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Appendix B2: The Capital of Capital
Appendix B2: The Capital of Capital.

The City of London was, and still is, often referred to as a single entity, particularly amongst those keen to ascribe cunning scheming or malevolent intent to the nebulous forces of finance it represented. This is of course untrue, the shear variety of services offered and trades carried out by up the firms that worked in the City made a degree of internal disagreement inevitable and the various 'tribes' would regularly find themselves on opposite sides of the policy argument. That said there was some common ground and on a few select issues they could manage to speak with one voice, or at least as a mostly coherent choir. The most commonly held views were on trade, where the vast majority of the City's denizens were enthusiastic free traders for the simple reason that trade was the lifeblood of the City; the more the world traded, the more opportunities for profit there were. This was not just the trade of Britain, or even that of the Empire, from the perspective of the City any increase in world trade was an opportunity and something that would somehow end up benefiting them. An example from the summer of 1937 will perhaps demonstrate why this believe was so widely held.

The question of German-Japanese trade had been bothering both governments for quite some time; Japan was running a large deficit it could ill afford, while Germany worried about it's exposure to the risk of another devaluation of the Yen and the lack of any way to use the large Yen balances it was piling up. In theory the new Japanese policy for Manchukuo seemed to offer a way out of this; Manchurian agricultural exports could be used to pay for the German machinery imports the ambitious industrialisation plans required. Japan could therefore reduce it's own industrial imports (many of which had been earmarked for being sent onto Manchuria) while Germany would remove the Yen foreign exchange risk as it was being paid in raw materials, mostly high energy soy beans which became the fats and margarines that German farming could not produce. There was of course a problem and it was naturally political; the German government had not recognised Manchuria so could not officially trade with them. The Reich was trying to walk a careful path between China and Japan, hoping to keep both on side as trading partners and perhaps future Allies or distractions, so had not wished to enrage Nanjing by recognising Japan's puppet state. The solution was to forgo the preferred government to government treaty and instead use the German trading house of Otto Wolff to broker a theoretically commercial deal. Otto Wolff would take large scale industrial orders from the Manchukuo government and undertake to deliver them up front, then being repaid partly in cash but mostly in twice yearly agricultural shipments deal. The directors of Otto Wolff being reassured by a secret Reichsbank guarantee that the exports could be sold on in Germany and they weren't actually taking any risk. The relevance of this to the City was the credit facility was denominated in Sterling, the first batch of orders having a value of £2million (for scale total German exports to Japan were barely £30 million in 1936), and the 'cash' part of the repayment was also specified to be Sterling.

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The monumentally vast Bush House in Central London shortly before the final finishing works. The dream of the American industrialist Irving T. Bush the building, and it's sister tower block in New York, were intended as temples of trade and visible symbols of Anglo-American friendship. After Bush's bankruptcy in the Great Depression the new owners were rather more concerned with just getting tenants into what had been dubbed 'the most expensive building in the world' (due to it's lavish use of Portland Stone and extravagantly decorated interior) and so departed somewhat from that vision. One of the new tenants was Arcos (the All Russian Co-Operative Society), the Soviet import/export guarantee body and occasional espionage front. Arcos was one of the many Soviet financial institutions based in London and it operated along side the older Russian banks and merchant organisations that the Soviets had claimed and nationalised. Not only was London a nexus for trade, even Soviet trade, it was the home of the London Gold Fix which was the benchmark sterling price for the precious metal. The London price was the reference rate used for all bullion transactions outside of the 'Gold Bloc' nations and, as a leading Gold exporter, the Soviet Union deemed it valuable to keep a close eye on the bullion market.

Aside from a certain amusement in seeing two proudly autarkic governments deciding to use Sterling the benefits to Britain do not appear immediately obvious, and in a direct sense that is somewhat true. It is from the consequences of the deal that the benefits flowed to the City, starting with the need for Japan to acquire moderately large amounts of Sterling to make the 'hard currency' element of the repayments. This implied increased Anglo-Japanese trade as Tokyo sought to earn the required foreign exchange with obvious benefits to the merchant banks who would facilitate the trade. While the goods covered by the deal would be carried on German and Japanese shipping, neither nation possessed enough tonnage to even carry their existing trade let alone any extra, so ships had to diverted from existing trade and were replaced by tonnage chartered from British lines. With that came the whole trail of ship brokers, insurance, merchant banking, bunkering and all the other professions who made their living facilitating trade. Finally when Japan made it's repayments those funds would not go into the Reichsbanks reserves but be used to pay for yet more German imports from either Britain or the wider Sterling Area. The government, to the limited extent it was aware of this transaction and the many like it, were somewhat less enthused about the Sterling Area being used to help Germany and Japan strengthen their economies. But just as the ubiquity of Sterling had many advantages for Britain it was recognised there were costs, not least of which was that people would use the currency for purposes you would rather they didn't. With enough effort from the Bank of England and Treasury the deal could have been scuppered, or at least forced to use a different currency and made to take longer to arrange and settle. However this minor benefit would have come at the very high cost of discouraging the countless other overseas parties transacting in Sterling and driving trade towards the ever-eager arms of New York or Paris. Sterling was pre-eminent because it was available, widely accepted and useful, if it became apparent the British government would intervene to stop it being used for certain purpose that would undercut that utility. Thus, like the Soviet banking presence in London and many other annoyances, the trade was monitored but tolerated as a price that had to be paid. It should also be noted that the many disparate intelligence groups scattered across the government had long since become accustomed to using this 'commercial intelligence' to supplement the information that came from more official sources.

If trade was the subject of widespread agreement within the City then loans and credits were a point of tension, though as any good banker should admit new and existing loans are always a point of tension for a financial institution as they require various contradictory concerns to be balanced. This remained a truism whether the loan was for a domestic mortgage or a new mineral export harbour in Peru, even if the number of factors that had to be balanced increased considerably for the latter. Taken as a whole Britain had a very large stock of investments, offered trade credits, and outstanding debtors, all of which generated a substantial portion of the 'invisible export' income that the overall balance of trade depended upon. This stock had to be added to by issuing new credits and offering new loans as old ones were paid off, because if not that income would shrink. Indeed ideally the stock of outstanding instruments should grow, so that the income generated and returned back to London and thence the country would also grow. Furthermore, just because the City was pre-eminent did not mean British capital had a monopoly, far from it, so the terms had to be keen as most would-be debtors had options beyond the City. The source of the tension should therefore be clear, debtors only had so much money they could use to make payments and if too much new debt was added then they may not have enough to pay the new debts and their existing old debts, particularly if any new investment would take time to generate an income (if indeed it ever did).

