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Politburo acting decisively to....deescalate the situation? Goodness, never thought I'd see the day.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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Lurking_Badger
Cheese Enjoyer
- Location
- Wisconsin
I want to see how other nations react to this.
I imagine countries more aligned with the USSR praising it on its non-violent break up of a protest. There is definitely going to to be news headlines from the USA about the suppression of free speech and horrible use of military forces on peaceful protesters.
I imagine countries more aligned with the USSR praising it on its non-violent break up of a protest. There is definitely going to to be news headlines from the USA about the suppression of free speech and horrible use of military forces on peaceful protesters.
My interpretation:
People find out all the dirty laundry the Goverment has been quietly trying to fix/hide, they of course are mad, but protest like Gandhi, but Government freaks out. Politburo takes over and sends in the troops and MOI, but they act with real restraint and the people respond, and the day is saved (kinda sorta not really)
At least no Tiananmen.
Terminator57
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
How do the omakes work in this new configuration ? Is it still a +10 or +15 bonus ?
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Yea, the omakes bonus stay the same
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- UTC+0
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I asked a bit ago and they are the same, 15 for canon ones and 10 for non-canon ones iirc
Terminator57
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
That doesn't make them any less "profitable"to solve uncompleted projects in the new configuration ?
Since turn length got doubled and progress requirements halved, omakes staying the same strength actually de facto doubles how powerful they are
- Location
- The great frozen north
That seems to have ended relatively cleanly, and more importantly it ended in a way that doesn't make Klimenko's job harder. But the final arbiter of the '65 Incident's legacy will be what impact it has on the anti-corruption itself. A good outcome would be if it makes it easier to reorg HI and the govt starts publicizing results so it looks like the protesters got some of what they wanted. The worst case scenario would be if the investigations get scaled back or if they get obstructed in the name of preventing leaks, which would harm us and remove part of the point of getting The Voz replaced.
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Well, ideally this wouldn't have happened at all. But as it is, it probably ended up much better than what the average outcome would be. And uh, don't worry about the investigations being scaled back or obstructed, the opposite will happen. Masherov is coming at the Ministry with a big fat sledgehammer. The govt won't be publicizing this stuff, if anything it will tighten information flows even more I suspect. This might not be the death blow to reform that it could have been, but it will definitely slow it down a lot and maybe cause some reverses.
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- Location
- The great frozen north
Jeez what's up with Kuzbas? It's still at 94/400 progress- after the dice consolidation. That'll eat about 5 HI dice to complete, which is a lot with us at 1 turn a year now. Assuming the progress not getting slashed is intentional, it must've been combined with what would otherwise be stage 4. All that, for just -15 to coal price...
This USSR is blessed. Well.... Blursed hahahaha
Yep math doesn't add up, it still 400 progress, but it still double of Donets Mechanization - which is now halved in progress
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Again, in theory. I'm not sure the actual Soviet poor feel this way in practice.
This isn't an abstract argument. The question is whether the actual poor people on the ground feel more secure from knowing there is free bread (and ONLY free bread), or whether they would feel more secure knowing there is very cheap bread, cheese, onions, potatoes, and even doctor's sausage a time or two a week. Again, whether they actually do, not whether they should in theory.
Because either the argument is about logic, in which case logic will tell these people (who actually have to count the kopecks they spend on food) that unless they gorge themselves on Only Bread all day every day for the rest of their lives, they're still paying less for food than they did before...
...Or the argument is about emotion, in which case, well, the emotional desire to have anything other than bread to eat comes into play.
I think we may be overestimating the appeal and power of "FREE BREAD" because it resonates very poetically with us.
Further electronics development is the only thing likely to keep the labor crunch from squashing us in the reasonably near future.
I'm a bit shaky on that hope. Remember that what killed Soviet computerization was, more than anything else, political pressure to avoid rocking the boat. Those pressures still exist in this timeline, so if the project loses momentum, it may be a long time before it acquires momentum again.
Given that coal prices are on a scale of 1 to 100 and 40-60 is "normal" while 20-40 is "very cheap," a -15 to coal price is a pretty big deal.
In a society where much of the population lives in crowded apartments, letting just anyone easily get a dog is a recipe for a lot of very unhappy, very poorly rested, very stressed out neighbors. Because not everyone who loves dogs is willing or able to keep them from barking incessantly.
There is a good reason why in the United States, at least until the ADA was interpreted in such a way as to make doing so unsustainable, quite a lot of apartment complexes had "no dogs allowed" rules.
There are other pets that are quieter, but dogs bark. They can be an actual problem in dense housing where you share a wall or floor with someone else's home. Like, lived experience here. It's an issue.
Red Army: "See, Politburo, we KNEW it would be a good idea to fund the tank chassis armed with dozens of spring-loaded boxing gloves! WE KNEW IT! AND YOU THOUGHT WE WERE MAD!"
