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Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up th

Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.

betaby 7y ago
Never heard that, why would they in planed economy?
- allovernow 7y ago
  In authoritarian states you frequently get situations where you're punished for not meeting certain bureaucratic metrics. For example, in China word is factory output is used as a proxy for productivity, so they're allegedly running factories without producing anything just to raise the power bill to appear productive. Face is ingrained in Chinese culture partly because in an authoritarian state where your behavior must fall within rigidly defined qualitative and quantitative metrics, appearances are everything.
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    The American model for government funding is also a bit messed up ( at least what I remember from high school civics in the 1980s) where each department must spend what they are allocated or the department is guaranteed to get less money in the next fiscal year budget. I could be wrong but this creates a disincentive for saving money as most states and the federal government work on the same model.
    - mamon 7y ago
      It seems reasonable at first: if you weren't able to spend all the money you've got that means you've got too much of them. But you're right, that does create the incentive to needlesly spend. Also, it is not limited to gorvernment: a Director in a Fortune 100 company that I'm working for right now is buying 40 16" MacBook Pros for a team of .Net developers, because: a) he had spare $100k in his budget. b) it is easier to get VPN access approved for external contractors if they are using Macs
      - p_l 7y ago
        Current client wrote-in a stupid policy into intermediate vendor's contract that I have to use a Mac. Nothing, absolutely nothing that is used in the company is related to the Mac. In fact, a lot of the tools we use would work better on Windows, and many people use Windows. The Macs for direct employees are used as perks.
    - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
      As much as I've seen people complain about use-it-or-lose-it I've never actually seen an alternative that seems to work better for the amount of effort put into it
    - creato 7y ago
      Big companies often work this way too.
    - jerf 7y ago
      AIUI, it isn't exactly that it is enshrined into law that if you don't use it, you won't get it next year. It's just that there's never enough money to give everybody what they want, and not using all your money is a primo-grade signal that you don't need it, so of course you lose it. I believe you'll find this isn't an "American" phenomenon at all. With some kind of award for not using all your money, it's hard to justify it for the people spending it... and "rewards for not spending all the money" are also really easy to cut out of next year's budget... Certain patterns just naturally emerge with budgeting at scale, and if you've got some brilliant idea about how to fix it I can assure you that with just some minimum business acumen you can become a very rich person.
      - cmonnow 7y ago
        so.. if I don't need $100 i.e. I can do all my work with $80. Then my budget for next year becomes 80. You have given a scenario where budget of one team is decreased. So, where did that $20 go ? To some other team, right ? What about the reverse scenario? If I cannot do all my work with $80, I ask for more, say $100. Then my budget for next year becomes 100. I don't see a problem with this. Budgets are fluid and change from year to year. Because I saved the company $20 in year 6, I will be rewarded with $20 in year 7 if I ask for it.
    - eyegor 7y ago
      It's actually even less efficient than that. On top of keeping spending high, every project that involves contractors must have at least 3 bidders [0]. So for smaller projects people often spend substantially more time modifying contract details and finding contractors than the project itself takes. (By playing with project requirements, you can increase the pool of contractors). At an unnamed national lab, 6-week projects typically took 6-18 months of hunting down contractors until the start of work. [0] not sure if this is still true, but certainly was in 80s-early 00s.
  - p_l 7y ago
    It doesn't have to be an authoritarian state, nor do you need the concept of "face". It happens often enough in corporations. Which arguably are authoritarian... (with rare exceptions).
