or how to be a good communist in the twenty-first century.
For all it's worth, I promise the reader, whether he be the proverbial alien anthropologist or one of the two-three dudes who are still reading this site -- it's so quiet around here nowadays that not even the spambots seem to bother too much, much to my relief -- I promise him or her, or xzhreszbw that this will be a very boring article. What can you do, I don't visit Athens or the marvelous Boga (no thanks to you), nor do I get to visit Pescara each and every day. Sometimes, like the stupid salaryman that I am, I run out of PTO, UPTO or whatever the fuck TO days the local lords permit, so I gotta sit and work, or otherwise commute to work, that is, when I don't meet with some other salarydude such as myself. So what am I to do, start to write about how great coding is?! Balderdash!
Anyways, today I am not going to write about the Romanian electric auto-pilots, who are slowly beginning to throw that lithium shit out the window; nor am I going to discuss how Romanian "prosumers" got their anus enlarged by the local authorities who promised them phree energy and the likes, only to threaten to force them to buy... well, some lithium shit. I'm not going to write about any of that, instead I'm going to piss on the poorest of the poor, without any regard whatsoever on whether that's nice or anything.
So this Warranty-Return System is a bunch state-concocted nonsense where they tax each plastic bottle an extra 0.5 Romanian lei, or about ten United States cents, as "warranty" that's to be "returned" once the buyer brings said bottle to a collection point among the many that have started appearing around the country. I won't go into too much detail about why it's nonsense, but sure, let's do some math together. A Bucharestian Big Mac menu costs about 32.3 lei at the time of writing, so in order to buy one solely out of returned plastic bottles, our dear prostsumer would have to buy about 65 plastic bottles of water or cola or what have you. So that's about 33 liters of half-liter bottles, which at four liters of water per day ('cos of global warming) would afford them a menu roughly once a week and a bit. That's not really enough for survival, is it?
But wait, just in case you still think I'm full of shit, let's do some more math! At the time of writing, 1 liter of Bucharestian gas costs about 7.35 Romanian lei, that is, roughly $1.6. Let's say that you need to drive four kilometers to the nearest collection point, using a vehicle that consumes a generous 3 liters per hundred kilometers -- but really, downtown that's going to go around 5 to 10, depending on various factors. So anyway, 3 * 4 / 100 = 0.12 liters, which goes for around 0.9 lei. If you count the return trip, that'll cost a total of 1.8 lei, so you'll have to drink almost 4 bottles of half a liter each on the way just to break even1. And we ain't even counting them lungs that you damaged with your non-eco-friendly automobile, mmkay?
But okay, let's say that instead of a car you're using a bicycle, and that somehow you've stumbled upon a sack full of exactly one hundred half-liter plastic bottles of various sorts, but in any case, each and every one of them eligible for WRS, or SGR as they call it in the local pidgin. Let's say that you're extra lucky and that, after your half-hour stroll through town on two wheels and with the sack on your back, you found the local SGR point to be unused by other brave eco-friendly souls such as yourself -- which realistically speaking never happens, but anyway, let's say! -- so you start feeding it bottles. Let's say that on average it takes you roughly ten seconds to take a bottle from the sack and feed it into the machine, which... anyway, you get the idea! 10 * 100 = 1000 seconds, that is, roughly 17 minutes, which yielded a grand total of 50 lei, which... ain't that bad, is it? So how much did it take you to actually collect the hundred bottles?
Well let me tell you that today I was taking a stroll to the local money collection point aka bank for some business and it so happens that I passed by the bottle collection point. I shit you not, there were about ten good Romanian folks queueing with plastic (!!) bags of maybe ten to twenty bottles each. They seemed quite patient too, and perhaps they were discussing the local news, i.e. how the local politrucian is going to give them apartments for free, just like their parents before them. So then it struck me: holy fuck, we're back in full-blown communism! Not covidism, not stalinism, but a fully democratic communism as only ol' Engels himself could have envisioned, one where the local folks are happily given a pretext to socialize and be good to one another, only this time with McDonald's and smartphones.
The only problem with all this would be that the fuckers in question are opening up garbage bins and soiling the streets with trash for perhaps ten bottles per piece. Now how much extra money do you think the authorities have to pay the local cleaning services for that?
Warranty-Return System, or how to make the Planet a better place for everyone. And by better I mean, of course, worse.
