The internet will belong to America and capitalism and that is a fact.
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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
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Nate700
The Great Lurker
- Location
- USA
The internet is too important to let capitalism control.
Mmm, potentially, but I think you overestimate the strength of the ministry here a bit. Bala isn't fighting the ministry over this because microcomputers isn't worth the minor political fight it'd cost, if Bala really wanted to, he could force it through no matter the resistance.
Which, if future projects are as useful as they are irl, well ministry be damned what the minister says goes. Only case where we could be delayed would be in a temporary troika where we need support from the ministry to stay afloat, which in either case would last a couple turns at most as we either lost and are replaced or won and no longer need to rely on our base.
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Ashimov, a good roll, please I beg you
Devestating roll on the computers, and a very harsh blowback for the failure too. We'll need to fix that for certain, but alas, Asimov cannot roll well to save his life, so the great anti bureaucracy purge will be a long time away
Devestating roll on the computers, and a very harsh blowback for the failure too. We'll need to fix that for certain, but alas, Asimov cannot roll well to save his life, so the great anti bureaucracy purge will be a long time away
- Location
- The United States
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- She/Her
Probably not, majority of the Internet is by the mid next century going to be block dominated and in effect both way firewalled out while the US does the same via preferred flavor of justification. The US network, outside of the very first decade is almost certain to end up smaller.
Edit: To an extent it's funding and who stagnates dependent but at current pace a US that sits there and Brazil's isn't entirely unlikely. The funniest for me possibility tbh is mutual stagnation but that's less likely then one of the other. (I may be over estimating you but I think you'll be somewhat competent)
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It is maybe worth remembering that the actual Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were anti-being thrown onto the streets to starve because the capitalists were trying to make the skilled weavers pay the costs of the downturn in textile demand after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
It is hard for me to imagine that a ministry where a huge amount of personnel worked under Voz are anti-technology per se. Balakirev just decisively put his foot in his mouth at a time when there's so much competition for educated jobs that wages just dropped a whole bracket:
Imagine you are a secretary who's just moved to Moscow to take up a job at the prestigious ministry of the economy, your head full of the assurances of your elders that your degree in stenography is a ticket for the gravy train and you get there and... Your pay packet is a fraction of what you expected (overall educated labour wages may only have done down by 8%, but I bet that isn't because people who have had the job for 10 years got a cut, probably new hires are getting paid substantially less), so the bills are all a struggle and now your boss is talking about how the ministry needs to be filled with microcomputers that let each secretary do the work of 20! It's not like it will take you long to put two and two together and decide that you aren't going to be one of the secretaries doing 20 times more work and the boss is an anti-communist wrecker robot and basically the 70s version of Mark Zuckerberg.
Like, sure, this is annoying, but this is just part of having an minister who is just the wrong side of the Dunning-Kreuger graph when it comes to his political smarts. Blaming people for being horrified when Balakirev says something horrific is entirely counter-productive.
And even the worst loss, the Academnet, would be a useful tool that would become obsolete rather quickly. While the delay will suck, the delay also means that when we do get to roll out an academic network and office computers, they will be vastly better than what we could make now and everyone who gets ahead of us during our political delay will have to rip out the old stuff and replace it while we leapfrog them.
If we adopt different standards, it might be pretty difficult to access the other block's internet.
The OTL internet connects everyone because everyone agreed to a set of underlying standards and a unified infrastructure. With different standards, connecting to the other block's network would be fairly obvious, costly (due to being charged like an international call), and fiddly, needing special hardware and software. Not enough to stop each side from watching the public network of the other, but certainly enough to discourage many ordinary folks even without a firewall.
I shall try to not disappoint you, but I make no promises.
Regards,
fasquardon
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The ministry has always been a good ally of Comrade Stalin, was it not the ministry that allowed comrade Stalin to rule as well as he did?
Without our efforts, Comrade Stalin would not have been able to drag the Soviet Union into the 20th century.
As such, if Stalin were to rise from the dead, he would be supportive of the current ministry.
Some lower level bureaucrats might have to be sacrificed to appease him though...
Well where else is he supposed to get the souls to sustain his new undead life, we can't give him the minorities anymore they are needed to make cheap jeans for the City people!
While not wrong generally, I'll note that Educated Labor probably didn't drop a bracket, since almost certainly completed second stage of Central Asian gas and it probably had Educated Labor increase in it.
You keep saying that it is a lower personnel, secretaries and clerks, which is source of discontent, except even now they barely have any power to keep bosses from rolling them over. 1970s USSR, even notably more liberal one than ITTL? Highly unlikely, and they definitely don't have political weight to kill Academnet. This is middle management fighting to preserve their fiefs.
I also think that you underestimate how valuable it would've been. Yes, 'net itself would be obsolete fairly soon but it likely would lead to development of TCP/IP-sky and uncovered a lot of non-obvious problems with large-scale networks.
