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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't people just make a business of buying ladas and and selling the parts?

Old Soviet joke:

"I want to sign up for the waiting list for a car. How long is it?" / "Precisely ten years from today." / "Morning or evening?" / "Why, what difference does it make?" / "The plumber's due in the morning".

The easiest way to get spare parts was simply to steal them. Cars were frequently stolen off the street and stripped. Factory workers would smuggle in old parts, fit them to cars on the production line and smuggle out the new parts. The spares that were available invariably ended up being funnelled off into the black market.

See also the Soviet black market for blown light bulbs:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/02/mar...

This, sir, is hilarious btw.

Also, a friend of mine from Moscow IRL 90's once said the electricity went out because the power lines were stolen.

I think 2000s Iraq had thieves steal the power lines, too.

In the UK cable thieves thieves are a problem for telecoms and rail industry attaching a 4x4 to one end and dragging the cable out is one popular technique.

This some times all messes up the power for trains

Soviet Russia didn't exactly support the entrepreneurial spirit.

fair enough :\

Maybe not in a traditional sense, but they did have a pretty robust black market

And as I hear the stories, this did happen. Cars are tough because you can't do a mechanic's job without tools and some obvious space, but there are at least stories of people getting cars and parting them out at a profit. (Similarly, there are stories of tank "repair" in WWII happening by taking finished tanks meant for service and stripping them for parts to repair multiple other tanks.)

One of my favorite anecdotes is from an old episode of Car Talk. A woman called in to ask if the following was ok (I'm paraphrasing from memory):

"So my neighbor, who's from a former Soviet Bloc country is a great guy who helps me out when my car breaks down. One time my battery is dead, so he offers to jump start my car. While I look on baffled, then shocked, he unscrews his car's battery from the mounting, then flips it over and presses the contacts directly to my car's battery. It started though! So is that safe?"

To further paraphrase the guys' responses... "Oh god no!!!" They further went on to point out though, that at some point when your life is dangerous and hard as a kind of background state, the little things stop even grabbing your notice.

The degree of black marketeering in the USSR was just... staggering. Systemic. Understood to be "how the system works". Sometimes though you get tragedies like Vladimir Komarov.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/co...

I recently watched a documentary about the space race, which mostly focused on von Braun and Korolev. As I was watching it, it seemed like the Soviets had a huge advantage of secrecy. The Americans never knew what they were doing. But perhaps the constant media attention for the US held them accountable.

Going further off-topic, the fact that Korolev died because he spent years in a work camp due to the dumbest of political spitefulness is just depressing. From what I can tell, Korolev could have single-handedly won the space race for the Soviet Union - too bad they killed him.

One may wonder that one should be worried that the more the media profess their political independence, the less likely it is to be true.

I honestly don't know what you're trying to say.

Could be a "retcon" but I always heard we (the US) opened up the media on our space program as a sort of "marketing program" to show how awesome we were (on the world stage generally and specifically to the Soviets).

I'm pretty confident there's some truth to this. The core reasons may have had less to do with marketing than practicality, but at a minimum the government saw an opportunity and grabbed hold.

As for the lack of initial secrecy, that may have just been a practical consequence of why we won. NASA and JPL opened subcomponent development to private industry. At least in propellant development, this meant both research contracts and a general understanding that someone coming up with particularly good products could expect a massive government payout.

It produced great results and even got private investors to foot a large research bill. It also had the consequence that the work was rather less secret than it might have been - especially the failures, which were generally shopped around to other buyers if they had any interesting properties. But it worked out pretty well overall: even with Russia getting info about US efforts, the rate of new research was still impressive enough to be thoroughly competitive.

Anyone looking for an internal account of the (propellant) story might enjoy Ignition. It's free here, though Chrome can't handle the pdf: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

Space programs had immense propaganda value in those days. In the US, we rewired our whole primary education system in response to Sputnik. Then we structured our lunar exploration program as an unsustainable "race" for the sake of showmanship rather than science.

This is one of the handier arguments to use against moon-landing deniers. If the Russians had the slightest reason to believe that we weren't doing exactly what we said we were doing, they'd still be laughing at us.

> Then we structured our lunar exploration program as an unsustainable "race" for the sake of showmanship rather than science.

The entire Soviet space program was an unsustainable exercise in political showmanship, and 'Me first!' moments.

Consider the visiting cosmonaut program, the first woman in space (Who was also the... last woman in space, for the subsequent two decades.)

Consider the secrecy surrounding launches (To avoid getting egg on your face, if the mission fails/is aborted...)

Fortunately (Or unfortunately), if it weren't for political showmanship, neither country would have had a space program.

If the battery turned upside down was sealed would it be okay to do this?

I've only ever bought "maintenance free" sealed lead-acid car batteries. Presumably it would be okay to use one of these upside down for a brief couple of minutes.

I've bought two gel-acid sealed batteries that claimed they could be mounted and used upside down.

