I've found the same in the US as a non-native (but white) - my ethnicity is discounted, I'm lumped into a very peculiar bucket and my opinions don't count. Pretty weird experience. Is it really diversity or just a different power trip?

Pretty cool article though. We all became developers so we can build things: we have that in common I think.

Maybe he would, but all the experiments so far have failed for pretty much the same reasons and at enormous human cost.

Meanwhile capitalism in whatever form it's tried has proven itself to be an incredible engine of poverty reduction and human/social progress. There's always been tension between capitalism and democracy and we may be at a point where some of the cracks are showing.

It's worth keeping in mind that we do live in the propaganda bubble of the Soviet Union's arch nemesis.

For their KGB, we had our J. Edgar Hoover. For their political purges, we had our House Committee on Unamerican Activities. For their later economic struggles, we had our great depression.

We never had several deliberately inflicted famines killing millions of people. In every single example you listed Communist countries were demonstrably worse. Humanity is capable of some pretty awful things under any system of government - Communism, or perhaps the way it comes about, has consistently demonstrated that itself better at enabling our worst impulses compared to democratic capitalism.

That people, included in the UK elected representatives, make a case for the Soviet Union and Communist China having done more good than bad is a a terrible failure of history.

But you're missing the point of what I'm saying:

I suggest taking the notion that communism is always bad with a grain of salt, given that our nation has been propagandized to despise communism much as the Soviets were propagandized to hate capitalism.

The Soviet Union went from a third world country of farmer peasants to becoming the world's first spacefaring civilization in only 40 years. Considering where they started, I believe that is quite impressive.

During the cold war, each side's media focused exclusively on the other's shortcomings, turning molehills into mountains, so to speak. To not acknowledge the reality distortion field around reporting of the era is an assault against the historical record.

The USSR becoming the world's first space faring nation is to a large extent the result of the Second World War and the knowledge gained from German scientists - because Stalin purged the nascent Soviet programme during the Red Terror.

Was the breaking of the kulaks - causing the Holodomor which killed an estimated 2.5m-7m Ukranians let alone deaths across the rest of the USSR - a necessary step in the industrialisation of Russia?

Capitalism industrialised - and indeed created industrialisation, with some pretty nasty consequences which led to unionisation and the growth of the middle classes. However none of those nasty consequences were anything close to what Communist regimes have brought us - that isn't bias, historical propaganda, it is just fact on whatever measure you choose to adopt.

Regardless of past propaganda, anyone can go straight to former USSR countries now, to learn what happened there, as millions of regular folks and scholars have. And of course there is the undisputed fact that the USSR failed as a nation, despite its earlier successes.

How about your native population? And your police force is still shooting former slaves on a daily basis.

I'm British - the police over here killed 3 people last year, and that was an above average year. The USA is not the entire set of Western Liberal Democracies.

I stand corrected, sorry.

Either capitalism is a new phenomenon and we don't have enough data to know how stable it is beyond outlasting communism, or what you call 'capitalism' is anything except communism - in which case it has failed catastrophically many times throughout history.

Democracy is relatively new, and has proven hard to establish in most of the world, so there isn't a lot of evidence that it's stable.

I think that's fair enough. I guess all we can say is best of what we've tried so far.

"instead I offered broad time ranges that would narrow down to more accurate ones as work progressed"

Well, that is an estimate according to managers who actually understand what they're doing ;-)

And let's not forget spending a decade rampaging about China raping and murdering.

So, yeah, it turns out that when a country goes out and commits mass murder for ten years then carries out a surprise attack against another country who thinks they should maybe just cut back a bit on that whole raping-and-murdering thing and has otherwise stuck to their own borders for a couple of decades, the first country gets the blame for the ensuing war. Go figure.

There are likely some historical reasons. Here's a quote from The Times from 1860:

If this [exodus] goes on, as it is likely to go on…the United States will become very Irish….So an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale, and in a new world. We must gird our loins to encounter the Nemesis of seven centuries’ misgovernment. To the end of time a hundred million spread over the largest havitable area in the world, and, confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made. (The Times, quoted in The Nation, May 1860)

Most countries discriminate between citizens and non-citizens. As a non-citizen here (US) I'm actually not too upset by this.

So following that logic, I guess if a "rich" person was to drive through Appalachia they would be inevitably doomed?

That's an absurd extrapolation. Please try to follow along here! I'll repeat it slowly for you:

Because there's (in general) little to be gained from robbing people in this area, there are no or few violent street gangs and other forms of organized crime like you'd find in various cities where there's a more colorful mix of rich and poor. Lacking an organized criminal element, Appalachia presents not significantly more (nor less) danger to well-off tourists than any other area where poor people live and a few will -by statistics- be criminals; and considerably less than various cities, certainly various neighborhoods, where robbery and other violent crime are common and more or less an "industry."

I think it's fair to say that in recent times "Ireland was enjoying a quality of life that could not be sustained" but the explanation you offered is incorrect. In reality it was based on a property bubble and cheap investment capital due to artificially low interest rates engineered by the chief eurocrats. Go back a little further and the explanation for increasing employment in the 90s is based on having a young, well educated and underemployed population just as globalization was really kicking off.

Ireland joined the EU in 1973. If "subsidies" and "job luring" are the explanation, I'd have expected to see more progress way back then.

I'm not sure where you're going with your arguments that it was all based on "EU subsidies" and "luring jobs", but since others may read this I wanted to correct the record.

edit: it is true that the UK lent money to the Republic of Ireland in order to bail out UK banks with massive exposure to the property bubble - a bubble created in large part by the reckless practices of those very same banks. That loan has to be paid back by Irish tax payers.

By bringing in QALYs?

QALYs are barely relevant in this discussion. Quality Adjusted Life Years are an attempt to allocate scarce resources in the absence of a pricing mechanism. It is by no means perfect, but thats not the point - it is used at the margins. Do we spend money on this cancer drug that will extend the life of 75 year old prostate cancer patients by 6 months or spend it on heart disease drugs for children giving them 50+ years. Unless you are one of the 75 year olds or children it is a pretty easy question.

But the question we do not ask ourselves is - do you have the means to pay now you are dying of a horribly expensive disease? No-one cares about QALYS here in the UK except when newspaper editors decide to go for a ratings pull