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Except, in fairness, dying from choking on a ham sandwich is a thing that is possible. It is possible to choke to death while eating a ham sandwich. Fan death is not an actually possible thing.
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Oct 16, 2014 09:04
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...I always thought fan death is some surreal internet joke about Koreans...
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Oct 16, 2014 09:47
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Wiki's piece on Fan Death meshes with what I remember.
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Oct 16, 2014 10:39
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TheImmigrant posted:Wiki's piece on Fan Death meshes with what I remember. 
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Oct 16, 2014 11:19
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Grand Fromage says that fan death is a common euphemism for alcohol poisoning and suicide.
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Oct 16, 2014 12:31
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Nintendo Kid posted:No. The 90s famine was definitely the worst in their time. Despite how bad things are now, it actually marks an improvement from the 90s (though it's still a massively worse place than the 80s and especially than the 70s). Ah, thanks for the clarification. Most sources that I read claim that they never really came back from the 90's famine and it's just been all downhill ever since, but I found that a little hard to believe.
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Oct 16, 2014 12:45
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Full Battle Rattle posted:Ah, thanks for the clarification. Most sources that I read claim that they never really came back from the 90's famine and it's just been all downhill ever since, but I found that a little hard to believe. There's a lot of space between Just Awful and Losing 10% Of Population From Famine.
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Oct 16, 2014 12:57
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Arglebargle III posted:Grand Fromage says that fan death is a common euphemism for alcohol poisoning and suicide. Isn't Soju like $1 a bottle or something in ROK?
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Oct 16, 2014 13:12
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Lawman 0 posted:Isn't Soju like $1 a bottle or something in ROK? The cheapest grade of Cham was about $0.85 for 375mL eleven-twelve years ago. It's only about 22% ABV, but kicks you in the rear end. Two of those bottles would have me flying. Three would have me on the floor. Takes like poo poo, but then again so does Korean beer. Joke was that OB was named after a tampon; (S)Hite had an invisible 's'.
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Oct 16, 2014 13:32
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Fall Sick and Die posted:I dunno why you all think that having North Korea be a part of South Korea is against the interests of South Korea. Consider turning the entire North into resource extraction and cheap factory laborers. It's not like they'd consider making it a truly equal part of the country, like extending South Korean minimum wages there or something. You'd be far more likely to see the entire north set up as a sort of Chinese special economic zone where you'd have South Korean rule of law and leadership allowing investment in the north to the benefit of South Korean businesses, with some level of Northern leadership bought off. The economics of it isn't the big problem unless you're thinking this will go like Germany where they try to uplift the entire region to the Southern level in a decade. The politics is much more problematic... Having a poverty-stricken wasteland with totally uneducated workers to be exploited for free only works when it's a colony populated by some other ethnic group. South Korea can't get away with turning North Korea into a gulag-style slave labor camp. It's just impractical for so many reasons; it'd be a net drain on South Korea's economy no matter what. Typo posted:The difference is that at least in a generation or two wages will rise because the population of South Korea is getting smaller and demand for labor is going to rise. North Korea may well be second world under a unification scenario. I don't really buy it. The North Korean workers are so uneducated and unskilled that their usefulness as slave labor comes out kind of inferior to workers in neighboring sweatshop countries, plus they'll have to be either paid more or more heavily subsidized compared to existing sweatshop workers since there's no way food prices are going to go down when the country collapses. A general rule of thumb is that if you can come up with an answer as simple as "just turn North Korea into a manufacturing center, everything will get better" then you're obviously wrong about something because it's not that easy a problem! Nintendo Kid posted:poo poo, North Korean schools would be delighted to accept South Korea's old textbooks lol
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Oct 16, 2014 14:47
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I'm not sure what you know about manufacturing or what kind of education you imagine people need to sit in a chair for 12 hours and repetitively perform the same motion without saying your true feelings about how much it sucks. North Koreans are born factory workers. Also I like your idea about how people never oppress their own ethnic group, that's very nice.
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Oct 16, 2014 16:00
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North Koreans are for all purposes universally literate, in Korean. They are also conditioned to absolute obedience. Provide them a modest increase in standard of living, and you've got the ultimate menial worker. South Korea's economy is based heavily on manufacturing.
