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Belarus’s Soviet Economy

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Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#101

Post by timwaagh »

All this talk of how everyone is cared for feels so cozy. I can understand the desire for tight knit community. Everybody working for the greater good of all. Everybody equal, why should anyone dream of more? No one left behind under leadership of the great Sacha. Sure there is KGB and repression but nothing unnecessary.....

But the reality is that most humans are fundamentally competitive and fundamentally awful creatures. Only thing they will do given all this is find ways to beat the system to give themselves advantage over others.

Dear communism, it's not you, it's us.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#102

Post by eps »

stevesimmons wrote: post #39
jcmontx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there last year, World of Tanks seems to be a huge thing there too

Belarusians are very proud of World of Tanks! My Belavia flight back yesterday morning was a World of Tanks themed plane: - exterior paint and headrests promoted World of Tanks. - each tabletop had a blueprint of a different tank - even the pre-takeoff safety briefing was recorded in a World of Tanks style! See photos here: https://airlinerwatch.com/belavia-and-wargaming-reveal-secon...

Impressive and ridiculously tacky at the same time.

It's like flying inside of an ad that gets glued to your eyeballs for the duration of a flight. It's appropriate for ferrying gamers to a WoT event somewhere, but for regular flights this is completely unacceptable.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#103

Post by dep_b »

arcturus17 wrote: post #96
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was the backlash for Romania greater than the one for Bulgaria?

Not GP but in Spain we have ton of Romanians, and it’s one of the most popular “blame the immigrant” targets. You can see how that becomes a political problem. (I don’t agree with those views, I’ve been to the country a couple times and I think the culture and the people are beautiful)

I'm not really picking sides here, but the roaming gangs are really visible compared to regular Eastern European immigrants. There's just this watershed moment when the Romanian borders opened where all of a sudden you started noticing them, while the influx of for example Poles was much more gradual and consisted of mostly people that came with the idea at least to work.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#104

Post by ben_w »

jogundas wrote: post #98
lnsru wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Germany. It’s a better experiment. Former democratic part got billions from westerners and didn’t evolve far. They got basically new infrastructure build from western money, but people left former communistic paradise. Salary gap is still huge. That’s why Tesla picked location there and not in the western part of the country.

A much more nuanced story can be told about Germany, see eg https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/10/31/germans-still-do... . When it comes to the Tesla factory, it will be right outside Berlin https://www.dw.com/en/tesla-factory-outside-berlin-to-cost-4... .

Berlin is in the east of Germany. I live in Berlin, and have considered cycling to Poland and back as a day trip.

One of my German coworkers remarks often that wages for any given job in former-DDR-areas are much lower than the same jobs in pre-reunification-Bundesrepublik-Deutschland-areas.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#105

Post by CapricornNoble »

stevesimmons wrote: post #39
jcmontx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there last year, World of Tanks seems to be a huge thing there too

Belarusians are very proud of World of Tanks! My Belavia flight back yesterday morning was a World of Tanks themed plane: - exterior paint and headrests promoted World of Tanks. - each tabletop had a blueprint of a different tank - even the pre-takeoff safety briefing was recorded in a World of Tanks style! See photos here: https://airlinerwatch.com/belavia-and-wargaming-reveal-secon...

As a treadhead (but one who doesn't play WoT): that's awesome! Especially the tank blueprints. WoT also funds videos on some of my favorite military history YT channels.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#106

Post by gambiting »

roenxi wrote: post #35
sparkling wrote: post #12

I had the chance to visit Belarus last year for a extended period. The capital, Minsk, is by far the cleanest and safest place i have seen anywhere. Putting aside the human right issues, i think the president there has run the country quite well given the circumstances and the post-soviet situation he inherited. Mostly staying out of conflicts, keeping a balance between the big brother to the east and the western Eur…

