The last two projects I worked on were partially botched, and one was offshored. The big reason was managers who preferred to work with people who were nice and/or obsequious instead of people who had a clue.

They get along really well with the offshore guys ("jump!" "how high?") but they keep calling back the brighter people whenever anything complicated comes up (work the weekend to fix what the offshore team wrote this week). Given the choice they fail with people who do what they tell them instead of succeeding with people who tell them why what they want is not what they should want.

I think offshoring is due 99.9% to HR and management practices in North America.

In Western democracies turnout can vary a lot, so if a candidate gets say 51% with 50% turnout he got 25.5% of potential voters.

Hitler, even with a street army intimidating voters, never got more than 33% of the vote (much less the population). He used some "national emergency" political maneuvers to take power and take power and cancel future elections. I think there was a subsequent election, run by the nazis with little opposition and direct intimidation of voters (invisible ink to find out who voted how, fictional counts, etc.) but he certainly did not have a consensus for war and genocide.

Most Germans, certainly most Berliners, were against going to war. They were driven to fight by intimidation and propaganda.

And I'm off topic... Damn Godwin!

Did not think hard enough... Divine right to rule anyone? Does any god see believers equally?

Equal before god? Depends on the god.

Not to mention initially grabbing parts of Czechoslovakia instead of supporting them against invasion.

Polish leadership was abysmal in the '30s. Actually political leadership sort of hit an international low at that time. Horrible leaders popping up everywhere.

Offshoring to companies that provide guys with huge lists of (bought? fictional) certifications on their CVs and signatures and no actual knowledge whatsoever. It may be cheap but the servers and network are being run by some guy off the street who can't spell "Windows," "TCP/IP," or "UNIX."

The frustration with trying to get these "admins" to do simple tasks is mind boggling.

I think there is value for the clueless. A lot of the people in our class loved it and were amazed by the questions. I could not believe that people were getting married (and, in several cases (though it WAS catholic) re-married) without thinking about basic living together stuff (and 28 out of 30 couples were living together, including us). I know people who had more enjoyable courses but I don't know anyone who said they really got much out of the class.

The history of the period that I last read was written by a Reaganite republican, so lots of aspects (especially the ones relating to the '80s) were biased and some were completely wrong, but I had the impression that he tended to get what he wanted and kill the people who opposed him. He did not kill off as many people as Stalin, but I don't think the decisions were collegian, or at least not peacefully collegian. People thought very hard before opposing Lenin (or at least they did after he killed the ones who did not take him seriously).

With Stalin it did not matter, he ended up killing everyone he interacted with.

Neither paid a lot of attention to what life was really like in Russia or to what was going on outside of their power grabs.

Dictators can do capitalism (e.g. Singapore), no one has tried communism (dictatorships say they are communist, none of them are, Russia, China, Burma, Cuba, etc. are incompetentist dictatorships) outside of a few American hippies, and levels of socialism tend to make more difference to the people than to the economy. Regulatory structure makes a huge economic impact (Germany and Japan had good ones imposed on them and they used them to outcompete America while being fairly socialist), socialism makes a minor one.

I did. It was painful and unproductive. "What would you do if you found out you could not have kids?" What would you do if you had not thought about this before deciding to get married? Almost everyone in the class I took was already living together, most were married, almost none were clued in. It was a complete, complete waste of time.

I suppose that if you get through the course it is a sign your relationship is strong and that you are on the same wavelength.

I guess the only positive impact was that it was a significant step on my SO's way out of the catholic church. I used to feel bad (20 years ago, or so) about not going to church with her, especially as she would often end up not going, and there are seriously positive aspects (meeting people when you move to new areas, shared context with said people) to church attendance (that do not balance the negative for me of actually having to sit through it, or at least did not when I was much younger). Now she has no interest in going either.

The priest who married us said the relationship would not last due to my lack of faith. The marriage is still fine after 15 years.

YMMV. I have heard of better and worse churches and priests. Ours were pretty bad.

Yes, but non-dictators would not have done such a terrible job of implementing socialism. Lenin was completely out of touch. He supported getting Russia out of WWI and that was enough to bring him to power. He had no idea how people lived, what economics was, nothing. He purged most of the people who could have let him know. Then he acted as though he was god. Stalin pretty much followed. They could have chosen any economic model and botched it.

I find the good headhunters tend not to stay in the business long. Strangely the clueless make-a-pile-of-CVs-and-shovel-it-over guys stay forever.

I think it was the dictatorship, not the socialism, that caused problems in Russia. As in Cuba, China, etc. the "communist" government was a pack of opportunist thugs seizing power and making most of the population miserable. Socialism was a detail.

Unlike the US system it is not the worst in the developed world.

I guess the location explains the utter uselessness of Comupuware software.

Well they claimed number of devs not number of commits, and they also said that they were submitting to RedHat for their distro more than to the linux kernel, but, yeah, you can't put a lot of faith in sales reps which is why I prefaced my comment with the source.