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Oct 16, 2014 16:16
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TheImmigrant posted:North Koreans are for all purposes universally literate, in Korean. They are also conditioned to absolute obedience. Provide them a modest increase in standard of living, and you've got the ultimate menial worker. South Korea's economy is based heavily on manufacturing. Sounding a little Sheng-Ji Yang there, mate. One would think that the oodles of mineral wealth locked in the North would be a large enough long-term asset to sweeten the deal, but dealing with the aftermath of refugee of exodus really is an enormous problem.
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Oct 16, 2014 16:18
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Fall Sick and Die posted:I'm not sure what you know about manufacturing or what kind of education you imagine people need to sit in a chair for 12 hours and repetitively perform the same motion without saying your true feelings about how much it sucks. North Koreans are born factory workers. Also I like your idea about how people never oppress their own ethnic group, that's very nice. In the US, some of the poorest and most uneducated Southern states, like Alabama and Mississippi, have lost manufacturing business because the workers are so illiterate that they can't read the signs and reminders on the machines, making training especially costly and expensive. I imagine such problems would be even worse in North Korea, and any gains in literacy would be offset by the population being much worse with machines. And I didn't say no one would ever oppress their own ethnic group, but it probably wouldn't be too popular allowing Koreans in Korea to starve to death by the millions, and paying them enough to feed themselves will price them right out of the low-wage labor market.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:41
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Main Paineframe posted:I imagine such problems would be even worse in North Korea, and any gains in literacy would be offset by the population being much worse with machines. Why do you imagine this
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Oct 16, 2014 17:44
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Koramei posted:Why do you imagine this Because the people who've lived their entire lives since they were born farming dirt in prison camps will need jobs too? North Korea isn't completely composed of totally uneducated bumpkins who've never heard of electricity in their lives, and in fact plenty of North Koreans can do factory work as demonstrated by Kaesong, but there's at least a hundred thousand people in the camps, and I'm sure there's still plenty of farmers who've never been to the cities. I'm sure there are more than a few people in North Korea who are at least as unsuited for factory work as poor people in the richest country in the world are. There's also other difficulties to consider, like the North Korean dialect of Korean varying somewhat from the South Korean dialect, which makes literacy difficult to judge. Of course, the fact that the North claims an even higher literacy rate than the South's 97.9% shouldn't be taken at face value either.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:55
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North Koreans aren't starving to death by the millions and there'd be even less chance of them doing that if it were unified and had access to international trade. Outside food is in fact probably cheaper than that made domestically. Also lol if you think that moving manufacturing out of the USA has to do with, "workers are too stupid to read the signs" and not "workers are paid 10 times more here than in Asia". I mean listen to that argument... people in the United States are too uneducated to work in a factory, so let's move production to rural China and Vietnam where people are more sophisticated?
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Oct 16, 2014 17:56
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Fall Sick and Die posted:North Koreans aren't starving to death by the millions and there'd be even less chance of them doing that if it were unified and had access to international trade. Outside food is in fact probably cheaper than that made domestically. Also lol if you think that moving manufacturing out of the USA has to do with, "workers are too stupid to read the signs" and not "workers are paid 10 times more here than in Asia". I mean listen to that argument... people in the United States are too uneducated to work in a factory, so let's move production to rural China and Vietnam where people are more sophisticated? Outside food may be cheaper but they'll need a lot more of it than they've been getting, especially when the domestic agriculture and distribution systems totally break down and the fields are bulldozed to make way for megafactories capable of employing the entire population. They're not starving but there's plenty of food insecurity. Also, without subsidies, the sticker price they pay will be too high to afford on the $62 per month a North Korean worker earns at Kaesong. I'm talking about manufacturing that has been moving from southern states to northern states or Canada, not to Asia.
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Oct 16, 2014 18:09
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Main Paineframe posted:Because the people who've lived their entire lives since they were born farming dirt in prison camps will need jobs too? North Korea isn't completely composed of totally uneducated bumpkins who've never heard of electricity in their lives, and in fact plenty of North Koreans can do factory work as demonstrated by Kaesong, but there's at least a hundred thousand people in the camps, and I'm sure there's still plenty of farmers who've never been to the cities. I'm sure there are more than a few people in North Korea who are at least as unsuited for factory work as poor people in the richest country in the world are. the camps are pretty staggering in scale but hardly representative of anything beyond a tiny fraction of the total population. how does the language varying make literacy hard to judge? of all north korea's figures, literacy is probably the most believable. hangeul is dumb easy to learn. besides, there are already south korean factories in the north. i'm sure they've got it figured out already. Main Paineframe posted:And I didn't say no one would ever oppress their own ethnic group, but it probably wouldn't be too popular allowing Koreans in Korea to starve to death by the millions if they don't care now they're not going to care then
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Oct 16, 2014 18:15
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Main Paineframe posted:I'm talking about manufacturing that has been moving from southern states to northern states or Canada, not to Asia. So the manufacturing problems that you brought up aren't going to matter in regards to Korea because it's high tech manufacturing that requires huge inputs to train workers, not low wage, low skill factory jobs of the sort that would be used in a place like... North Korea.
