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ah 12 packs of cigarettes and a half a litre of vodka. a complete balanced breakfast.
ah…
blin.
Only if Abe is into cheeki breeki hardbass.
Sure, but what will you eat for the rest of the month?
12 packs of cigs seems like a huge luxury
For a month? It’s just dried shredded leaves wrapped in paper, cigarettes are super cheap to produce, tax makes them expensive.
You didn’t live in the eighties I bet. It was cheap back then and everyone smoked.
average smoker smokes about 20 cigarettes a day. so it’s a little less than half of a monthly use of cigarettes.
from what i understand the ration was meant to supplement what you consume, not provide everything
Is 20 cigs a day honestly the average nowadays?? Mind blowing and sad. My mum who was an addicted smoker since she was 10 years of age and went through maybe 5 to 10 cigs a day.
it’s been the average for a long time. it’s due to nicotine’s pharmacological effects. its half life is roughly 1~2 hours. so a smoker on average will feel the compulsion to smoke an hour or so after the last cigarette. since most people are awake somewhere 16 hours a day, that’s about ~16 cigarettes a day.
your mom’s smoking habits were definitely atypical
This is what Conservatives around the world want and glory hallelujah we are almost there! The only difference is all those rations will not come from the government but from corporations paid for by the government.
- 4 boxes Kraft Mac and Cheese
- 6 cans Heinz Beans
- Etc.
0.5 liter of vodka? What were they supposed to do the other 29 days of the month?
Let alone the rest of the first day?
This ladys eating better than I do
How?
With an average net income ranging from 1100 USD to 2400 USD, any average worker should eat better than this
This lady monthly rations amount to approximately 160 USD, while the average minimum wage workers spends from 260 to 350 USD worth on groceries
Which I really doubt is a problem, given that the median of the monthly income in usa is about 5k usd
That is around 970 calories a day if you take 1/30th of each edible item on the Table.
It’s not enough, but surprisingly almost half the needed amount.
If Poland is anything like the US, families were expected to keep a garden where they grew many vegetables and fruits, and often kept chickens.
Are you referring to ‘Victory Gardens’ in WWII?
If so, that’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, since Poland had been at peace for over 35 years.
I’m Estonian, not Polish, but I’ve helped my mom grow potatoes and stuff. Because of the peasant history, our people have always grown our own food. Only in the least few decades has it been getting less common.
Prior to WWII, during the depression.
You supplement it with potatoes, carrots, cabbage, cucumbers and other veggies. And some apples and seasonal fruit.
Things sucked but people weren’t malnourished back then.
Also not shown here: gasoline was also rationed, as were cars themselves.
I was trying to figure out how to make it work for week but a month?
Their priorities were fucked up. Cigarettes and alcohol, obviously, but more sugar than rice? Huh?
Also, lots of meat but no other food groups?
Elsewhere in the comments it’s mentioned that these were just the rationed things; there were unrationed foodstuffs.
Rice is not precisely native to Poland… The staple food is potatoes, which weren’t rationed.
Unpopular opinion: we need to ration electricity consumption as well as fuel today, even in capitalists countries. Because that stuff actually has incredible impact on the planet, and will (must) drive consumption down, so that companies / individuals start integrating “efficiency” into their thinking
I don’t see any other solution to the “exponentially growing power consumption” problem.
I don’t see any other solution to the “exponentially growing power consumption” problem.
In the U.S., at least, power generation has been roughly flat for the last 20 years, not growing exponentially:
That’s excluding our hard on for AI the last few years. Would love to see this updated.
I’m surprised by how much natural gas makes up the mix.
Power usage levels in the US, though, are insane compared to mother countries.
electricity is only a tiny fraction of energy use.
c/selfhosted has entered the chat
Power for the power god
time to self-host a powerplant?
Pigouvian taxes are a traditional solution to negative externalities, and they are often better received by the public than rationing.
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It’s expensive to be poor - the lights turning off a few days before the end of the month will incur even more costs than a higher electricity bill.
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Taxes raise money for other programs, instead of costing money to enforce rationing.
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Higher taxes in general will also help reduce inflation.
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Tax revenue can be spent on stimulus checks to offset the cost for people who use less energy than average.
Rather than stimulus checks we need to be using the money to subsidize alternatives. And we can just switch subsidies. Some examples of that include that by reducing cattle subsides we can subsidize lower emissions meat alternatives or even offer free classes on how to cook meals that happen to be lower emissions, and we can stop funding airports and put that money into rail systems, similarly by removing mandatory minimum parking and reducing road funding that money can be put into transit solutions that enable less car centric lifestyles.
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Looks equivalent what you’d get at a Canadian food bank nowadays that’s meant for 3 days.
Was this meant to be supplemented?
That’s a very good question
Half a liter of vodka monthly? Aren’t the Poles known for their consumption of vast quantities of the stuff?
Yeast is not on the list but the 2kg of sugar wasn’t just for cakes I’m sure.
What they were officially allowed to drink vs what they did drink.