You don't want sparks near the terminals of a bad battery, it can cause a small explosion that showers you in battery acid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93acid_battery#Risk...

  he unscrews his car's battery from the mounting, then flips it
  over and presses the contacts directly to my car's battery.
  is that safe?

Electrically, it's not all that different from using jump leads - there's the same risk of sparks, the same voltage and load involved.

There is a risk of battery acid leakage from flipping the source battery, but that depends on the type of battery - a sealed unit is unlikely to leak.

There's also a risk of injury from being so close to the engine bay when it's started - say, if your hand came into contact with a moving part like a belt or a fan - but again, that's dependent on the layout of the engine bay, and those risks are generally clearly visible and obvious.

It's certainly not "normal" practice for the western world, but there isn't really all that much risk in it. And it turns out Americans do it too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcYjJcEZuOA

Also there's some potential for damage to electronic components like the ECU by connecting terminals in the wrong order (i.e. not +ves first). And sparking. Lots of chance of that, more than jump leads which (unless you're incompetent) aren't going to be making and breaking contact several times while you wiggle the battery around trying to make it fit.

The order in which you connect the terminals has nothing to do with preventing electrical damage. The reason why you're supposed to connect jumper cables in a particular order is for safety. When you connect just the positive, it doesn't matter if you accidentally brush the other end of the cable against the body or ground of the other car. Then the only thing left to connect is ground and if you accidentally brush the ground lead up against the body then it isn't going to matter as you're trying to connect that lead to ground. Also, the reason why you connect the last lead to a well grounded part of the engine away from the battery on the god car is because that's the only connection that creates sparks. Sparks around a bad battery are a bad idea. Batteries regularly create some Hydrogen and Oxygen gas, normally it doesn't produce that much at all and it gets vented out of the battery but with a bad battery it might have very little electrolyte left and it might have multiple cells filled with a bit of acid and a lot of explosive gas. If that spark ignites any explosive gases in the battery it will probably crack apart the plastic casing and shower you with battery acid.

There's the same amount of sparks but now instead of the sparks being on a grounded part of the engine away from the battery the sparking occurs right at the terminals. The problem with bad batteries is that it might not just be dead, batteries will vent hydrogen and oxygen and on batteries that lost most of the electrolyte in a cell they might have enough hydrogen in them to blow the battery apart and throw acid over the person jumping the battery.

Also, the risk of battery acid leaking is probably a good bit better than you might think. If you just grab a run of the mill car battery there's a very good chance that it's just a regular old wet cell battery with an open vent so it'll leak acid if you turn it upside down.

More and more i find myself thinking back to a claim that Lenin asked Marx about the latters thoughts about turning Russia communist, and Marx scoffing at the idea.

This because Marx envisioned the transition happening after capitalism hit a crisis, where upon the workers would take over and continue to operate the factories within the existing supply network (more coops, less central planning).

In the USSR however it seemed one got more akin to the old Ford factory, where raw iron and coal came in at one end, and finished Model Ts rolled out the other.

Thus there were no independent sub-suppliers of parts, everything was made internally as needed, and nothing more.

For some reason, at first, I thought it was a comedy bit.

Yes, this was one of the places where Lenin diverged from classical Marxist thought. Marx argued that society would slowly and naturally evolve towards socialism as workers gained experience and "class consciousness" from struggling with their capitalist bosses. Lenin argued that the slow evolution Marx had predicted was not actually happening, so a "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) of highly committed activists and intellectuals was needed to drag the workers into the socialist future they stubbornly refused to realize they wanted.

In retrospect this can be seen as a turning point in the process by which communism, a philosophy devoted to letting the masses rule themselves, turned into Soviet communism, a system in which the masses were bossed by party elites as hard or harder as they had been by the old czars and capitalists.

Ah yes, vanguards. Worked so wonderfully in France, Russia, and Egypt. Yep, that's sarcasm if you can't tell.

What i am referring to in each instance is the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the various fundamentalist groups around the middle east that follow some interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's philosophy.

Red Plenty (by Francis Spufford), a novel about economic planning in the USSR, is an excellent read and characterizes the information problems at the core of the failure of central planning.

Because, just like concert tickets, there weren't enough cars, and they were sold at below-market price.

This meant that people would pre-order vehicles years in advance - and had to get extremely 'creative' when it came to keeping them running. (As jdietrich alluded to.)

The other problem with cars is that given 10 broken vehicles, there is high likelihood that 4 of them have the same broken part.

This is still a problem in Cuba, Ladas are still really common over there, I just can't imagine all the hacks they must do on a daily basis just to keep them running. I spent my last vacations in Cuba, one day I met a really nice taxi driver who owned a Lada, he asked for my E-Mail and asked me to let him know of any Lada parts seller.

Because you couldnt just walk into a shop and buy a car. You literally had to have a car buying permit, which might take years to get. Because of this, used cars could cost singificantly more than a brand new one from a shop.

You would have had trouble finding the parts or finding parts for the machines to build the parts. Or finding the parts to build the machines to build the parts to build the machines to build the parts.

I hope you get the idea.

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