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obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
I don't particularly think anybody is really going to care about what the specific model of tank's sitting around the protests with their guns aimed menacingly are gonna be...
Tank nerds will and that is what matters to some people (tank nerds)
Can imagine the tank fans and intelligence people are going to be both mad the new fun stuff was not used.
Those are some fighting words. T-52 (54/55 OTL) does not look like shit.
It does depend on exactly how poor we're talking here.
If a poor person in the USSR of TTL's 1965 is buying a varied basket of things - bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, sausages, a variety of toiletries - then a subsidy that impacts the whole basket of food and basic toiletries could be a neutral change. The loss of actually free bread not really a significant change in life because even the poorest have food security.
However, if we still have significant numbers of people who have real anxiety about where their next meal will be coming from, even if the subsidy is a neutral change, that there is no longer the relief from anxiety of the system saying "we've got you, you'll always at least have bread" will have a significant negative mental toll.
It's worth remembering that food insecurity doesn't just look like Holodomor Ukraine, it also looks like middle class Egyptians rioting because they are worried they won't be able to afford even onions soon and ostensibly middle class British nurses using food banks. People can experience food stress without being in danger (yet) of starvation. And even a monotonous diet is better than food stress.
In a narrow sense that has some truth to it, but you're missing out a few important factors and it matters what kind of boat-rocking was being avoided. The political "stability" element holding back Soviet computerization is excessive secret keeping (because information was a weapon for bureaucratic turf wars) which slowed the spread of technology, resulted in excessive production of custom units rather than standardization and mass production and also OGAS specifically being seen as a threat by the finance ministry.
What you didn't touch on is that Soviet manufacturing of computer parts was utterly insufficient for rolling out OGAS before it was decades obsolete and perhaps more importantly, that feelings of technological inferiority led to repeated decisions to kill promising local developments in order to re-direct skilled personnel into studying American or British designs in order to copy them - and of course, by the time those designs were copied they were even in the best cases half a decade behind the new cutting edge. Copying things that had already hit the American or British market meant that novel projects that could actually bring the USSR closer to parity were neglected.
Despite all of these issues however, investments continued to be made in the sector and some understanding that it was important remained. Indeed, Soviet personal computers were very interesting in the late 70s and 80s - some of the domestic designs sidelined in order to redirect resources to copying foreign designs were used in niche consumer products for tinkers, ordinary hobbyists were making home computers out of thousands of chips and dozens of boards with logic designed by either themselves or other hobbyists and copies of foreign designs got interesting local innovations added.
At the time that the Soviet Union collapsed, it's worth remembering that the IBM PC was only just starting to become the most common personal computer, machines like the Commodore 64 were still in common use, India was the largest semi-conductor producer in Asia and TSMC was 4 years old and pretty much unknown outside of Taiwan. The biggest reason why the Soviet computer industry failed is the entire system failed, they never really got the chance to either rise from behind like did TSMC or become largely irrelevant like India's domestic semiconductor industry. If we make a wrong choice on computerization, I am fairly confident that we'll have other chances, because that happened even with the multiple wrong turns the OTL USSR took and its happened in other countries around the world.
And heck, I think we've already made some significant bad choices, but I am not worried about the overall effort of pushing our electronics forward.
If the ASU falls by the wayside, the investments in transistor production and in designers and operators will remain, even without the ASU being pushed out the door, we'll still be able to apply those investments to other projects.
Regards,
fasquardon
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CrabMonarchy
Allegedly Dutch
- Location
- the Netherlands, apparently
If Vatutin had sent in the T-64s instead then the West wouldn't even have pictures of tanks menacing protesters to show, on account of the tanks all breaking down on the highway before ever making it into Moscow.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Given the economic conditions of the USSR and the fact that we're at full employment or close to it, my natural impulse is to think that the levels of food stress aren't that bad. I could be optimistic; my hope is that Klim will be able to give us a better sense for what is needed.
But what I'm reasonably confident about is that if the program were so popular that it was genuinely likely that ending it would cause major popular unrest, then the attempt to cancel it would be running into at least SOME flak from the Supreme Soviet. Notice that the anticorruption protests were protesting against the same corruption the Supreme Soviet has been demanding investigations into. The problem wasn't that the Supreme Soviet wanted to ignore the will of the people; the problem was that the Supreme Soviet, having correctly divined the will of the people and trying to follow it to remain popular, got in trouble for not doing enough.
If the Supreme Soviet is so eager to eliminate the free bread program, my gut feeling is that they are probably not wrong to think they can do so without causing enough people to freak out that we start needing to worry about food riots.
Especially if the program is replaced with something that is as good or better for the average low-income Soviet system even if it doesn't have that charming simplicity of "BUT THE BREAD IS FREE, COMRADE!"