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- UTC+0
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She confirmed it.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, you really can't lay down thousands of miles of rail line up to and including urban centers without some significant population displacement. And you have to build into the urban centers, because you need your big passenger rail terminals, your Grand Central Stations, to be in the city or they're not accessible to the general public who are on foot or using mass transit.
And these are high speed rail lines, too, so no level crossings. It's disruptive any place it comes near.
And these are high speed rail lines, too, so no level crossings. It's disruptive any place it comes near.
- Location
- Italy
she confirmed it, but... just think about it. Rail has to go through cities, and we're displacing Millions of people and moving them around and to our new buildings.
All in all, it's necessary lesser evil, because the benefits for society as a whole are massive, and as long as the economy grows, work becomes less dangerous (mine work is now much less deadly for example, as is building railways in the winter
) and maybe less heavy, and standards of living go up...well, take the example of Singapore and China nowadays. They're authoritarian states not that different from our URSS, but while they have problems and SOME people are unhappy, MOST people are perfectly fine trading some rights, privacy and freedoms for massive economic improvements they end up benefiting from.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, really, it's not even a freedom and tyranny thing.
There's just no way to take 19th century cities, designed for populations of hundreds of thousands and for horse-drawn carts, and rebuild then as 21st century cities, designed for populations of millions and for mechanical vehicles and mass transportation, without a lot of stuff getting torn down and rebuilt.
You can't rebuild the infrastructure of a city without a lot of destruction and reconstruction. Even if you're talking about something that you think will objectively make the way people live better, the way people around here view the idea of urban densification in the US on this website... Well, that is still ultimately going to mean that millions of people are going to be pressured into abandoning their homes to be destroyed, in some cases homes that have stood for generations, in many cases homes they would prefer to have kept.
Because that is how "rebuilding national urban infrastructure" cashes out at ground level. It's just what this means.
There's just no way to take 19th century cities, designed for populations of hundreds of thousands and for horse-drawn carts, and rebuild then as 21st century cities, designed for populations of millions and for mechanical vehicles and mass transportation, without a lot of stuff getting torn down and rebuilt.
You can't rebuild the infrastructure of a city without a lot of destruction and reconstruction. Even if you're talking about something that you think will objectively make the way people live better, the way people around here view the idea of urban densification in the US on this website... Well, that is still ultimately going to mean that millions of people are going to be pressured into abandoning their homes to be destroyed, in some cases homes that have stood for generations, in many cases homes they would prefer to have kept.
Because that is how "rebuilding national urban infrastructure" cashes out at ground level. It's just what this means.
The underlying premise of planquests as a genre (and this one especially) is "what if Seeing Like a State was a game?", I'm pretty sure basically every action we take results in somebody somewhere getting their life ruined so that we can make a number go up on a spreadsheet in Moscow. Because yeah, like Simon said, that's just another way to describe constructing a modern state.
Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
- Location
- Bottom of the pot
As someone who have lived in a house 1m from a urban rail line for 30yrs, I wish the gov would come and relocate us to a new place 
Y'all worry too much about displaced ppl, just give them a better accommodation when they move and most of them would voluntary take the deal. The rest may need more persuasion, like monetary compensation or community 'encouragement'.
Y'all worry too much about displaced ppl, just give them a better accommodation when they move and most of them would voluntary take the deal. The rest may need more persuasion, like monetary compensation or community 'encouragement'.
Well I don't know about everyone else around, but I'm a European myself so I certainly don't view this from the USA view on it. So while I think it's undeniable that you're obviously right that it's hard to not at least tear some things down to for instance get rail lines some what deeper in to cities and such at not all to excessive a cost. Quite a few European countries never really want all that extreme on it either, certainly not like the USA did, thus leaving quite a bit of historic cities still actually fairly intact (Well aside of the ones blasted to pieces in wars of course). I guess in part because if you could supply a city with carts already, then you could probably make a lot of the infrastructure still work with cars as well. Scaling to millions isn't really that important, as the cores are still as effective in transport as they always were. New build of roads to them for the larger city are a different matter, but are also new build. Which leaves quite a few European city areas still delineated till today in which time period they were built.
