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> The guards gave the Americans a choice: Surrender the undocumented merchandise and enter Austria, or turn back into war-torn Eastern Europe. What war? This was Hungary in 1994, 4-5 years after a surprisingly peaceful end of communist rule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars
Yugoslavia bordered the two countries mentioned - Austria and Hungary.
Never thought I'd see the day where a Playboy article is on the top of HN. Great read.
I'm not. Playboy's articles have always been tremendous. When I was younger I had a t-shirt with a Playboy logo on it and the phrase "I read the articles". I'm starting to think we need a curation platform for long-form content. Preferably a subscription service that can solve the paywall problem elegantly. I don't use music subscription services because I want to keep the music, purchasing a file makes more sense. B…
I find glancing through the medium.com homepage works pretty well if I'm just looking for one or two stories to read.
> The guards gave the Americans a choice: Surrender the undocumented merchandise and enter Austria, or turn back into war-torn Eastern Europe. What war? This was Hungary in 1994, 4-5 years after a surprisingly peaceful end of communist rule.
The end of communism was surprisingly peaceful. Yugoslavia rapidly disintegrating afterwards was an entirely different affair. Austria had a border with Yugoslavia - with the part that today is known as Slowenia. The actual independence war of Slovenia lasted only 10 days [1]. Still, troop movements happened in sight of the Austrian border and the Austrians were not happy at all.
The outbreak of full conflict between the recently declared independent states of Croatia and Bosnia with Yugoslavia happend shortly after and was not over in 1993/94 [2]. So I guess any Austrian border patrol would have been wary of refugees/smugglers/shady elements crossing any eastern border.
Hungary was never immediately affected by the war in the former Yugoslavia, but it had an enormously long border with a country at war with itself and the economic impact (loss of trade with the southern neighbours, influx of refugees etc.) could be felt in many ways. So, compared to western standards, Hungary might, at the time, have looked slightly less than appealing. In particular if you didn't know the local language and were smuggling...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars
Never thought I'd see the day where a Playboy article is on the top of HN. Great read.
Never thought I'd see the day where a Playboy article is on the top of HN. Great read.
I'm not. Playboy's articles have always been tremendous. When I was younger I had a t-shirt with a Playboy logo on it and the phrase "I read the articles". I'm starting to think we need a curation platform for long-form content. Preferably a subscription service that can solve the paywall problem elegantly. I don't use music subscription services because I want to keep the music, purchasing a file makes more sense. B…
I surprised myself by figuratively sitting at the edge of my seat reading this tale. The thing that interests me more though than the tale itself if the buyers. I'm not a collector. I can understand the shady dealings and the clandestine meetings to make cash selling these things, but I would love to read about the mind of the buyer of these things, that I consider junk. If I came across something in the attic that w…
Once there's a large group of "needful" collectors, the other collections (the kind that want to make money) show up. If an item becomes "hot" with needful collectors, the speculators will buy it up, creating scarcity and driving prices even higher.
This works out pretty good, until a disruption happens in the market. Sometimes the market gets flooded with low-value merch (how many X-titles were there?) Sometimes a couple of movie bombs ruin the property (exhibit number 1: "The Fantastic Four.")
You see this disruption in the "real world" too. When was the last time you saw a "used CD store?"
But for the "needful" collectors, the value is in having the thing. And the more the thing costs, the more value people place in having it.