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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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This is less about material need and more whether we want to gather political support, which considering how we plan to blow up a good chunk of our support base, is not the worst ideia. As for concerns about preserving the historicity of the City, I could not care less, the worse it is the better Leningrad looks in comparison! So its really a W on Voz's part to propose this.
 
Some thoughts on other things in the update:
Blackstar said:
Politically the great pivot has fallen towards the question of how much responsibility to give to the enterprises and their management, as instead of the old approach of viewing management as loyal elements of the party, some have mouthed the revolutionary idea that they may not represent the workers adequately. Such a revelation has not come unchallenged by the luminaries of the various pro-decentralization candidates. Using the pharmaceutical example as a wedge has served as more than sufficient to reduce their influence on the political system as now any of their criticisms of the planned system can be dismissed with the strategic employment of non-sequiturs.
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I get there's stuff going on, but I can't decipher which way the see-saw has fallen. Is it the pro-worker-control or anti-worker-control that has had its influence damaged by pharmaceutical fiasco?

Kefauver is doing well domestically with his safety net, which is bad for us since it reduces how quickly capitalism will get discredited. China is still in flux, and France is still setting stuff on fire. Italy is having its Years Of Lead and could well catch fire too. And Czechoslovakia...
Blackstar said:
Continued reform-ism in Czechoslovakia has so far stalled out, as while they have broadly opened membership chances for nearly all workers, many have avoided signing up. This has come as a result of the necessary party dues of their model along with the involved process of membership, resulting in a practical slowing of the rate of intensive political participation and demonstrating the limits of worker involvement in politics.
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"so far" stalled out. So we may still get a Prague spring. But note the reason party membership is growing slowly: Bureaucracy, and the dues. The communist bloc has effectively added significant monetary cost to enfranchisement, so despite having one that's near-universal on paper Czechoslovakia isn't seeing much more political involvement. This I think will be a significant obstacle to democratization in the future.

Blackstar said:
Textile Industry Modernization(Stage 2):

High employment manufacturing has started to prove problematic in that the finalized production of clothing items from processed cloth is unfortunately labor intensive. These issues however have been simply solved with the strategic positioning of plants. A worker in the RSFSR may demand far more wages to be employed processing sheets of fabric into shirts, but a worker in the Central Asian republics or Caucuses doesn't suffer from such issues.
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Just swell. We're already at the point where our planners are salivating at expanding production in peripheral regions because they don't have to pay the workers as much. It's not a significant problem for now: We do want to expand industry east of the urals, and Central Asia is still part of the USSR so it's not like we're outsourcing. But it's not a great mentality.

I am worried about the sustainability of our agriculture. Descriptions of both the LCI and Agri farm-related action results talk about increasing production by throwing bigger and bigger heaps of fertilizers at things which sounds like it will cause some serious runoff problems.

That proposed European high speed rail network sounds SEXY.
 
Mr. Sandman said:
As for concerns about preserving the historicity of the City, I could not care less, the worse it is the better Leningrad looks in comparison! So its really a W on Voz's part to propose this.
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I was very suspicious of maximum scope creep, but this is actually an extremely compelling point. I think I'm sold on the merits of obliterating most of Moscow and replacing it with soulless edificies of industry, Leningrad would become inarguably cooler.

[X] Plan: DENSE
 
General_Urist said:
I am worried about the sustainability of our agriculture. Descriptions of both the LCI and Agri farm-related action results talk about increasing production by throwing bigger and bigger heaps of fertilizers at things which sounds like it will cause some serious runoff problems.
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To an extent, that is the green revolution in a nutshell. High intensity agriculture is very much a product of this time, and it is the height of the green revolution in terms of increasing yields. Even with just mono-nitrogen the yield gains per acre are absolutely massive. I think to an extent people under-estimate the sheer impacts of the green revolution and why the current aggressive fertilizer/mono-crop agricultural regime happened. Just going off the study below, pushing modern barley from 25kg N/ha to 50kg N/ha increases return by 2.5 t/ha almost doubling it. Pushing towards 100kg N/ha drives yields to a near tripping of original cultivars. For all the issues of modern industrial agriculture to the people in setting its litterally a mircale of productivity that is improving crop yeilds per labor by near double and improving crop yeilds per water by almost tripple. Most loss of water from ag is evaporative rather then growing, and the smaller green area that can be used the less water will be used.

https://www.researchgate.net/profil...-its-physiological-determinants-in-barley.pdf
 
General_Urist said:
The canal ain't super critical, but I would not put it behind the roads. Unified barge transport is our primary tool to remove the stress coal inflicts on our transportation network. If we build the West Russian high capacity roads help it will either not help or results in the roads getting clogged with ugly coal trucks.
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We don't really want roads to move coal, or other high volume goods.

We want it to move lower volume things. Clothes, food, electrical appliances... Things produced by smaller factories unconnected to the main railway network, or aimed at smaller cities.



