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To be fair, Jong Il's ability to play countries off each other was hindered greatly by Il Sung's policies of "spending about 2 decades before dying ripping off all other countries".
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Oct 8, 2014 21:35
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Zeroisanumber posted:North Korea always has had very good printing technology. Note: the North Korean "superdollar" printing machines really were only capable of handling Us bills up until the 90s like that bill you posted. They're utterly unable to handle the security features in later issues like these:  
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Oct 8, 2014 22:37
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Jagchosis posted:That said, as far as I know the primary motivation for propping up North Korea was to avoid having a more powerful, unified and pro-West Korean state on China's border. No, it's because they know that anything going down in North Korea means suddenly getting a ton more North Korean refugees. South Korea is already effectively on their border in all but the "can orchestrate a ground invasion" sense - and frankly if Korea even tried that after reunification the Chinese could easily crush that long before they reach any sort of major cities. You also have to consider that a reunification of korea means probably a decade or more of the currently quite robust South Korean economy being drained by rebuilding the North, and even after that a long time to go before unified Korea grows beyond its pre-unification economy. If what China wants is weak Korean competition, a unification will buy them that for a rather long time.
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Oct 10, 2014 06:44
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Jagchosis posted:Talking about the motivation during the 90s, before China Strong Again, during the 90s their concern was all about dealing with North Korean refugees. South Korea was also weaker then too. Concerns that were based around "omg American-allied country on our border" were more of a 70s - early 80s issue - but then again during that time period North Korea was still doing quite well and had implicit backing of the USSR.
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Oct 10, 2014 06:50
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Trochanter posted:If North Korea's government collapses, can/will its neighbours seal off the borders and let its people die en masse? Well the border with South Korea is pretty well sealed off with all the land mines and other military stuff there already. It's the Chinese and Russian borders that are much harder to seal off, admittedly with much of the NK-China border going through terrible mountain areas.
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Oct 11, 2014 17:06
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whatever7 posted:You can't seal off the Yalu River. It is hard to walk across the minefields safely en masse, and I think you can expect NK military elements to block or destroy the few safe mine-free routes out of spite. DMZ is highly dangerous with minimal safe traveling capacity even if all soldiers there on both sides left their posts, after all.
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Oct 11, 2014 18:03
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TheImmigrant posted:I almost went to North Korea in 2002, while living in South Korea. Pyongyang stopped issuing visas to US citizens, which put the kibosh on my plans to see a Stalinist theme park. I actually stepped across the border at the conference room in Panmunjeom, but that doesn't really count. These days North Korea does have internet and cell phone service, but it's pretty much only for foreign visitors' use. If I remember right it's done through a partnership with an Arabian cell phone company.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:35
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WorldsStrongestNerd posted:It doesn't matter whether or not China wants to be in charge of NK. In the event of a collapse backing the strongest warlord may be China's only option. The alternative may well be to shoot several million starving refugees swarming the border. It's honestly quite debatable that they'd be able to reach the border. It's terrible terrain, almost no one has vehicles, people who are starving can get very far on foot, and even if people tried to jump on the trains to get out, most of them are run by electricity and the grid that remains is sure to get cut. And all these problems for getting to the borders will be tripled during harsh winters. Most of the starving refugees are going to be stuck pretty close to where they live now.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:17
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Full Battle Rattle posted:Is it fair to say this is the worst shape they've been in yet? They're never exactly paragons of stability and I have read about the soldiers barely having enough to eat...god, what a catastrophe. 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).
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Oct 16, 2014 03:16
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Halloween Jack posted:No, I don't think that's required for the endeavour to be incredibly expensive. In seriousness all they need is a stable food supply (south korea has this without relying on the very labor intensive ag that North Korea's poor soil requires) and shipping in mining equipment to get the resources that North Korea is loving full of. poo poo, North Korean schools would be delighted to accept South Korea's old textbooks et cetera, really all the current government services stuff that South Korea is scrapping as they go on (much like any modern country) could be easily recycled for use in NK.
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Oct 16, 2014 04:41
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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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whatever7 posted:United States's major infrastructure building periods were during recession and after WWII. Having over supply of labor is a primary motivation. Cheap labors and incomplete labor law can also help too. Both Dubai and China are examples of the later two conditions. I don't know if you're aware of this but the tip of the antenna spire on the old WTC 1 was 1,727 ft. The 49 extra feet they made the tip of the antenna spire of the new one was a minimal change (and incidentally is actually better for broadcasting once it's fully spun up. It also didn't take 13 years, it took 8. No construction was started until 2006 because there was a lot of clearing out debris and poo poo to be done first, as well as deciding designs.