A balancing act was therefore required and for much of the 1920s the creditors had been in ascendance and the British government had prioritised collection of old debts. Trade deals had emphasised how a portion of any Sterling generated for the foreign power had to be used for debt servicing, these deals and measures like them had seen British creditors achieve repayments far in excess of their peers in Paris and New York. As the Depression struck minds in London started to change, it became apparent that the previous approach was having unanticipated costs, or at least unanticipated in terms of scale and consequence. Money spent on debt servicing could not be spent on British exports and the demands for surety of repayment where making British investments less attractive. The merchant banking sector of the City was also making the argument that if the debtors economies could be helped to grow they would find their existing commitments a lighter burden. The tipping point was the appointment of Walter Runciman to the Board of Trade in 1931, appointed to balance the pro-tariff Neville Chamberlain in the Treasury he would oversee a change in trade policy. Instead of chasing old debts Britain used it's leverage to promote British exports and new overseas investment. This change did indeed produce results as exports increased considerably and, significantly, they rose far faster than imports. Whether this success was being achieved at the cost of storing up problems for later as the creditors claimed, was of course, a different question.

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A new narrow gauge diesel rail car from the Birmingham Carriage & Wagon Company undergoing final inspection, and photo opportunity, prior to being shipped to Argentina for service on the British owned Buenos Aries Western Railway line in early 1937. Out of the roughly £500million of British capital invested in Argentina by the mid 1930s some 60% of it, almost £300million, was invested in railway companies. Railway schemes had long been considered the ideal overseas investment; they required plenty of British engineers and exports to build, the locomotives and major replacements were often sourced from Britain, they did not compete with any existing British industry (indeed they often opened new markets for exports) and they were profitable so the creditors got repaid (provided one ignored the occasional over-budget disasters and failures of planning). However by the mid 1930s there were few places that had not already had their own 'railway mania' at some point, so British capital had to look for new projects and to the regret of the government these were often more controversial. It must be said that with hindsight this was probably for the best, with the rise of the cheap passenger car and the affordable lorry, railways were no longer the profitable venture they had once been.

The new projects themselves were, in the absence of the traditional railway investment schemes, generally 'Grand Projects'; the large scale and occasionally quixotic industrial works programmes that proliferated as countries either sought to escape the Depression or elevate their nation up the ranks of power. Due to their size (and often questionable business case) the schemes were generally led by the foreign government in question and could struggle to attract conventional investors. The City's solution was to enlist the help of the Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) of the British government to assist in getting the projects financed. Setup in the aftermath of the Great War to restore British exports in markets that had been lost during the war, the ECGD had broad powers to guarantee debts, underwrite loans and even raise it's own funds as required. Yet those powers were rarely exercised as ECGD involvement was something of a self fulfilling prophecy; the presence of the guarantees meant the guarantees were rarely called upon. A foreign government defaulting on commercial loans was one thing, to a certain extent the Treasury and Bank of England encouraged the idea that investors must face the consequences of their decisions, but to default on a loan backed by the British government would have diplomatic consequences. In a typical ECGD scheme the 'price' for the guarantee was the understanding that British firms be used for the design and engineering and that British suppliers would provide all the necessary equipment. It must be stated this was not a British innovation but very much par for the course, any nation with pretentious for an export industry had an organisation like the ECGD with similar aims and powers.

Typically 'Grand Project' schemes were deemed 'strategic' by the foreign government promoting them and in some cases this was not just a euphemism for 'loss making bad idea' but a correct description (and of course often it was both). The largest and most lucrative of these strategic projects in the 1930s and 40s were Iron and Steel works; the thought process in the promoting nations tended to be that great powers had their own steel industry, the country in question wanted to be a great power, so therefore it needed a steel works. This was to the great annoyance of the British government as Steel was one of the more sensitive industrial questions in the country; Britain was the 3rd largest steel exporter in the world, but also the 1st largest importer. This is not quite as mad as it seems because 'steel' covered everything from girders, to cutlery, to car bodies to armour plate and no nation could make every type, even the Americans and Soviets imported certain specialist grades of steel. It did however mean that any new overseas mill was seen as a threat to British exports and a 'waste' of capital that should be spent building a new mill in the UK so Britain imported less. Then of course there was the Imperial dimension as the Dominions were all net importers of steel and could be relied upon to agitate for further investment in their own pet schemes. That the British government persisted was for reasons both commercial and strategic.

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The Karabuk Iron and Steel Works, north Turkey, just after full opening in 1940. Turkey had been attempting to build a modern steel works since before Turkey had existed, it had been a dream of the Ottoman state going back to the mid 19th century. There were many reasons for the failure but a key one was that, economically, the entire scheme made very little sense; Turkey lacked any iron ore mines, her coal was low grade and poor quality, and the domestic Turkish iron and steel market was not large. To support the new works it also proved necessary to build almost all the supporting infrastructure; power stations, sintering works, coking works and so on, then to connect them up with new railways and provide new ports to handle the imported iron ore. Unsurprisingly the Karabuk works proved to need heavy subsidy and steep protective tariffs in order to survive, while the idea of 'profits' was a distant dream, a depressingly regular outcome for such schemes regardless of who initiated them.

On the commercial level the schemes were lucrative, not perhaps for those who planned them but certainly for those who designed and built them. To take the example of the Karabuk works, total fees came in at £2.5 million and the supply of plant and equipment provided 30,000 man-years of work for the supply chain in Britain. Moreover it was work that went to those parts of the British economy most in need, the heavy industry areas that had struggled to escape the Depression. The technical success of the works was also valuable, Karabuk did not make money but it did make steel in the required quantities and to the specified standard. Where Krupp had previously dominated, future British consortia had a success outside of the Empire to use as a selling point. The most important motivation though was grand strategy, Germany had ambitions in Turkey and had funded railways and wider works as part of their plan to woo the Turkish government. The Karabuk contract broke that run of success and inserted British interests into the most strategic project in Turkey and made Ankara dependent on Britain to finally achieve their decades long dream. It is hardly surprising that the Foreign Office had lobbied hard for a relaxation on the usual ECGD limits to push the project through, nor that the Imperial General Staff and Board of Trade had joined them. A secondary strategic benefit came from the payment and this returns us to the original view of the City; any increase in trade was always a benefit to the City. Under the pretence that it would take time for Karabuk to become profitable (it being un-diplomatic to doubt it would ever actually turn a profit) the British consortia, the ECGD and the Turkish government agreed that repayments were linked to a claim on Turkish mineral exports of chrome, molybdenum and manganese amongst other strategic materials. This was to prove highly satisfactory and a pattern that would be repeated on future schemes were there were concerns about repayment, not least the vast works contracted for in Brazil and China near the end of the decade. From a British government perspective the arrangement restricted Germany's access to such materials, at no cost to the British taxpayer, and brought Turkey further into the British sphere of influence. Viewed from that perspective a guarantee on a loan and further complaints from the Steel lobby doubtless seemed a small price to pay.

