My buddy said the police really laid Ambushes for the corrupt cops and the arrests sometimes escalated. So, well, they didn't got struck down by a drone but they really were at risk of getting taken out by 5.54mm bullets. Sure not everyone was corrupt and violent but still quite a lot.

If you say violent crime was low I am gonna believe that. Corruption and theft though were everywhere in the Eastern Block really bad, I know it myself from my visits in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and the simple casualness everybody took possession of government property was insane. A fellow of my uncle build his whole house in East Germany with stuff people he stole from the communist government. It was straight forward insane. Violence on the other hand was rather low and mostly because the cops were not shy about getting very violent you up just because they could. I remember when two border guards beat up a class mate in Berlin in 1989 because he had long hair. He stood in a queue waiting for being checked, the two border guards walked by, grabbed him, punched him a couple of times and send him back into the queue. My whole class was starring like "WTF what just happened"...

I know at least two Soviet/Russian Vehicles in my Munich neighbourhood straight forward stolen from the Soviets/Russia. One 60 year old Ural Truck which an East German buddy used to flee from Iraq in the 1980th to West Germany, another also pretty old GAZ used by a team of Russian soldiers fleeing from Ukraine through Turkey to Munich last Year.

While I once have been in Communist Romania it was during a holiday when I was eight and in a fenced hotel area. I can only remember it was kinda boring because no kids of my age were around. I should definitely visit the place again when I do my Europe tour after retiring, I guess it changed a lot.

If you are living in Romania you might also remember how life was there 20-50 years ago. The stories my buddy told me about his time over there are... wow. The story how his Grandpa as a major of a small village during communism stole enough money from the communist party until he could bribe his way to the West - and actually nobody minded him stealing like 90% of all money going to his village... In the late 1990ths my buddy was robbed at gun point twice. By Highway-Police. When he invited his Uncle to a good restaurant in the capital the simple farmer didn't dare to step through the door because "I am not worthy"... Nowadays... it is a lot more relaxed. Not perfect but the really big shit is gone. Still he thinks most Romanian youngsters are kinda crazy but most Europeans are, just in a different way. And the tourist regions are actually quite nice.

The Albanian Government ist pretty well aware of their lack of control and gave full control over shipping lanes to FRONTEX around ten years ago.

That by the way is the main reason nowadays drugs mostly arrive in Rotterdam again. Easier to hide between millions of metric tons of cargo than in a single fishing boat.

I can assure you that there are regions within the European Union where people are even less poor and not trying anything criminal to get rich. I'm referring to parts of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and southern Italy.

Not to mention Third-Party-Members like Albania, Moldovia, Bosnia or Macedonia who are partially Third-World-Nations.

You won't find poppy plants there. And while there is some organized crime - surely more than north of these countries - they are more or less under control and operate in the shadows.

But then the EU is also relaxed about giving work visas. Lots of people from those nations do some seasonal work within the EU, earning good money. We have all sorts of Ukrainians, Albaniens and even Tunesiens around Germany doing such jobs. Usually they earn enough money within two years to return home and start a family and a business.

Weeding out FARC and Shining Path actually did teach valuable lessons which habe been repeatedly reapplied successfully during modern counter-terrorism.

Both where heavily invested in organized crime but are nowadays toothless or non-existant due to coordinated goverment and civilian efforts.

The Best example might be "The Sons of Iraq" who helped to pacify Iraq quite well. The Coalition literally hired local people suffering most from extremists to fight the extremists and it worked like a charm. FARC and Shining Path were pushed into insignificance by roughly the same methods.

Yes, there were "revenge" killings by the "somewhat good guys" against the "really bad guys". But in hindsight it was necessary to show the "really bad guys" that the tables had turned. As long as the overall violence decreases - deal with it.

Oh, by the way, did you know that the Mafia once was an organized military organization fighting for Sicilian independence? Over the last 200 years they slowly degraded into a bunch of sometimes wealthy oligarchic stock market fraudsters, but mostly pick pockets and low level fraudsters, at most bribing officials for construction jobs, if at all. 40 years ago they killed judges and police officers in the dozen. Nowadays they get beat up if they show up in Palermos shops and demanding the Pizzo (protection money). And the police stands by and collects the beaten gangster afterwards without minding the locals doing local justice. Works fine.

Who is "they"? Names, pls.

PopOS is a sure way of getting into ten times more problems than Ubuntu.

Seriously, I know them all. Started with NetBSD in 1991, used pretty much everything.

If your system isn't super weird then Ubuntu is the most relaxed experience you will ever have as a newby.

(And yes, I am not using Ubuntu currently. But then, I hat 35 years of POSIX/Unix/Linux experience)

I am an old timer. I started with BSD before there was even a Linux. NetBSD on an Amiga 3000 before the AT&T law suite against NetBSD, then heared about Linux which was twice as clean as NetBSD and without legal issues - Later NetBSD removed all legal issues nonetheless.

First Linux was a Watch-Tower Distribution, basically a big RAM-Disk with a rudimentary Linux system which you copied to HD. No package manager, nothing. tar, make was the way to do installations. Shortly after Slackware and SuSE which basically was the same back then. Then a lot of SuSE then Debian, then Ubuntu. Don't care much about the distribution nowadays as long as it is DEB-based.

But now something to scare all of you: Today my most used POSIX environment is... Cygwin. Well, I got a Windows-Notebook for development and a VM is really clunky in comparison to a fully integrated POSIX-layer like Cygwin. For developing Stuff it actually matters very little if you use BSD, Linux, Cygwin or even Solaris.

88% is so typical - for Nazis it means the eight letter of the alphabet twice, which means "Heil Hitler". Given that the Z symbol of his genocidal war looks like a half Swastika we can now finally agree: Putin is the reincarnation of Hitler.

In East Germany the people loved their nation most only weeks before collapse: 99,92% voted for the pro-soviet government.

Then the CIA dropped 20 million agents from invisible helicopters which fakes mass demonstrations and used mind-control rays to make them love the west and hate the soviet union.

In the first election after reunification the Communists got 11,1% of all votes in Former East Germany. Damned CIA mind control rays.

In my whole life I never bought digital audio or video content on vinyl, VHS, CD, DVD, Blueray. Never ever. It sounds as weird to me like paying for air to breath.

But one day I visited a live concert of a small band which I loved as a teenager. After the show I met with their drummer, gave him €200 cash and said "You know, when I was young you were cool about kids copying your music without paying. You told us if we like you music we can enjoy it. And if we can afford it, we can pay you. Back then I couldn't. Today I can."

And so I paid them five times as much as I saved back then by copying their music.

You think Hamas would be the one to attack humanitarian aid and food for the Palestinians in Gaza?

They did that a lot actually. For Hamas their subjects are just animals. See 06:30 at https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/p/why-the-jlots-wont-work-in-gaza

And while they are able to fire over 100 missiles per day into Israel they can take a good beating for quite while. Think about that: During their reign they fired 2 million missiles and grenades into Israel - during peace time as I might add.

They are pretty beaten anyway, pretty much every ally has meanwhile distanced from them: https://www.nzz.ch/international/gaza-krieg-die-hamas-will-auch-im-ramadan-weiterkaempfen-ld.1821648

I guess they want go down in flames and take as many Gazans with them as possible. And they are doing a great job, don't you agree?

And now a serious question: What could Hamas do to end the violence?

He is not just an extremist but also an Idiot.

Killing everyone in Gaza is just dumb because there are also several 10.000 Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

But meh... we already learned that extremism breads brain rot. Hamas is proof of it.

Crass