving this time, had just gotten freed from jail. The taxi was transporting him from the halfway house.
- stuckkeys 2y ago
  That is wild. Enver was a piece of work for sure.
  - fractallyte 2y ago
    So was everyone who followed his directives...
    - black_puppydog 2y ago
      That's simply not true. That example should tell you that, if anything, a good part of their motivation was a healthy sense of self preservation. This is by the way what we're literally seeing play out in the US right now. Tim Cook, Zuck, all the other rich guys chipped in for the inauguration to signal their deference. Because they know Trump and Musk would remember if they didn't.
    - frereubu 2y ago
      If you're interested in why this happens, try reading some of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If the choice is comply or die, fine upstanding morals don't really come into play except in very rare cases. And even then, what good does getting shot for a minor detail do in the grand scheme of things? You're not going to spur a revolution to overthrow a dictator because you were shot for not following an order to the letter in a Siberian concentration camp.
ajxs 2y ago
Albania is definitely worth visiting. BUNK'ART in Tirana is an easy way to see the bunkers for yourself. Somewhat related: Famous Russian urbex photographer Lana Sator is still stuck in Albania, after being arrested for espionage while documenting Albania's abandoned cold war military infrastructure: https://archive.is/o7rgB https://archive.is/o7rgB For what it's worth, she is a well known photographer. I've been following her work since the early 2010s.
vjerancrnjak 2y ago
Now they’re building hundreds of gas stations every 100 meters. Gas stations with very unique architecture.
- precommunicator 2y ago
  Exactly. I've spend a day in Albania, from Shkodër to ferry terminal in Durrës. Haven't seen a bunker, but easily saw 100s of gas stations. Almost none of them accept card, unfortunately.
- matznerd 2y ago
  Lol I don't think there are that many, which area? But gas stations can be like normal businesses there and often have restaurants and sometimes even hotels. I accidentally stayed at a gas station hotel once by the airport, when my go to hotel was full and I didn't know and booked online, and only when I arrived did I realize it was a gas station.
- ImageLonging 2y ago
  I wonder if economists regard this as a sign of a bad economy. Some years ago lowland Tajikistan (a country where the economy is weak outside of remittances from gastarbeiter in Russia) saw a sudden wave of building petrol stations one after the other to the point of absurdity. A great many of them then went bust.
mastax 2y ago
> The construction of prefabricated bunkers alone cost an estimated two percent of net material product, and in total the bunkers cost more than twice as much as the Maginot Line in France, consuming three times as much concrete. Incredible.
- jajko 2y ago
  There is a reason why Albania was for a long time the poorest country in Europe. This is one of the reasons, maybe the largest one.
maxglute 2y ago
Rare Earth - The 750,000 Bunkers of Albania https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU
MichaelRo 2y ago
Since we're at it, I read a theory that Albanians may be the descendants of Dacians, from the Roman province: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia Their language is unique in Europe and probably originates in the Thrakian, Illyrian, and Dacian languages. With the important mention that one must not apply today's assumptions of a unified language when referring to something as "Dacian", think more of a situation like in today's Dagestan, where on a surface of 50,000 square kilometers, 3 million people speak no less than 40 languages. The theory is that during the Roman retreat from Dacia, the population (estimated to as low as 100,000 and as high of 500,000 people, so not exactly a Biblical exodus), migrated to south of Danube and eventually today's location. The toponymy is strangely Albanian, like even the name of the Romanian capital "Bucharest" means "beautiful is" in Albanian.
- mathieuh 2y ago
  Unique how? It's an Indo-European language, like many of the other languages spoken in Europe. There is also a proposal that Albanian is closely related to Greek and Armenian.
  - etc-hosts 2y ago
    Albanian is unique because its the only surviving branch of a particular branch of proto-Indo-European languages . This is a pretty good explanation http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html
- ImageLonging 2y ago
  Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historical linguistics in recent decades. The evidence is overwhelming that Albanian originates from the Central Balkans. While Albanian does show signs of belonging to a Balkan Indo-European subgroup deep in prehistory, it is not closely related to Thracian – Matzinger’s 2012 paper “Zur herkunft des Albanischen: Argumente gegen die thrakische Hypothese” in the Ismajli Festschrift conveniently sets out why. While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago). * (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)
joeofbook 2y ago
[dead]
fforflo 2y ago
Shameless plug (who would have thought): I've played hide and seek in Albania and used a bunker as a hideout. AMA :D That's one of the few experiences I remember when I was 3-5yo.
- fforflo 2y ago
  Another Albanian thing worth mentioning is an extensive list of oil wells dispersed across residential areas see [0]. Family legend has it that my father almost drowned in one [1] when he was a kid, and a relative had to pull him by his nose to save him. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visoka_oil_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visoka_oil_field
Theodores 2y ago
We are always fighting the last war, and, as Ukraine has proven, much has changed. The situation for Ukraine is dire, mostly due to a lack of manpower for the infantry. They are always on the retreat, getting holed up in cities where it is the tower blocks that become the bunkers. There are no 'big arrow' movements by the Russians, they only ever send out small groups of soldiers after lots of artillery preparation. Commonly available MANPADS mean that big tanks and planes don't go anywhere near the front. It is drone warfare. From the point of view of the Russian side, imagine if Ukraine was littered with these bunkers, all of them filled with drone operators. I would say that this would be an upgrade on what Ukraine has with the trenches they have been building in the East since 2014.
- rocqua 2y ago
  You need trenches, or something similar, if you are going to mount any kind of lasting defense. Specifically, you need a safe way to run your logistics (or in military terms: your lines of communication, which refers to your supply lines, not your phone lines). A lone bunker is incredibly difficult to resuply, relieve, or reinforce. That is the power of trenches. They give protection for when you need to move goods, people, or information. If you can cut a defensive position off from any of these, it won't stand up very long. You can still use such positions to delay. But Ukraine needs to hold territory, not delay it's loss.
pmontra 2y ago
Ah Albanian mason who has been living in Italy since the 90s told me a story about bunkers. I cannot date it to a year nor assess its truth but here it is. A Minister (maybe Defense? Army? whatever) went to check the new bunkers. They looked good but he asked to the chief engineer how he could be sure that Hoxha would be satisfied with them. "You know, if he thinks they are not good I'm dead." "They are very good." "So you must get in. We will shell the bunker and check if it's really as good as you say." The engineer was not happy with that but the choice was between getting in or die immediately. He got in and they shelled the bunker all day long. The bunker survived, the engineer eventually recovered from the experience (temporary deafness and other problems) and the Minister could bet his own life on those bunkers.
- sokols 2y ago
  Yes this is a widely circulating anecdote. That Minister was Mehmet Shehu[0], an interesting character in his own right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_Shehu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_Shehu
  - PestoDiRucola 2y ago
    And the guy that was forced to get inside the bunker was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Moisiu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Moisiu
gunian 2y ago
The relative ease one could tunnel underground these days are bunkers obsolete these days? Could one build a mini underground city that is reinforced with all the amenities

