Soviet Whale Whacking
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Killing to meet goals for unwanted products.
https://fee.org/articles/why-the-soviets-slaughtered-180-000-whales-during-the-cold-war/
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Interesting article.
They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!”
Yes, central planning at its best!!!
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When we used to meet with the Soviet Mininstry of Oil and it’s drilling specialists they would always take great pride in the hundreds of thousands or millions of metres their various oil well drilling concerns had made over past year or five year plan period. We would always ask what percent of those metres resulted in a discovering a producing well. Their answer was inevitably that as drillers they were only concerned with the total number of metres drilled. Discovering oil formations was a plan mandated objective Ministry of Geology and not theirs.
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@Renauda LOL
An older friend told me a story when he was assisting with a refinery in the DDR. There would be one operator assigned to each "column" and their job was to keep the column operate stabile. Didn't matter how that effected the columns before them or after them.
Same mentality in their mentality. Very "silo" in their thinking.
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Exactly. On any given project only the top person had any inkling of what could be considered a substantive part of the overall progress or state of the project itself. Everyone below was in their own silo and acted as more as gatekeeper of information more than anything else. All bosses had their personal fiefdom.
