Memes

In the morning 10 comments. Now 110.

Let's see who is the debatelord vibe basing facts against cowbee...

Ex soviet block kid here, even got CCCP stamp in an old passport.

This might be true, but it might be worth considering that by late 70 it would not really matter that much. You could hardly get anything with the money left, basic food products included.

Buying meat in a store would be a thing of a chance or you got nasty scraps, and there was really little other options beyond popatos and a few other very basic foods. In my country most of 80s people would que for most of the day to buy toilet paper, and one your run around the city based on rumor on where something could be gotten. This created a massive black market, but there prices would make an average pay worthless. And also any western foreign currency would be worth much more than local, as they were key for smugglers, anyone looking to escape to the other side and tightly controlled (if you were even given a passport and were allowed to travel abroad you could buy a very small amount of currency, much below what would be needed to sustain oneself). Anyways stuff like this, institutional inertia and stiffness, plus repression of any attempts at change created a feedback loop of a massive shadow economy and corruption that chocked the system and created a deeply pathological culture that has been an issue in the region since.

And public transport was dirt cheap, a third of the population had summer houses. If we could replicate the capital distribution without the human rights infringement, that would be amazing. But recently the US is doing the opposite: replicate sky high prison population with skyrocketing inequalities

I highly recommend the recent Deprogram podcast (ep #248) where they go into a discussion of the daily life experiences of people in socialist countries. Hakim’s father lived in the USSR and Yugo, living in a the former Yugoslavia, has a ton of anecdotal experiences from family and friends.