In any case, it's just a different point of view from a different part of the world. I just don't think modernization is really as strong an argument as you appear to present it here, retrofitting was perfectly effective for many a city really. The inner city areas were often enough fairly dense already really, part of the reason probably much of Europe saw far less high rise developments as well.
Due to the above the city renovations in Russia that are being done right now leave me kind of with mixed feelings actually. I originally thought when they said renovate in the plan, they meant renovate but I guess that was a bit naive of me. But it's probably the best you can hope from from the Soviets with in political reality, though can't help but suspect they're greatly misjudging what actually really is important and what isn't. Though well, that's just how this quest has always been I guess. Just have to get through things best one can. Still a shame so much of the historic cities are probably being destroyed at substantial cost when they probably didn't have to be damaged nearly so much though.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
That is a very important asterisk- most European cities were beaten up pretty heavily in World War Two, if not before. And quite a few more underwent considerable rebuilding late enough in the 19th century that the necessary basic transport corridors were already in place by the 20th (see for example Paris with its boulevards during the rebuilding by Haussmann.
And some of us will say "oh, Haussmann was just trying to make the city accessible to crackdown troops instead of having easily barricaded alleys," but the thing is, pre-1850 Paris was objectively a very crowded city and that objectively did contribute to problems of sanitation. Crackdown troops aren't good for the working class, but neither are cholera epidemics. And, again, the Walled City of Kowloon does not represent the ideal model of urban development.
Europe has plenty of cities with surviving chunks of city centers that date back to the early 19th century or earlier, but the fact that you can even walk into those cities at all and find buildings and infrastructure built after 1945 illustrates that this kind of thing still has to happen in some form and on some level.
I'm very clearly not saying "everything must be torn down," I just want to emphasize that. But some things have to be torn down. You cannot get from 1800 to 2000 without some cycles of destruction and creation, any more than medieval cities were truly static and unchanging in their own day. There's survivorship bias in that we notice the buildings that stand for several hundred years, but don't notice the areas where buildings didn't stand for that long.
Again, creation and destruction are both, and both have always been, parts of urban life. What matters most is ensuring that the destruction is not pointless and (hopefully) is not used as a club by powerful elites to hurt underclasses.
Well, I know a lot of what's being torn down here is Stalinist-era barracks housing and tenements, and I'm not sure that counts...
While there are a fair few cities like that, I always tend to find it more interesting to consider the places that asterisk doesn't apply, because not all European cities were destroyed. Nor did all cities have enormous boulevard torn through them. Switzerland in general I think wouldn't particularly fall under these categories in recent centuries I'd think. Though I won't claim something as ridiculous like they don't have wider roads in their cities, maps and street views make clear they certainly have some.
And as you note a certain level of renewal over time does happen, though not everyone necessarily did what Paris for instance did. Not every city particularly cares to make car access all that easy in their city centers. Obviously most old city cores aren't the walled city of Kowloon either, rather that's an extreme.
Well I realized a lot wouldn't be the best of buildings and of course in most places those kind of buildings tend to disappear over time.
I just have mixed feelings because I can't help but suspect they'll tear down a lot of other things in their drive for 'modernization'. That they're substantially overdoing it far beyond what is necessary.
But as I noted, this isn't really a government that lets one do highly balanced decisions, so I guess it'll be hard to avoid a fair bit of that.
My point I guess is more of a, while you're right and cities always have replacement cycles, I don't think modernization had to change that much to many a city core street plans either, not really. Not unless you for some reason really wanted a lot of cars in them all the time.
Still this won't change the reality in the Soviet Union, so as noted... mixed feelings. I guess I'm a bit sad a fair bit of historic stuff that had plenty of potential probably will be bulldozed away as well.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
I voted for Roads to help promote Siberian and Far Eastern development and relieve some pressure on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. We also need to expand the road network in order to assistance with National Defense and Disaster Relief. That is just my thoughts and I think we should move forward.
- Location
- The great frozen north
OK I get it, we're always demolishing someone's house to get our infrastructure up. I'll adjust my expectations in the future. But demolishing neighborhoods to run a freeway through the city is not just bad because you're kicking someone off the land, it's bad because you shouldn't run freeways through cities.
