Ah yes, the Blyatbox. I guess we’re going back to cold war era Russia where all their stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies of stuff from other countries. Makes sense, Putin for some reason has really had a hard-on for recreating cold war era Russia.
stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies
The reason they only had reverse-engineered copies is because the bigwigs at the CPSU decided that the workers didn’t need personal computers, despite the fact that all the computer research facilities in the USSR (of which there were plenty) recommended that they do.
If the USSR had thrown it’s weight behind personal computing we could have had some interesting shit.
Ternary computing is some serious alt-history fodder.
Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can’t compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It’s just different manufacturing paradigms.
The USSR was what is called a “shortage economy” as opposed to western capitalism’s “surplus economy”. In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.
The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that’s simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.
On non-complex stuff, I wish some of our shit was still built to last like shortage economy stuff was. It seems like planned obsolescence creeped from a handful of products to basically everything.
A lot of it is market forces and globalization — people just get the cheapest version off Amazon if they don’t know the brands — but even relatively expensive clothes, tools, charging cables, etc. break all the fucking time.
This isn’t a communist vs. capitalist rant so much as an old man one. Simple products were generally better quality in the past. The cars broke down more but the tools you needed to fix them lasted fucking generations. Jeans didn’t just rip like they do now. Even things like pocket knives lasted forever if you took basic care of them. You can still find quality products but it’s increasingly impossible in some product categories.
Planned obsolescence is a direct consequence of capitalism, and it gets worse the more capitalism develops. Capitalism, through competition and markets, makes some companies triumph and some companies to be outcompeted by the ones that triumph. This, coupled with ever-increasing capital investment by the companies that get the most profits, leads unequivocally and necessarily to increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few companies in a given sector: oligopoly and monopoly. And when a sector is dominated by oligopoly and monopoly, it means competition between companies, the whole premise of capitalism, disappears. And it is at that point when malpractice such as planned obsolescence becomes a thing, because consumers literally don’t have a choice.
You’re absolutely right that it would be great to go back to times before planned obsolescence, but the only possible way to do so is politically, by eliminating the very system that leads to planned obsolescence.
Excited for the Blyat Boy Advance
Guess they can’t keep buying Xbox controllers fpr their drones. So they create a console to get kids to play video games and natively learn the new controller they will eventually use on the battlefield
I hate how accurate you are. There’s no other reason it would be government backed ESPECIALLY during war time where they’re pissing money away and losing their soldiers left and right without be able to fill the open spots.
From what I hear, the war spending is still pretty low, all things considered. This could just be another autarky subsidy.
Blyatstation is going to be a huge success, trust me.
This is certainly a choice.
I feel bad for the devs they’re going to hold at gunpoint.
The Dendy Deck is the most exciting console ever made! I am totally not being held at gunpoint in front of a window right now!
Immediately made me think of this.
Rosconsole is best Russian console! Play exciting Russian video games!
• Is Drink Borscht Contest
• Vote for Putin
• Call of Russian Duty: Freed Maximum Security Prisoner Ops
• Tetris
• Federation of International Bandy Jam
• Soviet Food Line Simulator
I will believe it when I see it. Who will be making games for them, I wonder.
I’m genuine curious if it’s any good.
Russians are kinda EE experts. If anyone’s gonna resolder their GPU…
In orbanistan (hungary) occuppied by soviets for 40 years (but even today orban is in the pocket of putin), we have a joke: “the problem with soviet/russian microelectronics: the product does not fit through the factory gate”