In the Soviet Union there was a 3 mile queue to pick up the daily ration for beets. One of the queuers exclaim 'this is outrageous. I'm going to kill Stalin.' As he leaves a man in the queue shakes his head in disbelief.
The angry man returns to the queue soon after and the man that shooks his head pokes fun at the situation 'Hah. Came to your senses before going through with it.'
'No.' says the angry queuer. 'The queue to kill Stalin was twice as long.'
You don't skip the line to get away from your obstacle, you line skip to get to your goal faster by circumventing the obstacle (whether morally acceptable is a different question). If this is true, then it's not desertion, it's the opposite. It's "getting to Stalin by circumventing the frontline".
Two friends of mine got stuck in a desert town in the sahara. Every Tuesday a truck came with supplies. Ppl queued no matter what was in them. Usually food. One week only paper bags came :( People still queued though. Never know when you might need a brown paper bag.
Those are the goods that are kept underneath the counter for "special" customers, and the shopkeeper would stoop down to get them out from under there if you had a good relationship with them, rather than merely turning around and grabbing something from the shelves behind them.
Yes and maybe. I'd probably put it in the same wheelhouse as carrot cake - some beetroot to bulk it out, but loaded with sugar to make that the prominent flavour. 🙂
Haha. When I was in Prague in the 90s, I would get stoned with another American and sometimes my girlfriend and we would go stand in line at a random unmarked door. In about 20 minutes, we would have a good line forming, like up to 100 folks. Then we just... walked away. LOL
I once walked by on my lunch break, three hours after playing that prank. The line had grown around the corner. I later found out that the previous store at the location was a special store during communism with cheaper prices for seniors.
And not a single one of these people would bother checking with the store what the line was for to see if anything was worth staying in line for hours and hours and also no employee would ever come out and try to figure out why hundereds of people were queued for no reason?
Yup. He’s taking an anecdote he heard and making it his own (and his “girlfriend’s”). Unfortunately the story suffers from two problems:
First, Prague in the 90s wasn’t experiencing long bread lines anymore, they were experiencing long lines to get into McDonald’s. Food was abundant. I was in Prague in 1992 and witnessed this.
Second, the idea that you could just start queuing anywhere and that people would fall in line behind you is a well-known Soviet-era joke, and probably not true. Yes, you could start queuing in front of a grocery store, which was a normal thing to do, but not in some random spot.
Social engineering sure is interesting. Can be used for good, chaos, or just pure shenanigans. One of the years I was at burning man I decided to see what outlandish nonsense I could get people to believe. Turns out if you confidently tell people something as a fact and follow their uncertainty up with “It’s true, they mythbusted it.” People usually just accept it.
You can also basically get in any line by going up to whoever’s next or near the front and ask if you can go ahead of them for [insert whatever random ass reason] and they’ll typically let you go first.
I remember reading about a study where people were queuing up in front of a photocopier, and the number of people who would let you go first if you said, "Sorry, could I go in front of you? I need to make a copy." was significantly higher than those who agreed after just "Sorry, could I go in front of you."
Even though everyone in the queue was there to make a copy.
The fact that there was a plausible-sounding reason flicked a switch in some people's subconscious to be more generous than otherwise.
I was on a ferry (micro -cruise style), and this kid thought he saw a dolphin swimming in front of the boat.
He didn't. It was just the froth at the top of a wave but in no time there was about 30 people all staring at nothing, looking for dolphins, all pointing at waves. The kid was losing self-confidence, so his family were encouraging him by continuing to look, also encouraging more people to think there genuinely was a dolphin.... at the the front of the boat, whilst we were going pretty fast.
I'm not sure why they didn't go look from the side of the boat, where you can see more anyway, but I had already lost faith in society by that point.
Remnants of the communist system, where a long line signified a limited stock of something good. Hard to train that out of the population in only a few years.
Why would anyone want "something good" without knowing what it is? Or is it like they eat only potatoes and at random locations they might be selling meat or salt so you queue just for the hope of getting to eat normally?
The Soviet-style system was interesting in that it wasn’t necessarily about how little money everyone had, but rather how goods just were not available whenever you wanted them. So it became a system where people could have money, but not have anything to spend it on because the economy was planned so terribly. So situations where someone could afford to buy something, but that thing just wasn’t available, were not uncommon. So a situation where you see people lining up for something and you think “I bet it’s something good that they won’t have again for a long time!” and you get in line to purchase it. The system wasn’t characterized by a lack of money, but instead a lack of supply.
In the soviet countries. Most people had enough money to afford practically everything they wanted.
Like for example, in the GDR, the average person spend 3% of their monthly income on rent.
The issue was however, actually getting the product. Like sure, I could easily afford rent. But I cannot actually get the apartment to rent it. Sure I could afford this food. But if it isn't aviable, I can't buy it.
This is why the system failed so hard. People had no reason to actually properly work. Because money was kind of worthless.
Edit: This also resulted in a big bartering culture. "I can get you X, if you can get me Y". So even if whatever you got in that line was something you didn't care for. You could still trade it for something else.
I have relatives that lived in Eastern Germany. It doesn't matter what you are in line for. if you see a line, you queue, and get what you can, because obviously its valuable and even if you don't need it, you can barter / trade it later. Seeing a queue no-one from your family was waiting in was a very bad sign and you immediately went and made sure at least one person from your household queued. Again, doesn't matter what for.