Bunkers in Albania

215 points by samclemens 2y ago

andrewfromx 2y ago

[flagged]

alwa 2y ago
I’m surprised at the length of this gag, drawing on what seemed to me to be a particularly robust Wikipedia entry. Is the point that the article strikes you as juvenile, or that you feel like it unfairly makes touristic spectacle of something more complex than the treatment here reflects? And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM? I’m curious because of the earnestly, completeness, and the slight flavor of “how do you do, fellow kids” in lines like “Talk about a plot twist!”
- stordoff 2y ago
  > And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM? I suspect so, as ChatGPT generates a fairly similar output[1] from the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania". As an example (this was part of the first output it produced): OP: "Jake: So get this - there was this leader named Enver Hoxha who was super paranoid about getting invaded. We're talking an average of almost 6 bunkers per square kilometer. They're literally everywhere - beaches, mountains, cities, even in hotel gardens!" ChatGPT: "Jake: Okay, so get this: back in the Cold War, Albania’s leader, this guy Enver Hoxha, went totally paranoid. He thought everyone was gonna invade—like, NATO, the Soviets, literally everyone. I retried the prompt twice - the first time[2], "so get this" was used again, and the second time[3] used the name "Jake" again. Hardly proof of LLM use, but it'd be a weird coincidence if not IMO. [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcdaa-bda4-8011-a3a9-a5d03e7c9d47 https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcdaa-bda4-8011-a3a9-a5d03e7c9d... [2] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcf87-869c-8011-8727-8e370bde6f5f https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcf87-869c-8011-8727-8e370bde6f... [3] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcfd5-f87c-8011-b1ff-dca4dfd5eb56 https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcfd5-f87c-8011-b1ff-dca4dfd5eb...
- andrewfromx 2y ago
  I started reading the wikipedia article and just couldn't get into it. It all read like blah blah blah to me but why was it on the HN homepage? There must be something interesting about it. I've used the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds" many times. The output I was able to read no problem and actually enjoyed it. Any sort of dry text this works wonders for my brain being able to comprehend it. But judging by the downvotes I'm guessing this is just me! It was https://claude.ai https://claude.ai pro plan.
  - bean-weevil 2y ago
    I thought the article was entertaining because of how absurd and obviously bad the idea of constructing the bunkers was.
  - alwa 2y ago
    See, now that seems like a pretty cool use case, I’m glad to hear this technique is serving you well! I guess it’s cases like these—where I’d be inclined to do the reverse, taking “20-year-old dialog” and asking Claude to give it to me straight—where the promise of LLM personalization shines… I suspect the downvotes have less to do with your good intentions here, and more a mix of confusion over the context and HN’s hostility toward LLM content (which tends to have a low effort-to-quantity ratio). Personally, I probably would have reacted more positively if you’d introduced your original comment with this explanation (although I’d suggest just leaving a link to the LLM conversation rather than pasting the whole thing). Thank you for engaging on it! But yeah, to me the LLM version strips out the most entertaining part: the pictures of these crazy things! Who but an autocrat could look at those and think “good idea”…

