>Of course working with nuclear stuff is a little easier if you are willing to completely lay waste to a portion of your country considerably larger than Holland and poison generations of your people while failing to deliver the most basic goods and services and funneling most of your resources to a cynical kleptocracy. <g>

I'd better go to sleep now. I read this as "clinical kleptocracy".

>BTW for all the "medical achievements" do some research on how many hospitals in the USSR did not even have hot water.

The true failure of XX century socialism is that it failed to protect itself from, as Lenin put it, "thugs in our ranks". It went so far that the thugs used the system to protect themselves (starting with that guy from Georgia or even much before him), while evading responsibility at all levels.

Even in the advanced soft system that we had, where there were many form of direct democracy at lower levels and a market economy, there was still pretty much nothing people could do against a thug, if the thug was a card carrying Comrade Thug with good backing. So on one end I went to an elementary school with perfect heating, new building, enough and well educated staff, everything squeaky clean and well maintained, with strict limits to class sizes (24 to 30, as was the standard then), with all sorts of extracurricular stuff - we even had a full photo lab, 8mm cameras and lab etc, while in the mountains they'd cram 40 kids from grades 1-4 in one room, 35 of 5-8 in another, and two teachers with just chalk, blackboard and a wet rag were the whole school. And nobody really checked whether these teachers were really educated, certified etc.

In my city there's a modern hospital, still unfinished, which is being built for about 30 years now. It's mostly built from a local tax that we voted in periodically - about 2% of your net income - and nobody knows how many times and how much was skimmed. Meanwhile, in the same yard, the old buildings (and I mean old - all of them are over 150 years) were just patched here and there. Cockroaches always find a crack. Most of the buildings are still in use - the new hospital works only up to 3rd floor. When will they reach the 7th, nobody knows.

Was anyone fired over this? Was anyone incarcerated? You're kidding me. Comrades, we must protect our cadre, the enemy wants us to fight amongst ourselves.

Then they'd change enemies, change the political system, change the parties, fly over from one party to another, and the percentage embezzled never drops. Some get caught, specially if their party is not in power at the moment, but most of the time they make a deal and it goes away. Even I can see that, after all these years of absence.