Again, that's the political line in 1930, not how the past 48 years actually worked out. Soviet agricultural labor has been immensely mechanized and what labor does exist is mostly done by CMEA guest workers at sub-Soviet wages, due to geopolitical and technological developments that were unforeseeable in 1930 and render the idea of a bunch of like.... neo-peasantry "breeding" and tilling virgin lands completely irrelevant to the modern economy. The closest you'll see is maybe like a family owned cattle ranch or fruit farm? That operates as a capitalist enterprise in a market framework though, not like a homestead. And most of the useful land has just been massively intensified by massive state agricorps through pesticides, fertilizers, mechanization, GMOs, intensive irrigation, etc. rather than putting marginal land under cultivation.
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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
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HanEmpire
Delicious
One, I wrote that before I learned that Blackstar always speaks within the bounds of POV knowledge and biases. Second, we've since implemented policies that steadily coerced and incentivized rural farmers to move to the cities for better paying work. The agricultural sector is now dominated by state-owned agri-enterprises, basically mega-conglomerates in all but name, with new farmers being comprised of immigrant labor.
The Moshav and Kibbutz system seem to work just fine for Israel in the modern day.
Yes, it leveled out, that's why we stopped getting labor from migration to the cities.
We do get agricultural focuses though, specifically to expand irrigation so new virgin lands can be brought under cultivation. Presumably these are being done for someone.
It seemed to be talking about the out of character results of changing the party line, not the intended results of the party line. As evidenced by the then later "oops i forgot that not changing the party line would look like the rise of kulaks during great purged time" statement being very obviously out of character.
I don't doubt that is a possibility, but can I get some sources for that?
[]Fruit Expansion Program: Increasing the focus on new fruits will provide a vast number of jobs to otherwise under-served communities and improve the overall economy. Agricultural profitability will not be raised by further expansions of grain but through a strong commitment to alternative means of production. In effect enterprises in more Southern areas will be provided benefits in water allocation alongside regular tax benefits for the localization of fruit production. Practical impacts will be limited as the trees grow but significant profits can be realized in the next few years. (150 Resources per Dice 0/175) (-11 CI1 Electricity) (High Profitability)
I feel like it was explicitly stated somewhere, but as an implicit statement here's one. "Will provide a vast number of jobs" along with 0 general labor attached to an action.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Here's a quote from the Tenth FYP update.
At this point our ag sector uses a lot of Eastern European guest workers on large enterprises.
Man I can't believe our Deputy is getting promoted so fast
I would like to thank you both, my trawl through to try to find the tipping point was currently early Malenkov and was liable to take some time.
The wording "shifting more towards" is somewhat vague as it could be an understatement and the phenomenon is universal or more precisely used and the phenomenon is gradual. So I'll try to parse some more.
"Consolidated strongly" but qualified with "in higher-income republics". So it is consolidated as has been stated, but mostly in rich republics while poorer republics are still mostly smaller and cooperative operations.
And the smaller operations are innovating and evolving to stay somewhat competitive for now, and very much do still exist. What can be concluded is that while the trend that was stated is happening, it is not immediate, nor total and that there is probably still a notable, if waning, rural population. Based on what this reveals though Funding for Local Beef goes to these smaller operations.
I mean it's explicitly stated in the option, but the term small farms become much more revealing in context of this trend. It could be construed then that this option will make smaller operations more competitive thereby slowing the hollowing out of rural areas and therefore preserve our birth rate somewhat while still being profitable.
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Any politician acting like that near any of our citizens that regularly use the roads are likely to end with there dacha fire bombed at this point.
They will just hike to it then.
The American station beat ours and was better to boot. That's a big part of where they are ahead. Our station program just hasn't been rolling well.
It absolutely is a megaproject. What to us is a couple dice and a tenth of our resources/year or so was to the OTL Soviet Union something that was unaffordable.
That the river reversal also includes deep canals that can carry heavy barge traffic from the middle of Siberia to Western Russia is also quite beyond anything considered OTL so far as I know.
Indeed, our whole deep water canal system is quite boggling. (And without it we would have slammed face first into a bad coal crisis by the start of the TTL 70s.) I can't remember if we are using nuclear earth moving for those canals, or the nuclear canal digging was given up as impractical. But I do remember that even the non-nuclear digging was far beyond what the OTL Soviet Union could have done.
