Perestroika barely got underway before the USSR collapsed, so I'm wondering what was Gorbachev planning to do if collapse had been averted? Just how much privatization was he willing to allow? Did he think of his plans as still being essentially socialist and why?

Is there any debate? How do we know he actually wrote it?

I know it's about some ship being sunk, although i'm not so sure. Any way, what I actually want to know is an in-depth explanation of that or if it was any different, then that. Also, what were their motivations, etc.

Thanks in advance!

PS. Enter***

I'd understand units on the field wouldn't want the extra weight, but it seems like on garrison duty or certain defensive actions it would be useful. Did this happen? Or was the cost of the extra weapons too high?

I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, but it's worth a shot.

My company is undergoing rebranding and we are stuck on a name. My father (boss) wants the name to show that the company is "creative and inventive" and has his eyes set on "thingamajig fabrications". Unfortuently, I disagree with him on the name. Regardless. He told me I have till Thursday to come up with a better name (approved by him), and till Monday to show some logo concepts (very rough - I do the advertising/coding for the companies website and databases).

One name he did like that I was able to come up with was Herculean Fabrications, but said Hercules doesn't represent the inventiveness he wants portrayed. What I would like to find is something that balances strength and inventiveness. Is there a mythological creature/being or combination of them that could be used to show these attributes?

Thanks a lot!

Was in class today (Theories of Inter. Relations) and was wondering how the U.S. pop. is so much larger than Great Britain, France, or Russia, considering as how all three of the countries were established well before the U.S. was. I understand population growth, but how did the U.S. catch up so fast and then exceed other countries and why have the others seem to have stagnated (i.e. Russia)?

Some thoughts I had on it-

-A country's population expands to it's territorial size (but then this doesn't explain Russia)

-Immigration (however, it seems too large of a population difference to be just immigration)

-China lost around 5.6 million people during the Second Sino-Japanese war, yet blossomed into the most heavily populated country

What are some good, relatively easy to read (but without sacrificing too much complexity) books on Attila the hun?

In school, I was told that religious houses produced mead almost as a by-product because they kept bees to make wax for altar-candles, and the easiest way to separate the wax was to wash the combs. Consequently they ended up with loads of diluted honey which will pretty much turn into mead by itself if you ignore it. Is this true? I can find plenty of corroboration for the acquisition-of-wax part of this but none for the practice of washing out the honey.

I as looking for information regarding horn armour and I found a two links that discussed armour that was made out of horn being used in medieval times. I found this interesting and tried to find more information, and failed. The linked that I did found discussed that it was probably very rare and that it might have been capable of stopping arrows.

The more specific question I'm wondering about horn armour are;

Who was it that used horn armour? (Cavalry, infantrymen. Knights, peasants, etc. etc.)

How effective was it compared to mail or scale armour?

How was it made and what horns would they use for it?

When was it used? While I know it was used in Medieval times, the middle ages span quite a long time and I would like to know more specifically when it was used.

I'm sorry if I'm not being clear with my question, English isn't my first language and I'm not very good at explaining either.

I've never seen a representation of Carthaginians or the Punic Wars in which they're any less white than the Romans (I'm playing the video game Rome II as I think about this, where they're the same skin colour as, say, members of ancient tribes of Britain) - but isn't it more likely that their skin colours were similar to North Africans or people from the Middle East today? The Phoenicians who are thought to have founded Carthage weren't European (in my pretty surface-level understanding, anyway), and there must have been local people living in Carthage as well. Plus, as a trading civilization, there must have been a larger than normal (for classical societies) amount of cultural exchange and inter-ethnic mixing.

So is representing Carthaginians as white people in modern pop culture and history an example of erasure, or were they actually a similar skin colour to the Romans or Greeks?

I am of course thinking of places like Ireland where a lack of potatoes once ended in disaster, what did they do before they had them? They seem to be quite integral to nearly all European cuisine however, so it's a pretty broad ended question I suppose.

I've heard that the "Western" genre is popular in Japan due to overlapping themes and (internal) socio-political situations between North America in the 1800s and Japan in the 1600s.

Were they actually similar in terms of the struggles / hard ship / daily life?

Thank you in advance to those who reply.