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?

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.

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.

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.

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?