Innovation and technology

Even the authoritarian, bureaucratic soviet union has beaten American ingenuity at several places. The following examples are from the April 95 issue of Discover magazine(p88-91)

-To keep aircraft helmets from tearing off heads during high speed ejections the soviets simply drilled holes in them. "Why the western military establishment, with its thousand-dollar screwdrivers, never came up with so simple and elegant a solution, nobody can say". Meanwhile, the pentagon's "next-generation fighter" [I'll assume that means the f-22] will use the superior soviet ejection seat design.

-Tetris came from the soviet union - and capitalism provided hundreds of inferior imitations (3D word-tris with Barney-shaped blocks anyone?)

-The capitalist west has an "infatuation with over design. For example...a space shuttle that can't take off in the rain...Russian spacecraft are also built horizontally and then stood up at the launchpad, which cuts pre-launch preparation down to about 8 hours. American rockets, in contrast, are built standing, and rolling them out for takeoff requires days"

-Some other soviet inventions mentioned throughout the article: a double loop refrigerator, aircraft that can land with tank treads, a saw for cutting titanium, optical blood analyzers, lazar dentist drills, a microchip sized microwave generator, a gearless transmission, and a way to unclot coronary arteries, and (my personal favorite) a no-nonsense method of firefighting, that uses tons of high explosives to blow out forest fires "like a birthday candle".