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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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fasquardon said:
Well, let's be aware, not all good things can be measured with numbers, and this has been a real shortcoming of effective altruism as a philosophy. If you look for solutions to problems that make number go up most per unit input, you are ignoring all the problems you can't measure by default.
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I mean, the really big shortcoming of effective altruism is that the language of it lends itself on the one hand to people who take it, use it in ways it wasn't meant, and justify to themselves their own scams, and on the other hand to a bunch of gullible dorks who are very susceptible to the aforementioned scammers.

The counterpart in the USSR was the obsession with building up heavy industry to the exclusion of all other things, the idea that if we could just keep raising the steel quota, everything would get better.

It's more complicated than that, but you can get beyond that level of foolishness even on "make number go up" logic. It's just that you need to not be a scammer or a gullible fool, and willing to accept that you may need to create numbers and metrics to evaluate things that aren't as easy to measure as "so, how many tons of iron ore?"

So what if they don't have a surplus? That doesn't actually matter very much. Even if the entire block had an energy deficit, building interconects would help, because doing so increases reliability, which helps the economy operate more efficiently. Now, we've been at the stage where just building new power plants made more sense than building interconnects, but that is starting to change. When we're at the point of building butt-loads of nuclear reactors, for example, we'll have a large surplus of power when certain regions are in night that we'd want to export to places that are in the morning or evening, and a large number of timezones to shuffle power around in. Also, we'll want to be deploying things like wind power around the 80s or so, and not all regions get the wind at the same time.

So the case for international interconnects is strong in the next 5 years or so, so that the grid is ready for the changing production technology.
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It's going to be at least 10-15 years before we have, for example, that level of nuclear power rolled out. Interconnects make increasing sense as we approach the turn of the millennium, but we're not there yet, we won't be for a long time, and the person I was talking to, AHEM, was not so far as I can determine discussing things in the context of "yeah, I'm talking about a point in time as far in the future as the Great Patriotic War was in the past."

So the answer to the question "so what" boils down to "so you're parachuting into a conversation from days ago, changing the context of the conversation, and declaring my point irrelevant on that basis." It feels kind of hostile.

Right, and to be honest the best place to put alot of the high-tech industry we'll need is in Moscow or Leningrad, where the best universities, the best economies of scale and the best nightlife are. And we don't need to turn Moscow into the Soviet version of 'Frisco.
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Having the capital be in one of the most avant-garde cities in the country is not necessarily a bad thing...

Also, a big part of what's structurally wrong with San Francisco as a city is that it's in earthquake country and pinned up against a mountain range and an ocean. Moscow is none of these things; it actually makes sense to put stuff here.
 
fasquardon said:
Well, let's be aware, not all good things can be measured with numbers, and this has been a real shortcoming of effective altruism as a philosophy. If you look for solutions to problems that make number go up most per unit input, you are ignoring all the problems you can't measure by default.

Voz is... Not as bad as he could be. But his personal shortcomings will be leading to serious problems, though hopefully serious problems that are small in scope, and thus won't give the next head of the ministry a heart attack when they see how bad Voz let things get.
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I kind of disagree.

kind of.

you can't exactly put a number on to how much people are happy or unhappy, but you can estimate how many people are affected by something, so while you can't say that "better tasting food will make people X% happier", you CAN say that "millions of people will be happier due to this change, resulting in higher approval".

So it's more that some things can't be measured with precision, but you can still have some estimates, and numbers help with that.

and of course there's also secondary effects, like "air conditioning will make people more productive and reduce health problems", or "happier people will be more productive" and so on. Not the ONLY effect of such changes, nor necessarily the most important, but it's one aspect that can convince Voz to support positions because he's still indirectly having numbers go up. Just a different kind of number.

Simon_Jester said:
I mean, the really big shortcoming of effective altruism is that the language of it lends itself on the one hand to people who take it, use it in ways it wasn't meant, and justify to themselves their own scams, and on the other hand to a bunch of gullible dorks who are very susceptible to the aforementioned scammers.

The counterpart in the USSR was the obsession with building up heavy industry to the exclusion of all other things, the idea that if we could just keep raising the steel quota, everything would get better.

It's more complicated than that, but you can get beyond that level of foolishness even on "make number go up" logic. It's just that you need to not be a scammer or a gullible fool, and willing to accept that you may need to create numbers and metrics to evaluate things that aren't as easy to measure as "so, how many tons of iron ore?"
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Basically this. It's all a matter of having or creating the RIGHT numbers, numbers that actually represent important things.