These issues would all surface during the Imperial Economic Conference and none of them would be easily resolved. The ECGD proved to be a surprisingly controversial subject, mainly due to Dominion complaints that it did not apply to investment within the Empire. As such investments were not see as 'exports', just moving capital around the Empire, this is perhaps understandable but the problem remained. There were schemes to promote investment within Britain (the Special Area Scheme) and for investment elsewhere (the ECGD) but nothing for intra-Empire projects, making them comparatively less attractive. With the aero-industrialisation schemes discussed in earlier chapters starting to ramp up in Australia and Canada this was becoming an issue, the main factories were getting funded but the supply chain was struggling for financing. More precisely they weren't so much struggling as upset at paying commercial rates and wanted to get ECGD under-written funding instead (government backed debts being less risky and so lower interest). The Dominions could have provide incentives that matched ECGD, but naturally wanted London to bear the risk and costs instead as it would be British firms that mostly benefitted. London believed that as the Dominions wanted the factories, they could pay for them. At heart it was a mismatch between politics and economics; the Dominions had their own budget, debt and policies so were naturally treated as separate countries by bankers assessing risk, but politically they saw themselves as part of the Empire and wanted to see benefits from this, such as being seen as low risk debts. The Sterling issue somehow managed to be more explosive, even if it was more tightly focused on Canada. While the rest of the Empire, and much of the world, pegged to Sterling, Canada had linked to the US Dollar due to proximity as much as anything else. The US adherence to Gold when Britain devalued had been painful and it had only got more painful, her exports were over-priced and the US tariff wall caused even cross-border trade to collapse. Canada had always been an oddity, inside Imperial Free Trade but outside the Sterling Area, but the contradictions were becoming impossible to bear. The Conference would see a choice finally made.

--
Notes:
Well that is the 'short update' idea truly dead, killed by this monster. But are you now not better informed about the balance of trade, the Sterling Area and the wonderful world of overseas foreign investment?

From the top, the German-Japan-Manchukuo trade deal is OTL as is the use of Sterling. I find the idea of the two main Axis powers having to use Pounds to trade with each other a fascinating detail, so naturally had to include it. The currency aside it was a fairly standard German 'barter' deal, machine tools being essentially swapped for Soy beans, the sort of deal you have to do when none of the countries involved has useable currencies or 'normal' economies. You can see why the British were so confident the German economy would implode under blockade, because it was a Frankenstein's monster of a mess pre-war.

British readers and/or fans of the BBC may recognise Bush House as home of the World Service in OTL, though they did not move in until during WW2 when their main studio was bombed. There is no link to the recent Presidential Bush family as Irving T. Bush was from an unrelated Dutch family. He did go bankrupt OTL and lose control, but I think he got it back briefly. Here the Depression in the US is worse, so it is gone for good. Arcos is OTL, as was their spying in the 1920s, and they did end up in Bush House which I find mildly funny given it's original intent.

British investments in Argentina were that huge and were heavily railway focused, most of said railways did pay nice fat dividends until the late 1920s. For once the Depression was not the problem, it was the rise of taxis and cheap lorries under-cutting them and the government restrictions on fares and rates. There were tensions pre-war about this, but then everyone got distracted by the war and things drifted. Post-war Peron nationalised the lot at a cheap price, though in fairness the train lines weren't worth much once the country was flooded with war surplus vehicles that finally destroyed their chance of ever making a profit.

The Turkish Steel Mill is OTL as is the repayment scheme, the Foreign Office, IGS and everyone else did have a view and it went through with an ECGD guarantee. The war cut off Iron Ore imports to Turkey so they developed a domestic supply and kept going. It was famous for always losing money and terrible management, but it meant Turkey had a domestic iron and steel supply during WW2. Post-war it became a mill-stone of losses and debt, but by then it was definitely un-closeable due to Cold War grand strategy and a desire for a steel supply that could not be cut off. OTL the Brazilian mill (Vargas works) got built by the US during the war on dodgy terms as a "please don't join the Axis" bribe, while the Chinese mill in the Canton valley was being designed and finance discussed with a British consortium, then the Japanese rudely interrupted with the Marco Polo Bridge incident. With that not happening and China in the Sterling Area the scheme is going ahead.

The ECGD did exist as discussed and everyone had their own equivalent. The US had the Export-Import Bank that FDR setup in 1934 and I'm assuming something similar happens in Butterfly because it is so damn obvious and everyone else is doing it.

Finally Canada did peg to the USD but did sign up to the Ottawa agreement on British Empire tariffs. It did get a bit rough when the UK devalued before the US, but it was a short gap so manageable. Here the US is still on Gold so maintaining the CA$-USD peg is hurting. Something has to give and the Imperial Economic Conference is when it does.
 
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Wise words as always. This is probably why the actual next chapter ended up as around 4,000 words. Which as you say is a proper Butterfly length.
Of course! Though as I've noted in my own, the latest updates out of Japan have been relatively quick (though certainly not painless, especially for the Commonwealth members here!). For instance, the last two updates from Japan have totalled out to under 1k words (which includes the picture blurbs), but the R&D chapters could rise to over 3k... and one set was over 4k! Taken together, the chapter of the North Sea naval engagements was somehow over 10k words. Clearly...

Dundee chapter was 2,000 so you are probably correct on the length. I do have aspirations to be able to dismiss entire topics in a single less than respectful sentence, I just can't quite manage it.
I feel like sometimes this happens to me, and about things that should have not been dismissed.

Minions or Subjects. Either works for me.
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A foolish role to put yourself in. If nothing else I have endurance on my side, I can probably keep majestically writing this longer than people will have patience to keep reading.
He has thrown down the gauntlet...

And now, if @Wraith11B can keep control of himself, we have reached the bottom of the page so I can post the next chapter and get top of the next page.
I have proven to be so capable!
 
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What luck, an update, and thus the optimal time to delurk having read through this entire only-slightly-monstrous beast of an A"A"R over the past two months.

The most commonly held views were on trade, where the vast majority of the City's denizens were enthusiastic free traders for the simple reason that trade was the lifeblood of the City; the more the world traded, the more opportunities for profit there were.
City of London is now confirmed as having been founded by a group of Ferengi who found themselves displaced in time and space.

The directors of Otto Wolff being reassured by a secret Reichsbank guarantee that the exports could be sold on in Germany and they weren't actually taking any risk.
Ah, government reassurance, surely there can be nothing more trustworthy of course. Just in case, someone check and make sure the Reich government isn't being run by a collection of sociopaths, pathological liars, and madmen with a tenuous-at-best grip on reality and an even worse comprehension of basic macroeconomics. Just in case, I say.

One of the new tenants was Arcos (the All Russian Co-Operative Society), the Soviet import/export guarantee body and occasional espionage front.
"Occasional", a word which here means "on every occasion". See also: spies, Soviet.

But just as the ubiquity of Sterling had many advantages for Britain it was recognised there were costs, not least of which was that people would use the currency for purposes you would rather they didn't.
In this respect the position of Britain is rather analogous to that of a parent of teenagers, in this way among others as I'm sure our authAAR will demonstrate agreement with by posting his trademark nodding smiley.
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It should also be noted that the many disparate intelligence groups scattered across the government had long since become accustomed to using this 'commercial intelligence' to supplement the information that came from more official sources.
And thus we find once more proof of that old investigative adage, Follow the Money.

