https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...ut-why/283620/

So what was the terrorism? Have a company/monopoly lose money but not impact any end users?

No one can figure out any motive. I agree terrorism seems like a poor choice of words, as that implies some kind of political motivation.

Corporate espionage, IMO. Shadowrunners on the job

I think the terrorism idea was that it is not difficult to wreck the grid by doing this simultaneously at multiple sites. My recollection is that these transformers last a long time but there is little inventory and they take months to build. I didn't scrub this memory and I could be wrong, however.

The linked WSJ article explains in somewhat more detail. It turns out that large transformers are usually custom-made and the procurement cycle for them ranges from months to years.

The Giant Echidna

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOT_Po..._165_hijacking

Cliffs:
-East German platonic couple want to defect to West Germany
-Travel to Poland where they will meet with a West German guy that had forged papers for them
-West German guy never arrives (East German secret police caught him)
-Couple hijacks return flight and forces plane to fly to West Berlin, where they are given asylum.
-Seven random East German passengers also decide to defect impromptu

Getting across that Berlin Wall was hard.

Nextflix commissioning should be saying hi dere.

What a super cool story.

That’s amazing that the United States presided over the entire case. We really overreach our boundaries a lot.

Okay, I've fallen down the rabbit hole of Berlin Wall escapes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Engels

-Soldier takes his APC and floors it into the wall trying to break through to freedom
-Wall > APC
-He tries to climb across, gets shot twice by East Berlin border guards and gets stuck in razor wire
-West Berlin citizens pull him to safety while West Berlin police lay down suppressing fire on East Berlin border guards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_G...balloon_escape

-Family builds hot air balloon (clandestinely, you couldn't just buy fabric without arousing the stasi)
-Tries to float over the border at night but comes up short and lands in a minefield. They get out without getting blown up but lose balloon
-Stasi searches for balloon people but never finds them
-They try again and make it!

i don't even know what an echidna is.

They landed in the American sector of occupied West Berlin. We weren't overreaching our boundaries. That occupation just lasted a lot longer than most people think it did, and we rarely used that law. It was still the law that the United States Court for Berlin could take jurisdiction within the American sector from 1955 (when the US abolished it position of High Commisionor for Germany) through 1990.

Lol that 35 years after WW2 ended that you don’t think America wasn’t overreaching her boundaries by taking jurisdiction of a case of East German escaping to the west via Poland. Where does America’s border reach into Europe?

notsureifserious.jpg

I had a physics teacher who used to get distracted super easily. Every lesson we'd just set him off on something we found more interesting than the actual curriculum (a possible explanation why I got a D in my final year's exam).

One time he went through this exact scenario, talking about a team shooting the cooling systems on the transformers. I'm kinda suspicious as it would have been around that time he would have just retired.

Thank you for proving me point. America loves to get involved in foreign wars and staying put. See also Korea, Japan, and the Middle East.

USA#1

Definitely got to win.

This episode was just another part of The Cold War. It shows how bad things must have been in the East when other hijacked victims didn’t even want to return home.

On the other hand, if USA didn't get involved in WWII most of Europe will still be speaking German. And I'd probably be speaking Japanese.

FYP

Goddammit, I swear I was going to make that exact post.

Not the Berlin wall but I used to work with a lady whose mom escaped East Germany as a teenager. She was caught the first time by an East German guard, was detained but then released. She tried again and was successful.

Communism is a horrible thing.

compared to what?

Compared to any non-totalitarian form of government.