Post your Second World Problems here

[badgate]

My cat won't stfu

[Mr. Morden]

My friend cracked his iPhone the other night. Camera still works.

What is iphone.

Sounds Lithuanian.  I thought it might be an exotic farming tool, but the camera suggests that it's some new kind of surveillance device.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

hawk eats baby

[The Mikado]

I'm being sent to a reeducation camp, but I don't want another degree, and you just know tuition will be bankruptcy-inducing.  Thanks, Chairman Obama.

[Bacon King]

My friend cracked his iPhone the other night. Camera still works.

What is iphone.

Sounds Lithuanian.  I thought it might be an exotic farming tool, but the camera suggests that it's some new kind of surveillance device.

is new tractor from KGB

KGB watch you while you plow potato

but joke is on KGB, farm have no potato

is funny except for hunger

[Mr. Morden]

[badgate]

My friend cracked his iPhone the other night. Camera still works.

What is iphone.

Sounds Lithuanian.  I thought it might be an exotic farming tool, but the camera suggests that it's some new kind of surveillance device.

is new tractor from KGB

KGB watch you while you plow potato

but joke is on KGB, farm have no potato

is funny except for hunger

You're a sentient tractor?

[Napoleon]

Can we get a fukkin like button already! Damn

[Bacon King]

My friend cracked his iPhone the other night. Camera still works.

What is iphone.

Sounds Lithuanian.  I thought it might be an exotic farming tool, but the camera suggests that it's some new kind of surveillance device.

is new tractor from KGB

KGB watch you while you plow potato

but joke is on KGB, farm have no potato

is funny except for hunger

You're a sentient tractor?

badgate no understand Latvian accent

[With you in spirit]

my straw hut's roof has a leak in it.

[Zanas]

I don't think half of the people intervening in this thread actually understand what it is about. Which I think has to do with the fact that none were born before 1991...

Anyway, yesterday I got a ticket for bread, I went to get it but there was shortage of bread. Today, I went to get my ticket, but there was shortage of paper : no ticket

[angus]

My elder brother, the family breadwinner, impaled himself on his machete when he tripped and fell while harvesting in the family cornfield. 

[Mr. Morden]

I don't think half of the people intervening in this thread actually understand what it is about. Which I think has to do with the fact that none were born before 1991...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

have entered employ as cultural attache (one of thirty two) at embassy in London.

[With you in spirit]

A white American male from Oklahoma visited my family and I today. He smelled of fast food and sexual frustration. We feared for our lives.

[bore]

This thread really needs this:




Second world refers to the country's in red.

[With you in spirit]

Goddammit Bore why ruin the fun

[Serenity Now]

Been sent to prison camp, got cancer..

[angus]

Goddammit Bore why ruin the fun

It doesn't really ruin the thread, it just assumes that we're stuck in the mid-70s.  Back then, there was a NATO group, a Warsaw Pact group, and everyone else.  Either you were aligned with the Good Guys, the Bad Guys, or no one.  The "everyone else" group included the smart dictators, those who played their hands close to their chests, making permanent alliances with neither the USSR nor the USA.

The world simply doesn't operate in that bipolar political fashion anymore, and now every dictator worth his salt plays his cards close to his chest, and so vestigial terms like "second-" or "third-world" no longer apply.  Unless, of course, we're going to make this a Period Piece.  For the moment I'm assuming that we're not doing that, and I'll stick with a modernist interpretation (nowadays we use terms like "High" "medium high" "medium" or "low" "human development index" and I'm interpreting "second world" in a modernist sense to refer to the "medium" and "low" human development indices), although I don't think the nod to late 20th century history necessarily ruins the thread. 

I came up with mine on my second trip to Guatemala, where I'd actually read that a leading cause of death among campesino farmers was falling out of their cornfields.  Guatemala is very mountainous, and the fields upon which corn is often planted typically make very sharp angles of inclination.  In the old days, Guatemalteco rulers oscillated between pro-USA dictators and unaligned dictators.  Nowadays, in the newspeak of modern vernacular which doesn't include terms such as "third" or "second" world, the guatemalans might be called, perhaps surprisingly, "medium HDI."  Medium, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.  If you're entering from Mexico, which I have done, it seems like a poor country.  If you're entering Guatemala from either Honduras or El Salvador--I've entered by land from both of those countries on various occasions--then Guatemala seems like a fairly prosperous place.