It’s an early ERP system. People undersell or oversell it depending on their ideological bias but that’s what it’s most comparable to imo.
It’s not particularly exciting but it was a practical idea.
It’s not particularly exciting but it was a practical idea.
Modern Free SocietiesTM lose their minds over networked water meters; this was a near-real-time index of important metrics from the country's important industries. The actually-Marxist government used this data to wage class war against the still-private owners of eg trucking companies. We don't hold with that sort of panopticon in the West, no sir!
...Regarding corporations, obviously. Citizens dutifully endure their smartphones and smartspeakers and smartdoorbells reporting important metrics to advertisers and Amazon and the cops. The point is that ideology colours everything.
(Water meters more often than not as well.)
What are the chances your gas station does not record the plates and gas purchase data together? Or the credit card number. Or perhaps even driver's license number in some places.
Etc. Ad nauseam.
The data is just not directly available to either the consumer or the government. That does not make for good privacy though.
Try to calculate if Germany will run out of gas this winter. You can't . Because economy is not centrally planned.
If you had the in depth data such a network provided, the estimate would likely be more accurate.
The monitoring of this sort is done by every energy company these days, just not public or interlinked. The governments get lump values from the big companies instead.
For example: take gas from paper-clip factory and give it to fertilizer factory?
Governments these days use pricing, including special case pricing and tax breaks to achieve a similar thing even more roughly. Unless there are shortages, in which case they intervene directly.
So, what we have now is actually much less efficient.