mastazi 2y ago

I love Albania, for reasons related to my job I used to travel there multiple times a year until around 2010. Those bunkers are absolutely everywhere, even right in the middle of nowhere (I guess that's useful if you happen to get lost in the wilderness while hiking). In towns and cities they have been sometimes repurposed, e.g. I remember seeing that someone created a small cafe on the beach using one of the larger bunkers. The problem with reusing them is that the vast majority of the bunkers are of the smaller type (mostly below ground level, and on the inside there is barely enough room for a couple of people) and it's hard to find a new purpose for those.

euroderf 2y ago
Japan has the famous "love hotels". If the bunkers fit two...
- frereubu 2y ago
  "Love bunker" has a certain ring to it.
- walrus01 2y ago
  'albanian concrete fuck hovel' could be a punk band name
- dibujaron 2y ago
  Further down the wiki article, it mentions that the bunkers re indeed often used for this :)
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
Public restroom Suicide booth
AdrianB1 2y ago
Same for me, I used to travel for work earlier (2002-2006) and I loved it. The only problem at that time was the language barrier, almost nobody was speaking English in the eastern part and just a few people in Tirana or Dures. In 2009 I tried to go there with a friend on a motorcycle trip, but we were unable to get in the country due to language barrier, I don't know what was wrong. So we went to Ohrid instead.

Spagbol 2y ago

I had never heard of Enver Hoxha until I listened to the episodes about him on the Real Dictators podcast. Very wild stuff. I find it really fascinating and rather sobering that these invasive authoritarian governments can one day take root and control most or all of the rest of your life. I fear that people's complacency or thoughts that "surely it can't happen here" are part of what lets them rise in the first place, and I wonder just how quickly you can find yourself inside of one.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
Well, let's look at what was happening in Albania. Since forever: Ruled by ottoman empire ...along comes the 20th century... 1912: We declare independence! 1914: Let's pick a king... 1925: Let's pick a new king... 1939: I guess the Italians are king now... 1944: Communism, we're all kings! 1946: Hoxha is the king of kings
- thih9 2y ago
  1991: nope, let’s elect a parliament 1997: one more time and without pyramid schemes[1] 2009: nato 2014: official eu candidate [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
  - vasco 2y ago
    The pyramid scheme one is scary, I wonder what will happen when crypto collapses. It's gotten so big that it infects the rest of the financial system in a big way already - globally.
- Yawrehto 2y ago
  "Everyone is a king, but some kings are more kingly than others." Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with. [1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-losses-during-the-holocaust-by-country https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los... [2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them. [3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.

matznerd 2y ago

Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant... I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro). Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc... The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania. Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state. So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc. But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans... Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.

dzink 2y ago

The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.

treyd 2y ago
This is why a lot of the academic work on economic planning over the last ~30 years has been on shifting the coordination and decision making down on the hierarchy closer to where it's relevant and where the people impacted by some decision have the most to say about it, and instead aggregating statistics and issues upwards for high-level visibility (instead of taking a "top down" approach to planning). This naturally involves leveraging the communication infra and analysis tools we have today that just didn't exist in the past.
- rapsey 2y ago
  Academic economics is cargo cult science.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Being an industry full of people who's mostly worked their whole careers in centrally planned institutions I have full faith that they'll screw it up. Academia has (to use a broad brush) been lusting after various flavors of central planning for a century. Why would they stop now? (That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
euroderf 2y ago
> The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.