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Oct 16, 2014 18:41
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My Imaginary GF posted:I want to learn more. One pretty funny drinking game went like this: Everyone sits on the table, one guy starts a drink, then everyone counts to three simultaneously. At "three" everyone points at someone else. They guy who drank last also points at someone, and says some other number (preferably less then 10) while pointing. So, imagine that dude A (who drank) is pointing at dude B who Points at dude C who Points at dude D who Points at dude A. If the number Dude A says is 2, then we follow the pointing from dude A to dude B to dude C, two steps in this case because he said 2. Dude C now has to drink, and following this the game is repeated with dude C saying a new number. Everyone is supposed to point simultanously, and conspiracy to get some (non foreigner) shitfaced is/may-be-based-on-social-mores-I-dont-quite-get serious buisness. In my case, I was saved by the fact that our gracious Korean Hosts had a bet running. We were a half-Russian half German (me) a pretty hilarious Lithuanian, a French guy and about 8 or so Koreans. To the Koreans, the question of wether a Half Russian-Half German can outdrink a Lithuanian is perhaps akin to the "Can a Ninja defeat a Kossak" question to a western European, well worth "empirically" exploring, more so if you are somewhat inebridated. Of course, two camps opened between the Koreans, and it was decided to make a monetary bet on which whitebread would be shitfaced last (we of course didnt know about that). As it happens, a combination of complex strategies done in order to make "their foreigner" win, Alcohol Prices in Dänemark, complex strategies on my part in order to not get shitfaced (I am actually quite good in evolutionary game theory, considerable less good at drinking than being half German half Russian and a reserve soldier would suggest though), and the fact that the hilarious Lithuanian dude could drink hilarious amounts of alcoholic beverages, resulted in a draw due to alcohol depletion. We basically ran out of booze, and were stuck with a snoozing/wasted French guy, 2 other drunk whitebreads, and a bunch of Koreans (and some other assorted East Asians) who were now completely unsure on who won the (monetarily charged) bet. More hilarity ensued. On the next day, I got a half serious Job offer from one of the summer school instructors because I could solve complex differential equations while looking like the Avatar of "being totally Hungover". But well, I can totally recomend travelling to South Korea. Pretty awesome place. E: Only thing that sucks is the beer. Mightypeon fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 19:31
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South Korea is definitely worth a visit. Any boozer with a connection in Incheon would be well advised to stretch it out a few days. Seoul isn't cheap, but it's not Tokyo or Shanghai crazy either. Stay in a yeogwan and eat and drink till you forget your flight out. Busan is a loving cool city too, like Chicago to Seoul's New York(Yeouido)-cum-Los Angeles (Teheran-no/Apgujeong/general Gangnam) rolled up in one.
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Oct 16, 2014 20:18
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I'd like to visit Korea but my melanin count is pretty high and I heard it's racist as poo poo there...
