DYNOMIGHT ABOUT RSS SUBSTACK

Notes on the Balkans

Notes on the Balkans

Jul 2022

Comments at reddit, substack.
  1. People say the cafes in Albania are great. This is true. They are similar to Italy but with environments that are more laid-back and… better? Standards are remarkably high even at roadside cafes next to petrol stations.

  2. People say people in Albania are relaxed and friendly. True. So true that for this reason alone the country will forever have a place in my heart. Essentially every interaction we had with an Albanian was positive, even when we did idiotic things. Once we walked into a construction site in the mountains and asked a guy, “Is this a hiking trail?” Confused, he said “No, this is a private house… But you’re welcome to walk around!”

    I don’t get it—don’t Albanians have bad days? And what about all those theories where Communism makes everyone cold and pitiless?

  3. Across the border to the North there was a sharp cultural change. People were totally fine, on par with large cities in North America or Western Europe. It’s just that the reassuring smile you get from every Albanian every time was gone. We once thought this pattern was broken by a friendly waiter, but after examining his name tag realized he had an Albanian name.

    Why? Well, here’s one theory:

    slavic-cropped-small

  4. No masks anywhere ever.

  5. Smoking everywhere always.

  6. Like everyone, I sometimes fantasize about quitting it all and living an idyllic rural lifestyle. But when I actually see rural life, it seems to involve a lot of truck stops. In the Balkans, the rural lifestyle up close still looked damned idyllic.

    But we shouldn’t romanticize things. These countries are urbanizing:

    Country % urban in 2001 % urban in 2021
    Montenegro 59.6 67.8
    Albania 42.4 63.0
    North Macedonia 58.3 58.8

    There’s also a massive out-migration, driven by a lack of economic opportunity.

  7. Albanian history is a long series of different regimes—Greeks, Italians, Ottomans, Communists—none of which are described in museums or historical sites with particular reverence. Though people seemed OK with the general direction of things since the 1991 end of Communism, one driver called it “democracy”. Anyway, being used to the past being distorted to give neat lessons for modern ideological battles, I found this kind of refreshing.

  8. The term “Macedonia” is controversial. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, the Republic of Macedonia became an independent country. But the region historically known as Macedonia also includes a big chunk of Northern Greece and a bit of Southwest Bulgaria. Greece was upset about another country using this name, as many Greeks see themselves as ethnic Macedonians, and feel they are the rightful heirs of the history of Alexander, etc. The Republic of Macedonia wanted to join NATO and the EU, but Greece promised to veto this unless the naming dispute was resolved. They started negotiations in 1995 and finished 23 years later with the Republic of Macedonia renaming itself North Macedonia.

  9. There are lots of American flags in Albania and Kosovo, apparently the result of Woodrow Wilson supporting Albania’s independence after World War 1 plus the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 which ended the attacks on ethnic Albanians there. The latter earned Bill Clinton a couple of statues and a street. For being the first American president to visit, George W. Bush got a statue and some streets and a weird conspiracy theory about his watch getting stolen.

  10. Albanian beaches were full of Italians, while Montenegro beaches were full of Russians (not overtly concerned about current events…) and hiking trails everywhere were full of Germans.

  11. Over fierce Russian protests, Montenegro joined NATO in 2017, only 18 years after it had been bombed by NATO. The Russian foreign ministry released a statement saying:

    In the light of the hostile course chosen by the Montenegrin authorities, the Russian side reserves the right to take retaliatory measures on a reciprocal basis. In politics, just as in physics, for every action there is an opposite reaction.

  12. Everywhere seemed very safe, and no one tried to cheat us. Once there was a little confusion about how much we paid for petrol. We quickly realized that the machine had shut down in the middle of the filling, so the attendant had just restarted and put in the rest. We said “OK, thank you!” and prepared to leave, but the attendant—who spoke little English—had sensed our earlier hesitation and insisted on laboriously going through the history of the machine to print out both receipts and show that they added up.

  13. In Albania, almost everyone under 40 seemed fluent in English, while older people were variable. Fluency seemed slightly lower to the North, though this perception might be confounded by the cultural differences mentioned above.

  14. The beaches had astounding natural beauty, but almost all have been transformed into nightclubs with table service and loud music. There are a rare few that haven’t, usually because you have to fight your way through a kilometer of brush and climb down a cliff to get to them. At these, boats often show up and blast dance music from offshore.

  15. There was little public dysfunction and few people asking for money, most of whom appeared to be Romani. In Albania’s capital the small number that were around were often allowed to go table to table at bars/cafes/restaurants without interference from the staff, and a huge percentage of the locals who were asked gave some money.

