Russian Christmas Sale

Me and my wife are a little envy when we hear about Christmas sale in Europe or USA. Prices are so low, most of the merchandise is even cheaper than here in Russia, and of course the quality of the products sold is higher than here.
You might say "Poor Russians, how you live without Christmas sale?". You are wrong, we have a christmas sale. But as with all the things that we borrow from you, it is enriched with Russian colour.
Almost all of the december you can see a lot of billboards that say "New Year's 50% discount". Looks attractive. Let's vizit one of this sales. Wow! The price is 20% HIGHER than it was in November! Well, that is New Year's sale in Russia! Merchants know that demand is very high before the New Year and try to get more money. Not from larger amount of sales but from the higher prices. People would buy in any way, especially if it is said that "discount is 50 %".

Software bugs lead to deaths from alcohol poisoning.

We all know that software bugs are annoying and sometimes dangerous. When you are in Russia, software bugs can harm your health or cause your death.

This year is the worst of almost 20 years for Russian alcoholics. Our government has decided to put in some order to the alcohol market, centralize and computerize it. The idea was to develop a computer database to store all the operations performed between players on the alcohol market. It’s aim is to stop cheap illegal alcohol products circulating here. What we get when our government tries to make something ordered? Right. Even more disorder.

The computer database was full of bugs. Actually, legal alcohol manufactures, importers and intermediaries were unable to operate. The database was down almost all the time during summer. Unfortunately by that time the law prohibiting alcohol operations that are not reflected in this database was already in action. There was almost no alcohol at shops. It was a perfect situation for criminal alcohol market to grow. And it did.

What is the criminal alcohol like? It is produced from spirit that is not intended to be used by humans as a drink. It’s a poison. Today we almost have an epidemic of alcohol poisoning. Large amount of the poisoned people are pensioners. I saw an interview with one woman suffering from toxic hepatitis caused by illegal alcohol. Correspondent asked her «Did you know that this is dangerous alcohol?» - «Yes» - «Why did you drink it?» - «It’s cheap».

What can I say. Russian people still combine extreme genius with extreme stupidity.