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Oct 16, 2014 20:48
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Main Paineframe posted:Having a poverty-stricken wasteland with totally uneducated workers to be exploited for free only works when it's a colony populated by some other ethnic group. South Korea can't get away with turning North Korea into a gulag-style slave labor camp. It's just impractical for so many reasons; it'd be a net drain on South Korea's economy no matter what. Well this is just flat out untrue, and noone is talking about a slave labor camp, don't be dumb. quote:I don't really buy it. The North Korean workers are so uneducated and unskilled that their usefulness as slave labor comes out kind of inferior to workers in neighboring sweatshop countries, plus they'll have to be either paid more or more heavily subsidized compared to existing sweatshop workers since there's no way food prices are going to go down when the country collapses. A general rule of thumb is that if you can come up with an answer as simple as "just turn North Korea into a manufacturing center, everything will get better" then you're obviously wrong about something because it's not that easy a problem! Why do you think this? I don't think you understand the food situation there at all. Food is loving cheap but we just aren't going to dump billions of pounds of rice on them and have the regime cock it all up. Main Paineframe posted:In the US, some of the poorest and most uneducated Southern states, like Alabama and Mississippi, have lost manufacturing business because the workers are so illiterate that they can't read the signs and reminders on the machines, making training especially costly and expensive. I imagine such problems would be even worse in North Korea, and any gains in literacy would be offset by the population being much worse with machines. And I didn't say no one would ever oppress their own ethnic group, but it probably wouldn't be too popular allowing Koreans in Korea to starve to death by the millions, and paying them enough to feed themselves will price them right out of the low-wage labor market. Comparing US manufacturing to asian is utterly retarded. This is real basic stuff, we don't do the same poo poo because why the hell are you going to pay US wages when you can just go to Asia. US workers have to be more highly skilled, it's higher tech manufacturing. They need to be able to read manuals and solve basic problems and think a bit. You don't need any of this for basic manufacturing. And way worse with machines? China didn't have any problems filling up their factories with illiterate farmers, I'm not sure why you seem to think north koreans are an alien race. And why you keep going back to this idea that they will be starving slaves. Life isn't the greatest for a chinese factory worker but they have a higher standard of living than NK doctors. Paying them enough to feed themselves will price them out? Complete nonsense. Main Paineframe posted:Because the people who've lived their entire lives since they were born farming dirt in prison camps will need jobs too? North Korea isn't completely composed of totally uneducated bumpkins who've never heard of electricity in their lives, and in fact plenty of North Koreans can do factory work as demonstrated by Kaesong, but there's at least a hundred thousand people in the camps, and I'm sure there's still plenty of farmers who've never been to the cities. I'm sure there are more than a few people in North Korea who are at least as unsuited for factory work as poor people in the richest country in the world are. You really don't seem to understand that manufacturing is not done the same way everywhere. And you act like countries have never transitioned from farming to industry; what you are claiming is impossible has occurred in basically every country.
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Oct 16, 2014 20:59
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TheImmigrant posted:Wiki's piece on Fan Death meshes with what I remember. I have never heard of this and now my friend is yelling at me for asking her about it. 
Rand alPaul fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 21:07
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tsa posted:Why do you think this? I don't think you understand the food situation there at all. Food is loving cheap but we just aren't going to dump billions of pounds of rice on them and have the regime cock it all up. Can you eat decently for a month on a grocery budget of just $63? Because that is what Kaesong workers are making right now. That's just a hair over $2 per day, by the way, and assumes that they would be able to spend 100% of their daily earnings on food. I have a hard time believing that food is that cheap in South Korea, and there's no compelling reason for it to be any cheaper in North Korea than it is in the South beyond "someone else is paying most of the cost for them". So either they have to be paid more than Chinese laborers, or the South Koreans will have to subsidize food costs in the North. That's the biggest catch in the (idiotic) "just wall off the dirty norks and use them as sub-minimum wage sweatshop labor, and reunification will be cheap" plan: one way or another they have to be able to afford to eat food at South Korean prices, and one way or another that money is going to have to come from South Korea, whether as govt subsidies or private wages. There's no magic formula that will make reunification easy on the economy, no matter how hard you exploit the North for labor and resources.
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Oct 16, 2014 21:24
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I disagree with you guys arguing semantic of NK's worker quality. Once SK absort NK, it will give a major demographical boost to Korea, and it will emerge as bigger and stronger nation than Japan 20 years later.
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Oct 16, 2014 22:00
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whatever7 posted:I disagree with you guys arguing semantic of NK's worker quality. Once SK absort NK, it will give a major demographical boost to Korea, and it will emerge as bigger and stronger nation than Japan 20 years later. Well like India and China can tell you, more people isn't always better. And I'm pretty sure the combined population will be smaller then Japan's.
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Oct 16, 2014 22:07
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whatever7 posted:I disagree with you guys arguing semantic of NK's worker quality. Once SK absort NK, it will give a major demographical boost to Korea, and it will emerge as bigger and stronger nation than Japan 20 years later. SK has the same demographic problems as Japan, maybe on a 10 year delay, and has less than half the population of Japan to begin with. Besides the fact that SK is still poorer per capita than Japan, there's no reason to think the New North Korea would be any different demographically. So yes, it is theoretically possible that Korea would match Japan economically, but this is assuming essentially everything goes as planned over a multi-decade period.