This is not quite as mad as it seems because 'steel' covered everything from girders, to cutlery, to car bodies to armour plate and no nation could make every type, even the Americans and Soviets imported certain specialist grades of steel.
Someone should also check and make sure the aforementioned Germans are aware of this immutable fact. Again, just in case.

Unsurprisingly the Karabuk works proved to need heavy subsidy and steep protective tariffs in order to survive, while the idea of 'profits' was a distant dream, a depressingly regular outcome for such schemes regardless of who initiated them.
Anyone who counts on a government scheme to be profitable is either quite delusional, or surrounded by those who are.

Of course, this need not be a knock on government schemes, more an indication that "profit" and "government" ought not be found in the same sentence as the word "scheme".

Well that is the 'short update' idea truly dead, killed by this monster. But are you now not better informed about the balance of trade, the Sterling Area and the wonderful world of overseas foreign investment?
Verily and indeed, Amen.

I have proven to be so capable!
Only barely, in fact following so closely behind that one suspects this is only because Lord Pip beat you too it, and not out of any good-will of your own!

On a couple of other notes from recent pages of the thread, as I can recall them:
  • Someone, likely Pip, had @'ed me about some arcane game mechanics question, which sadly I would not have been able to answer due to the fact that my expertise on game mechanics, AI vagaries, and game file typos is sadly limited to HoI3, thus here I can only but spectate, kibitz and vote for tanks.
  • A pox upon whoever in this thread mentioned Aurora 4X and cursed me with yet another time sink to detract from more important things, such as all the other pointless time sinks I use to distract myself. :p
  • I would caution Lord Pip not to consider myself a "subject", as through no fault of my own besides being born an American my presence in this thread may quickly become quite...revolting.
  • Particularly given the rather taxing length of the average update. :p
 
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What luck, an update, and thus the optimal time to delurk having read through this entire only-slightly-monstrous beast of an A"A"R over the past two months.
Indeed! Though I feel like if we kept up the pressure of top-of-page I'd imagine they might come along faster.

City of London is now confirmed as having been founded by a group of Ferengi who found themselves displaced in time and space.
They lurk in the shadows, for sure.

Ah, government reassurance, surely there can be nothing more trustworthy of course. Just in case, someone check and make sure the Reich government isn't being run by a collection of sociopaths, pathological liars, and madmen with a tenuous-at-best grip on reality and an even worse comprehension of basic macroeconomics. Just in case, I say.
Fairly certain that somehow, El Pip is making the Reich... well, perhaps not the punching bag of Europe, but certainly not the Boogeyman that Paradox encourages it to be.

"Occasional", a word which here means "on every occasion". See also: spies, Soviet.
"spies, Soviet" sounds too much like a tautology.

In this respect the position of Britain is rather analogous to that of a parent of teenagers, in this way among others as I'm sure our authAAR will demonstrate agreement with by posting his trademark nodding smiley.
DYAEiOu.gif
Give the man a few years (perhaps ten) and he will likely nod sagely.
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Someone should also check and make sure the aforementioned Germans are aware of this immutable fact. Again, just in case.
In Paradox worlds, this is pure fantasy talk.

Only barely, in fact following so closely behind that one suspects this is only because Lord Pip beat you too it, and not out of any good-will of your own!
Barely, because I stopped long enough to watch the post happen! It was magic!

On a couple of other notes from recent pages of the thread, as I can recall them:
  • Someone, likely Pip, had @'ed me about some arcane game mechanics question, which sadly I would not have been able to answer due to the fact that my expertise on game mechanics, AI vagaries, and game file typos is sadly limited to HoI3, thus here I can only but spectate, kibitz and vote for tanks.
  • A pox upon whoever in this thread mentioned Aurora 4X and cursed me with yet another time sink to detract from more important things, such as all the other pointless time sinks I use to distract myself. :p
  • I would caution Lord Pip not to consider myself a "subject", as through no fault of my own besides being born an American my presence in this thread may quickly become quite...revolting.
  • Particularly given the rather taxing length of the average update. :p
1) Same.
2) I feel the pain, though I was sorely tempted a few days back when the remastered Command and Conquer was on sale on Steam...
3/4) Way to stick it to the Redcoat about all of the lovely Americanisms! Yes!
 
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Fairly certain that somehow, El Pip is making the Reich... well, perhaps not the punching bag of Europe, but certainly not the Boogeyman that Paradox encourages it to be.
It seems that generally w.r.t. Germany, we have in this AAR two what-ifs: on one hand, "what if the rest of Europe hadn't cocked everything up?". On the other hand, "what if Germany had an actual parent who taught them about consequences for their actions?" and for the latter I return to my earlier commentary.

"spies, Soviet" sounds too much like a tautology.
It's for emphasis.

2) I feel the pain, though I was sorely tempted a few days back when the remastered Command and Conquer was on sale on Steam...
I commend you for resisting the temptation. On one hand, nothing entitled "remastered" is ever worth getting, at best you get the same thing you could have gotten in a regular version and much more often you get something with all the nostalgia wrung out of it to keep a graphics department employed. Doubly beware if the "remastered" version is then subjected to additional "patches" which couch obvious money-grabs as "improvements" to the game which go in completely another direction from the original philosophy.
 
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For a second, I thought that Hitler was planning to bomb London with beans, with terrible and farting consequences.
 
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There were actually surprisingly few History Book ones.

Indeed. Everyone wants to inject their own characters and have them take Germany down themselves.

A foolish role to put yourself in. If nothing else I have endurance on my side, I can probably keep majestically writing this longer than people will have patience to keep reading.

All we have to do is wait.

The City of London was, and still is, often referred to as a single entity

It really is, legally and politically, a single entity, just with wildly out of control limbs.

The monumentally vast Bush House in Central London shortly before the final finishing works.

Now host to the business school at Kings College, which means the place is grand, cold, and now full of business graduates. Eurgh.
 
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Now that is more like the way things should be! A nice "short" and very interesting post, filled with facts about steel production in (OTL) neutral nations that you wouldn't get in any other AAR. I particularly enjoyed the American steelworks built in Brazil as a bribe not to join the axis (could be an update in that ;) ).
 
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Now that is more like the way things should be! A nice "short" and very interesting post, filled with facts about steel production in (OTL) neutral nations that you wouldn't get in any other AAR. I particularly enjoyed the American steelworks built in Brazil as a bribe not to join the axis (could be an update in that ;) ).

Plus I managed to hold my comments for an entire many hours, just so princess could have her top page. Galling to do that only for it to be a love letter to the Bloody City of Scum and Villainy.
 
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A grand update. Nice to hear British commercial interest in China continues to progress and wonder what will happen in Imperial Conference. Is it possible for Canada to enter Sterling zone (forgive me if this is stupid question) and would that be good (and how good?) for the unity of the empire?
 
