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Having lived through a Soviet inspired bureaucracy where the wait times to get a phone line was years, getting a car could take up to 5 years; this article is s

Having lived through a Soviet inspired bureaucracy where the wait times to get a phone line was years, getting a car could take up to 5 years; this article is spot on. Eerily familiar. That same tingling of dread from decades ago washed over me haha. Everything was mandated by a bureaucrat, how many factories there could be, how many goods they could produce. There was no concept of supply and demand, instead there was five year plan from the central government and that was what would be implemented regardless of the ground reality. When people got a phone line installed in their house, the neighbours would come over to marvel as if visiting a new born baby. When my uncle got his allotment for a scooter after two years, he distributed sweets to his co-workers. It was a great occasion.

drevil-v2 7y ago
I just remembered an incident; My grandfather had to call his sister who lived in a different country. The middle class and the poor did not have access to International Direct Dialling because the central telecom commission had not accepted the demand for more international connectivity. There were no private telecom companies only state owned because we were good socialists. And International Direct Dialling was a luxury reserved for the political elites and the rich industrialists. No what we had to do was book a "person-to-person" call. They would give you a 2-3 hour time slot in which the call might be connected and you would have to wait by the phone. And when it was connected the operator could hear everything. This is mid-1980's I am talking about haha
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
This part of the article was a bit silly -- Canada is nothing like this. I feel like he tied his own experiences with late-soviet bureaucracy to his frustrations with conservative Canadian business climate; but the two are not analogous really. Canada is a market economy with very low corporate taxes and when compared to European economies regulation is actually very light. Our business norms and regulations are tied in most part very closely to the United States. But the investment culture is very conservative and the economy is tied excessively to resource extraction. And yes, there is a long history of a few families having strong dominance over everything, and of businesses/companies gaining monopolistic positions through regulation. An example of this is the wine industry in Ontario -- I could go on a long rant about that... but I'll restrain myself.

drevil-v2 7y ago

I just remembered an incident; My grandfather had to call his sister who lived in a different country. The middle class and the poor did not have access to International Direct Dialling because the central telecom commission had not accepted the demand for more international connectivity. There were no private telecom companies only state owned because we were good socialists. And International Direct Dialling was a luxury reserved for the political elites and the rich industrialists. No what we had to do was book a "person-to-person" call. They would give you a 2-3 hour time slot in which the call might be connected and you would have to wait by the phone. And when it was connected the operator could hear everything. This is mid-1980's I am talking about haha

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

This part of the article was a bit silly -- Canada is nothing like this. I feel like he tied his own experiences with late-soviet bureaucracy to his frustrations with conservative Canadian business climate; but the two are not analogous really. Canada is a market economy with very low corporate taxes and when compared to European economies regulation is actually very light. Our business norms and regulations are tied in most part very closely to the United States. But the investment culture is very conservative and the economy is tied excessively to resource extraction. And yes, there is a long history of a few families having strong dominance over everything, and of businesses/companies gaining monopolistic positions through regulation. An example of this is the wine industry in Ontario -- I could go on a long rant about that... but I'll restrain myself.