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Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]
« Last post by IainB on February 14, 2017, 02:41 AM »@4wd: That Trump loo paper thing reminds me of a bit of British bureaucracy gone slightly bonkers. I think it was up until the mid-seventies that, if you worked in the Civil Service and used the toilet facilities, then you would be likely to use the lu rolls provided, which consisted of an off-white single-sheet crinkly-scrapy paper, where every single sheet had "Property of HMSO" (Her Majesty's Stationery Office), or something similar, printed diagonally on on the outer side.
This was presumably to deter stationery theft...the Brits of that period being a relatively impoverished lot (the after-effects of the war), when loo paper had been scarce and was worth nicking. I was reminded of that history when I went to work on a contract in The Philippines, and when I arrived, my expat colleagues detailed the customs and behaviours I would need to be aware of, one of which was to ALWAYS have at least one toilet roll handy, because toilet rolls were not provided in office toilets where we worked - due to theft by the impoverished Filipinos - and you were out of luck if you had an urgent call to Nature and forgot to take your toilet roll with you.
The reason for the poverty there was that the Americans - who been economic colonists - had left the place in the greedy hands of several large "baron" families who ran the country like a medieval serfdom (and still do), so it was a perpetual economic basket-case where loo paper was a scarce/valuable commodity.
It seems that, strangely, poverty and the lack of affordable loo paper go hand-in-hand.
So I don't think Americans should take offence at this new Chinese loo paper, because I suspect that, if one were of the Chinese masses under similar poor economic circumstances as above, then paying a premium to some Chinese manufacturer so that one could have the face of anyone that one might dislike (or had been indoctrinated to dislike) on one's toilet paper would probably not be on one's list of affordable necessities as a good value-proposition - unless it had been (say) mandated by someone like Chairman Mao, which would make it entirely a different and important matter, possibly one of life-or-death.
So the buyers would otherwise be, likely as not, only those on higher incomes who had some surplus personal disposable income and who did not appreciate or care that they were being induced to just waste money on a puerile money-making scatological gimmick that added no economic benefit to their lives, but simply directly profited the opportunistic state-approved manufacturer of toilet rolls - the decision to purchase thus making a rather self-revealing statement about the buyer.
We can all tend to make mugs of ourselves and we are all ignorant, and I'm sure the Chinese would be no exception and they should not be blamed for their ignorance.
This was presumably to deter stationery theft...the Brits of that period being a relatively impoverished lot (the after-effects of the war), when loo paper had been scarce and was worth nicking. I was reminded of that history when I went to work on a contract in The Philippines, and when I arrived, my expat colleagues detailed the customs and behaviours I would need to be aware of, one of which was to ALWAYS have at least one toilet roll handy, because toilet rolls were not provided in office toilets where we worked - due to theft by the impoverished Filipinos - and you were out of luck if you had an urgent call to Nature and forgot to take your toilet roll with you.
The reason for the poverty there was that the Americans - who been economic colonists - had left the place in the greedy hands of several large "baron" families who ran the country like a medieval serfdom (and still do), so it was a perpetual economic basket-case where loo paper was a scarce/valuable commodity.
It seems that, strangely, poverty and the lack of affordable loo paper go hand-in-hand.
So I don't think Americans should take offence at this new Chinese loo paper, because I suspect that, if one were of the Chinese masses under similar poor economic circumstances as above, then paying a premium to some Chinese manufacturer so that one could have the face of anyone that one might dislike (or had been indoctrinated to dislike) on one's toilet paper would probably not be on one's list of affordable necessities as a good value-proposition - unless it had been (say) mandated by someone like Chairman Mao, which would make it entirely a different and important matter, possibly one of life-or-death.
So the buyers would otherwise be, likely as not, only those on higher incomes who had some surplus personal disposable income and who did not appreciate or care that they were being induced to just waste money on a puerile money-making scatological gimmick that added no economic benefit to their lives, but simply directly profited the opportunistic state-approved manufacturer of toilet rolls - the decision to purchase thus making a rather self-revealing statement about the buyer.
We can all tend to make mugs of ourselves and we are all ignorant, and I'm sure the Chinese would be no exception and they should not be blamed for their ignorance.
