5 ms·

One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century

70 points by dgudkov 7y ago

ahi 7y ago
OT: there must be a ton of science that gets lost, delayed, or duplicated purely due to language barriers.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 7y ago
Well I've been employed by certain high tech multinationals whose obsession with certain MBA flavors of the decade metrics have reduced them to shadows of their former selves. They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.
- ismail 7y ago
  I’m curious what do you mean by “mba flavours of the decade metric”? Is that a common term?
  - freddie_mercury 7y ago
    It's not a common term but it is readily understandable to most people. There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM). Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than about the fads themselves. Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - andromeduck 7y ago
    Play on flavour of the month (FOTM), in this context meaning KPIs and other heuristics.
SethTro 7y ago
"The Soviets killed some 180,000 whales illegally, driving several species to the brink of extinction" For those of us that skip straight to the comments
- knowaveragejoe 7y ago
  The real meat of the article is why they did that, though.
  - immad 7y ago
    Since you made me curious I read the why :) > The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. 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!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward crime.
    - ChristianBundy 7y ago
      That's really interesting, I'd love to read more about it. Are there any articles you could recommend?
      - petre 7y ago
        Here you go. There was one running earlier on HN. It's quite depressing. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
        ChristianBundy 7y ago
        Wow, thanks for the link! That was a great read. I just wish there was an online platform where we could comment on articles like this and discuss with each other. Maybe someday!
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
I'm confused by the seemingly interchangeable use of the words "socialism" and "communism" implied in this piece.
- mc32 7y ago
  The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was communist. So was Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, etc. even though officially they all had “socialist” in their official names while they were under soviet influence, so it’s no surprise people find the terms interchangeable.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    We wouldn't use Democratic People's Republic of Korea to interpret the meaning of "democratic".
    - mc32 7y ago
      That’s just their other usage of democratic where to them it is equivalent to folks’ or people’s (keeping with Greek etymology, if not spirit of the word). But we keep the traditional meaning of it.
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  I don't understand why I'm being down voted for this comment.
  - Swizec 7y ago
    As someone who grew up in a former socialist state, I mostly understand the distinction. But you gotta admit that the only countries so far that have attempted outright socialism were/are all communist as well.
    - Lowkeyloki 7y ago
      That's true. But I support socialist policies around things like education and healthcare. Heck, the public education system in the United States /is/ socialist. But good luck getting a politician to admit that. Anyway, my point is that systems like single-payer healthcare is certainly a socialist policy, but I don't think calling it a communist policy would be accurate. I could be wrong, but it seems like socialism is more about the application of tax dollars towards social security programs, whereas communism is a form of rules and organization imposed on the private market. I'm probably oversimplifying it, though.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
I've heard from my friends who were part of the first iteration of Green Peace that they would use the I Ching to search for whalers, once all of their other options were exhausted. They swear up and down that it worked for them and they found a lot of ships that way.
_bxg1 7y ago
> The actual answer has a lot to say about the impossibility of rational economic calculation under socialism (and also the lesser but still important problem under capitalism of mispricing in the presence of externalities and the difficulty of aligning private and social incentives.) It's refreshing to hear such a frank statement of the problems with pure communism and pure capitalism in the same sentence.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  Your statement would be even better if you dropped both 'pure's.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Pure capitalism is an engine without a steering wheel. It's very efficient and powerful, but without guidance it will just drive you off a cliff. Socialism is a steering wheel without an engine. They both have important aspects; it's only when they're treated as absolutes that they fail catastrophically.
- abalone 7y ago
  I don’t get why they call externalities a “lesser” problem or put it in parentheses except out of ideology. Sure you can point to horrific environmental crimes in communism, but what would you say the primary economic engine is that has led to widespread environmental destruction and the climate crisis?
  - ummonk 7y ago
    Because capitalism at least takes some signals into account through its pricing mechanisms; it only ignores externalities.
    - adamson 7y ago
      You don’t think the Soviet economy would have collapsed much earlier than it did had it taken no signals at all into account? There are signals other than price that give you a sense of demand
edoo 7y ago
This reminds me of FDR burning fields of grain and killing herds of cattle to drive prices up even while people were starving. The high level goals are to 'improve' things but some serious bugs got introduced into the process that resulted in practically the opposite of intentions.
- knowaveragejoe 7y ago
  Source for this?
  - edoo 7y ago
    Search for instances of slaughter on this page http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/dustbowl.htm http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/dustbowl.htm Wickard vs Filburn is the atrocity that allowed them to destroy farmers fields.
  - oppositelock 7y ago
    It's a matter of history. The Agriciultural Adjustment Act of 1933 limited the amount of wheat production in an effort to prop up prices. It was challenged by farmers and went to the supreme court as Wickard v Filburn. This established that the inter-state commerce clause can be used to regulate intra-state commerce, and since all farming affects commerce, thereby farming. [1][2] The feds generally paid farmers more than their crops were worth on the market to destroy them, so they were destroyed, and this was most definitely happening at a time when there were food shortages in the US. There is nothing as malicious as a politician on a mission. The US also poisoned tens of thousands of people during prohibition with denatured alcohol. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act [3] https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...
ummonk 7y ago
>As a rule, the people who became commissars were the ones who couldn’t find another job. They were not very smart but were very conceited, self important individuals, especially after they had been given a taste of power, and especially over other people. Those who were thinking about a career in the party system, who could speak loudly and authoritatively from a podium, and who curried favor with the boss, these people could climb the party ladder quickly, and high up. This describes a pervasive problem with large bureaucracies, including universities and large corporations. The only difference is that corporations have a bigger incentive to try to prevent this because those corporations that are able to get better middle management will outperform those that are unable to.
imnotlost 7y ago
Perhaps it would be better to talk about the complete failure of planned economies[1] (centralized) VS the success of market economies[2](distributed). I guess you could do both systems under a totalitarian regime or a democratic regime. Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined Soviet Union. There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No one even knows what they're talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
- buildzr 7y ago
  I tend to agree with you that we're past this point and market economies offer bountiful opportunities to perform minor tweaks with major outcomes and improved efficiency, if you're more left leaning that may mean systems like basic income. Even in many countries with socialized medicine, it's quite common to have hospitals operate as businesses, hiring doctors, performing research and marketing and just billing the government and insurance companies in some cases for the resulting healthcare provided in the end. Then I go to reddit and find stuff like /r/latestagecapitalism on the frontpage where they... quite blatantly would rather have a soviet style system and wonder what went wrong.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dang 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568

