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Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

Hyper inflation drives people to buy goods that can be resold later for more. This happened in CCCP while it was falling apart. People would show up with all their money every morning at their local stores, buying whatever was available no matter what it was. They could resell it later for more money (effort to preserve the value of the currency they held). Apple products are a safe bet as they typically hold on to their value well, are small and convenient to hang onto (refrigerators are more difficult), and can be sold abroad, etc.

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It's very odd to write CCCP in an otherwise english paragraph in latin alphabet. YOu would be better understood to write USSR or better just write Soviet Union.

(For those unfamiliar, CCCP is SSSR in cyrillic alphabet).

Ah thank you! I was thinking China but that's CCP. I was wondering if I was missing something from history.

If you stop to think about it yes it is pretty odd, but enough people do this that I don't have to think twice when I see it. You'd definitely wouldn't see it in formal writing, but informally it's not uncommon. A quirk of cross-cultural transmission maybe?

I think it's more often subtle morality/superiority signaling by calling an entity by a different name.

Think Republicans referring to the "Democrat party" instead of the "Democratic" or people using "CCP" instead of "China".

"China" can refer to any number of different things; "CCP" only refers to the Party.

…do you not make a distinction between “china” and the chinese communist party?

i think even the CCP itself does.

China the government, people, and place are separate and which one is being referred to is basically always obvious from context.

People don’t do this naming a political organization instead of country name for government actions for anywhere else in the world

If I use CCP instead of China it's not to signal morality/superiority myself, it's to fend off people that are going to get all fussy and misinterpret and declare themselves moral/superior.

Sometimes accepting the premise of people you're trying to disagree with ends up reinforcing their position.

I'm okay accepting the premise that 'China' is ambiguous sometimes.

I grew up in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. We usually used the term "USSR", but I think most of us recognized "CCCP" as the Russian equivalent.

Yes, believe it was on their jackets at the Olympics. That’s where I learned it.

Folklore: in Italy, at the time the USSR was a real football power (Euro finalist etc), CCCP was often used for kids jokes as meaning "Col Cazzo Che Perdiamo" ("we ain't fucking losing").

Yes, I am very familiar with the name CCCP because of the space stuff.

All their propaganda posters featuring rockets would contain those letters.

Even here in Europe this is a thing now because they seem intent on making our money worthless with negative interest rates. As a consumer I have very little financial confidence left.

Whats stopping people to exchange their money for euros or dollars? It's a popular tourist destination, after all.

Nothing is stopping us, in fact the dolarisation of savings hit 67% (if I'm not mistaken). People keep their savings in gold and fx. But your salary is fixed in Lira, the cost of living increases. Each month you see that you are getting poorer and poorer (and by poorer I mean 10-15% each month). It's really hard right now.

If you're interested, this article on economist covers the situation: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/erdogans-zan... (There is a paywall, you can read it from google cache).

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