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A grand update. Nice to hear British commercial interest in China continues to progress and wonder what will happen in Imperial Conference. Is it possible for Canada to enter Sterling zone (forgive me if this is stupid question) and would that be good (and how good?) for the unity of the empire?

It's possible...and more likely the longer the US is in economic meltdown and isolationist. Not sure whether that point will ever come though, unless the US collapses into civil war. The dollar is just a little too powerful and prevelant in the amercias to use much else, at least long term.

However, the US economy and dollar have plummeted and not shown any sign of recovery. And the rest of the empire is booming (apparently) because imperial preference saved them all. Unity is at an all-time high, politically and economically. So if they were ever going to be swayed away (and not federalised a la 1901), it would be about now. Something has to change for Canada to stay fiscally consistent. They have to leave the imperial zone, or give up the dollar.

As for the empire...mostly good I think. Canada is a fairly robust and strong economy. Them linking themselves more tightly to Britian and everyone else would be good for everyone else (for the most part, I think). For Canada? It really depends on what they end up doing after full independence. Or rather, what the Commonwealth ends up being. If its a euro-zone with a shared central bank and currency (I'm fairly sure Pip won't do this) in the long run, then fine. If they leave and have to make their own currency, its inevitably going to orbit around the dollar again. So once more, the question is taken out of Canadian hands and back into what the UK and USA do.

This incidentally, is one of the main reasons why you wouldn't want to have to chose, if you were Canada. You're placing a lot of faith on someone else to be economically responsible and fortunate in the long run.
 
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I feel like sometimes this happens to me, and about things that should have not been dismissed.
It was @Jape who suggested the alternate subtitle for this work - "Butterfly Effect, or; I crammed 1938 inside my head."

I'd blame it on being overly-ambitious, but honestly that over-states the level of conscious thought behind the choices. I'd much rather write about a subject that interests me, or that I know nothing about, than anything as mundane as advance the plot. This has had a detrimental impact on the rate of progress, but that cannot be helped at this point.

He has thrown down the gauntlet...
Indeed I have sirrah, indeed I have.

What luck, an update, and thus the optimal time to delurk having read through this entire only-slightly-monstrous beast of an A"A"R over the past two months.
Hurrah and welcome aboard. Many a lesser reader abandon the effort, so congratulations on making it this far.

City of London is now confirmed as having been founded by a group of Ferengi who found themselves displaced in time and space.
Why not the other way round?

Ah, government reassurance, surely there can be nothing more trustworthy of course. Just in case, someone check and make sure the Reich government isn't being run by a collection of sociopaths, pathological liars, and madmen with a tenuous-at-best grip on reality and an even worse comprehension of basic macroeconomics. Just in case, I say.
The Reich government then reassured them that if they didn't do the trade, they would all be arrested and shot. And that's a government guarantee anyone can rely on.

"Occasional", a word which here means "on every occasion". See also: spies, Soviet.
Mostly. The Soviet did really badly need hard currency so had to include a few non-spies to do the actual business deals, spies are quite bad at commerce.

In this respect the position of Britain is rather analogous to that of a parent of teenagers, in this way among others as I'm sure our authAAR will demonstrate agreement with by posting his trademark nodding smiley.
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There is something of the "adults not in the room" about the Inter-war period in OTL. A lot of people who could have stepped up and just sorted things out before they got out of hand but didn't, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not.

That is literally the smiley from my imgur account, good work. I can only respond with my other trademark nodding smiley.
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And thus we find once more proof of that old investigative adage, Follow the Money.
A plan that has never been known to fail.

Someone should also check and make sure the aforementioned Germans are aware of this immutable fact. Again, just in case.
99.999% of Germany is absolutely well aware of the problems of steel, as we shall see later. I even think the chap at the top is aware at this point, his... unique... medical regime has not yet taken it's catastrophic toll.

Anyone who counts on a government scheme to be profitable is either quite delusional, or surrounded by those who are.

Of course, this need not be a knock on government schemes, more an indication that "profit" and "government" ought not be found in the same sentence as the word "scheme".
I'm not 100% sure if the Turkish and Brazilian governments were being delusional or just lying on the off-chance someone believed them, but they talked a good talk on how their steel mills (and other things) would be profitable. No-one believed them of course, but various pretences had to be made.

On a couple of other notes from recent pages of the thread, as I can recall them:
  • Someone, likely Pip, had @'ed me about some arcane game mechanics question, which sadly I would not have been able to answer due to the fact that my expertise on game mechanics, AI vagaries, and game file typos is sadly limited to HoI3, thus here I can only but spectate, kibitz and vote for tanks.
It is heartening to see that the Men of Tanks have new members to replenish their ranks. :)

  • A pox upon whoever in this thread mentioned Aurora 4X and cursed me with yet another time sink to detract from more important things, such as all the other pointless time sinks I use to distract myself. :p
  • I would caution Lord Pip not to consider myself a "subject", as through no fault of my own besides being born an American my presence in this thread may quickly become quite...revolting.
  • Particularly given the rather taxing length of the average update. :p
"Minion" it is then.

I am also feeling very proud of myself for resisting the temptation to start properly playing Aurora 4X C#. I wasted far too much time on the original version so have avoided the new version as that will probably be worse.

Indeed! Though I feel like if we kept up the pressure of top-of-page I'd imagine they might come along faster.
My secret is out.

Fairly certain that somehow, El Pip is making the Reich... well, perhaps not the punching bag of Europe, but certainly not the Boogeyman that Paradox encourages it to be.
My impression is that no-one in Paris or London was scared of Germany, in the sense of thinking the Germans would win any war. It was known Germany was running on bluster and economically lurching from crisis to crisis, as it tried to do too much with too little. Hence why provoking an economic collapse and/or revolution in Germany was the war strategy. The Allied political leadership feared the cost of even a victorious war, not the chances of Germany winning. With hindsight (and indeed at the time) this a mistake and allowed Germany to grow stronger and actually become a threat. I say threat, but the Battle of France was still on a knife-edge and only very small changes would be enough to make Sicklecut fail and allow the French to form a defensive line. Once that happens Germany has thrown it's punch, is out of reserves, ammo and supplies and is basically doomed.

Give the man a few years (perhaps ten) and he will likely nod sagely.
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I will embrace the problems of teenagers in a heartbeat if it means I can get a lie-in and not be bounced awake by excited small children in the early hours.

Barely, because I stopped long enough to watch the post happen! It was magic!
Sometimes I wonder if you stalk the thread ready to pounce, and it appears you do. It is good to have this confirmed.

2) I feel the pain, though I was sorely tempted a few days back when the remastered Command and Conquer was on sale on Steam...
I commend you for resisting the temptation. On one hand, nothing entitled "remastered" is ever worth getting, at best you get the same thing you could have gotten in a regular version and much more often you get something with all the nostalgia wrung out of it to keep a graphics department employed. Doubly beware if the "remastered" version is then subjected to additional "patches" which couch obvious money-grabs as "improvements" to the game which go in completely another direction from the original philosophy.
The C&C remaster does appear to be incredibly faithful to the original game, to the point of keeping in the original bugs, terrible AI and UI limitations, at least if random Youtube types are to be believed because I've avoided buying it myself.

In any case for complicated reasons I ended up playing a Dutch version of C&C back in the day, which had been slightly badly translated with random words left in English. Hence my nostalgia is for things like the "Obelisk van licht" and "Mammoet Tank" so I like to leave them as is and not be ruined by a proper translation.

It seems that generally w.r.t. Germany, we have in this AAR two what-ifs: on one hand, "what if the rest of Europe hadn't cocked everything up?". On the other hand, "what if Germany had an actual parent who taught them about consequences for their actions?" and for the latter I return to my earlier commentary.
Broadly true. But the rest of Europe and the British will still cock things up, just different things in different ways. And of course the Nazis are going to learn about consequences, but they may not learn the lesson that everyone else wants them to learn.

For a second, I thought that Hitler was planning to bomb London with beans, with terrible and farting consequences.
That is quite an impressive leap Kurtie. :) And as you say the consequences of such a dastardly scheme would indeed be terrible.

Indeed. Everyone wants to inject their own characters and have them take Germany down themselves.
You can have a bit more freedom with characters I think, you can get away with larger changes and bigger leaps of logic without having to justify them. Lots of detail and background can be dismissed in a couple of lines of dialogue about "new ideas", in a way that is a lot harder to pull off in other formats.

All we have to do is wait.
And read long updates about subjects that most AARs tend to ignore or, more likely, not even think about enough to even consciously ignore.

It really is, legally and politically, a single entity, just with wildly out of control limbs.
And a very bad case of multiple personality disorder, with the various personalities regularly arguing with each other.

Now host to the business school at Kings College, which means the place is grand, cold, and now full of business graduates. Eurgh.
I do like the idea of forcing them into somewhere nice and grand, to be lectured about the merits of cold miserable cost cutting. I hope it may provoke the correct cynicism and doubt in the students about what they are being taught, "If economy and cost cutting are so great, why are we being taught in the most expensive building in the world and not somewhere cheap and outsourced like Hull?"

Now that is more like the way things should be! A nice "short" and very interesting post, filled with facts about steel production in (OTL) neutral nations that you wouldn't get in any other AAR. I particularly enjoyed the American steelworks built in Brazil as a bribe not to join the axis (could be an update in that ;) ).
I am glad you enjoyed it. The Brazilian steelworks may well feature at some point, but not for a while. Steel in general however will feature soon (In Pippian terms). There is a thrilling update on the grand strategy and diplomacy of steel making from low quality Iron Ore which I'm sure you will all endure. Enjoy. I meant enjoy. But also endure.

Plus I managed to hold my comments for an entire many hours, just so princess could have her top page. Galling to do that only for it to be a love letter to the Bloody City of Scum and Villainy.
There is probably a decent paper in the mismatch between how important the Square Mile is to the British economy and how much it is disliked. When that dislike seeps into actual policy economic problems inevitably follow.

A grand update. Nice to hear British commercial interest in China continues to progress and wonder what will happen in Imperial Conference. Is it possible for Canada to enter Sterling zone (forgive me if this is stupid question) and would that be good (and how good?) for the unity of the empire?
The Imperial Conference will be the next 'proper' update, a few more Appendix chapters to do as I look at various bits around Britain and the world that are relevant and (hopefully) interesting.

On the technicality of changing the peg and entering the Sterling Area, that is very doable. The Bank of Canada did hold more dollars and sterling, but they were just rounding errors really. Canada held almost all it's reserves in Gold (97%) at a very high level compared to the economy, which it needed to as it was trying to peg to the US that was also gold backed and far larger. Switch to a Sterling peg and those reserves are just as useful, indeed the peg would be stronger as Britain would make an effort to maintain any peg (for Empire unity and to reassure the wider Sterling Area) while the US would not make any effort at all, if they even noticed. For the other questions, see below.

However, the US economy and dollar have plummeted and not shown any sign of recovery. And the rest of the empire is booming (apparently) because imperial preference saved them all. Unity is at an all-time high, politically and economically. So if they were ever going to be swayed away (and not federalised a la 1901), it would be about now. Something has to change for Canada to stay fiscally consistent. They have to leave the imperial zone, or give up the dollar.
The US economy has plummeted but the dollar remains on the Gold Standard so has theoretically not moved, everything else has moved around it and the other Gold Bloc countries. Indeed at this point the US Dollar (and so the CAN $) are over-valued, Sterling has dropped after leaving Gold but they have not. Good for importers, bad for exporters and Canada is a net exporter. OTL there were various deals done with the US around lowering tariffs, but these have not happened due to to the US being much more protectionist.

As for the empire...mostly good I think. Canada is a fairly robust and strong economy. Them linking themselves more tightly to Britian and everyone else would be good for everyone else (for the most part, I think). For Canada? It really depends on what they end up doing after full independence. Or rather, what the Commonwealth ends up being. If its a euro-zone with a shared central bank and currency (I'm fairly sure Pip won't do this) in the long run, then fine. If they leave and have to make their own currency, its inevitably going to orbit around the dollar again. So once more, the question is taken out of Canadian hands and back into what the UK and USA do.

This incidentally, is one of the main reasons why you wouldn't want to have to chose, if you were Canada. You're placing a lot of faith on someone else to be economically responsible and fortunate in the long run.
Having Canada in the Sterling Area removes the exchange rate risk on Empire-Canada trade, but that was never a massive deterrent compared to the impact of tariffs. It makes shuffling money around a bit easier, but how much British capital would have gone to Canada anyway when there are more lucrative opportunities elsewhere (something else for the Imperial Conference to discuss)? It's probably positive but not a major difference economically, politically it is a big step though.

For Canada they probably like the idea of being a bridge between the two, having part of a foot in each camp makes them far more important and influential than they would otherwise be. On a forced choice, assuming broadly similar economic outcomes, you would go for the UK because British politicians will at least think about the impact on "the Empire" of a decision, whereas no US politician would consider the impact on Canada of a policy for a single second. Of course in OTL the economics were so massively tilted in favour of the US that there was no real choice, just trying to keep both options running as long as possible. This will not be the case in Butterfly.
 
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Minion" it is then.

The only real minions are the game characters.

My impression is that no-one in Paris or London was scared of Germany,

No, no that seems quite true. And makes a lot of sense really. No ones scared of Putin either, except for the countries orbiting Russia.

will embrace the problems of teenagers in a heartbeat if it means I can get a lie-in and not be bounced awake by excited small children in the early hours.

I don't know, I suspect lying awake waiting for them to come back from god knows where at 3 in the morning is probably worse? Especially when they wake you at 4 coming back in.