> Putting aside the human right issues... I'm not sure that is a safe start to an argument that a country is well run. When human rights get suppressed that means people lose the ability to, eg, honestly complain about massive problems or take basic steps to improve their standard of living. Growing an economy at the expense of human rights is kinda stupid. What is the point of making people's lives materially better…

I mean, I guess it's just hard to understand for people who have never lived under such a system. In Poland it's relatively common for people to say that life used to be "better" under communism, even though yes, what you could buy was limited, where you could travel was limited and sometimes yes, you would be assigned to a post somewhere and had to move there whether you wanted to or not(freshly graduated teachers would usually be assigned to a school in the country that needed teachers, with little personal choice). All of that sounds horrendous from the perspective of western countries today(or well, in fact, Poland in 2019 too), but not everything is just black and white - there were good things about it too. Excellent quality of education. Of healthcare. Public transport that was cheap or free to use, and regular. Massive investment in infrastructure. New things which were built were usually built with citizens in mind first, not profit.

Like, it's really hard to explain because you'd never see the benefit of that over personal freedom, but I get why older generations are nostalgic over it. I wouldn't go back to it but it wasn't all bad.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#107

Post by smashah »

stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

Next time you're in Minsk, go to chaikhana. It's the only nice place to eat IMO.

Chaikhana Lounge Cafe

vulica Surhanava 61, Minsk, Belarus +375 29 325-45-45 https://g.co/kgs/Y6YE4E

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#108

Post by kome »

rayiner wrote: post #8

The former soviet states are a great natural experiment in economics. Countries that liberalized their economies, like Estonia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Latvia (the "mostly free" countries here: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking ) have grown much faster than countries that retained socialism and central planning, like Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. See: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/aug/17…

If you comment about those issues, it would be nice you knew something about it.

Ukraine is very liberalized economy, perhaps more than in the west - and yes, the results are less than stellar, for a complex number of reasons.

About Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia the economic results seem OK, but the social one is close to tragedy: in 3 Baltic countries emigration has been terrible, and the lost a large part of their population, threatening the social fabric. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health...

Your comment is pure ideology.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#109

Post by arcturus17 »

dep_b wrote: post #103
arcturus17 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP but in Spain we have ton of Romanians, and it’s one of the most popular “blame the immigrant” targets. You can see how that becomes a political problem. (I don’t agree with those views, I’ve been to the country a couple times and I think the culture and the people are beautiful)

I'm not really picking sides here, but the roaming gangs are really visible compared to regular Eastern European immigrants. There's just this watershed moment when the Romanian borders opened where all of a sudden you started noticing them, while the influx of for example Poles was much more gradual and consisted of mostly people that came with the idea at least to work.

I know that Romanian criminals, from petty to violent and organized, have been a thing in Spain since I was a kid, well before their entry into the EU.

That being said, what I saw in fact after their adhesion was that the quality of immigration seemed to improve (at least from what _I_ could see). Good number of honest and sometimes very well-educated people in services.

I guess the question to ask respective to their adhesion is whether the total amount or proportion of Romanian-origined criminality increased.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#110

Post by CapricornNoble »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #29

Does anyone else find the pictures of tractor engines hypnotizing? It's a total antithesis of American or Chinese-for-American manufacturing, where everything is maximal or minimal. Instead everything is "reasonable", a reasonable cost, a reasonable engine efficiency, a design that makes simple sense, parts that aren't optimized to the micron in order to save plastic...it's so refreshing to look at the inside of a ma…

My opinion: It's the Soviet engineering mentality, forged during WW2, and honed during the Cold War. From more than a few sources I've read, the Soviets basically optimized their country from top to bottom to fight and win a nuclear war, and that included manufacturing equipment that was considered highly durable, and easy to repair in harsh weather conditions (up to and including post-nuclear ones).

But hardware that is over-optimized for the worst-case scenario ended up highly inefficient during normal peacetime operations, hence their economy was hugely underperforming. I suspect the Soviet economy would have proven surprisingly robust in another total war .....fortunately we didn't find out.

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