Shieet i could down all of that in 3 days easy
damn that’s like 8000 calories per day
Here’s a fun fact, people generally underestimate the number of calories in a thing by 20-30%. Which you have also just done.
The total calories consumed each day if it’s all consumed in 3 days, not including the cooking oil or the vodka, would be 11,145.
You could smoke 4 packs a day for 3 days?
Easy
Yes. I’d also eat those bags of sugar and flour that I totally overlooked
Alright, where are the anti capitalist tankies defending this?
This has little to do with socialism/capitalism and more with that fact that the economy was centrally (terribly) governed and most of the products were exported to the “friend nation USSR”
75% of sugar output exported to the Sovs while the citizens of Poland ‘enjoyed’ sugar rationing.
75% of sugar output exported to moscow and leningrad, you think the people of anywhere outside the immediate vicinity of those two cities got to see any of it? Let alone anywhere east of the Urals?
Comunimsm is not that bad! It only has a 100% failure rate, but that’s the CIA/UFO/Soros fault!
Reminder you live in a country where you have to pay other people to deny you healthcare.
Nope, I have universal Healthcare, like 32 of the 33 advanced economies.
Plenty of countries with universal healthcare that are also capatalistic societies. I love communism, too but the other comment had a valid point.
Ussr never fully recovered after ww2 and had to engage in a very expensive arms race while attempting to rebuild. Imo saying that communism doesn’t work often forgets this fact.
Plenty of capitalist countries did recover, so that just one more argument against communism.
Completely different situations. One country had to recover from complete devastation and bootstrap everything from scratch, could not rely on anyone and had to fund and support allies with that.
While other European countries were barely touched it could benefit from US funding which was in itself completely untouched and benefited from the collapse of the entire capitalist competition worldwide.
The ussr was much less devastated than Germany, and it didn’t support allies, it received support first and exploited colonies later.
Not true. Majority of ussr most economically valuable areas were destroyed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kPVo9w79D6wUssr provided major military assistance to china Korea, vietnam, African countries fighting for freedom.
Also look up comecon.
Also who do you think was responsible for reconstruction of half the germany? It was ussr most which was also half destroyed itself.All of this was a much higher burden on ussr than US which was left intact.
I mean, they didn’t have to engage in an arms race, any more than either side had to go to space or the moon. They did so for the propaganda, and to make themselves look tough, the same as the US.
They are in the same place where pro-capitalist liberals are when people talk about food insecurity in today’s West, and let’s face it, the rest of the non-Western world.
There goes the sweets! Now she’s even more annoyed!
I can and do live very well off less than that.
You do realize that all nations ration as necessary right?
Here in the USA I can buy whatever I want, even if it’s bad for everyone.
The US isn’t currently rationing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
Here in the USA we are aware that they aren’t rationing. You don’t think it’s necessary?
Your comment is irrelevant
No it’s not
“In the 80s Poland was rationing”
“All countries ration when they need to”
“Im currently not rationing in the US”
“That’s because the US isn’t currently rationing {link to previous US rationing occurrences}”
“I know that”
So explain what relevance that has to the discussion
Complaining about them when they aren’t here. See? They’re everywhere!
Can someone calculate the calories in that? I’m too lazy.
Maybe don’t include the sugar. That’s a shit ton of sugar to go through in month.
Ballpark estimate, excluding the sugar:
2.5kg beef: ~6265 Calories
0.5l vodka: ~1082 Calories
1.3kg white rice: ~4743 Calories
1.3kg flour: ~4732 Calories
500g butter: ~3585 Calories
300g cooking oil (Google says rapeseed oil is popular in Poland so I used that): ~2652 Calories
250g chocolate: ~1338 Calories
Total: 24,397 Calories or ~813 Calories per day
Some other people online also did the math and came up with similar numbers. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37027027 came up with 33,063 Calories (including the sugar)
Nice, that was super fast. I guess it’s probably enough for one person to survive if they practically don’t move at all the entire month, for a little while at least.
Still not pleasant I imagine.
What would you be willing to do to ensure that your fellow citizens aren’t dying of literal hunger on the streets?
(Clearly to most Americans, that answer is “absolutely nothing”)
Exactly, and thst sounds like the sort of rations Americans had during the world wars. It was supplimented by a mass movement of community gardens. Personally I’m more a fan of the ration points system we used so that you aren’t stuck with stuff you won’t use and those who’d rather eat like Hannibal of Carthage and go less hungry can do that while those who’d rather eat more resource intensive foods like meat can accept the cost of their demands in the form of calories. Though that may just be because I’ve always been the sort who’d rather be full of lentils and potatoes than hungry after a burger, even before I quit meat.
Though that may just be because I’ve always been the sort who’d rather be full of lentils and potatoes than hungry after a burger,
I think some of us have experienced poverty (or near-poverty) in our lives, so we understand things like this.
That’s what the cigarettes are for
But what if I wanted to eat the soap?
Yummy bubbles
You get another 333 calories from the sugar, add it to the vodka!