General_Urist said:
We're doing well with 8 HI dice this plan and won't be building as many steel-gobbling car factories next plan, so we're good without a focus there especially if we only go slow on autonuke. Meanwhile I consider a service focus non-negotiable, we need to make up for the poor performance this plan and we don't know how long before we get the two dice we lost to the economists back. Thanks to loot from the army we have 10 base infra dice. If we don't need to continue autohousing, it might be sufficient.

The big issue is LCI. We'll be running autogas, possibly even a third stage of it which would drop us to 4 or even 3 dice without a focus. And light consumer industry is the area where the USSR is lacking, we're doing a lot right now but I am skeptical we'll have enough done that we can be safe on limited dice next plan.

So, I am seriously entertaining an LCI-Service focus. But I might go for Infra-service instead depending on just how things turn out.
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I'm pretty sure we won't be done with autohousing, and likely even with steel.

We might also want more non ferrous metals as well.


That said, LCI+services sounds good


General_Urist said:
Just swell. We're already at the point where our planners are salivating at expanding production in peripheral regions because they don't have to pay the workers as much. It's not a significant problem for now: We do want to expand industry east of the urals, and Central Asia is still part of the USSR so it's not like we're outsourcing. But it's not a great mentality.

I am worried about the sustainability of our agriculture. Descriptions of both the LCI and Agri farm-related action results talk about increasing production by throwing bigger and bigger heaps of fertilizers at things which sounds like it will cause some serious runoff problems.

That proposed European high speed rail network sounds SEXY.
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Eh, wanting to move manufacturing jobs where they cost less is basically normal and kind of unavoidable, at least up to a point.

And I don't see a problem with higher fertilizer use. If anything it looks like an objectively good thing to me
 
Before the Green Revolution, and until its impact on agriculture became clear, people were honestly worried that the world would start to experience overpopulation-induced famines at a population level of three to five billion people.

That wasn't them being bad at math; that was crop yields being lower.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Before the Green Revolution, and until its impact on agriculture became clear, people were honestly worried that the world would start to experience overpopulation-induced famines at a population level of three to five billion people.

That wasn't them being bad at math; that was crop yields being lower.
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NIMH is likely to happen still so they will switch to that overpopulation theory.
 
Manowl said:
NIMH is likely to happen still so they will switch to that overpopulation theory.
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Uh...

I don't think you're entirely plugged into what I'm talking about here.

See, there was concern over the Earth's ability to feed people being overrun by overpopulation in the '50s and '60s, and this was founded in fact, though admittedly in ignorance of the sheer high yields possible in theory with high-input Green Revolution agriculture.

"Overpopulation" is not some kind of bullshit 'theory' in the full general case. It's a valid concern that can apply to real societies if there is a reason for the population to not be able to sustainably expand. It's sort of like how 'global cooling' isn't a problem we're worried about right now, but it's definitely a problem that would loom very large if we actually fought a major war and touched off nuclear winter. There's a difference between a problem you don't have and a problem that isn't real. Moreover, there is the observation that to some extent we don't have an overpopulation trend because many of the trends being observed in the 1950s and early 1960s (such as the baby boom) were not followed indefinitely... but it could not be rationally predicted that this would be a non-issue.

...

Now, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by NIMH. Do you mean the 'rat utopia' experiment? If so, yes; that did become a sort of trite and trivialized example used in 60s and 70s social science to support the idea that overcrowding can potentially cause serious problems among rats and, implicitly because it was 60s psychiatry and behavioral science and all that, among humans. But I don't think that it was "switched to" as an "overpopulation theory," so much as it was part of a broader trend to recognize that the Earth's resources are not literally infinite and can be exhausted by a large enough human population that exploits them greedily enough.

Which is, uh... true. Even if some people got the math wrong or made incorrect predictions because they didn't specifically allow for this or that technology, it's still objectively true that the planet's resources are finite.
 
General_Urist said:
I am worried about the sustainability of our agriculture. Descriptions of both the LCI and Agri farm-related action results talk about increasing production by throwing bigger and bigger heaps of fertilizers at things which sounds like it will cause some serious runoff problems.
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For sure, it is a big problem. Best thing I think we can do is to not go too extreme with agriculture options (but also don't neglect the sector, middle path is best here), and invest in the science, education, hobby gardening and to a lesser extent computing development that can give us the tools for the next stage of scientific agriculture.

Today in the OTL we have an understanding of how to replace the dangerous brute-forced monocultures of the green revolution with engineered ecosystems growing in soil biomes that can support maximum fertility for a given environment, the TTL Soviet Union is a long way from being able to do that. Especially given the bad ideas that the Soviet Union (even with our success in TTL in greatly reducing this) has around agriculture.

This is kinda like cars and roads, we (me included) have been so focused on avoiding the big problems of the OTL present, but political and practical realities mean we need to do some of these things to get past the problems of the TTL present.

Regards,

fasquardon
 
If you really want to solve population pressures in my opinion then we need to invest in reducing woman and child mortality, general healthcare and family planning. As populations move from rural to urban setting the number of children needed will go down.
 
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