Add to that we've got the luxurious HSR network. The towering power of atomash. And we are building a heavy lift rocket (Energia in OTL was one of the costs that probably broke the Soviet Union, insofar as it was an unnecessary luxury) and we are building an even more capable heavy lift vehicle and it isn't even taking the majority of our space budget...
That's multiple megaprojects that were either at the limits of what the OTL Soviets could have done, or beyond them, that we do with such casualness that we don't even consider them THAT special.
I mean, looking above at some of the things we casually bash off that would have broken the OTL Soviet Union is a good start to seeing how much better the USSR is doing.
We also have a stronger, higher tech and more flexible economy with both stronger central control and stronger private enterprise. We have a more robust political system. We have police who can actually face down the army and allow the citizens to demonstrate peacefully at least some of the time. We have a bigger population. And a stronger international position. Oh, and we actually know how to trade, meaning other countries import stuff from us that isn't just raw materials.
Decentralizing infra construction would probably help ALOT with our road failures.
As others have noted, we really need to work on building up our aluminium production - for one thing aluminium is super recyclable and so if we get it cheap enough we should be able to reduce the growth of our plastic useage by a bit.
And if we get it cheap enough to compete with steel, alumiunium reinforced concrete is a great upgrade over the steel reinforced stuff (would make a GREAT material for roads if we hit the right price point, would have a much lower maintenance cost, and as the OTL US is finding out now, the maintenance costs of roads is killer).
As for plumbing together all the rivers from the Baltic to Pacific, I am actually tempted. Such a megaproject would allow us to react to flooding or drought with a powerful tool, equalizing the impacts across a land are twice that of all of Europe. And my own view is that river reversal has already gone far enough that Central Asia will get whatever water it demands until the Arctic rivers run dry. So plumbing things together wouldn't increase demand faster than it would anyway. But it will allow us to spread that demand over more watersheds.
It's a project worth considering IMO.
Comrades! I found the catfishperson spy!
Ahhh, anti soft science bias. Still, it sounds like him emphasizing her hard engineering background means that he respects her at least. Otherwise he'd be calling her a mere social scientist.
Yeah. I am curious how we built all those ring roads and didn't end up with a more robust system. What kind of traffic did Voz rebuild Moscow for?
That's a really good point.
We don't measure transportation prices or throughput, so as with any system, we optimize for the things that are scored, like oil prices and RpY.
One again, we find that when history isn't holding our hands, we walk into well-known failure modes of the OTL Soviet Union. (Also a failure mode of alot of modern organizations.)
Only, that's not what's happening. It's been ages (like the in-game 50s) since anti-roadism had any real grip on the threadviet, and we have spent almost a whole generation now STILL underfunding roads.
Well. With the exception of this turn. But even this turn, with the threadviet already having freaked out and self-flagellated when the Moscow traffic project first appeared on our books the turn before, all the plans were putting no free dice into roads. It was only when I reminded people that we needed at least 4, if not 5 dice that we went up to 9 dice on roads. And I am pretty sure that all the folks making plans were well aware of the need for road investment.
But roads aren't sexy, the returns on investment from roads aren't measured and so people are naturally going to lean towards putting as much fun stuff in their plans as possible. Add to that making a plan for this quest takes alot of work - my own effort at planning this turn basically was only possible because I ripped off agumentic's work. I didn't have the time to make a plan of my own from scratch before the vote closed. I am sure many people are in the same boat. So there aren't many plans getting proposed. Nor is there much time to debate plans. So we tend to end up with plans that are heavy with things that seem fun at the time.
And that also extends to the debates we have. I am pretty sure we've discussed the space program waaaaaaay more than we have roads. But roads will do more to help us win the Cold War. And when we do talk about roads, we usually do so without as much substance as say, our our discussions about nuclear energy.
At this point, I am thinking we should maybe go for infra focus next turn, put only minimal dice into every other infra project (MAYBE housing can be an exception to that) so that things like the rail industry don't loose experience, and pile all of our other dice into roads.
I am not sure if building all the roads we can at once would be a good idea, since in the short term that would reduce road capacity, but at this point I think we have to do mechanically sub optimal things to get through the psychological blocks that are standing between us an a reasonable road network.
In good news, an infa/services plan should be a pretty good fit with an oil crisis...
Well, this is just BS.
Start with the biggest falsehood here: the US and other western countries do not force underdeveloped countries to not build factories and coal plants for environmental reasons. Yes, they energetically engage in greenwashing, but if you look past the facade, in fact there is a brisk business exporting pollution to poorer countries.
