Some of the wonderful covers from the Sovtet Union magazine Техника молодёжи (Technology of Youth)

When I was growing up, I recall reading these magazines, and it made me really excited about technological progress and the future. I found these sorts of ambitious ideas and grand scale engineering to be really inspirational.

This is the kind of vision that's sorely lacking under western capitalism where the best and brightest minds end up wasting their talents working on utterly useless, and often harmful, garbage like Facebook or Twitter.

Instead of people figuring out how to advance humanity and solve big problems in the world, they're working on figuring out how to shove as many ads as possible in people's faces.

There's a stark contrast between the west and China in this regard. China has a vision for the future and it implements large scale engineering projects today. It's pretty much the only place where real meaningful technological advancement is happening at scale today. This is the power of central planning and communism!