- refurb 7y ago
  Politics and the impact of bureaucracy? It was common that quotas were created by leadership who were often not close enough to the need to properly design the quota. That got passed down through multiple layers of management, all of whom could care less if the trains were full and were more interested in meeting the quota so could advance in their career. People complain about unethical behavior in capitalist systems, but that's not a property of capitalism, that's a property of humans.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > why would they in planed economy? I hope this pun doesn't fly over everyone's heads
- jtolmar 7y ago
  Same reason large corporations do redundant things and ignore their own best interests; bureaucratic hierarchies just don't scale well. A few layers removed from object reality, all that's left is loyalty politics and meeting your metrics. I think communism can work, but the Soviet version with a giant state-controlled bureaucracy can't.
closeparen 7y ago
This is just another instance of the classic Soviet problem. A scarce resource is allocated by a government bureaucracy instead of a market, and the bureaucracy's design is imperfect, so nonsensical incentives fall out of it sometimes. There's no irony. It's just kind of quirky for the West to manage flight/landing slots this way, instead of an auction (as the FCC does with spectrum).
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  To be fair, the auction model doesn't seem to work well when it comes to spectrum. What you end up with is a few big players delivering awful service while having enough money to outbid anyone, essentially preventing any competitor from ever breaking into the market to provide better service.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I would consider that an anti-trust problem, not an scarce-resource-allocation-system problem. The concept of an auction is predicated on having a liquid market—both that there are replacement goods available from other sellers, and that there are many buyers "at the top" with enough bidding power to compete fairly between themselves, such that they'll "pick their battles" by buying only what matters most to them.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    The government can only give away slices of a fixed resource for so long. Eventually it runs out. You literally can't start an airline from scratch. You have to first buy one that already has landing slots, then figure out how to dispose of the planes/staff/operations/debts that come with the package. Is that really better for competition than just having a market for slots?
    - kroep93nd 7y ago
      Only for them to immediately be gobbled up by 1 or 2 big players. How about a market for destinations? Oh wait that will be immediately controlled by one player. Hm it seems consolidation is the natural path we prefer towards solving a problem. Why not let the bureaucracy manage it then? Give up the pretense. This is all market capture of finance by low effort grifters who will throw a fit when they don’t get privilege for nothing but being an obnoxious talking head.
Reedx 7y ago
This appears to be happening in China with electricity quotas. Running AC and machines in empty factories to make quota. "Local companies and officials are fraudulently boosting electricity consumption and other metrics in order to meet tough new back-to-work targets" https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Lights-go-on-but-no-one-goes-to-work https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Lights-go-on-but-no... "Video evidence. In #Wenzhou, factory manager told they must consume 3000 kWh electricity by midnight, as the authorities use electricity usage as a criterion of re-open rate. Even this factory has not re-opened for lack of supply and manpower due to #COVID2019, manager had to.." https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1233793672497573894 https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1233793672497573894 "Argh. A Wenzhou-based factory owner tells how district officials are telling him his closed factory (he has no workers) must turn on the machines and consume electricity or he’ll get “a visit”. Higher ups are watching the electricity numbers." https://twitter.com/You_Shu_China/status/1233535925185122305 https://twitter.com/You_Shu_China/status/1233535925185122305