70 points by dgudkov 7y ago

ahi 7y ago

OT: there must be a ton of science that gets lost, delayed, or duplicated purely due to language barriers.

Well I've been employed by certain high tech multinationals whose obsession with certain MBA flavors of the decade metrics have reduced them to shadows of their former selves. They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.

ismail 7y ago
I’m curious what do you mean by “mba flavours of the decade metric”? Is that a common term?
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  It's not a common term but it is readily understandable to most people. There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM). Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than about the fads themselves. Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- andromeduck 7y ago
  Play on flavour of the month (FOTM), in this context meaning KPIs and other heuristics.

SethTro 7y ago

"The Soviets killed some 180,000 whales illegally, driving several species to the brink of extinction" For those of us that skip straight to the comments

knowaveragejoe 7y ago
The real meat of the article is why they did that, though.
- immad 7y ago
  Since you made me curious I read the why :) > The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. 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!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward crime.
  - ChristianBundy 7y ago
    That's really interesting, I'd love to read more about it. Are there any articles you could recommend?
    - petre 7y ago
      Here you go. There was one running earlier on HN. It's quite depressing. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
      - ChristianBundy 7y ago
        Wow, thanks for the link! That was a great read. I just wish there was an online platform where we could comment on articles like this and discuss with each other. Maybe someday!

Lowkeyloki 7y ago

I'm confused by the seemingly interchangeable use of the words "socialism" and "communism" implied in this piece.

mc32 7y ago
The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was communist. So was Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, etc. even though officially they all had “socialist” in their official names while they were under soviet influence, so it’s no surprise people find the terms interchangeable.
- stordoff 7y ago
  We wouldn't use Democratic People's Republic of Korea to interpret the meaning of "democratic".
  - mc32 7y ago
    That’s just their other usage of democratic where to them it is equivalent to folks’ or people’s (keeping with Greek etymology, if not spirit of the word). But we keep the traditional meaning of it.
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
I don't understand why I'm being down voted for this comment.
- Swizec 7y ago
  As someone who grew up in a former socialist state, I mostly understand the distinction. But you gotta admit that the only countries so far that have attempted outright socialism were/are all communist as well.
  - Lowkeyloki 7y ago
    That's true. But I support socialist policies around things like education and healthcare. Heck, the public education system in the United States /is/ socialist. But good luck getting a politician to admit that. Anyway, my point is that systems like single-payer healthcare is certainly a socialist policy, but I don't think calling it a communist policy would be accurate. I could be wrong, but it seems like socialism is more about the application of tax dollars towards social security programs, whereas communism is a form of rules and organization imposed on the private market. I'm probably oversimplifying it, though.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

