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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Normal plastic toothbrushes or electric ones? How many colors do we make and which? Soft or hard bristles? What about toothpaste?
 
Differences between the two leading plans:

Plan Tiberium and Industry
  • Blue Zone Perimeter Redoubts 1+1 dice (20R)
  • Experimental Tiberium Treatment Labs 0+1 dice (20R)
  • Secondary Schooling 0+1 dice (5R)
Plan Space Marines
  • Toy Plants 0+1 dice (5R)
  • Yellow Zone Aquaponics Bays 0+2 dice (20R)
  • Refill Strategic Food Stockpiles (Medium) 0+1 dice (0R)
  • Orbital Strike Regimental Combat Team Development 1+1 dice (15R)
Ultimately they're both more similar to each other than they are different. 24 dice (and 290R) in common.

Originally they would have been even more similar. I'd wanted to do Toy Plants as well, but when looking around at where I could use my last free die I found that putting just an extra 5 R on Secondary Schooling made its completion chance shoot up from 9% to 51%. Which was just too big an advantage to ignore, sadly.
BOTcommander said:
Normal plastic toothbrushes or electric ones? How many colors do we make and which? Soft or hard bristles? What about toothpaste?
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Toothbrushes are a GDI conspiracy. I clean my teeth with a tiberium pick, the same way Kane does every day!
 
While GDI itself has always run its internal economy with heavy amount of planning, a Command and Conquer economy if you will, the pre-TW3 GDI Blue and Yellow Zone civilian side economies seems fairly capitalist from the little lore we have on them. Why does the GDI Treasury run the GDI economy in a central planned manner in the first place? Was it because the Treasury had always ran GDI's internal economy in a planned manner and they decided to run the world economy in the way they knew when that responsibility was forced on them?

There were a bunch of tiberium focused companies in the lore of course. There was Pérez-Toscano-Zelenetzky, the company won a contract from GDI to keep Tiberium from spreading or entering buildings. Supposedly working with state-of-the-art technology, there have been incidents in which PTZ made-buildings have malfunctioned unsurprisingly. From a report from W3N reporter Annabella Wu, one housing building's automatic shutter system failed to work. Kaspm's Tiberium Warehouse was an international company, that was to build safe Tiberium warehouses for the civilian population. In game, the capturable neutral tiberium spikes and tiberium silos are mentioned to be owned by private companies. These private tiberium spikes and silos were often seized by the warring factions. While GDI personnel are mentioned to usually refund the owners of the Spikes that are commandeered or destroyed with vouchers that can be exchanged for credits in Reykjavik, the Brotherhood of Nod and the Scrin did not care to hand out financial compensation to the former private owners. However, we don't see private businesses harvesting the open tiberium fields. Ithillid mentioned in an explanation (as the games don't say how) on tiberium spread to North America that presumably private tiberium farmers bought tiberium to the USA only to be turfed out by the EPA and having their feet eaten by the now out of control tiberium. Were private businesses banned from harvesting open air deposits? In the quest, all tiberium spikes so far have been placed by the GDI Treasury. Did all the private tiberium businesses collapse or were nationalized by GDI during the Third Tiberium War? I saw that some of the Free Market forum posters in one of the updates wanted GDI to bring back tiberium private businesses. There were some real life defense contractor companies still around before TW3 in the lore such as Raytheon, Mitsubishi, and Mikoyan alongside fictional defense contractors such as Otani-Lincoln Laboratories which designed the GDI war factory buildings.

Developer Mike Verdu's comments on the Blue Zones. "The place to be in 2047 is in a Blue Zone – and only 20% of the Earth's surface has been designated as such. GDI controls the Blue Zones, areas that suffer from minimal Tiberium infestation and have been relatively untouched by war. The populations of the Blue Zones live in relative comfort, going about their lives in high-tech futuristic cities that sit in forested valleys or nestle in pastoral farmland. They benefit from Tiberium as a resource; their energy-intensive economies are powered by the awesome energies generated by the green crystal – but they suffer none of the side effects that make life in the Yellow Zones a living hell. If you reside in a Blue Zone, Tiberium seems to have more upside than downside – you have almost limitless energy at your disposal and yet your surroundings are relatively pristine. Most of the world's wealth is concentrated in the Blue Zones " and "To the citizen of a Blue Zone, Tiberium provides clean power for flying cars, large homes, and a vast technological infrastructure."

Other lore material and some of the quest updates mention that the Blue Zones have a strong nostalgia for the pre-tiberium world. Lore material mentions that the New Eden reclaimed blue zone was at least partially build by private developers with a preference for designs based on an idealized version of the pre-tiberium world. The pre-tiberium world would be pre-1995. The idealized pre-tiberium golden age would be for the Western dominated Blue Zones , for better or worse, would be just after the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent victory of capitalist free market liberal democracy. This might be a reason why Ithillid have decided that pro-free market capitalists have dedicated party in the GDI parliament while socialists are implied in the inuniverse forum posts to be merely a subfaction of the big tent Developmentalists. Incoming Yellow Zone refugees probably have a less rosy view of the pre-tiberium world. After all, what would become much of the Yellow Zones were already unpleasant places to live before tiberium arrived.

