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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Not one of these points is limited to capitalism.

The USSR beat us in almost every space milestone and would have beaten us to the moon if not for the untimely death of the guy running their space program.

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Yes, USSR did that, but for the cost of exhausting their economy, bringing poverty to their people and dissolving eventually.

It's like comparing North Korea with Germany - NK can send rockets to space, while Germany can't. But can you say that NK is ahead of Germany in terms of inventions?

The space race was hardly a factor is the demise of USSR. Even the arms race wasn't that big of a factor by itself. Soviet Union's economy being incredibly wasteful was what done them in. They produced a tremendous amount of basically garbage goods to satisfy quotas in numbers, so it required a huge increase in base/heavy industries production to drive a tiny increase in consumer goods production. That's why USSR could build great rockets but not a decent car. The central issue is that Soviet economy was perpetually stuck between capitalism and socialism. The workers were expected to have their labour alienated, as in capitalism, but were safe in employment and the wage didn't mean all that much because of all the socialized services (which meant little for non-basic needs in life without a strong consumer goods economy, the issue for ordinary people wasn't that they had no money to buy stuff, they had, but there was usually nothing to buy). So they naturally sabotaged the system by not giving a shit about the quality of "their" products.

Down votes aren't disagreement votes. If you have an issue with their comment then reply, but don't put them into the negative because you don't like the facts they point out.

You're explicitly wrong about downvoting being a mark of disagreement. That's been black-letter HN culture since forever. I don't entirely like it either (though I'll admit that I do it, too), but 'pg repeatedly went on record, saying he meant for it to be that way.

That said, I can't stand it when people downvote comments pointing out objective, verifiable facts that they don't like. It happens all the time, and I despair a bit for the quality of discourse even possible in a community where that's a thing that people do.

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