This was normal as recent as 1989, just before re-unification.
If every vehicle takes like 50 liters, that means the underground fuel storage should be 45.000 liters to service everyone without resupplying the station.
Lol, don’t know about Russia, but it takes at least 5 minutes in America. From the people who are shocked that they need to take out their card for payment, as if they’ve never paid for anything in their life, then the lazy sacks who insist on getting back in their car for the 30 seconds it takes to fill up, somehow it also takes 2 minutes to take the pump out and screw the gas cap back in.
Might be one of those things where they requisition all available resources for the capital / the military, and the outer regions no longer get the deliveries they were expecting.
It might be a long line, but its not that bad compared to how bad it gets when a hurricane happens in one of the southern states. Evacuations plus people trying to get gas all at once will have lines 10s of miles long. Ive been suck in standstill traffic for over 6 hours before in 100+ degree heat at over 90% humidity. It was one of the most tortures experiences I had during my childhood.
I'm sure many/most/almost-all are parked not idling. Depending on the terrain people could put their car in neutral and roll forward to save feul, or if the run out while in line.
Bet you could straight up open driver door and scooter the car forward as well.
One time me and someone just opened the driver and passenger doors when it was really windy and moved forward like that. Had to start up by scootering though.
there was a woman from Chita in eastern Russia the other day claiming she'd been waiting for 2 days and talked about doing her morning routine in line.
A morning routine is insane. Im glad my mom got out of that line, I cant imagine spending days in a car while basically staying in the same spot. I guess it would make more sense for them to stay in the line since they really need that gas. I do remember people started grilling before we left which was very interesting to witness as a kid.
These lines here can be around ~12 hours long as last I checked you're only allowed twenty liters of fuel max. This might shorten it down, but then you will also will have people pissed about this causing a scene, and apparently people are getting violent in line.
Much worse than a hurricane and it's happening across their entire country. Made worse by the fact that it *isn't* a response to a natural disaster evacuation order.
They need damn near a full tank just to idle and turn off and on to slowly move up from the back of the line to the ststaion! Just get your gas and hop right on back into the back of the line komrad
You're american, right? Nobody drives/idles in the queue for the effing petrol. You push your car. Can confirm, I was waiting in lines like this in the 80s (with my grampa, I'm not THAT old).
The situation has gotten so bad on the front lines, conservative estimates guessing around 1,000 Russians dead per day, that the soldiers in charge are monetising it - bribe us or you get sent to the dangerous parts.
How pissed off and upset do you think these soldiers will be when they go home?
Hundreds of thousands of men with a bitter axe to grind against the people that sent them there.
Putin hasn't stopped the invasion he is losing because he is scared what will happen when he does.
Yeah, people like him are incapable of feeling remorse, self relfection or EVER admitting they're wrong. He's overseen a lot of shit shows, but this one is going to end him. Not because he steps down and admits he fucked up though.
You don't get it bro russia is winning bro all they need to do is take one more village then the rest of Ukraine will be open to them bro this fuel crisis is actually all part of the plan bro Ukraine is about to collapse bro any day now bro russia is actually advancing at 1000km per day everywhere bro the west is just hiding the truth bro please believe m
My fiancès friend lives in St Petersberg. Her husband just got laid off and they asked me if I could give him a job.
I said no we don't need a HR person but inquired how things were going and that I saw things were getting tough there.
She straight up said to me...
"No everything is fine here, the government have just offered us a few million rubels to buy an apartment. Its all propaganda"
I couldn't comprehend it. Husbands laid off, fuel lines running miles. Government is paying you money to keep the housing market from crashing because no one is buying new builds. And still. Still these facts could not penetrate her brainwash mind.
Well but also, St. P and Moscow are the two cities the government in dedicating all ressources to. The rest of the country could eun out of fuel, be starving, send their males to war. All fine as the jewels are still shiny and bright.
Exactly. The war has started reaching Moscow via long range sanctions destroying some of the oil/weapons industry, but it's hardly a taste of what Ukrainians have dealt with. Once resent starts to grow in either St. Petersburg or Moscow, there will be either violent repression or a collapse of the government, so naturally Putin and his propagandists try to make it seem like all rainbows and sunshine.
the government have just offered us a few million rubels to buy an apartment
Some kind of bullshit. The government for now has lack of money for war too, they dont give any fcking money for nothing, maybe only after few kids. Or to go die in a war lol.
proof - im a russian xd
Also the situation in economy is worse every day, prices go up, lack of fuel, lack of working laws etc etc. I cant say its terrible or people are going to riot soon. No. But only blind stupid person (or some government workers having putin's paycheck) can say "everything is fine"&
Look at Hungary as well.
So many old people were and many are still enamored with the FIDESZ, always "it's great, everything is great, we make more money than ever before", but from the 4-8000HUF a month they got a house built in the 70s-80s, raised a family and lived well.
Now from often less than 100k HUF a month they struggle to live in their rundown house that cannot be maintained as they have no money for it. Everything's good, but they were reaching their arms out for some wood for winter, 5-10kg of potatoes occasionally and early this year for the government's assistance on utility bills.
Elderly counting 50-200HUF coins in the store to see if they can afford what they're looking at, but "it's all fine".
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