If you look at what partners from underdeveloped countries say about the Chinese and Westerners as investment partners, every single one that I've read or heard speak on the issue has said that the West doesn't invest in productive things because the West isn't very interested in investing. So investment flows are minimal and tend to be restricted to extractive industries that generate little return for the local economy. Western investment also tends to come with more onerous terms. Meanwhile, the Chinese by all reports offer very reasonable terms on their investment deals and are interested in things that actually have more use to local people, rather than only in things that leave the locals with a pittance of money and a huge toxic hole in the ground.
The Chinese just seem to respect their partners more and Chinese expertise tends to lead them to have an advantage in things with more local benefit as well. They're better at building railroads than Americans are, so they tend to get those contracts and railroads have always been a tide that lifts all boats once built.
As far as development in general and the necessity of turning Moscow into a smoggy hell. I give you the OTL Soviet Union: in terms of production of physical STUFF the Soviets produced more than the USA in the 80s. But quality of products from raw steel to finished goods all was lacking. This meant that while the USSR produced steel for roughly the same resources as it took anyone else, the poor quality of much of that steel meant that the GDP produced per kilo of coal/oil/iron ore or per joule of energy was much lower.
Quality matters. Efficient resource utilization matters.
So when we face questions about blanketing Moscow under industrial smog, is the benefit of the industrial production and the cost savings on (actually very cheap) chimney air scrubbers such that it compensates for the raised costs in terms of traffic accidents and lung diseases?
In OTL Britain, London's air was cleaned up after it became clear that the London smog was causing more monetary damage to the British economy through traffic accidents than it would cost to end the smog.
The same will be true of Moscow. So why do you want to waste resourses on traffic accidents when chimney scrubbers are cheap?
And just to editorialize more generally: I have been noticing in recent years there is a real tendency to blame environmentalism for the piss poor token policies various countries took to greenwash themselves. Like for example how in the US, there were rebates for people who bought electric vehicles while the roll out of a charging network to support vehicles was underfunded and balkanized between several companies with incompatible standards. The result is that for much of the country, all-electric vehicles aren't very practical and people are pissed off and feeling conned. Because they were, by the greenwashers. Or how in Britain the last government announced that no-one would be allowed to buy new petrol or diesel vehicles after 2030, but then did no work to make sure the country could transition to something else. The result is a policy that looks like pure self-sabotage and will need to be changed. This sort of greenwashing absolutely is bad for development. But it is also not real environmentalism.
In general, since the industrial economy happens IN the environment, any effective development policy must take into account environmental costs. Rare species of fish that no-one has heard of might not sound very important to humans, but it all connected. It's a headache to have to consider the cost of declaring their habitat a sacrifice zone, but such considerations actually support progress in the long run.
That isn't to say that greens don't get their brainworms - see the suffering Germany has had since it shut down its nuclear power plants early. I wouldn't call that greenwashing, but it was still bad for development.
Regards,
fasquardon
I'm not sure that's particularly realistic, this particular river reversal was the 'easy' one. Where you had the least difficult elevation changes to deal with by a massive margin, and you could get away with 'merely' creating one of the largest artificial lakes ever. Including a ton of extra infrastructure that fortunately managed to side step some of the environmental problems. The costs for going beyond the current project are way to insane I suspect to be reasonable for the minor payoff in water gains. It is probably more cost effective to get Central Asia at this point to take their water conservation methods. They had their carrot, now if need be there might have to be some stick as else things get to absurd cost wise for some agricultural boost. And how much is that really worth for the economy?
On a side note, I recently ran in to some of the concerns the USSR had environmentally on truly pulling a lot of water from the Arctic. And it wasn't just some areas they didn't care about becoming dry. One of the more dire threats was that the permafrost line might move quite a bit further south if you did that. Like say 50 km for the project the USSR was thinking, or if you actually drained the rivers dry... who knows, maybe a 100 km? Maybe substantially more? That would have some pretty major impacts on usable land in the USSR, a very high cost to bear. I sadly didn't read it further at the time, as we weren't going to do more insane river reversal so didn't seem worth the time investment. But we dodged more of a bullet then we realized, I'll explain it away as us being lucky due to it being smaller scale and the current Minister actually being some what of an overachiever in solving problems at times.
But as such I fear if one really went full bore, that the QM would have a number of rather painful side effects to choose from, including potentially permanent economic hits at a scale that would matter.
Just be happy the transport to West Siberia got way easier out of this and you didn't get struck down to much for it aside of the sacrifice zone.