For example, OT Russia cared a lot about "how much steel was produced"... but did they care about "how effectiveness/efficienty was the workforce used for steel production"? Or the health conditions of the steel produces? Or if they were well fed, got a good wage, and had enough time to enjoy it? The number of work accidents?

All of these things can be represented or estimated with the right numbers.
 
Balmung1 said:
Trust me this road phobia is nowhere near as bad as the aversion the SB planquesters have over education.Seriously it was only ONE TIME that it nearly caused an cultural genocide and secession crisis because a ultranationalist Magyar conspiracy and it was in the godamn balkans in the 19th century so they should be thankful it was only once and wasn't a full cultural genocide or nationalist revolt. Not only that but the education system is so bad that the biggest provider of education is the Catholic church(and most peple don't even have acess to said schools) and this is before the massive baby boom caused by us giving people a living wage and the Dole which has made the empire's population skyrocket and this isn'tcounting the vassal states like Poland or Italy which have like 0 attempts at improving education.
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The hell you on about?

View: https://imgur.com/a/jCAbJYg

We have good-ok education.


The thing we see meming about, in Austria quest, is service, and how Fucking shit it is.

We have:
- Severe Lack of Housing
- Severe Lack of Sewers
- Severe Lack of Water

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DAOT said:
The hell you on about?

View: https://imgur.com/a/jCAbJYg

We have good-ok education.


The thing we see meming about, in Austria quest, is service, and how Fucking shit it is.

We have:
- Severe Lack of Housing
- Severe Lack of Sewers
- Severe Lack of Water

Modifier
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Austrian urban quality of life over there may be listed as bad/almost decent, but it's still noted to be better than just about any other countries major cities in Europe. Especially London, which has massive sewers but is otherwise a Victorian hellhole.
 
I thought we wanted to avoid piling up everything important like high-tech industry in Moscow, as opposed to spreading stuff across secondary and tertiary cities?

On nuclear: We have three cores set to complete, for 16 power total. That's less than 6 power per core. It's a proof of concept of course, but for serial production much more power per core will be needed and I expect teething troubles there. Another reason no to go whole-hog on autonuke in next plan.
 
fasquardon said:
I mean... This is talking about stuff that, to my knowledge was never seriously considered in OTL and that makes me wary
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Isnt the easy solution to this to do it once, in a low risk place and then see if it works?
- If it fails shit sucks, but it was low risk and worth a try.
- If it works, great lets do it some more.
 
Drieder said:
Isnt the easy solution to this to do it once, in a low risk place and then see if it works?
- If it fails shit sucks, but it was low risk and worth a try.
- If it works, great lets do it some more.
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Problems are 1) Are any of them low risk with how big they are 2) with how big they are, it will take many years for them to complete and more for us to see their full ecological effects.
 
General_Urist said:
Are any of them low risk with how big they are
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Which we will find out when we get to it 7 turns in the quest or idk 1 year RL.

My point is mostly not to dismiss anything too early due worries which (while not entirely unreasonable) are somewhat unfounded as we have literally no idea about the projects: costs, rewards, locations or possible ecological damages. We just know its a thing in the future and while speculation is all well and good there is no reason to develop an aversion this early.
 
General_Urist said:
Anyways what's the general consensus if any on further hydropower? The super-dams we'll unlock for the 8th plan probably give us substantially cheaper carbon-free power than nuclear (albeit with likely similar lead time), but they might do unfun things to the local ecosystem and perhaps native inhabitants as large hydropower projects tend to do. I'm inclined to push forwards for the memes and numbers go up. Big infrastructure projects not attempted in OTL are cool.
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From the little knowledge I have of geoengineering, the megadams are an absoloutely awful idea. All the water presses down on the earth's crust and causes a load of earthquakes. The Three Gorges Dam in China for example has caused a load of earthquakes. (Linked is a thing where the US geological society claims they caused 3,400 earthquakes over a 6 year period).

EarthView–Three Gorges Dam Brings Power, Concerns to Central China | U.S. Geological Survey

Before and after the Three Gorges Dam for the Yangtze River
www.usgs.gov www.usgs.gov

My understanding is that we want to build dams bigger than this, and build them like 20 years earlier. I would be surprised if they didn't shake themselves apart. Some of the more modest proposals may be fine, but the Lower Lena for example is definitely only for if we want to go funny mode.
 
