Hungary's Needy Given Money to Burn 95
Knowing that ideas are a dime a dozen and eager to think outside the box, Hungary's central bank is burning old currency to help the needy. The bank has found that the 40-50 tons of currency that needs to be burned every year is a blessing in disguise for people caught between a rock and a hard place due to the extreme cold sweeping across Europe.
Re:Yeah...thanks, I guess (Score:5, Insightful)
Providing wood or coal would be an extra cost to the government. If they already have the paper and are already destroying it why not compress it into a useful brick for burning. I'd imagine it wouldn't burn that fast if compressed enough.
Re:Depressing (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it would be more depressing to know they are burning the money somewhere else and I am still cold. I mean the currency at that point has no real value and putting it back into circulation would cause insane inflation. This is really the best possible outcome.
Re:Depressing (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really.
If you watch the video you will see that they aren't giving out stacks of bills in bank bands, but rather shredded note stock compressed into highly dense bricks and mortared together with a flammable medium.
According to the video they burn with roughly the same intensity as brown coal (AKA: Lignite). It's not the greatest fuel ever, but in a country where most homes are still heated by either steam boilers or coal/wood burning stoves, it's an acceptable alternative to either re-circulating the notes and causing hyperinflation (thus worsening the poor's problems by many times over) or having the poor denude the countryside looking for wood to burn. Hungary controls it's money supply AND the poor get free fuel to get them through the winter. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Re:Up in smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
[rhetorical]Is the shredding/compaction process along with the delivery by trucks and collection by individual citizens truly superior to simply sending the unprocessed notes off to be burned in great, big boilers to generate steam-powered electricity for wider, cheaper distribution of power?[/rhetorical]
I know you said rhetorical, so you probably know the answer, but:
Sure, burning it in one place for power generation would probably be a more efficient use of the "disposable cash", assuming that is the problem they are trying to solve. In this case though the problem is: "We have these poor people who are freezing in the winter." and someone else noticed "Hey, we're going to burn this used money we took out of circulation. If we can process it a little more, maybe we can give it away to the poor and kill two birds with one 1,000 Euro brick."
Doesn't make it the MOST efficient way of doing things, just a better use of the resources they had available.
To make everyone happy, those who disapprove of the solution can complain that "They just keep throwing money at the problem and expect it to go away".
Re:Well, Hungary, you asked for capitalism... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please. As a 1st gen immigrant from Romania, an eastern european soviet block country crushed by first the Nazis and then the Soviets, capitalism as done in the US is a godsend compared to the bullshit of Marxism. What you have in Russia and Romania is the result of years of devastating communism, where there is no incentive to work, everyone steals from their employer (the state). The same people are in power now as before, they're just "capitalists" by name. I have family that went back after the revolution and tried to help the country, start businesses, teach etc. They got stolen blind because of the same attitudes that had been forged into the soul of the people by communism.
Never mind that I had relatives in prison tortured because my family wouldn't join the communist party. My mother told me about when she was being appointed to her first job, how she wanted to request to be in a different location so she went to the hearing and a married couple went first. They were stationed (the govt picks where you work in that system of govt by the way) over a hundred kilometers apart. They had no car. They had a child. They requested to be posted closer together. The govt presiding officer told the woman - eh you can find another man in your new village. After a few similar cases my mom just left without a hearing.
Go back to your dear Russia and take your communism bullshit with you. Never again you fucks and take your fucking KGB putin and his fucks with you. Thank God for the US. The main regret of the Romanian people and the cause of so much horror there was that the US didn't take over and instead gave Romania to you Russian bastards.