That's one point of view on it, though I have heard others. Where China gives easy loans to governments that put it in to projects that in many cases don't give sufficient economic return to service the debt. Some things I've heard point to the super majority of these 'reasonable' term loans as such to likely need to be written off as unrecoverable.
Which is something that I've heard once happened to Wester development loans to countries as well. And thus since then they put stricter limits on giving loans to such countries, as they prefer not to be in an endless loop of countries over indebting themselves with bad loans and then having to write those off. Wanting projects to actually be able to have sufficient economic return to pay the debt off would certainly not be an insane position to hold after all.
Is that position on it entirely accurate? I don't know, but from what limited time I spent on it, it seemed like it was potentially also true. In which case I do think it gives an extra perspective on the matter. Where the West is perhaps not being quite so unreasonable as some claim, and China just starting to find out why the West got more cautious about such loans.
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Is a good point. The lakes further east would need to be even more huge.
And more huge lakes would have a huge number of environmental and (at the scale we're talking about) geological impacts.
Very interesting.
My understanding is that there are a number of inaccuracies. But it's a complex topic. There are alot of Chinese investors operating in an even larger world where there's plenty of opportunity for people to twist facts or just make honest mistakes when interpreting what's going on. I expect that it will be one of these things that someone will write a good history book about in 50 years and blow my mind.
Mmmm. Our infant mortality is probably also much lower. The OTL Soviet Union had a rather high infant mortality in Central Asia. For us, Central Asia is more developed and thus likely to have a MUCH lower infant mortality.
I would hope infant mortality in the rest of the USSR was moderately lower as well. Though I am not really sure how our health system compares overall with OTL.
Also, while urbanization and greater wealth to correlate with lower birth rates, it is important to recognize why: human desires naturally aim towards the perceived replacement rate (the lag between reality and perception is what leads to the high growth rates of the demographic transition). Greater wealth has been correlated with better healthcare and better education, both of which reduce infant mortality, also freedom from famine helps alot, this means that humans can get enough adult children from fewer pregnancies. Add to that, said the education that supports greater wealth also takes time to acquire, delaying reproduction. Dense populations also suppress human desire for children.
But the desire to end up near replacement rate is strongest if economic conditions are equal. So while the urban density effect means that comfortable families in the cities have less children than similarly comfortable rural families, the former is still bottoms out above replacement rate and only a little below the comparable rural populations.
The reasons why populations go below replacement rate at higher levels of wealth has to do with other factors that are ALSO correlated with wealth. Most significantly the effect of combined education and misogyny and the impact of neoliberalism on housing. Countries with well-educated women AND with cultures that don't value those women tend to have the lowest birth rates/woman. The impact of neoliberalism on housing means that runaway house price inflation means that even if a society is otherwise wealthy, people actually grow ever less able to afford the kind of stability required to feel confident bringing children into the world.
Soviet society, while far from ideal as far as gender equality goes, is still doing relatively well. Being more comparable to France, and a long way from Italy, South Korea or Japan. So that shouldn't be an undue drag on the birthrate.
But the big advantage will be the housing situation. With cheap housing provided by the state (something even the OTL Soviet Union didn't really have as housing was usually provided by the enterprises) the birthrate should stabilize at a relatively high level.
You saw a bit of that in the OTL regimes in the Soviet-style economies, where compared to US-style economies, birthrates dropped faster relative to wealth at first, but bottomed out at a higher level relative to comparable US-style economies.
My guess is that if the Cold War had lasted long enough in OTL (and the OTL USSR had more demographic problems than ours) one of its few advantages would have been its demography.
But we will see where the quest goes in due time.
Regards,
fasquardon
I'm not so sure that would have been the case myself, demographics have turned out to be fiendishly difficult to understand in reality and no one has an actual full answer on why it goes like it does. Though there are of course various factors that seem to play in to it.
So housing cost can matter, but it is far from decisive, I believe Germany and Japan due to some what different policy have housing closer to at cost levels, but neither are known for good demographics. Maybe free housing would do more, but I wouldn't know by how much.
Another factor that seems like it might have a fair bit of impact is working hours. In this France has some fairly short working hours compared to much of the world at 35 hours, and might thus be part of the explanation of why it's holding up some what demographically. As for why, speculatively raising kids takes a lot of time, so if work takes to much time away people just have less time for children. Some of the countries with some of the worst overwork issues do tend to have absolutely terrible demographics, so this does seem like something that can have major impact.