I've heard from my friends who were part of the first iteration of Green Peace that they would use the I Ching to search for whalers, once all of their other options were exhausted. They swear up and down that it worked for them and they found a lot of ships that way.

_bxg1 7y ago

> The actual answer has a lot to say about the impossibility of rational economic calculation under socialism (and also the lesser but still important problem under capitalism of mispricing in the presence of externalities and the difficulty of aligning private and social incentives.) It's refreshing to hear such a frank statement of the problems with pure communism and pure capitalism in the same sentence.

stickfigure 7y ago
Your statement would be even better if you dropped both 'pure's.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Pure capitalism is an engine without a steering wheel. It's very efficient and powerful, but without guidance it will just drive you off a cliff. Socialism is a steering wheel without an engine. They both have important aspects; it's only when they're treated as absolutes that they fail catastrophically.
abalone 7y ago
I don’t get why they call externalities a “lesser” problem or put it in parentheses except out of ideology. Sure you can point to horrific environmental crimes in communism, but what would you say the primary economic engine is that has led to widespread environmental destruction and the climate crisis?
- ummonk 7y ago
  Because capitalism at least takes some signals into account through its pricing mechanisms; it only ignores externalities.
  - adamson 7y ago
    You don’t think the Soviet economy would have collapsed much earlier than it did had it taken no signals at all into account? There are signals other than price that give you a sense of demand

edoo 7y ago

This reminds me of FDR burning fields of grain and killing herds of cattle to drive prices up even while people were starving. The high level goals are to 'improve' things but some serious bugs got introduced into the process that resulted in practically the opposite of intentions.

knowaveragejoe 7y ago
Source for this?
- edoo 7y ago
  Search for instances of slaughter on this page http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/dustbowl.htm http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/dustbowl.htm Wickard vs Filburn is the atrocity that allowed them to destroy farmers fields.
- oppositelock 7y ago
  It's a matter of history. The Agriciultural Adjustment Act of 1933 limited the amount of wheat production in an effort to prop up prices. It was challenged by farmers and went to the supreme court as Wickard v Filburn. This established that the inter-state commerce clause can be used to regulate intra-state commerce, and since all farming affects commerce, thereby farming. [1][2] The feds generally paid farmers more than their crops were worth on the market to destroy them, so they were destroyed, and this was most definitely happening at a time when there were food shortages in the US. There is nothing as malicious as a politician on a mission. The US also poisoned tens of thousands of people during prohibition with denatured alcohol. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act [3] https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...

ummonk 7y ago

>As a rule, the people who became commissars were the ones who couldn’t find another job. They were not very smart but were very conceited, self important individuals, especially after they had been given a taste of power, and especially over other people. Those who were thinking about a career in the party system, who could speak loudly and authoritatively from a podium, and who curried favor with the boss, these people could climb the party ladder quickly, and high up. This describes a pervasive problem with large bureaucracies, including universities and large corporations. The only difference is that corporations have a bigger incentive to try to prevent this because those corporations that are able to get better middle management will outperform those that are unable to.

imnotlost 7y ago

Perhaps it would be better to talk about the complete failure of planned economies[1] (centralized) VS the success of market economies[2](distributed). I guess you could do both systems under a totalitarian regime or a democratic regime. Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined Soviet Union. There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No one even knows what they're talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

buildzr 7y ago
I tend to agree with you that we're past this point and market economies offer bountiful opportunities to perform minor tweaks with major outcomes and improved efficiency, if you're more left leaning that may mean systems like basic income. Even in many countries with socialized medicine, it's quite common to have hospitals operate as businesses, hiring doctors, performing research and marketing and just billing the government and insurance companies in some cases for the resulting healthcare provided in the end. Then I go to reddit and find stuff like /r/latestagecapitalism on the frontpage where they... quite blatantly would rather have a soviet style system and wonder what went wrong.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dang 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568