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I dug up a more in-depth study on Three Gorges and I'll just quote part of the conclusion here as a TL;DR for the paper if you don't want to read the entire thing:
The impact of reservoir water loading and unloading on seismicity in the reservoir area is mainly exhibited in the differences in microearthquakes and small earthquakes, while the relationship between relatively large earthquakes and reservoir water loading and unloading is not significant.
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So yes, all that water stacked up does seem to make the rocks unhappy, but not to the point where the dam is about to collapse or anything. Which squares with what I'd expect before reading this study, seeing as Three Gorges has been operating at full power for about 15 years so far and still appears to be doing fine. The authors of this paper also point out that more data is needed, of course, because that's one of the conclusions of any good paper, but right now I don't think a hypothetical Lower Lena dam is at risk of literally shaking itself apart, just moderately jostling some empty bits of Siberia.

Source: Variations in seismic parameters for the earthquakes during loading and unloading periods in the Three Gorges Reservoir area - Scientific Reports
 
Nevis said:
From the little knowledge I have of geoengineering, the megadams are an absoloutely awful idea. All the water presses down on the earth's crust and causes a load of earthquakes. The Three Gorges Dam in China for example has caused a load of earthquakes. (Linked is a thing where the US geological society claims they caused 3,400 earthquakes over a 6 year period).
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Remember that the minimum threshold for a detectable earthquake is far below the minimum threshold for an earthquake that actually damages anything. 3400 earthquakes is meaningless if they're all Magnitude 1.5 or something.
 
Catching up on a couple things I missed:

Simon_Jester said:
Notice that that's a Jewish quarter getting demolished. A literal OG ghetto. Gee, does that ever remind me of what happened in American cities! The underlying problem isn't "people build freeways," it's "people think that tearing down neighborhoods full of undesirables is an important part of 'urban renewal.' The freeways are just a pretext.

Also, we're never going to get the level of micromanagerial resolution that lets us ensure that all freeways everywhere in the USSR are built to highly enlightened standards of good judgment that seem entirely unproblematic. Especially if we judge 'entirely unproblematic' from a 21st century viewpoint where the economic consequences of having or not having the freeway are barely relevant and the cost of having any houses torn down to build it seem ruinous.

So we end up in a position where we can let the Soviet economy stagnate and/or grow very unevenly (tightly clustered around places we've built rail, with everything else being "in the sticks" and incapable of serious development), or we can build some roads.
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You're right that technically people shitting on minorities is the fundamental cause, but in absence of ways to influence that (we're not the ministry of culture), minimizing the pretexts available to the gamers for breaking out wrecking balls is the next best thing. And while the Jews were the hardest hit, the highway sucked for many more people. Barring black swan destructive events, there are actually not many excuses to go demolishing large parts of a city. "We need to make space for a freeway" was only an available one because there was a belief that people in cities used cars to much they would benefit from having a highway really close by instead of having to crawl their way out of town to get to one. Which is my nightmare scenario.

Yeah, we will unfortunately never got to plan highway positioning in this much detail. Best we can do usually is to indirectly nudge things in directions that won't encourage bad ideas. Which makes me nervous about the Moscow ring road, since apparently one of those rings is actually inside the build up are. Given Moscow is one of the few cases where we are demolishing a city for good-ish reasons other than building roads, if we're lucky doing the ring-road at the same time won't make our more car-loving planners connect the dots. But I still dread it.

Actually, given that the West USSR Roads action explicitly mentions building bypasses around cities, I wonder if we're actually encouraged to hurry that up before anyone in the ministry gets second thought and decides that keeping the cars running straight through cities is a good idea...
Simon_Jester said:
If we are willing to drown vast tracts of Siberian wilderness, we are implicitly, by basic consistency, probably willing to tear down Arthur Dentovich's house (with compensation) to build a bypass.
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It's the 1960, earth-chan still has almost no rights. The dream is to conquer nature, not to live in harmony with it. Point is, making a big artificial lake (and at most displacing a few thousand pastoral natives) need not be the start of a pipeline that leads to us displacing hundreds of thousands of urban workers (and making the lives of millions worse) for a big road.
 
General_Urist said:
You're right that technically people shitting on minorities is the fundamental cause, but in absence of ways to influence that (we're not the ministry of culture), minimizing the pretexts available to the gamers for breaking out wrecking balls is the next best thing. And while the Jews were the hardest hit, the highway sucked for many more people. Barring black swan destructive events, there are actually not many excuses to go demolishing large parts of a city. "We need to make space for a freeway" was only an available one because there was a belief that people in cities used cars to much they would benefit from having a highway really close by instead of having to crawl their way out of town to get to one. Which is my nightmare scenario.
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Railways aren't exactly invisible urban ninjas that don't result in neighborhoods getting demolished. If the USSR is running heavy rail in to urban centers then expansion of those facilities in the urban core will provide the same sorts of excuses to demolish neighborhoods as freeways do. Railyards are enormous and if roads out of the city are lousy the only way that Soviet industry can link to the transport network is by having yards, sidings and warehouses built in the city.
 