- Location
- UTC+0
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Well, yes, that's why Balakirev is not fighting the fight, its stabbing at the Ministry's political power base. Computers don't have friends in the Party or seats in the Supreme Soviet to complain about, our management and bureaucracy though...
Like, at the end of the day, yes, Balakirev could fire the entire Ministry if he wanted to, he has that authority. The issue is making it stick and keeping his job while doing it.
Anyway, this is not the end of the world, we'll get to it eventually, this is a temporary setback. There are advantages to waiting anyway, right now we'd be spending a ton of money at Altair 8800s that are not great and would be obsolete in a couple of years. Computing is rapidly advancing, if we wait a little bit we can acquire significantly more capable systems. In the meanwhile, its not like our computing sector is dependent on the Ministry at this point, the SoEs will do their magic in the meanwhile and adopt them on their own, and we have an export market as well.
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No, I don't think I am underestimating things. A new age of Stalinism would do far more damage than computerization being slowed by a bit.
Sure, it would be nice to have both no Stalin AND an Academnet, but let's maintain a sense of bloomin' perspective.
If MrRageQuit's numbers are wrong, maybe it isn't so much of a movement of ordinary office workers.
I guess we'll find out for sure when the next update comes.
Regards,
fasquardon
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Critical support to zombie Stalin, his new "national zombification" policy will increase productivity by 25% since Zombies don't sleep (though they do occasionally lose limbs) plus, zombies can't get cancer, so radiation becomes much less of an issue and we can invade France
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(Stalin wouldn't do it though, man was practically a pacifist when it came to foreign relations after WW2, put the final nail in the international movement doing it)
Bro thought the UN and IMF would lead to peaceful world socialism lmao
Bro thought the UN and IMF would lead to peaceful world socialism lmao
While Stalin typically had an extremely cautious foreign policy, this seemed to change in the 50s. See Korea. IDK why though. Mental health maybe?
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I'd argue his Korea policy was also overly cautious and conciliatory. He abstained the resolution instead of vetoing and mostly left Korea and China to fight on their own instead of aiding directly
Wasn't he the one who gave the go ahead for the invasion?
Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
There is also a North Korean option. The DPRK is not actually connected to the international network (except for some servers related to work abroad - be it intelligence or diplomacy). They have their own intranet, where all the necessary resources and sites are located and which is impossible to access without connecting to a North Korean device. We know that there are video hosting services, instant messengers, and a search engine - but we cannot work with them.
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They were gonna do it no matter what and honestly what we call the start of the war is really just an escalation of the low level fighting that existed. Plus if you read either McArthurs or the guy who lead the south at the times journals they say they shot first, but so did the north, so I think it was just one of those things that happened
- Location
- The great frozen north
Well, let's try inputting a little levity into this miseryOH NO carbros don't look!
I was bored and made a not-serious attempt at reconstructing what the planned West Russian then-normal speed passenger rail project looked like to start with, before Malenkov's anti-corruption hunt let us cancel useless lines in the middle of nowhere. I may have taken "three whole rings around Moscow" too literally.
I just realize the integration of Europe into the high speed rail system only started way after Malenkov's anti-corruption. Eh, just pretent those parts don't exist. I at least remembered to remove the vacation extension to Sochi that only was added later.
Anyways, we should do []Expanded Metro Systems this plan. Last time we let an urban transport project sit idle for long, buildings grew up in the way and the project turned disruptive.
I was bored and made a not-serious attempt at reconstructing what the planned West Russian then-normal speed passenger rail project looked like to start with, before Malenkov's anti-corruption hunt let us cancel useless lines in the middle of nowhere. I may have taken "three whole rings around Moscow" too literally.
I just realize the integration of Europe into the high speed rail system only started way after Malenkov's anti-corruption. Eh, just pretent those parts don't exist. I at least remembered to remove the vacation extension to Sochi that only was added later.
Anyways, we should do []Expanded Metro Systems this plan. Last time we let an urban transport project sit idle for long, buildings grew up in the way and the project turned disruptive.
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The reason for the Korean war has more to do with the goals of the leadership in Korea at the time. The USA had pulled out a lot of its forces and didn't seem to interested in South Korea at that point. So North Korea decided to give it a go and just present the USA with a rapid conquest an Stalin probably gave the ok on that. But then it all didn't quite go to plan and because the USSR at the time was in a policy of not attending the UN, the other members weren't stopped in calling for UN intervention either.
While there was a lot stuff going on and attacks back and forth before the war from the parties, best we can tell the North as such did pull the trigger on going all in on the matter. Aiming for weakness where South Korea was still training up its army and no serious USA presence. Their gamble just did not work as expected... as wars so very often apparently do not.
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I will not rest until every inch of Soviet land is covered in train tracks!
The entire Soviet population should live inside one gigantic train.