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Same happened on this "New Silk Road" track: "Empty trains on the modern Silk Road: when Belt and Road interests don’t align" https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-the-modern-silk-road-when-belt-and-road-interests-dont-align/ https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-t...
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  I wonder what this will do to the method of estimating Chinas economy via Electricity/Coal usage. What is next on the line that isn't being actively tampered with.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > I wonder what this will do to the method of estimating Chinas economy via Electricity/Coal usage. I think the causality goes the other way. I think that they are doing this because that is how their economy is measured.
Skunkleton 7y ago
This is similar, but different. We have an system that works in the normal case, that is struggling with an exceptional case. Could it be improved? Sure. Is it a sign that western civilization is doomed? No.
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  Yeah, that will never happen. Because we are immortal! All the civilizations before us weren't that smart and rich!
  - Skunkleton 7y ago
    Of course we will evolve into something else. Flying some empty planes isn’t going to be why.
dukoid 7y ago
I heard they were running heavily loaded (= not empty) trains back and forth without any purpose other than meeting ton-km quotas, but I wasn't able to find a source... Edit: Found an article mentioning this practice: https://mont.thesentinel.com/2019/10/03/one-imperfect-day-in-vladivostok/ https://mont.thesentinel.com/2019/10/03/one-imperfect-day-in...
- llukas 7y ago
  I read that some types of track require stressing every so often otherwise it loses its properties (in context of Polish railway laying new track then not running heavy trains on it and in consequence track had to be replaced again).
  - p_l 7y ago
    A slightly related issue is that airline pilots need to fly certain amount of time/operations to remain in current training. Part of the big problem with reactivating MiG-29 squadrons in Poland after the "aftermarket mods" resulted in grounding was that even the instructors lost the legal right to examine training level.
timthorn 7y ago
There are similar ghost trains in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150723-why-britain-has-secret-ghost-trains https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150723-why-britain-has-...
- beojan 7y ago
  That's not because they have targets to meet, that's because closing a station officially is very difficult.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    In both cases it's because of stupid bureaucracy, seems pretty comparable to me.
perl4ever 7y ago
I think I recall reading not too long ago about how in isolated cases recently, the price of electricity can go negative. This presumably would mean that people are being paid to waste it. But really, they're being paid to help keep the grid stable and running.
- eyegor 7y ago
  Most utilities don't have any way to store large amounts of energy, and it's non trivial to start up most energy generation. To me the grid looks like something between wizardry and a house of cards.
kortilla 7y ago
Not really ironic given that these airlines would choose to stop if the expected future profit didn’t make up for it.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Any large organisation will tend to run into exactly the same issues that the socialist centrally planned economies did. Centrally planning an economy simply can’t work and the inefficiency gets worse with scale. They have the politburo (the executive team), and apparatchiks (middle management). Large organisations are just a smaller version of a centrally planned economy. Market forces have very limited opportunity to influence the micro-level internal resource allocation decisions of a large organisation. There’s some things you can to do mitigate this within an organisation, but having efficiency decrease with organisational complexity and scale is inevitable. There’s only two reasons I can see that this doesn’t devolve into soviet style catastrophe. Firstly, some of the lost efficiency is offset by the economies of scale. Secondly, if an organisation becomes too inefficient, their market position can (usually) be usurped by competition. Shareholders can also fire insufficiently competent management, but usually not before the damage is done, and they can’t exactly guarantee the replacements will be any better.

Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.

betaby 7y ago

Never heard that, why would they in planed economy?

allovernow 7y ago
In authoritarian states you frequently get situations where you're punished for not meeting certain bureaucratic metrics. For example, in China word is factory output is used as a proxy for productivity, so they're allegedly running factories without producing anything just to raise the power bill to appear productive. Face is ingrained in Chinese culture partly because in an authoritarian state where your behavior must fall within rigidly defined qualitative and quantitative metrics, appearances are everything.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  The American model for government funding is also a bit messed up ( at least what I remember from high school civics in the 1980s) where each department must spend what they are allocated or the department is guaranteed to get less money in the next fiscal year budget. I could be wrong but this creates a disincentive for saving money as most states and the federal government work on the same model.
  - mamon 7y ago
    It seems reasonable at first: if you weren't able to spend all the money you've got that means you've got too much of them. But you're right, that does create the incentive to needlesly spend. Also, it is not limited to gorvernment: a Director in a Fortune 100 company that I'm working for right now is buying 40 16" MacBook Pros for a team of .Net developers, because: a) he had spare $100k in his budget. b) it is easier to get VPN access approved for external contractors if they are using Macs
    - p_l 7y ago
      Current client wrote-in a stupid policy into intermediate vendor's contract that I have to use a Mac. Nothing, absolutely nothing that is used in the company is related to the Mac. In fact, a lot of the tools we use would work better on Windows, and many people use Windows. The Macs for direct employees are used as perks.
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    As much as I've seen people complain about use-it-or-lose-it I've never actually seen an alternative that seems to work better for the amount of effort put into it
  - creato 7y ago
    Big companies often work this way too.
  - jerf 7y ago
    AIUI, it isn't exactly that it is enshrined into law that if you don't use it, you won't get it next year. It's just that there's never enough money to give everybody what they want, and not using all your money is a primo-grade signal that you don't need it, so of course you lose it. I believe you'll find this isn't an "American" phenomenon at all. With some kind of award for not using all your money, it's hard to justify it for the people spending it... and "rewards for not spending all the money" are also really easy to cut out of next year's budget... Certain patterns just naturally emerge with budgeting at scale, and if you've got some brilliant idea about how to fix it I can assure you that with just some minimum business acumen you can become a very rich person.
    - cmonnow 7y ago
      so.. if I don't need $100 i.e. I can do all my work with $80. Then my budget for next year becomes 80. You have given a scenario where budget of one team is decreased. So, where did that $20 go ? To some other team, right ? What about the reverse scenario? If I cannot do all my work with $80, I ask for more, say $100. Then my budget for next year becomes 100. I don't see a problem with this. Budgets are fluid and change from year to year. Because I saved the company $20 in year 6, I will be rewarded with $20 in year 7 if I ask for it.
  - eyegor 7y ago
    It's actually even less efficient than that. On top of keeping spending high, every project that involves contractors must have at least 3 bidders [0]. So for smaller projects people often spend substantially more time modifying contract details and finding contractors than the project itself takes. (By playing with project requirements, you can increase the pool of contractors). At an unnamed national lab, 6-week projects typically took 6-18 months of hunting down contractors until the start of work. [0] not sure if this is still true, but certainly was in 80s-early 00s.
- p_l 7y ago
  It doesn't have to be an authoritarian state, nor do you need the concept of "face". It happens often enough in corporations. Which arguably are authoritarian... (with rare exceptions).
refurb 7y ago
Politics and the impact of bureaucracy? It was common that quotas were created by leadership who were often not close enough to the need to properly design the quota. That got passed down through multiple layers of management, all of whom could care less if the trains were full and were more interested in meeting the quota so could advance in their career. People complain about unethical behavior in capitalist systems, but that's not a property of capitalism, that's a property of humans.
rolltiide 7y ago
> why would they in planed economy? I hope this pun doesn't fly over everyone's heads
jtolmar 7y ago
Same reason large corporations do redundant things and ignore their own best interests; bureaucratic hierarchies just don't scale well. A few layers removed from object reality, all that's left is loyalty politics and meeting your metrics. I think communism can work, but the Soviet version with a giant state-controlled bureaucracy can't.

closeparen 7y ago

This is just another instance of the classic Soviet problem. A scarce resource is allocated by a government bureaucracy instead of a market, and the bureaucracy's design is imperfect, so nonsensical incentives fall out of it sometimes. There's no irony. It's just kind of quirky for the West to manage flight/landing slots this way, instead of an auction (as the FCC does with spectrum).

Nextgrid 7y ago
To be fair, the auction model doesn't seem to work well when it comes to spectrum. What you end up with is a few big players delivering awful service while having enough money to outbid anyone, essentially preventing any competitor from ever breaking into the market to provide better service.
- derefr 7y ago
  I would consider that an anti-trust problem, not an scarce-resource-allocation-system problem. The concept of an auction is predicated on having a liquid market—both that there are replacement goods available from other sellers, and that there are many buyers "at the top" with enough bidding power to compete fairly between themselves, such that they'll "pick their battles" by buying only what matters most to them.
- closeparen 7y ago
  The government can only give away slices of a fixed resource for so long. Eventually it runs out. You literally can't start an airline from scratch. You have to first buy one that already has landing slots, then figure out how to dispose of the planes/staff/operations/debts that come with the package. Is that really better for competition than just having a market for slots?
  - kroep93nd 7y ago
    Only for them to immediately be gobbled up by 1 or 2 big players. How about a market for destinations? Oh wait that will be immediately controlled by one player. Hm it seems consolidation is the natural path we prefer towards solving a problem. Why not let the bureaucracy manage it then? Give up the pretense. This is all market capture of finance by low effort grifters who will throw a fit when they don’t get privilege for nothing but being an obnoxious talking head.