bruce511 2y ago

I've not been to Albania yet, so I can't comment from observation, but I'm surmising that most all off these bunkers would be pretty useless militarily anyway. A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use. Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.

esperent 2y ago
> would be pretty useless militarily anyway There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection. I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  Today bunkers could be operated remotely (using deeply buried optical fiber) or they could be even autonomous, so this would no longer be a problem.
szszrk 2y ago
Ok, but wouldn't that be also true if you substitute every "bunker" and "defence" word with "tank" and "attack"? I don't see a goal of your comment.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  Tanks, unlike bunkers, can move. Fairly quickly, in fact.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    They can move. They can be repositioned. They can congregate to provide mutual support. More significantly they can be used in attack as well as defense.

qez2 2y ago

My dad was a military analyst in the Balkans in the 90s. I am telling this story second-hand, but I'll try to get it correct. While in Albania, my dad shared a taxi with an older Albania gentleman. The man recounted his time working in the Albanian military in the 60s. His platoon had constructed a large number of bunkers, more than any other platoon. The dictator Enver Hoxha was slated to visit, to give them an award for building the most bunkers in the whole country. When Enver arrived, he walked around, and looked at a bunch of the bunkers they had constructed. He pointed at the bunkers. "Look! You have not used enough rebar! Obviously, you are trying to jeopardize the security of our nation, by neglecting to use enough rebar! You are traitors to Albania!" He swiftly sentenced the entire platoon of young men straight to 30 years in prison, which they approximately served. This man, after serving this time, had just gotten freed from jail. The taxi was transporting him from the halfway house.

stuckkeys 2y ago
That is wild. Enver was a piece of work for sure.
- fractallyte 2y ago
  So was everyone who followed his directives...
  - black_puppydog 2y ago
    That's simply not true. That example should tell you that, if anything, a good part of their motivation was a healthy sense of self preservation. This is by the way what we're literally seeing play out in the US right now. Tim Cook, Zuck, all the other rich guys chipped in for the inauguration to signal their deference. Because they know Trump and Musk would remember if they didn't.
  - frereubu 2y ago
    If you're interested in why this happens, try reading some of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If the choice is comply or die, fine upstanding morals don't really come into play except in very rare cases. And even then, what good does getting shot for a minor detail do in the grand scheme of things? You're not going to spur a revolution to overthrow a dictator because you were shot for not following an order to the letter in a Siberian concentration camp.

ajxs 2y ago

Albania is definitely worth visiting. BUNK'ART in Tirana is an easy way to see the bunkers for yourself. Somewhat related: Famous Russian urbex photographer Lana Sator is still stuck in Albania, after being arrested for espionage while documenting Albania's abandoned cold war military infrastructure: https://archive.is/o7rgB https://archive.is/o7rgB For what it's worth, she is a well known photographer. I've been following her work since the early 2010s.

vjerancrnjak 2y ago

Now they’re building hundreds of gas stations every 100 meters. Gas stations with very unique architecture.

precommunicator 2y ago
Exactly. I've spend a day in Albania, from Shkodër to ferry terminal in Durrës. Haven't seen a bunker, but easily saw 100s of gas stations. Almost none of them accept card, unfortunately.
matznerd 2y ago
Lol I don't think there are that many, which area? But gas stations can be like normal businesses there and often have restaurants and sometimes even hotels. I accidentally stayed at a gas station hotel once by the airport, when my go to hotel was full and I didn't know and booked online, and only when I arrived did I realize it was a gas station.
ImageLonging 2y ago
I wonder if economists regard this as a sign of a bad economy. Some years ago lowland Tajikistan (a country where the economy is weak outside of remittances from gastarbeiter in Russia) saw a sudden wave of building petrol stations one after the other to the point of absurdity. A great many of them then went bust.

mastax 2y ago

> The construction of prefabricated bunkers alone cost an estimated two percent of net material product, and in total the bunkers cost more than twice as much as the Maginot Line in France, consuming three times as much concrete. Incredible.

jajko 2y ago
There is a reason why Albania was for a long time the poorest country in Europe. This is one of the reasons, maybe the largest one.

