Is it a scam? How does it work?

Yes, but paid content is not the norm and the reason for that is that blatant advertising and shoving malaware down people’s throats on grandma’s recipe website is not only legal, it’s a predictable business model.

Yeah, that’s fine, but at some point we need to start talking about alternative methods of monetization for websites. On the one hand, compiling a list of recipies on a website and maintaining that website is not easy or cheap and the owners should be able to make money out of it. On the other hand, the user should be able to pay for this comfortably and have a nice experience on the website.

This ad model doesn’t serve any of the two, business or consumer.

You’re obviously taking pleasure in debating an idea. Obviously so do I. However, you need more training. You have to add more support to your arguments and contradict the opposing arguments with facts that hold up. You have to concede points and counterpoint when possible. And most importantly, you have to bring datapoints to your claims.

At the moment you’re only putting out ideas with very little data. When I asked for examples of sanctions and international pressure, I was expecting something like this which is concrete. The “Killing Hope” is a really bad data point because it doesn’t support your claim directly and it is “fictional” 3rd party data from a biased source.

With the examples of actual sanctions, I would have pointed that USSR and their allies which included China and strong economic ties with India had its own access to resources and economic development and could impose sanctions of their own. In fact, I can point out that USSR controlled by itself a land area comparable to the entire NATO alliance today and that between them and China, they occupy considerably more landmass and have considerably more population.

In fact, those sanctions were not going to make any dent in the actual USSR economy. That wasn’t the goal (since it was impossible to achieve). They were meant to weaken the relationship with the communist buffer states such as Romania, Poland, Hungary and they did to a certain extent.

But, of course, USSR was doing the same thing in what has been the US back yard: South America. Countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Brasil were being aided by the USSR with loans, technology and technical leadership in order to remove them from the US influence sphere. And USSR was more successful than USA at doing this. In fact, Romania, Poland, Hungary only became US allies after the collapse of the USSR while the south american countries were closer to USSR since the 70s.

The discussion from here either goes backwards in history to how Russia had a late start or goes into economic details for a while, but ultimately it always ends in the same place: one model collapsed, one didn’t.

I grew up in eastern europe. I’m intimately acquainted with the philosophy, propaganda and history of the area. More than just 3rd party information. I’m also familiar with the Russian culture and arts. This was the only foreign culture allowed to be imported into my country for obvious reasons before the 90s.

I’ve had similar discussions through my life and I’m frankly disappointed in this one. But keep practicing, you’ll get better at it. A hint: learn from the facts presented by others even if you don’t agree with the interpretation. It helps in the long run

You too. Have fun making excuses for poor witches

Who did your daddy tell you the hungry witch was?

You’re telling me it was the USSR. Poor thing, alone in the woods with nothing to eat… Those kids were so unfair to her

But the poor witch was so hungry… What could she do?

Oh spare me of that song played on the world’s smallest violin. That’s the stupidest take an the whole situation that I’ve ever seen. “Read a book”… yeah, the poor little witch being burned alive by Hansel and Gretel… Is that how you view that story too?

No, I’ve already dismissed the narrative that poor little USSR had a disadvantage against the big bad US when I pointed out that they abusively occupied half of Europe at the end of WW2 and had influence over a lot more of it. If you’re bringing up secret services and you’re saying that the US one was better at its job, then you’re simply pointing out that the USSR one was incompetent.

I asked for examples of international sanctions which USSR & their allies couldn’t match. That book is about CIA and US crappy foreign policy. If you say that CIA actions where themselves sanctions against USSR, then surely KGB should have solved the issue.

Killing Hope’

That doesn’t answer the question. At most, it just shows that KGB were more incompetent or not endowed with literary talent.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 because of the famine in 47?

And let’s circle back around to the far more important concentrated international sabotage if you please.

International sabotage? Do you have evidence of sanctions against USSR and their allies which weren’t matched back by USSR & their allies?

There was no famine in URSS post world war 2. What are you talking about?

I am giving you examples of perfectly functioning nations under capitalism, you’re replying one sentence nonsense. This conversation is over

That’s a very narrow view of what happened after the second world war. URSS occupied half of the European continent. It basically was the last empire in Europe with all the resources and human capital at its disposal to do anything it wanted. Not to mention war reparations.

And it lost. The ideology wasn’t working. It took 40 years for that empire to collapse, but collapse it did because it was built on the wrong principles.

There is no such thing as pure capitalism. If you’re talking about capitalism without regulations, that is called anarcho - capitalism and it doesn’t actually exist anywhere at the moment.

There is no such thing as pure capitalism.

Every one of those four is a mixed economy with significant central economic planning and regulation.

Every one of those four economies are democratic capitalist economies. What is mixed?

What would you call the siedge of Moscow if not nearly losing?

They did lose WW1 because of the revolution, that’s true, or rather stepped out of it, but that’s not what I was talking about. I meant the beginning of the WW2 and the Russian invasion which was a huge disaster overall. They managed to come out of it on top, but the cost was ridiculous. (Edited my original comment for clarification).

I’m calling them a superpower even if they were not on par with UK, France and Prussia, they were a bigger power than the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire at the time.

I’m not praising tzarist Rusia. It was a shit place, a reminesscence of feudalism after the industrial revolution. I’m simply trying to argue the fact that it was communism which allowed them the progress. They started from pretty high up to begin with. In fact, the two major examples, China and Rusia, while in some sort of identity crisis when they switched to communism, were historical powerhouses to begin with.

Other, no power houses who went communist didn’t fare so well. Cuba, North Korea, countries in the Balkans …