Also, unrelated question: How socialist is Vietnam in TTL actually? I've joked about Ho Chi Minh teaming up with the French and Yanks, but they're nominally still part of France and aside from perhaps land reform I can't see the French accepting of much seizing the means of production.
Also, unrelated question: How socialist is Vietnam in TTL actually? I've joked about Ho Chi Minh teaming up with the French and Yanks, but they're nominally still part of France and aside from perhaps land reform I can't see the French accepting of much seizing the means of production.
If I were to guess, maybe some degree of Social Democracy. Like there are Worker Protections and stuff but Private Industries still exist, even if they are regulated.
Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
- Location
- Bottom of the pot
Hopefully this time around a more moderate effort with fewer death/ fake trial as well as less generational resentment and corruption🤞
Maybe the French and US are racist enough to consider the value of local landlord the same as local peasant. Some form of exchange land ownership for share in a state control sharecropping enterprise?
I am sorry it came across as hostile. I do think you are under-estimating the degree to which international interconnects add to the quality of the electrical grid, even in a case where we don't have any power to export.
Electrical grids are one of those things that for the most part gets more reliable and more efficient the bigger you make them.
I think they are worth doing at some point in the decade.
Also, since the added stability and efficiency of tying the CMEA grids together will be a bigger improvement for the smaller grids in the club, it's something to keep in mind for when we want to do things to boost our main trade partners.
Mmm, maybe, but getting the RIGHT numbers is damn hard. Look at all the troubles we have working out things like national inflation rates or GDP numbers in modern western economies, and all the ways that things go wrong when one of those numbers is somehow misleading. And many measures for wellbeing and efficiency are even more complex and all have built-in assumptions, which may or may not apply in all situations. For example, see data on "world happiness" - in studies where wealth, childcare and life expectancy are used as proxies for happiness, countries like Sweden and Iceland top the charts, whereas surveys of people on the street where people are asked how happy they are put Ghana and Nigeria at the top of the charts. Both methods have something going for them, and certain obvious limitations, but given how different the rankings produced are, how is someone like Voz supposed to interpret that kind of data?
Also, and this is a big problem the Soviet Union had in OTL, even when you have the right numbers, when you make the right number a measuring stick, it ceases to become the right number, because managers are distorting everything they can to fit the measuring stick.
(Steel output of an economy is even today one of the most important indicators of economic health, since steel is such an important material. But in the USSR, where steel was a measuring stick, the usefulness of data on steel production was actually undermined.)
Rergards,
fasquardon
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They are commuinist and France has allowed them to seize some means of production that France itself didn't own/allowed for buyouts of their things in order to retain their agreement. The US is entirly happy to toss them at you just as with Cambodia OTL, they do not care what political flavor of nation something is as long as it oposes/contains you. Kosygin himself cares a great deal on not backing whatever group is willing to go against the US/limiting support to just communist and socialist movements. Literally no one else does in your government.
trooperist
Cinnamon Roll AI
So looking back at previous updates, Vietnam is technically a republic but with a very left leaning government. And also still technically a French client state, though the US might push for defacto independence. And China invaded on the pretext of protection for the Chinese minority in northern Vietnam. And while the French have been sending troops, the US limited themselves to air power.
But China still got it's shit kicked in after finding out it can't continue fighting like it's the 1930's. Oh boy what a mess.
But China still got it's shit kicked in after finding out it can't continue fighting like it's the 1930's. Oh boy what a mess.
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- Location
- Northish
Better they find bones for the next for decades than the millions of land mines that were planted in reality. We have so far kept out of much of conflicts abroad and I hope to keep it that way. If nothing else then to the spare budget all the money pits supporting communist nations turned into.
Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
- Location
- Bottom of the pot
1000 years should have produce enough skeleton I think? Chinese dying in VN is nothing new, not to be racist or anything but China invaded us like every Tuesday
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Two thousand years.1000 years should have produce enough skeleton I think? Chinese dying in VN is nothing new, not to be racist or anything but China invaded us like every Tuesday
China's been invading Vietnam since back when the Roman Republic was a going concern.