  16. After declaring independence in the 1912, Albania chose a flag based on this fierce double-headed eagle:

    flag of albania

    When Montenegro declared independence 94 years later and needed a flag, they decided on: Albania except with way more bling:

    flag of montenegro

    I thought that seemed a bit combative, but it turns out that double-headed eagles have been used for a thousand years. The motif seems to originate with the Byzantine dynasty of Palaiologos, albeit without the tasteful extension of the eagles’ tongues:

    byzantine-palaiologos-eagle

    Since then, it’s been copied by many places including the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, Serbia, Armenia, the Russian Empire and the modern Russia. In fact, in 1776, Pierre Eugène du Simitière proposed this for what became the Great Seal of the United States:

    proposed US coat of arms

    Sadly, this elegant monstrosity was not adopted.

Comments at reddit, substack.

new dynomight every thursday
except when not

(or try substack or rss) ×
Thoughts while watching myself be automated

(Excluding "please stop")

An old friend visited me a few weeks ago. And we soon got to chatting about—what else—how long will it be before all human intellectual work is automated. My position was: I dunno, because things are moving fast right now...

Tactical typing

ft. tactical guy

tap  tap tap  tap tap tap tap tap  tap tap tap tap tap tap

Let's stop counting centuries

One-indexing problems in everyday life

Here's a sentence from Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: 'The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled...

Fighting me and other survey results

Do extroverts have more martial confidence?

Thank you to the 966 people who filled out the survey. And thanks also to the strangely numerous people who read all the questions and wrote to me about them but didn’t answer them. (Though: why?)

Dynomight internet survey

(in which you are surveyed)

Hello, clever charming good-looking people. I am in need of a richer understanding of: you, the nature of reality, consciousness, ethics, dynomight internet website, and have therefore created a survey, which you can take it here. (You don't need to...

Things that don't work

Or: Things where there's a case worth considering that they don't work all that well for most people.

1. Acupuncture. 2. Phenylephrine. 3. Multivitamins. 4. Phosphoric acid. (for nausea) 5. Tree-based knowledge organization. The physical world whispers to us to organize information into "trees". For example, say you write something on a piece of paper, put the paper...

Shorts for January

Mean parents, graffiti, the youths, and BREATHTAKING design.

I made a graph of polling data in Finland on support for joining NATO from 1998 up through Finland joining NATO in April 2023.

Can I take ducks home from the park?

16 queries and 6 language models

Language models, whatever. Maybe they can write code or summarize text or regurgitate copyrighted stuff. But… can you take ducks home from the park? If you ask models how to do that, they often refuse to tell you. So I...

Contra four-wheeled suitcases, sort of

Are fancy fragile solutions overrated?

I have an almost moral dislike for the four-wheeled suitcase. Bear with me here. Before 1972, luggage had no wheels. Then, Bernard Sadow patented this design with four small wheels and a strap: By all accounts, this design wasn’t great...

Notes on Lawrence of Arabia

greater lesson unclear

1. There’s an early scene where Lawrence leaves a band of Bedouin people to go look for a man who was lost in the desert. He does this despite fierce warnings that after the sun rose, he would almost certainly...

Shorts for August

Noise, Indian cheetahs, and Fighting Joe

I think the bluetooth speaker is a pox on our civilization. Random noise makes it hard for me to concentrate. I tried the obvious thing and created a passive-aggressive mathematical model, but that unexpectedly failed to make the problem go...

Old jokes

That's what she said, a rabbi resolves a dispute, and six categories in the Philogelos

I've noticed a disturbing phenomenon: Many people who only recently watched the US version of The Office seem to think that Michael Scott invented That's what she said. Of course, the actual joke was supposed to be a ghoulish delight...

No soap radio

A potent anti-humor technology

No soap, radio is a sort of prank where you tell a "joke" with a meaningless punchline. The hope is that your victim will laugh despite not understanding it, thereby enabling you to ridicule them. Apparently, this works best if...

Shorts for July

Gorillas, penguins, noise location, air quality, and a conversational pattern that needs a name

Has a gorilla killed a human? Gorillas, despite their immense size and strength, are not aggressive. They are vegetarian except for eating insects and occasionally small rodents. In 1986, a five-year-old child fell into the gorilla pit in the Channel...

Shorts for June

More on teaching, hot in-laws, medical diagnostics, and some questions thrown into the void

Here's a collection of a few disconnected follow-ups plus some questions thrown into the void. Contra me on teaching. A couple of months back, I took issue with Parrhesia's proposal to make final exams worth 100% of the final grade,...

Warby Parker multiverse

Meanwhile, in the multiverse...

In your particular branch of spacetime, you may see things like this: