After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.

The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.

Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.

Read it in a book long ago.

Found an article with some of the keywords, but it is just the abstract. There are 10 sources for the paper though.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x

Stalin near the end had gone through half-a-dozen strokes, and was taking medical advice from a veterinarian.

His suspicious nature went into full blown paranoia, and he pretty much lost it.

The Stalin personality cult era after WWII when he was slipping off into dementia while suffering delusions doesn’t really need to be defended. Even the USSR admonished Stalin for his mismanagement and cruelty.

Emigration slowed down during the Khrushchev era, and then picked up again after the Afghanistan war debacle began unfolding. So it is not like it was constant either.

Lookup how Google does performance reviews and you’ll find out why they are so dysfunctional as a company. They took Intel’s Objectives and key results performance review system and turned it into a cross between Logan’s Run and the Salem Witch Trials.

https://blog.grovehr.com/google-performance-review

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/okrs-good-bad-and-ugly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR

OKR’s became Google’s go to excuse to fire older workers, and they have been sued so much for age discrimination - calls to the carnival - that it raised the average age someone was fired above 35 to 40 or so today.

Google hires fresh graduates out of places like Stanford’s and SJSU’s CS departments like off an assembly line to replace older workers, who burn out, are fired for performance, or leave for a better gig by the time they are 40 at a very suspicious amazing rate.

The average age of Google’s talent pool has been balanced mysteriously on or around 30 for years and years .

20-30 year olds typically are hired unto projects that only go places if the top dogs are fired for performance. So the young eat the old, and the old zealously try to make everyone happy - which makes no one happy- and this is the story that plays out over and over at Google. Google typically has gone from a run of about 10 years for a new service/product being cancelled or added to another existing product like a frankensteinian monster.

Intel uses OKR in highly motivated engineering teams working on hardware goals running up against the physical limits of modern technology and science.

Google uses OKR in lowly motivated creative/marketing/UI/etc teams working on nebulous software goals that are measured by browser cookies.

Humans are getting really, really good at computational chemistry and all life is about balancing a system of chemical equilibria. So maybe?

Computationally, we might be close. Practically, probably going to be awhile. There are aspects common to all life about the molecular machinery of DNA/RNA/protein synthesis that biology still does not have good models for yet . Without accurate models of the entire human proteome engineering to significantly reverse or delay aging is next to impossible - it would be shooting largely in the dark.

There were many novels, comic books, TV shows, radio programs, and movies before humans actually had the Apollo program to the Moon. 100’s of years of them. No idea where we are on that time scale now. We could be in the 1950’s during the Space Race or we could be in the 1850’s before even planes were invented, and gliders were the highest technology of the time.

Life extension technology is when capitalism’s execesses will finally dawn on most people. Having 200 year old trillionaires is going to be a hoot.

Imagine if Kissinger dies today too.

:im-doing-my-part:

Give mensheviks their own little republik.

Bloodsports should be allowed for TERFs and pedophiles.

South Korean work culture today is like Japan in the 1990’s bad.

No one is nostalgic for this era except half-in-the-grave boomers.

Show me a punk musical in the 1980’s. I’ll fucking spend 7 days straight in the theater masked up.

Cultures without art of their own will glom unto satire as if it were a compliment.

If you read the Handmaid’s Tale it is even worse when it comes to race.

All the horrible shit shown in the show only happens to white people in the books. Black people are in concentration camps in the book, but they are only mentioned for two sentences as the “Children of Ham”. Atwood loves writing about white women, but she has many tricks to make entire races of other women dissapear in her stories.