Sometimes I wonder if you stalk the thread ready to pounce, and it appears you do. It is good to have this confirmed.

Wraith is following you.

And read long updates about subjects that most AARs tend to ignore or, more likely, not even think about enough to even consciously ignore.

True, we were all just advising someone else why they should skip battles in ck2 history books if they want. Butterfly requires indepth discussion on the bullets, engines and poltics that drove the armies to that fight, then the history of the city, an aside to talk about South amercia, something about economics, then finally the begining of the start of the day of the battle. Then everything stops for two years while we talk about something else.

And a very bad case of multiple personality disorder, with the various personalities regularly arguing with each other.

Like most british institutes of a certain age, this occurred naturally and organically, and then at a certain point everyone looked at it and decided this was the way things were going to stay forever and stopped time there.

I do like the idea of forcing them into somewhere nice and grand, to be lectured about the merits of cold miserable cost cutting. I hope it may provoke the correct cynicism and doubt in the students about what they are being taught, "If economy and cost cutting are so great, why are we being taught in the most expensive building in the world and not somewhere cheap and outsourced like Hull?"

Well, they'll learn some valuable lessons like debt is cheap, change the figures when someone wants costs reduced, and that you can get away with anything, provided your mistake was big enough.

There is probably a decent paper in the mismatch between how important the Square Mile is to the British economy and how much it is disliked. When that dislike seeps into actual policy economic problems inevitably follow.

So much that concerted effort was made to crush it to death with a second London, which they controlled more tightly. Possibly one of the only times in history when people tried fighting fire with fire and it somehow causing both fires to turn to fountains of gold. Toxic gold sure, but still.

The US economy has plummeted but the dollar remains on the Gold Standard so has theoretically not moved,

Technically. But only on the paper in the amercian vault. According to everyone and everything else, it was suddenly a few feet higher than it used to be. Now, that was because everyone else had sunk a few feet lower but still...
 
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Because there's just so much to parse through...

RE: France, Fall Rot and all that: Having read through Robert Forczyk's excellent books (specifically, Case White, Case Red, and We March Against England), the invasion of Poland and France were literally only successful because the leaders of the Allied armies at the time were so goddamned timid and old that they could not actually form a coherent thought of defense and quickly became overwhelmed by thoughts of defeat. France's Gamelin, Lebrun and Reynaud had thrown in the towel mentally by the time that Rot had started, despite the willingness to fight ably displayed on the ground by the French forces. Not to mention that the Belgians failed to adequately (some might go so far as to say entirely) hold up their side of the bargain and thus absolutely screw over the rest of Western Europe. Not to bash the British Army, but their leadership was not much better, but much like the French, their line units put up spirited defenses of where they were assigned.

We could debate this ad nauseam but best to just let the game play out.

RE: My attentiveness... of course I follow all of my favorites. A shadow, if you will... a counterpoint to the Dark Lord Kelebek who just "appears"...
DYAEiOu.gif
 
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RE: My attentiveness... of course I follow all of my favorites. A shadow, if you will... a counterpoint to the Dark Lord Kelebek who just "appears"...
DYAEiOu.gif

In his case, it isn't stalking if he's always there.
 
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That is literally the smiley from my imgur account, good work. I can only respond with my other trademark nodding smiley.
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Right-click --> "Copy Image Location" --> "Insert Image" --> "By URL" --> Ctrl+V -->
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Verily and indeed.

I'm not 100% sure if the Turkish and Brazilian governments were being delusional or just lying on the off-chance someone believed them, but they talked a good talk on how their steel mills (and other things) would be profitable. No-one believed them of course, but various pretences had to be made.
I strongly suspect the lying bit. "Government must be profitable" is while a damn lie a damn lie as old as government itself, see the US Postal Service which has for longer than I, at least, can remember been criticized as "unprofitable" by those who would dismantle it, privatize the mail, and charge $23.59 to mail a latter to your grandmother. The point being, a large enough chunk of any population firmly insists on profit that they must either be lied to in order to pass anything, or else purged and happily(?) most of the world is not Soviet Russia.

My impression is that no-one in Paris or London was scared of Germany, in the sense of thinking the Germans would win any war. It was known Germany was running on bluster and economically lurching from crisis to crisis, as it tried to do too much with too little. Hence why provoking an economic collapse and/or revolution in Germany was the war strategy. The Allied political leadership feared the cost of even a victorious war, not the chances of Germany winning. With hindsight (and indeed at the time) this a mistake and allowed Germany to grow stronger and actually become a threat. I say threat, but the Battle of France was still on a knife-edge and only very small changes would be enough to make Sicklecut fail and allow the French to form a defensive line. Once that happens Germany has thrown it's punch, is out of reserves, ammo and supplies and is basically doomed.
Thinking it over, one suspects the real thing Germany kept getting away with was poor logistics in their operations, Poland of course was an utter pushover anyways but Norway ought not have gone nearly as well as it did, and then France should have been a stalled offensive by rights after the mess they made moving through the Ardennes. That they succeeded anyways surely played a part in German overconfidence that ultimately led to Barbarossa despite everyone in the logistics department and their aged grandmothers saying the supply trains would give out after 800 km of advance, if that.

What I'm saying here is that clearly the fall of France was a clever ploy to divert Hitler towards the East where his overconfidence would get him killed and Britain could swoop in in '44, fight them on the beaches and all, and play the hero while Stalin complained about doing all the work himself.
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The C&C remaster does appear to be incredibly faithful to the original game, to the point of keeping in the original bugs, terrible AI and UI limitations, at least if random Youtube types are to be believed because I've avoided buying it myself.

In any case for complicated reasons I ended up playing a Dutch version of C&C back in the day, which had been slightly badly translated with random words left in English. Hence my nostalgia is for things like the "Obelisk van licht" and "Mammoet Tank" so I like to leave them as is and not be ruined by a proper translation.
While admittedly a strange case, I take this as unvarnished support of my point regarding nostalgia value, which old originals with their 8-bit graphics and ancient UX will always have over any remake.

And of course the Nazis are going to learn about consequences, but they may not learn the lesson that everyone else wants them to learn.
As is true for every child with parents, guardians, or other assorted child-rearing figures.
 
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The only real minions are the game characters.
Says the minion.
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Wraith is following you.
As long as it's not in a professional capacity I should be safe.

True, we were all just advising someone else why they should skip battles in ck2 history books if they want. Butterfly requires indepth discussion on the bullets, engines and poltics that drove the armies to that fight, then the history of the city, an aside to talk about South amercia, something about economics, then finally the begining of the start of the day of the battle. Then everything stops for two years while we talk about something else.
I am just providing context. Possibly more context than is conventionally provided, but relevant context nevertheless.

Like most british institutes of a certain age, this occurred naturally and organically, and then at a certain point everyone looked at it and decided this was the way things were going to stay forever and stopped time there.
1946, when the Bank of England got nationalised. This went exactly as well as every other British nationalisation.

