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11:35 AM
I'd like to offer a little insight into what happens if you let the Russians win, for those of you who come from places lucky enough to have - I don't know, orcs as enemies, instead. As one late Russian sympathizer once said: Imagine ...
The money you earn working your ass off is absorbed largely by the state, ostensibly to be distributed across the population to ensure a more egalitarian society, but actually to line the pockets of corrupt party leaders who then go off and build castles that make Al Indelicato look like Nancy Meyers in neighboring vassal states. You'll swap out the nice house you're living in now for planned concrete block "communities" of four hundred apartments each, all facing the same empty courtyard - the better to keep an eye on each other. A great way to make a few extra pennies is to report to your local "protection officer" that the old woman whose window you can see into at night just bought a suspiciously nice new shawl.
You can use those extra pennies to go down to the grocery store - if it's your appointed day to go down to the grocery store. When you get there, they won't have anything. That's because the guy in charge of deciding which food goes to which store is in the pocket of that aforementioned party leader, who needs some oranges to decorate the floating fruit trays on his infinity pool in Graftistan. He lets Mr. Grocery Distributor take home an extra pack of lunchmeat to his family every year for his trouble. So you're stuck looking at empty shelves and fighting over the privilege to pay eighty-six dollars for a pack of hot dog buns. (The hot dogs are made of beets, and they are out of stock.)
You'll be cooking whatever you can find in a pressure cooker made in the '30's, because no one has ever come up with anything better. There's no reason to. Any money you make off your innovation will just go right back to Comrade McMansion up there, so why bother? There are no new drugs developed. Technology stagnates. Any incentive to try something new has been completely stifled, and so there is nothing new. Life slugs along at the same grey, miserable status quo forever and ever, and you start to believe it's better that way because it's the same for everyone. Even though it's not. It just looks that way, because the only things allowed on your television are programs that tell you it is. Your television is black and white, and it is a CRT.
There is no remote.
The money you earn working your ass off is absorbed largely by the state, ostensibly to be distributed across the population to ensure a more egalitarian society, but actually to line the pockets of corrupt party leaders who then go off and build castles that make Al Indelicato look like Nancy Meyers in neighboring vassal states. You'll swap out the nice house you're living in now for planned concrete block "communities" of four hundred apartments each, all facing the same empty courtyard - the better to keep an eye on each other. A great way to make a few extra pennies is to report to your local "protection officer" that the old woman whose window you can see into at night just bought a suspiciously nice new shawl.
You can use those extra pennies to go down to the grocery store - if it's your appointed day to go down to the grocery store. When you get there, they won't have anything. That's because the guy in charge of deciding which food goes to which store is in the pocket of that aforementioned party leader, who needs some oranges to decorate the floating fruit trays on his infinity pool in Graftistan. He lets Mr. Grocery Distributor take home an extra pack of lunchmeat to his family every year for his trouble. So you're stuck looking at empty shelves and fighting over the privilege to pay eighty-six dollars for a pack of hot dog buns. (The hot dogs are made of beets, and they are out of stock.)
You'll be cooking whatever you can find in a pressure cooker made in the '30's, because no one has ever come up with anything better. There's no reason to. Any money you make off your innovation will just go right back to Comrade McMansion up there, so why bother? There are no new drugs developed. Technology stagnates. Any incentive to try something new has been completely stifled, and so there is nothing new. Life slugs along at the same grey, miserable status quo forever and ever, and you start to believe it's better that way because it's the same for everyone. Even though it's not. It just looks that way, because the only things allowed on your television are programs that tell you it is. Your television is black and white, and it is a CRT.
There is no remote.