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No, we're not counting the initial costs, because for the most part someone else pays for the bottles these people bring to the collection points. I certainly don't waste my time with "returning" bottles, but someone does. And no, we're not counting the gentlemen and women who profited from this nonsense either! Anyway, read further for more context. ↩
I mean, I love bashing the state as much as the Next Guy, just for the fun of it (și pentru că „știe ea de ce”) -- but, nevertheless:
I think this system has encouraged me to actually move up in the 3R hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle). Previously, I would purchase soda or bottled water, throw the bottle in the Correct Bin and consider my Patriotic Duty fulfilled. Nowadays I just find it easier to simply reduce consumption and avoid soda altogether. No plastic garbage with an attached tax --> no queueing --> less plastic in the dump, overall.
Of course this effect is entirely unintentional, and fairly limited in scope, but a win is a win.
And let's not forget this system has actually managed to introduce more social signaling re: one's social status. If you can afford to purchase things and simply ignore this added "tax", you're probably somewhat well-off. If you need to queue and wait your turn and maybe hop around to find a working device, you're more likely in the orc class. As for those rummaging through trash, we don't talk about them.
By the way, coming back to your point about this being a communist trait: what are your thoughts on people queueing in stores and waiting patiently to use coupons?
> I think this system has encouraged me to actually move up in the 3R hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle)
Neat! I've been drinking tap (well, filtered) water well before they introduced the system. And I'm aware that I'm giving off virtue signals as I'm writing this, but yes, it's cheap and effective and it saves me the trip to the store, kinda reminds you that this is precisely why they invented tap water in the first place. I just buy the occasional bottle of mineral water from time to time and that's that -- glass, just to be extra posh, none of that plastic shit.
> As for those rummaging through trash, we don't talk about them.
Some of the folks that I saw weren't even hobos. The hobos in Bucharest have been doing this for a whole decade now, they certainly know how to open a trash bin without filling the whole street with garbage. I've "seen" some normal people do this instead, which brings me back to:
> So how much did it take you to actually collect the hundred bottles?
Which brings me to: how on Earth do they have the time for this?!
> By the way, coming back to your point about this being a communist trait: what are your thoughts on people queueing in stores and waiting patiently to use coupons?
Do you mean SGR coupons, or in general?
From a neutral perspective, this isn't much different from some of the computers that I use, which work much in the way of ye olde Unix timesharing machines: you queue a job for execution and at some point they'll take the job, run it and at the end they'll show you some results. This is perfectly fine, I suppose some things just work better this way because they save some resources -- one or two standardized setups that provide reproducible outputs are more efficient than N, especially since you don't use them 24/7 -- and because there's no urgency for them to give said results right away.
From an altogether other perspective however: I don't know if your parents told you any stories on how they spent ten hours queuing at the local market for a piece of rotten meat back in the '80s. Meanwhile, four decades later the US stock market just took a big hit, but also Lockheed Martin stocks went up, which to my eye definitely spells war. So to answer your question: if I survive this one, I sure as fuck hope it'll be worth it and that I won't be forced to queue for coupons or meat or meds or... for nothing.
By the way, the local press begs to differ.
But also, check out this dude.
Until now I had no clue that there was such a thing as a "loyalty card aggregator". See, folks have been primed for this kind of thing for decades now. None of the good old leaders of the 20th century, from Stalin to Mussolini, would have even dreamed about all this. And yet, here we are.
> So how much did it take you to actually collect the hundred bottles?
> Which brings me to: how on Earth do they have the time for this?!
I saw some of these "non-hobo" bottle collectors too. Actually 100+ bottles per day seems perfectly plausible. Never underestimate how much garbage can be produced by the populace every second. It's even easier if they can hang around a mall, where there are always loads of people milling about, leaving their soda bottles on the table or in the easily accessible bins.
There's a bit of a tragedy of the commons here, though. This model can only work as long as there isn't much competition from other collectors. Now I doubt they'll start slitting each others' throats over a 0.5 RON bottle, so eventually they'll probably be organized by some mafia, like beggars are. May have happened already, who knows.
You may be on to something here.
As I've said, this has been going on before SGR. A couple of years ago my brother saw a guy in Ferentari hopping off a Merc limo with some of these bags. So if someone has found a way to profit off of these, hat's off to them.
Anyways, that's somewhat how folks (well, the ones who did) profited way back during Ceașcă's times too, didn't they?