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Oct 16, 2014 22:11
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DarkCrawler posted:Well like India and China can tell you, more people isn't always better. And I'm pretty sure the combined population will be smaller then Japan's. First of all, how is it not good for China? Secondly, its not so good for India because India is basically people of different nations (castes) physically live together.
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Oct 16, 2014 22:28
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whatever7 posted:First of all, how is it not good for China? I...uh...are you aware of the concept of overpopulation? Do you think China instituted one-child policy because they hate children? It's not so good for India for the exact same reasons it was bad for China or still is for a shitload of African/Asian nations - increased population growth without accompanying equivalent economic rise is not a good thing for reasons that should be obvious. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 22:44
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whatever7 posted:First of all, how is it not good for China? http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21620202-vast-new-waterways-will-not-solve-chinas-desperate-water-shortages-grand-new-canals I'm not even going to comment on the quasi-racist/nationalist stuff about India
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Oct 16, 2014 23:25
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If the South intends to colonize the North, and use them as scrap wood then may Seoul be rubble before the war is over.
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Oct 16, 2014 23:28
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There would have to be some sort of plan to distribute current state property and wealth in the North to its people, and that could potentially help offset the initial difference, but more likely it would just be a huge mess like Russia where a bunch of assholes got insanely wealthy relieving the poor of their shares for a few months wages or whatever.
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Oct 17, 2014 00:02
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Full Battle Rattle posted:Ah, thanks for the clarification. Most sources that I read claim that they never really came back from the 90's famine and it's just been all downhill ever since, but I found that a little hard to believe. It's actually been improving, the only problem is that when you have to improve from such a nadir you're still shittily off. Main Paineframe posted:In the US, some of the poorest and most uneducated Southern states, like Alabama and Mississippi, have lost manufacturing business because the workers are so illiterate that they can't read the signs and reminders on the machines, making training especially costly and expensive. I imagine such problems would be even worse in North Korea, and any gains in literacy would be offset by the population being much worse with machines. And I didn't say no one would ever oppress their own ethnic group, but it probably wouldn't be too popular allowing Koreans in Korea to starve to death by the millions, and paying them enough to feed themselves will price them right out of the low-wage labor market. North Korean workers are generally well trained, even if their factory only gets to run twice a week due to resource shortages.
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Oct 17, 2014 00:10
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I actually have heard this year that NK outsourced programmers to China, the project leader could communicate in English. This was a shock to me, because it implied the NK state machine and higher educational system had not deteriorated.
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Oct 17, 2014 01:16
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whatever7 posted:I actually have heard this year that NK outsourced programmers to China, the project leader could communicate in English. This was a shock to me, because it implied the NK state machine and higher educational system had not deteriorated. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_North_Korea#Higher_education
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Oct 17, 2014 01:46
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whatever7 posted:First of all, how is it not good for China? If China had 100 million people, no one would ever even talk about them. As it is they are on their way towards being a super power.
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Oct 17, 2014 04:25
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OctaviusBeaver posted:If China had 100 million people, no one would ever even talk about them. As it is they are on their way towards being a super power. Thats my point. In 21st century international world trade, its very important to have a large economic system in the world and the biggest in regional trade. Once you ecosystem is large enough you have access to other tools such as currency manipulation, build up a deep sovereign wealth fund war chest to resist global financial crisis. In a smaller scale, it will enable you to reach monopoly in a particular business sector much sooner. Even if you don't have any competitive product for export, having a large demostic market to influrence import can still command respect in international trade. India is a good example.
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Oct 17, 2014 04:57
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Main Paineframe posted:I don't really buy it. The North Korean workers are so uneducated and unskilled that their usefulness as slave labor comes out kind of inferior to workers in neighboring sweatshop countries, plus they'll have to be either paid more or more heavily subsidized compared to existing sweatshop workers since there's no way food prices are going to go down when the country collapses. A general rule of thumb is that if you can come up with an answer as simple as "just turn North Korea into a manufacturing center, everything will get better" then you're obviously wrong about something because it's not that easy a problem! Except they aren't competing against neighboring sweatshop countries. If they are going against China yeah maybe you are right but even China is already moving away from low cost sweatshops and outsourcing them to other countries lower on the development ladder. Yeah education is probably an issue for NK but really how bad is the education in NK compare to the education of an average peasant in Bangladesh or Cambodia when they started manufacturing? It's not like stitching together shoes needs high level of education.
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