The CPSU doesn't need roads to destroy minority communities, they control who is assigned what housing, they can literally just demolish the neighborhood under the pretense of "renovations" and rebuild it with the residents being dispersed throught the Union.

Besides, the main road project explicitly mentions its mainly doing roads bypassing Urban centers, so they're not just not going to casually put a giant highway in the middle of Kuybishev or whatever.
 
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Also we've been slamming down passenger rail like crazy, we have absolutely been displacing everyone in the way, if your concern is destroyed neighborhoods the ship has long sailed even before you factor in the massive city renovations
 
General_Urist said:
Catching up on a couple things I missed:


You're right that technically people shitting on minorities is the fundamental cause, but in absence of ways to influence that (we're not the ministry of culture), minimizing the pretexts available to the gamers for breaking out wrecking balls is the next best thing. And while the Jews were the hardest hit, the highway sucked for many more people. Barring black swan destructive events, there are actually not many excuses to go demolishing large parts of a city. "We need to make space for a freeway" was only an available one because there was a belief that people in cities used cars to much they would benefit from having a highway really close by instead of having to crawl their way out of town to get to one. Which is my nightmare scenario.

Yeah, we will unfortunately never got to plan highway positioning in this much detail. Best we can do usually is to indirectly nudge things in directions that won't encourage bad ideas. Which makes me nervous about the Moscow ring road, since apparently one of those rings is actually inside the build up are. Given Moscow is one of the few cases where we are demolishing a city for good-ish reasons other than building roads, if we're lucky doing the ring-road at the same time won't make our more car-loving planners connect the dots. But I still dread it.

Actually, given that the West USSR Roads action explicitly mentions building bypasses around cities, I wonder if we're actually encouraged to hurry that up before anyone in the ministry gets second thought and decides that keeping the cars running straight through cities is a good idea...

It's the 1960, earth-chan still has almost no rights. The dream is to conquer nature, not to live in harmony with it. Point is, making a big artificial lake (and at most displacing a few thousand pastoral natives) need not be the start of a pipeline that leads to us displacing hundreds of thousands of urban workers (and making the lives of millions worse) for a big road.
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See, I'm kind of seeing a contradiction here. My point is that if it makes sense for us not to worry out of character about the ecological consequences of the huge dams we specifically out of character want to build, it's kind of silly for us to worry that much more about a few highways being built in urban areas. Either we're being scrupulous about the costs of our actions, or we're not.

Conversely, in character we have every reason to think Voz cares little about either of those things.

DeltaV11.2 said:
Railways aren't exactly invisible urban ninjas that don't result in neighborhoods getting demolished. If the USSR is running heavy rail in to urban centers then expansion of those facilities in the urban core will provide the same sorts of excuses to demolish neighborhoods as freeways do. Railyards are enormous and if roads out of the city are lousy the only way that Soviet industry can link to the transport network is by having yards, sidings and warehouses built in the city.
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Also this.
 
In all fairness, it really is a problem when your city centers are winding mazes of two-lane roads and you're trying to run a modern nation with modern infrastructure.

The ideal model for modern urban development isn't Houston or Los Angeles whatever, but it also isn't the Walled City of Kowloon, even if the Walled City was very, very walkable.
 
VonVonson said:
Also we've been slamming down passenger rail like crazy, we have absolutely been displacing everyone in the way, if your concern is destroyed neighborhoods the ship has long sailed even before you factor in the massive city renovations
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One dice a turn is hardly "like crazy" but anyway. Has there been much in-quest evidence of the damage it is doing, is it something Blackstar has revealed on the discord? Is it an inherent component of passenger rail building I'm not aware of?
 
General_Urist said:
One dice a turn is hardly "like crazy" but anyway. Has there been much in-quest evidence of the damage it is doing, is it something Blackstar has revealed on the discord? Is it an inherent component of passenger rail building I'm not aware of?
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Every dice is another rail line, sometimes 2 if it's high. As for the implication it's just based off how rail was built. Anyone in the way either gets bought off or shot off and given the state owns all the land I doubt we're the bought off type.
 
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