Technically. But only on the paper in the amercian vault. According to everyone and everything else, it was suddenly a few feet higher than it used to be. Now, that was because everyone else had sunk a few feet lower but still...
Sort of, but less than OTL. Sure the Sterling Zone went off Gold, but most of mainland Europe is still on it in some form or another and that's the only thing really keeping the show on the road for the Gold Bloc. They are all suffering, but to an extent it's self supporting misery - as long as none of them take the plunge and devalue, the rest can (just) tolerate the pain.

Because there's just so much to parse through...

RE: France, Fall Rot and all that: Having read through Robert Forczyk's excellent books (specifically, Case White, Case Red, and We March Against England), the invasion of Poland and France were literally only successful because the leaders of the Allied armies at the time were so goddamned timid and old that they could not actually form a coherent thought of defense and quickly became overwhelmed by thoughts of defeat. France's Gamelin, Lebrun and Reynaud had thrown in the towel mentally by the time that Rot had started, despite the willingness to fight ably displayed on the ground by the French forces. Not to mention that the Belgians failed to adequately (some might go so far as to say entirely) hold up their side of the bargain and thus absolutely screw over the rest of Western Europe. Not to bash the British Army, but their leadership was not much better, but much like the French, their line units put up spirited defenses of where they were assigned.

We could debate this ad nauseam but best to just let the game play out.
The one thing that is certain is that it will not play out like OTL and many things will have changed, some for the better and some for the worse. So as you say wisest not to start that debate. :)

RE: My attentiveness... of course I follow all of my favorites. A shadow, if you will... a counterpoint to the Dark Lord Kelebek who just "appears"...
DYAEiOu.gif
In his case, it isn't stalking if he's always there.
I did wonder what happened if you followed someone on the Forum software and now I know, so education has occurred. This is good.

I strongly suspect the lying bit. "Government must be profitable" is while a damn lie a damn lie as old as government itself, see the US Postal Service which has for longer than I, at least, can remember been criticized as "unprofitable" by those who would dismantle it, privatize the mail, and charge $23.59 to mail a latter to your grandmother. The point being, a large enough chunk of any population firmly insists on profit that they must either be lied to in order to pass anything, or else purged and happily(?) most of the world is not Soviet Russia.
That reminds me that I do need to at least think about the US Postal Service a bit. The US has had no Air Mail scandal, or at least a different Air Mail scandal, so the USAAC has not started the modernisation of OTL and the airlines are also doing different things. Might hand wave it a bit rather than do a chapter on it though, it is not really relevant to Britain at this point. Or perhaps ever.

I can sort of see where the argument why government must be profitable comes from. For a future update I've been looking at electricity and the current UK market approach is a decent example. The retail market (i.e. the companies the public deal with) are mostly useless; they do bill collection, meter reading and taking gambles on future electricity price to sell fixed price contracts. Actual power generation and supply through the network are entirely different companies. Because retail is competitive they all spend a lot of money on marketing, and because of the mismatch between variable electricity price and fixed price customer contracts the smaller supplies go bankrupt regularly (but electricity supply carries on regardless, because the retail firms have nothing to do with supply). A single monopoly supplier would not have those problems and as there is no need for investment or innovation that could easily be a government monopoly which, if prices stayed the same, would be profitable due to all the money saved on marketing. Of course that wouldn't happen, there would be political pressure to drop prices and so on. But theoretically it could work, so I can see why people think that way. It's just that they are wrong.

Thinking it over, one suspects the real thing Germany kept getting away with was poor logistics in their operations, Poland of course was an utter pushover anyways but Norway ought not have gone nearly as well as it did, and then France should have been a stalled offensive by rights after the mess they made moving through the Ardennes. That they succeeded anyways surely played a part in German overconfidence that ultimately led to Barbarossa despite everyone in the logistics department and their aged grandmothers saying the supply trains would give out after 800 km of advance, if that.

What I'm saying here is that clearly the fall of France was a clever ploy to divert Hitler towards the East where his overconfidence would get him killed and Britain could swoop in in '44, fight them on the beaches and all, and play the hero while Stalin complained about doing all the work himself.
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Rule #3 of British Foreign Policy - Don't get British people killed if you can get foreigners to kill each other instead.

While admittedly a strange case, I take this as unvarnished support of my point regarding nostalgia value, which old originals with their 8-bit graphics and ancient UX will always have over any remake.
You were correct to take it as complete support and agreement. If you are going to do nostalgia, do it properly with the originals.
 
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I did wonder what happened if you followed someone on the Forum software and now I know, so education has occurred. This is good.

Thus, El Pip supports stalking for educational purposes, 2020.

That reminds me that I do need to at least think about the US Postal Service a bit. The US has had no Air Mail scandal, or at least a different Air Mail scandal, so the USAAC has not started the modernisation of OTL and the airlines are also doing different things. Might hand wave it a bit rather than do a chapter on it though, it is not really relevant to Britain at this point. Or perhaps ever.

Aw, fuck the amercians. At this point, just say they vanished into the sea or stayed isolationist behind their borders forever.

A single monopoly supplier would not have those problems and as there is no need for investment or innovation that could easily be a government monopoly which, if prices stayed the same, would be profitable due to all the money saved on marketing. Of course that wouldn't happen, there would be political pressure to drop prices and so on. But theoretically it could work, so I can see why people think that way. It's just that they are wrong.

Why does providing water, electricity and heating to a population have to be profitable if the goverment is running it? At that point, just say its a basic right, fund with tax money and keep things free for everyone who pays tax (and individuals who don't). It'll be expensive, but not prohibitively so, not for the UK. And make companies who don't pay tax or tax doge pay through the nose for their coverage, whilst making it illegal for them not to have it.

Rule #3 of British Foreign Policy - Don't get British people killed if you can get foreigners to kill each other instead.

You can take such things too far. After all, the british did that in Talking Turkey, to our initial applause, but then had no other plan and didn't supply and command those vassal armies properly. Now they're in the strange position of having lose nothing personally in the war...but are certainly going to lose their empire and most of their prestige and renown after the war.

Remember rule number 1: Always win, or make it very clear to everyone that you actually did 'win' if you think about it.
 
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Aw, fuck the amercians. At this point, just say they vanished into the sea or stayed isolationist behind their borders forever.
May as well, frankly I doubt our post-1945 foreign policy could be made any worse in the process.

Remember rule number 1: Always win, or make it very clear to everyone that you actually did 'win' if you think about it.
Ah, yes, the Billy Mitchell school of thought, very effective if you don't mind being an insane crackpot in the process.
 
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May as well, frankly I doubt our post-1945 foreign policy could be made any worse in the process.

Ah, yes, the Billy Mitchell school of thought, very effective if you don't mind being an insane crackpot in the process.

No body ends up winning in the butterfly universe. Everyone builds nukes and wipes humanity out, rendering the whole project an extremely long shaggy dog story.

Indeed, Britian win at everything, if you are very selectively reading history.
 
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