Reedx 7y ago

This appears to be happening in China with electricity quotas. Running AC and machines in empty factories to make quota. "Local companies and officials are fraudulently boosting electricity consumption and other metrics in order to meet tough new back-to-work targets" https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Lights-go-on-but-no-one-goes-to-work https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Lights-go-on-but-no... "Video evidence. In #Wenzhou, factory manager told they must consume 3000 kWh electricity by midnight, as the authorities use electricity usage as a criterion of re-open rate. Even this factory has not re-opened for lack of supply and manpower due to #COVID2019, manager had to.." https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1233793672497573894 https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1233793672497573894 "Argh. A Wenzhou-based factory owner tells how district officials are telling him his closed factory (he has no workers) must turn on the machines and consume electricity or he’ll get “a visit”. Higher ups are watching the electricity numbers." https://twitter.com/You_Shu_China/status/1233535925185122305 https://twitter.com/You_Shu_China/status/1233535925185122305

Krasnol 7y ago
Same happened on this "New Silk Road" track: "Empty trains on the modern Silk Road: when Belt and Road interests don’t align" https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-the-modern-silk-road-when-belt-and-road-interests-dont-align/ https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-t...
NikolaeVarius 7y ago
I wonder what this will do to the method of estimating Chinas economy via Electricity/Coal usage. What is next on the line that isn't being actively tampered with.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > I wonder what this will do to the method of estimating Chinas economy via Electricity/Coal usage. I think the causality goes the other way. I think that they are doing this because that is how their economy is measured.

Skunkleton 7y ago

This is similar, but different. We have an system that works in the normal case, that is struggling with an exceptional case. Could it be improved? Sure. Is it a sign that western civilization is doomed? No.

Bombthecat 7y ago
Yeah, that will never happen. Because we are immortal! All the civilizations before us weren't that smart and rich!
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  Of course we will evolve into something else. Flying some empty planes isn’t going to be why.

dukoid 7y ago

I heard they were running heavily loaded (= not empty) trains back and forth without any purpose other than meeting ton-km quotas, but I wasn't able to find a source... Edit: Found an article mentioning this practice: https://mont.thesentinel.com/2019/10/03/one-imperfect-day-in-vladivostok/ https://mont.thesentinel.com/2019/10/03/one-imperfect-day-in...

llukas 7y ago
I read that some types of track require stressing every so often otherwise it loses its properties (in context of Polish railway laying new track then not running heavy trains on it and in consequence track had to be replaced again).
- p_l 7y ago
  A slightly related issue is that airline pilots need to fly certain amount of time/operations to remain in current training. Part of the big problem with reactivating MiG-29 squadrons in Poland after the "aftermarket mods" resulted in grounding was that even the instructors lost the legal right to examine training level.

timthorn 7y ago

There are similar ghost trains in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150723-why-britain-has-secret-ghost-trains https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150723-why-britain-has-...

beojan 7y ago
That's not because they have targets to meet, that's because closing a station officially is very difficult.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  In both cases it's because of stupid bureaucracy, seems pretty comparable to me.

perl4ever 7y ago

I think I recall reading not too long ago about how in isolated cases recently, the price of electricity can go negative. This presumably would mean that people are being paid to waste it. But really, they're being paid to help keep the grid stable and running.

eyegor 7y ago
Most utilities don't have any way to store large amounts of energy, and it's non trivial to start up most energy generation. To me the grid looks like something between wizardry and a house of cards.

kortilla 7y ago

Not really ironic given that these airlines would choose to stop if the expected future profit didn’t make up for it.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Any large organisation will tend to run into exactly the same issues that the socialist centrally planned economies did. Centrally planning an economy simply can’t work and the inefficiency gets worse with scale. They have the politburo (the executive team), and apparatchiks (middle management). Large organisations are just a smaller version of a centrally planned economy. Market forces have very limited opportunity to influence the micro-level internal resource allocation decisions of a large organisation. There’s some things you can to do mitigate this within an organisation, but having efficiency decrease with organisational complexity and scale is inevitable. There’s only two reasons I can see that this doesn’t devolve into soviet style catastrophe. Firstly, some of the lost efficiency is offset by the economies of scale. Secondly, if an organisation becomes too inefficient, their market position can (usually) be usurped by competition. Shareholders can also fire insufficiently competent management, but usually not before the damage is done, and they can’t exactly guarantee the replacements will be any better.