@Ithillid I am going to ask how are the GDI population receiving the heavy state control and planning of the economy?
After all, it would seem to the average Blue Zoner, that an economic system thought largely dead and discredited before the arrival of tiberium has suddenly taken control of their lives in the aftermath of the Third Tiberium War. The economic prosperity, private businesses, and large beautiful houses of the pre-TW3 Blue Zone life have been replaced by constant rationing, omnipresent state economic control, and efficient but very cramped apartments. Dr. Granger and the Treasury technocrats are mentioned to desire rebuilding the Blue Zone cities according to standardized plans with rationalized transports, communal recreational spaces, and distribution points. They also desire to empathize mass transit over the pre war GDI focus on personal vehicles over concerns of Nod converting private vehicles to military uses and because mass transit is more efficient for the compacted workforce in the Blue Zones. I wonder if some people are going to feel that Dr. Granger and the GDI Treasury are going to rebuild Paris and London into gray soulless cities in the name of efficiency and call the new apartments modern day Khrushchyovkas.
 
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BoredStudent1414 said:
@Ithillid I am going to ask how are the GDI population receiving the heavy state control and planning of the economy?
After all, it would seem to the average Blue Zoner, that an economic system thought largely dead and discredited before the arrival of tiberium has suddenly taken control of their lives in the aftermath of the Third Tiberium War. The economic prosperity, private businesses, and large beautiful houses of the pre-TW3 Blue Zone life have been replaced by constant rationing, omnipresent state economic control, and efficient but very cramped apartments. Dr. Granger and the Treasury technocrats are mentioned to desire rebuilding the Blue Zone cities according to standardized plans with rationalized transports, communal recreational spaces, and distribution points. They also desire to empathize mass transit over the pre war GDI focus on personal vehicles over concerns of Nod converting private vehicles to military uses and because mass transit is more efficient for the compacted workforce in the Blue Zones. I wonder if some people are going to feel that Dr. Granger and the GDI Treasury are going to rebuild Paris and London into gray soulless cities in the name of efficency and call the new apartments modern day Khrushchyovkas.
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Basically what happened was the Third Tiberium War. If it existed, most of it got nationalized and command economied into keeping going because GDI needed whatever was being produced. Look at things like British wartime employment measures in the Second World War. GDI needed a total economic mobilization just to keep the men fed in the field and with ammunition for their weapons. And that is something where one of the things that got cut early on was the capitalist profit motive.

Now, the response has been somewhat mixed. Some people, and really quite a lot of people are seeing less rationing, and better rations, A lot of people are getting housed. A lot of people are getting employed again. The thing is that as GDI keeps to the centrally planned economy, people are going to keep moving towards the Free Market Party, because that is their mechanism to force a return to the Pre War conditions and pre war ways of life. It won't entirely come back, because Granger and his Technocrats are remaking the fabric of GDI society, but it is a remaking that will increasingly get pushed back on. Especially once immediate fires are doused. People realize that there are not enough computer chips, people sacrificed when there was not enough food to go around. People ate the fungus bars willingly as the Initiative threw every available resource towards getting the economy back together. But the thing is that you will have to show them not only that you can provide survival, but you also have to provide a good life. And so far your administration has very much not managed that. There are some indications that things are going back to something approximating normal, but at the same time, schools are still mostly closed, food is still pretty bland, consumer goods are basically unavailable. And all of that feeds into people saying "The Free Market did this better"
 
In this interpretation of Tiberium Wars, the Scrin also beat us up really, really bad. We are in an ongoing state of emergency and as such have more control about the economy than usual.
 
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Would throwing some money at consumer goods grants alleviate the push-back? Or would it be the same as if we had provided the same amount of consumer goods via state manufacture?
 
Zanfib said:
Would throwing some money at consumer goods grants alleviate the push-back? Or would it be the same as if we had provided the same amount of consumer goods via state manufacture?
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It would be broadly the same overall, just different people responding at different rates. Some people would very much prefer to get free market produced goods, others just want the goods.
 
We have unique opportunity - we have chance to destroy capitalism without revolution. We must not squander it. In a decade, when people enjoy welfare state on unimaginable scale, when they don't have to work for survival, when thir labor isn't taken by bosses for scraps, and used to generate massive profit, when world wealth is not in the pockets of handful of bilionaries, then people will look at utopia around them, and thank us.
 
It's not just Consumer Goods that we need to fend off the Free Market party. We also need projects like Blue Zone Reconstruction (Phase 2) that visibly improve the world around those Blue Zone voters. (Also stuff like Blue Zone Duplex Row Housing cuz our housing quality is low.) Sure, Tiberium Glaciers are eating the planet, but that's a distant problem. Most cities have visible battle damage from the war that Blue Zone citizens have to see and deal with every day. And as we've seen there are a number of those citizens who could care less about what happens outside their Blue Zones.
 
So to stem the political tides supporting the FMP once the basics are out of the way, we need to either: actually centrally plan toothbrushes for distribution, bribe the fat cats allocate resources in an extremely inefficient manner, or contract the fat cats to make toothbrushes in an extremely inefficient manner.

It's for the best we demonstrate that central planning can deliver the toothbrushes before finally feeding the capitalists, given that it's far more cost effective.
 
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The best solution might be to get as many Yellow Zone voters into the network as possible while raising their standard of living slightly to create a loyal voting bloc. They will support those who seem focused on building up their communities and considering the squalor so many live in we really don't have to do much to better their lives. It is more of a long term strategy but it is more practical then letting unregulated capitalism loose on a hell world we are barely holding on too.
 
I love that while while Soviet plan is opening up markets, the GDI is apparently planning to strangle capitalism in its hospital bed.

Seriously though I think the advantage of grants is that long term getting a point of consumer goods every turn forever seems like a good deal. Not sure when or even if I would vote for it, but I think it's not a bad deal.

[X] Plan Tiberium and Industry
 
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How about we issue the grants in the last quarter of the Plan?

Unless it carries over, the rebalanced budget may just shuffle that off to the side and leave us with the lower amount we expected anyway.
 
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