Disposable income is probably also a factor, as in income you can actually freely spend, kids are expensive after all. And this probably thus links with housing prices, as that would be one of the fixed costs changing what your actual disposable income is.
Good child care support, preferably as cheap as possible, free probably even better. This seems like it can have an impact from some discussions I've seen on it.
And beyond that more factors yet, though to an extent they're probably variations of child support, things changing effective disposable income, and free time.
Still beyond those there is also one or several unknown factors, because for instance Israel has a very high population growth rate and no one I believe really knows why. Some claim to know why, but last I saw an in-depth article that looked at scientific evidence for each potential factor, they always found counter evidence that didn't seem to let it make sense. Thus leading to my current belief that we don't fully understand all the reasons why people will have children or not.
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In any case, I thought effective work hours in the USSR would have turned out high, like it is in China. But after looking around briefly I'm now getting the impression the USSR had a tendency at times to want to reduce work hours, and thus depending on the time frame had some where between 40-48 hour work weeks. Some times involving Saturday and some times not. So maybe slightly on the high side compared to some countries? Well it won't have impacted the demographics as much as I feared it would though. Well assuming they didn't have lots unofficial overtime that is, though I couldn't find any immediate statements about such at least.
Still, I do think the USSR probably was thus not all good in demographic factors. But it might have been ok as such, though I do wonder if they'd in time have even managed to keep as good a demographics as say France has. My suspicion is probably not, but that even so that they would still stay far away from the truly terrible demographics that one can see in many other places.
Still in the end I'm speculating as no one I believe fully understands this field, so who knows for sure I guess? I wouldn't be surprised if this quests USSR would be able to manage a bit better though, so long as one can keep the work hours down and things like child support good.
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A huge unstated factor in birth rate is the soft factor. Status, prestige, and desirability. People want to be "normal" they want to be "special" and they want to have what other people desire. Perception matters. If they think having a big family is a status symbol they will have a big family. If they think supporting a bigger family is prestigious, they will find a way to make it work. If they think everyone else wants kids, that raising lots of kids is what other people desire, they will desire it for themselves, desire to lord it over those who don't or can't. These factors will override logic, reason, lack of funds, lack of housing, chance of war, anything. People do what they desire, then justify it after the fact.
Oh right, on the question of housing and medical care, I looked around briefly for that as well. Apparently the USSR had a major shortage of housing and communal living for near its entire existence and its medical care system was way behind the West and suffered major shortages of medicine, tools, etc constantly while training of personnel was considered mediocre.
In comparison this USSR has mostly solved communal living, though it still exists for a small fraction of the population and there is a older housing issue now developing... though in a sense that's already a luxury problem compared to OTL USSR then. The medical care in the current USSR seems to be at least reasonably decent as well, with proper preventive care and no known shortages for medicines and tools, with overall abilities probably not to far behind the West either.
So overall things are working out pretty well I suspect, in most areas exceeding the historical levels by quite a bit. Well aside of roads I guess, apparently roads was sacrificed for the advancement of all other things.
In comparison this USSR has mostly solved communal living, though it still exists for a small fraction of the population and there is a older housing issue now developing... though in a sense that's already a luxury problem compared to OTL USSR then. The medical care in the current USSR seems to be at least reasonably decent as well, with proper preventive care and no known shortages for medicines and tools, with overall abilities probably not to far behind the West either.
So overall things are working out pretty well I suspect, in most areas exceeding the historical levels by quite a bit. Well aside of roads I guess, apparently roads was sacrificed for the advancement of all other things.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
How is the road and rail system in other Comecon or Comecon friendly regimes?
- Location
- The great frozen north
Something bugging me lately: How well-braced are we against the Middle Income Trap risk? We did HI-CI last plan and LI for electronics this plan, but is that enough? Infra-Service seems to have support as the focus for next plan, but that notably emphasizes none of the high-tech fields necessary for avoiding the trap. Not surprising though, pickings are slim: We can't do LI again because chip production is becoming the bottleneck for electronics. Chemical Industry with its fancy plastics is the least high-tech and picking it will crash the General Labor price. That leaves just Heavy Industry as the least nonviable, for the microchips and industrial robots if nothing else. Dear god, the siren song of an Infra-HI plan just doesn't stop singing eh? I know that Infra-HI is a questionable combo and I WOULD like to postpone an HI focus to the 1985 plan. But if our economy is not hardened enough against rising labor prices and possible oil shock to avoid getting Middle Income Trapped by then, I'd be kicking myself hard.
