I go out on my bike and collect deposit bottles.
It’s honest work.
It smells like beer and regret, but it’s real.
After one or two hours I make between €1 and €3.
Sometimes less. Sometimes more.
But I tell myself: At least I didn’t waste sats in plain sight.
Then I drive through a construction zone.
Speed limit: 30 km/h.
I drive 37.
Weeks later, a letter arrives.
€40.
No warning.
No conversation.
No human.
Just a camera, a number, and a demand.
Let’s do the math.
Ten bottle-collecting bike rides:
– €20 earned
– ~35,000 sats stacked
One tiny speed violation:
– €40 lost
– ~70,000 sats gone
Net result: negative sats.
I cleaned the city.
The state cleaned my wallet.
The bottle system says:
“Here, take 25 cents if you do something useful.”
The fine system says:
“Give us forty euros for existing slightly wrong.”
Bottle collecting costs time, sweat, and dignity.
Fines cost nothing — except obedience.
The camera doesn’t care if the road was empty.
It doesn’t care if you were careful.
It doesn’t care if you just spent two hours turning trash into value.
It only asks one question:
Did you exceed the number?
One fine deletes twenty hours of micro-work.
One letter erases weeks of discipline.
One click reorgs your life energy.
So what’s the better strategy?
Not working harder.
Not collecting more bottles.
Just driving five km/h slower.
In modern fiat reality,
the highest ROI is not productivity — it’s compliance.
Moral of the story for the pleb:
Don’t optimize income. Optimize loss avoidance.
Bottles are symbolic. Fines are real.
The system rewards obedience, not virtue.
Time is scarce. Cameras are cheap.
Stack sats, but avoid theft by the state.
I’ll still pick up bottles.
Not for the money.
But as a reminder:
In this system, being careful and complaint is more profitable than being productive.
