When they're not busy improving prositute's health or smoking legal weed, Amsterdam is busy being the best city ever in a variety of other ways. That's because, as we recently discovered, they round up all the alcoholics in the city, put them to work, and pay them in beer. Now that's what we call a business model.
The Rainbow Foundation (a local charity) sponsors the program, which hires out-of-work alcoholics to clean up litter on the city's streets. Said alcoholics are then compensated in delicious frosty beer, and what amounts to about $13 US dollars a day. The Times describes what a typical shift is like for one of the program's employees:
His workday begins unfailingly at 9 a.m. — with two cans of beer, a down payment on a salary paid mostly in alcohol. He gets two more cans at lunch and then another can or, if all goes smoothly, two to round off a productive day…. In addition to beer—the brand varies depending on which brewery offers the best price—each member of the cleaning team gets half a packet of rolling tobacco, free lunch and 10 euros a day, or about $13.55.
Uh, we could probably get used to that. The idea behind the program is the same idea behind a methadone clinic; give an addict a slightly less-worse version of the substance they're addicted to, and gradually wean them off of it. But in this situation, instead of a bunch of alcoholics sitting in parks, drinking hard liquor and yelling at pigeons, you have a bunch of alcoholics drinking beer, and making the city look pretty. Makes sense. Now if we could only get our drunk uncle to do the same thing…
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