Hmm, maybe if we somehow keep housing on 5 dice and spend the absolute minimum on other non-road stuff, we can just barely squeak by an HI-Service plan...
Hmm, maybe if we somehow keep housing on 5 dice and spend the absolute minimum on other non-road stuff, we can just barely squeak by an HI-Service plan...
- Pronouns
- It/Its
In fairness, I am in favor of the hive city in general on principle, regardless of if we have roads or not
- Location
- UTC+0
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They
The middle income trap in mechanical terms is essentially being well, trapped in a average general labor bracket. You can see for yourself how it is going by simply comparing that value from the start of the plan to the end. It is... going. We are struggling to get it up because its not easy (if it were this would not be a problem irl, so props to Blackstar for balancing this lol).
Labor Prices 1975 said:
You can see here, that in 4 years we have managed to increase general labor prices by a 8 points. This turn we are poised to pass through a critical benchmark, getting it above 50. So we've seen progress. But its not very fast, and this is with a plan that is basically tailor made for increasing unskilled employment (Services/LI) and no oilshock. It would have been easy to be more or less trapped in that 40-50 bracket if we were not consciously trying to avoid it.Labor Prices 1978 said:
Anyway, this answers the question of how we are doing. The question of what we should do I think needs some reflection on why this is happening exactly? Well, the answer is pretty simple if you don't get too much in the weeds of it: we have a ton of people past their 50s with a shit education not fit for our increasingly modern industry (this is basically most people who got their hs education under Mik, Mal basically built our educational system and set the groundwork for what it what it is today). And many parts of the latter are becoming less competitive because our wages are high.
The consequences of this are that our industry will start replacing these workers with more educated ones, that can do one or two things, operate labor saving machines that reduce labor costs, or produce a more modern product that is competitive in our globalized world.
From that we have a huge issue of, what do we do with these people? We can't give all of them early retirements and call it a day, and leaving them unemployed would be a drain to the economy and create many many problems. We can't afford to retrain them all to move back to the industrial sector, because giving them an education takes time and money, and the economic return of giving one to someone who is going to spend at most a couple of decades in the workforce does not make much sense when we can do it to a 18 year old that will spend almost 5 decades giving us a return on our investment.
This leave us with few options, the most expedient and effective one is expand the service sector to accomodate them. Becoming a janitor, food service worker or a secretary does not take a special education. And while its not going to give them the wages they got before all this, its going to give them a income and move the economy until they retire. This is the biggest impetus for the service transition, in market economies its usually how this situation self regulates. And in our case, we can and should give it a nudge. So basically a Service focus is mandatory this decade.
We can also find some jobs in other places, light industry has some space for these people. So does agriculture, not plowing the fields but working in meatpacking and food processing for example.
Then we have the other sectors, which are important but are just kind of shit when it comes to absorbing unskilled labor. Heavy industry, the chemical industry and infrastructure sectors all either demand increasingly skilled labor (HI and CI) or are going hard into labor saving. Especially when oil shock hits.
In conclusion, Services is the holy grail for dealing with the middle income trap, we need to really, really make sure we don't neglect it and invest in it, because it is simply the most reliable way to adress this crisis. Everything else is a bit secondary. This is why we chose "Services catchup", we need to have our eyes on the prize. Especially since last plan, whilst important for creating a basis for our modern industry, neglected the sector (and was a huge gamble we arguably should not have taken, but we were lucky and oilshock did not fuck us over then).
As for what we should do next plan, in my mind it is CI-Services. Oilshock is about to hit and we need it to stabilize energy prices, which throw a wrench into all our efforts to grow the economy and past this income trap. And the longer it takes to hit (we are already 5 years past 1973), the worst the hangover is going to be. Especially for our friends in CMEA, who need to import all their oil. Some people would say Infra-Services, and its a okay second, but I think the former is the best to adress our needs.
Anyway, this is a bit of a huge post, but I hope it helps.
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I also considered CI-Services, the main problem is that until oil shock hits the CI segment of that is less useful because driving down oil prices too aggressively prior to oilshock will just encourage more malinvestment in heavy oil consumption. Whereas I am really hoping a HI focus will allow us to make sweeping modernization in the sector rather than what is in effect a single pilot program for electric arc furnace steel if a large one. We will of course have to see what the actual option says the main thrust of the heavy industry focus would be, if it's not modernization and is instead something like mass vehicle rollout then it will become exceedingly obvious that CI is the way to go.