Soviet doctrine (and the broader Marxist doctrine) distinguishes between "personal property" and "private property". Things like furniture or car would be considered personal property, and hence okay. Land, means of (large-scale) production like workshops and factories etc, would be considered private property if owned, and that was banned. Houses and other things that straddled the line could be treated differently depending on the country and the era.

After the first revolution in February, 1917 (the one that saw the tsar abdicate), Russia became a capitalist republic. That lasted for 8 months.

After the second revolution in October, 1917, the power was in the hands of the soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, most of which were under Bolshevik control already.

In 1918, the power was very briefly (and largely nominally) exercised by the Constituent Assembly. It lasted for 13 hours before the Bolsheviks dissolved it.

By the end of 1918, Bolsheviks have purged the only remaining minority party that shared the power with them in the soviets, the left esers.

So, where do the "few years after the Russian revolution" come from?

They didn't call themselves communist. They had communist parties, which were ostensibly dedicated to the goal of achieving communism - eventually, sometime in the future.

As Soviet joke went, a party lecturer holding a class on dialectic materialism in a remote village said to the audience: "Cheer up, comrades! Communism is on the horizon!"

One of the peasants in the audience raises his hand and asks a question, "Comrade, what is a horizon?"

The lecturer answered, "A horizon is an imaginary line where the sky and the earth seems to meet, which always remains the same distance from us as we walk towards it."

None of those countries actually called themselves "communist", they were all "socialist". Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example. Communism, just as you say, was a label for a hypothetical future society that was just around the corner, kinda like fusion.

The one place where you'd see actual communist countries mentioned was in Soviet sci-fi. E.g. in Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, its early stages see an economic and scientific competition before the remainder of the Western world, headed by the USA, and the USCR - Union of Soviet Communist Republics - a result of the merger of all socialist states, with USSR and China as two cores, once communism was achieved in them.

Yup. The supreme irony is that capitalism did create the conditions for its own demise, as Marx predicted. Where he was wrong is the conditions themselves - he thought that communism would come first, and post-scarcity would only become feasible later. Turned out it's the other way around. Wait and see.

These guys don't need smallpox, because they're doing just fine with plain old JDAMs and Tomahawks.

OTOH, when you're equally insane but don't have billions of dollars to piss off on making things go boom, you might start considering extreme but cheap options.

If they can't play by the big boy rules then they don't belong in a big boy game.

The national picture of Detroit and surrounding area..is pretty much one big,decaying heroin/crack den with abandoned and dilapidated properties...with tumbleweeds aplenty in the streets.

Hell, the episode of Drugs, Inc on the Nat. Geo channel alone painted a pretty bleak picture of Detroit spreading heroin around to not only itself, but the surviving suburbs that are still around the area.

Nope. California's budget is very solidly in black, average salary is way higher than in Texas and industry is _growing_. It turns out, that being a nice place to live attracts business.

Got any links to stats that back that up?

Certainly not what I'm hearing on the national news stations....MSNBC, CNN, FOX..etc.

The company's H1B quota in 2009 was significantly affected by the layoffs. It will likely happen again next year.

It will also affect the ability to sponsor green cards.

There's no shortage of people who are literally insane in politics. Consider what happens if the "Caliphate" gets their hands on some samples.

I've re-read the article, and I couldn't find the part where she's talking about anything like that. Can you cite the relevant part?

Yeah - what I meant is that if there was no corresponding capital gains hike, then the uber-rich would hardly even notice, since that's what most of their income tends to be.

"The Wire," HBO, paid for by subscription
"Six Feet Under," HBO, paid for by subscription
"The SImpsons," dreck after about the 6th season.
"Breaking Bad" HBO, paid for by subscription
"Halt and Catch Fire" ? haven't heard of it. Oh well.

Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction...

You make it sound like implementing one million cells in software is a million times more difficult than implementing just one.