maxglute 2y ago

Rare Earth - The 750,000 Bunkers of Albania https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU

MichaelRo 2y ago

Since we're at it, I read a theory that Albanians may be the descendants of Dacians, from the Roman province: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia Their language is unique in Europe and probably originates in the Thrakian, Illyrian, and Dacian languages. With the important mention that one must not apply today's assumptions of a unified language when referring to something as "Dacian", think more of a situation like in today's Dagestan, where on a surface of 50,000 square kilometers, 3 million people speak no less than 40 languages. The theory is that during the Roman retreat from Dacia, the population (estimated to as low as 100,000 and as high of 500,000 people, so not exactly a Biblical exodus), migrated to south of Danube and eventually today's location. The toponymy is strangely Albanian, like even the name of the Romanian capital "Bucharest" means "beautiful is" in Albanian.

mathieuh 2y ago
Unique how? It's an Indo-European language, like many of the other languages spoken in Europe. There is also a proposal that Albanian is closely related to Greek and Armenian.
- etc-hosts 2y ago
  Albanian is unique because its the only surviving branch of a particular branch of proto-Indo-European languages . This is a pretty good explanation http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html
ImageLonging 2y ago
Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historical linguistics in recent decades. The evidence is overwhelming that Albanian originates from the Central Balkans. While Albanian does show signs of belonging to a Balkan Indo-European subgroup deep in prehistory, it is not closely related to Thracian – Matzinger’s 2012 paper “Zur herkunft des Albanischen: Argumente gegen die thrakische Hypothese” in the Ismajli Festschrift conveniently sets out why. While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago). * (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)

joeofbook 2y ago

[dead]

fforflo 2y ago

Shameless plug (who would have thought): I've played hide and seek in Albania and used a bunker as a hideout. AMA :D That's one of the few experiences I remember when I was 3-5yo.

fforflo 2y ago
Another Albanian thing worth mentioning is an extensive list of oil wells dispersed across residential areas see [0]. Family legend has it that my father almost drowned in one [1] when he was a kid, and a relative had to pull him by his nose to save him. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visoka_oil_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visoka_oil_field

Theodores 2y ago

We are always fighting the last war, and, as Ukraine has proven, much has changed. The situation for Ukraine is dire, mostly due to a lack of manpower for the infantry. They are always on the retreat, getting holed up in cities where it is the tower blocks that become the bunkers. There are no 'big arrow' movements by the Russians, they only ever send out small groups of soldiers after lots of artillery preparation. Commonly available MANPADS mean that big tanks and planes don't go anywhere near the front. It is drone warfare. From the point of view of the Russian side, imagine if Ukraine was littered with these bunkers, all of them filled with drone operators. I would say that this would be an upgrade on what Ukraine has with the trenches they have been building in the East since 2014.

rocqua 2y ago
You need trenches, or something similar, if you are going to mount any kind of lasting defense. Specifically, you need a safe way to run your logistics (or in military terms: your lines of communication, which refers to your supply lines, not your phone lines). A lone bunker is incredibly difficult to resuply, relieve, or reinforce. That is the power of trenches. They give protection for when you need to move goods, people, or information. If you can cut a defensive position off from any of these, it won't stand up very long. You can still use such positions to delay. But Ukraine needs to hold territory, not delay it's loss.

pmontra 2y ago

Ah Albanian mason who has been living in Italy since the 90s told me a story about bunkers. I cannot date it to a year nor assess its truth but here it is. A Minister (maybe Defense? Army? whatever) went to check the new bunkers. They looked good but he asked to the chief engineer how he could be sure that Hoxha would be satisfied with them. "You know, if he thinks they are not good I'm dead." "They are very good." "So you must get in. We will shell the bunker and check if it's really as good as you say." The engineer was not happy with that but the choice was between getting in or die immediately. He got in and they shelled the bunker all day long. The bunker survived, the engineer eventually recovered from the experience (temporary deafness and other problems) and the Minister could bet his own life on those bunkers.

sokols 2y ago
Yes this is a widely circulating anecdote. That Minister was Mehmet Shehu[0], an interesting character in his own right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_Shehu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_Shehu
- PestoDiRucola 2y ago
  And the guy that was forced to get inside the bunker was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Moisiu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Moisiu

gunian 2y ago

The relative ease one could tunnel underground these days are bunkers obsolete these days? Could one build a mini underground city that is reinforced with all the amenities