donjulioanejo

Can confirm. You're a piece of shit :D

Just wandering around in the Mojave is a good time.

All it does is make me wish for a nuclear winter.

None of these countries are in any way similar except using communist rhetoric.

China is originally a communist bureaucracy that has since abandoned all but the pretence of communism and now has "Wild West" style capitalism with virtually zero regulations. During Maoist times it tried to make peasants the heralds of change, but fucked up by killing off the intellectuals because of their association with the bureaucrat class. In the end, killing off almost everyone who actually had the skills to manage a country. My city is full of fuerdai, basically rich mainlander kids who throw around their money like confetti, and they're about the least communist people you can imagine, along with Arab Sheikhs who drive gold-plated Bugattis.

USSR was a great idea in the beginning, and Lenin was moving the country towards something like a free market socialist system (New Economic Policy, or NEP) where anyone was free to found a cooperative.

Unfortunately, Staling took power and put an end to NEP. Then he put the country on a planned economy starting in the early to mid 30s. It had the advantage of rapidly industrializing the country and massively increasing the quality of life for many outside the major cities (electrification, building schools, hospitals, etc), but also caused major famines (Holodomor) and the creation of gulags for forced labour. Barring World War II, in the 50s and 60s the USSR was fully settled into a planned economy, which was great for building industry, but horrible for consumer goods.

After all, a government economist is going to prioritize shit like "Let's build a better tank than the Americans, that'll show them!" instead of "there's no toilet paper." A planned economy can't effectively reprioritize based on demand. Suppose a paper factory is making X% toilet paper and Y% office paper. In a free market system, they could realize there's a deficit of toilet paper and adjust accordingly because it would mean more profit from higher prices. In a planned system their hands are tied until the next year, or the next 5 year planning session... where they could easily ovecompensate and make too much toilet paper instead, leading to a deficit of office paper.

North Korea, while heavily utilizing communist propaganda, is a dictatorship first, and communism a distant second. Kim Jong Un is effectively a divine monarch not unlike the Pharaohs of Egypt, with a bureaucratic system in place to keep that up. Ironically, it's also probably the most pure "communist" country out there... but only because they have so few resources around that they're basically forced to use planning for literally everything, from production to distribution to even rations.

Why did I read that in 70's Funky Black Guy voice?

Kiev is the Russian spelling/pronounciation/transcription, Kyiv the Ukrainian one.

Likewise, Lviv is the Ukrainian transcription, Lvov the Russian one, and Lwow the Polish one.

Also in the Polish alphabet, just as in German, a "W" actually makes a "V" sound. The letter "V" doesn't exist in Polish at all.