This post is a complement to the summer edition. Don't mind the almost-five-year gap between the two, as some things really don't change as quickly as the "official narrative" would have you believe.
So... Bucharest, and by extension, Romania; and by extension, Europe, and so on up to most of, depending on where you look from, the Western part of the northern hemisphere... anyway, this part of the world has finally had its first proper-ish winter in about a decade. Going back to Bucharest, I don't think we've had a rough January since maybe 2017, and that wasn't much compared to the winter in 2010 -- and let's not even go into the ones in the 1970s, when the trams would wade in between piles of half-meter thick snow. Still, this time around we've had more than a day of consistent snowing and more than a week of below-zero temperatures during the day, which... well, is something in this continuously warming global environment (or so we're told). And not only that, but nobody living in Bucharest complained about it, which means that Town Hall must have done a good job of handling the situation... right? That, or rather, I hear that Bucharestians have taken a liking to living in the cold, just like they used to do way back in the 1980s, right before they murdered the shoemaker. Frankly, I don't think the mathematician would even be worth the bullet.
Buut anyway! For what it's worth, and from what I hear from more or less reliable sources, the situation is more similar in other European cities than it is different. If I were to describe it in one word, I guess that word would be: unsustainable. If it wasn't obvious from the events of 2025, then I think 2026 will make things if not plainly, then at least more1 obvious: you can't do the same things this year that you used to with the same resources last year, so you're either going to have to pay more, or you won't have those nice things to begin with.
Take transportation for example: Town Hall2 has already announced that they will raise surface transport prices (archived) from $0.7 to $1 per ride, the same price as that of a subway ride. For what it's worth, I think that these fares are still ridiculously cheap and they mostly rely on the fact that said services are sustained by subsidies. Take the subway for example: there's probably around a hundred thousand people riding a metro on a workday; say that most of them ride the train twice a day, so the revenue that Metrorex makes out of ticket sales alone, leaving aside subsidies and discounts from subscriptions, would amount to about $200K per day. Now, given that the reported spendings (archived) for 2025 sum up to about $1.5M per day3, and assuming that Metrorex could maintain the same level of spending for 2026, ticket sales alone wouldn't cover even one seventh of the budget. Now add that the Romanian government, which also comprises the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, which administers Metrorex, runs on a deficit which is growing despite Ilie's impotent attempts at reduction, sprinkle some inflationary sugar on top and... I hope you get what I mean.
Surely, this kind of unsustainable evolution will likely not hit everyone equally. Betting venues and pawnshops will probably still make a profit, at least if we were to judge them by their ubiquitousness; big corps will hold, at least if we're to judge by Carrefour Groupe's revised decision to remain -- let's not judge these guys using the lens of classic capitalism, since, as that dude from Palantir said a while ago, the aims of big corps are no longer driven by profit, but sheer domination.
The point being that, regardless of whether I'll be off from reality by an inch or a mile, the more things change, the more the trend will stay the same: with you at the bottom and all the hotshots extracting all they can from the situation.
Such are the sad times that we live in.
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Of course, for some reason "things" were obvious to me, among others, as far as 2021; and not because I'm some prophet, mind you, but because I don't really listen to any of the bullshit spewed by either side of this reality show; or rather, I don't interpret public communication as a source of truth, but rather as a source of signalling.
By the way, the fact that you now have "sovereigntist" and "official/liberal/pro-European" media doesn't make this any less of a totalitarian environment. The folks who run the propaganda show have realized that, given that singularities tend to blow up in spectacularly messy ways, a dynamic two-pole totalitarianism is much cheaper to maintain, since most folks are going to lean one way or the other, even when ideas from either of them end up in contradictions via the usual doublespeak. The point is that, when a third narrative appears, it should be easily coopted and absorbed within either of the existing two, which is what the battle between "sovereigntists" and "pro-Europeans" is all about nowadays. In other words, they don't care whether you like, say, electric scooters or not, they'll just adapt the discourse to the "majority opinion", as formulated through focus groups, so that they get your votes.
This is the circus that you live in and I don't know how you folks can fucking stand it. ↩
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Nowadays led by some guy named Ciucu, ex-District Six mayor, now that the mathematician has moved on from Town Hall to Cotroceni, in what's become a predictable local trope.
Also, what in Beelzebub's name is with all the Cius and Cios and Câs permeating the public political space in the last years? A few years ago, Romanians had a PM called Câțu, who was followed by a Ciolacu guy, whose ministers included some other dude called Câciu. And since Bucharestians seem to like this kind of thing, they elected Ciucu as a Mayor; so I guess the next logical step is for Mayor-President Dan to name Cicciolina as the next PM after Bolojan -- I bet they'd try if they could afford her. Oh, and don't even get me started with the Bois. ↩
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For what it's worth, I also looked at 2024, where they published an annual budget of about $550M, and also a revised budget of $667M, i.e. about 20% higher. So if we were to also revise our initial $1.5M per day, that would bring us roughly closer to $1.8M. ↩