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Oct 18, 2014 01:58
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whatever7 posted:Why did it need 5 years to clean up the site? Do you have any understanding what the site was built on? No, clearly you don't. There was assloads of material to clear away first, there was rebuilding of transit infrastructure that had to take priority versus a bunch of dumb office buildings, and there was removing and re-setting up better equipped underground utilities. They excavated nearly all the way through the bathtub structure's containment to reinforce it as well. You'll notice this is why the new 7 World Trade Center got rebuilt in just 4 years (construction start 2002, opened for business 2006) - it was outside the main site, and that was with replacing the original with a taller building. Similarly the new 4 WTC was built in 4 years - 2009 to 2013; being on the furthest edge of the bathtub area from the main towers collapsing, and thus easy to get building once its site was stabilized. The new 4 wtc is 78 floors versus the old 9 story; the new 7 wtc is 52 versus 47.
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Oct 18, 2014 02:36
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Rand alPaul posted:Wasn't there also a lawsuit over the insurance at Ground Zero? I seem to recall that slowing down a chunk of the rebuild, along with finding more bodies Yeah there was a hell of a lot of lawsuits to work out before construction could begin.
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Oct 18, 2014 03:08
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Vagabundo posted:Isn't it in a bit of a state as well? Like structurally and all. Like a Health & Safety person would run away screaming in mortal terror levels of structural issues? Supposedly the foreign company they contracted to finish the building is going to completely rebuild most of the upper floors, the lower floors apparently being well enough off.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:29
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Charlz Guybon posted:Reunification doesn't mean the South has to open the borders to mass migration immediately. It would make a lot more sense to maintain the DMZ as an internal border and run the North as defacto colony for the next few decades. The DMZ is going to be a de facto border for a very long time due to the need to clear out the dangerous minefields and other such things, plus there will probably be a desire to change it from its current de facto natural reserve park status resulting from being no man's land into an actual national park with only minimal crossings to restore rail/road connections at full capacity. Spacewolf posted:How would that, politically, be tenable? How would South Koreans justify it to themselves, let alone the international community? Plus, how would it not build up incredible resentment among the (former) North Koreans? Among other things, East Germans had free movement pretty immediately due to the fact that East German infrastructure and such was actually in really decent shape, including the several land corridors from West Germany to West Berlin with well maintained rail and road. Not to mention East Germans generally having a decent ownership level of cars, even if they were lovely cars. Free movement for North Koreans? The ones with the capability to freely get to South Korea assuming we wake up tomorrow morning with the NK government unilaterally surrendering to South Korea and allowing free movement, etc - they're primarily going to be the very highest classes in North Korean society, the ones who not only get to have a car but can afford fuel in general. For the public at large, you're going to have a few people able to hitch rides on the few commercial vehicles around. Everyone else is going to have to walk, essentially, and given North Korean population centers most of them are going to be 40 hour or more walks to the SK border. How far can you expect people to walk in a day when they're already not exactly overfed at best, and close to eating just enough to get by at worst? How many people would really feel safe enough to risk leaving someplace that for the time being they can at least get by, to undertake a journey with little but the clothes on their back, across often quite rugged terrain, with little guarantee of getting supplies on the way?
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Oct 19, 2014 17:55
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I would personally expect Chinese control to be limited to within a few miles of their border, and that pretty much just to reduce refugee influx.
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Oct 19, 2014 19:45
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SedanChair posted:How "hard" would would this "internal border" in a reunified Korea be? It seems like anything less than the current "shoot people who try to cross" level of security would result in millions of refugees crossing. There is a multi mile wide border, through rough terrain mostly, filled with mines, tripwire guns, and armed but unexploded ordnance that can still blow your legs off the same way the "Iron Harvest" along the lines of the old World War I trenches in Europe every spring risks killing dozens. And there's only 2 or 3 narrow routes through there that are guarenteed clear - that is if NK leaders don't do a final gently caress you gesture by knocking over the many sets of massive concrete pillars they put by the sides of roads to block traffic. And most of the NK population lives 100+ miles from the border and would have to proceed on foot for the most part to the nearest crossing which would be even further. Essentially, even if all the active military there on both sides just cleared out, it'd be hard as hell for millions of refugee to safely get across.
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Oct 21, 2014 05:24
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tsa posted:Yea I think a lot of people's impression of NK is stuck in the worse times of the 90's as a lot of the popular books on NK were written then, but from the latest docus/books you don't get the feeling that young kids watching foreign media is particularly unusual. There was (are?) periods where chinese border crossing (both ways) became relatively easy and a bunch of cheap Chinese crap could be transferred. There's a key aspect there: you get a lot more of the Chinese stuff close to the border. It's progressively harder to obtain the further from that border you get.
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Dec 25, 2014 18:44
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JeffersonClay posted:Portable Usb media player. That get charged with what exactly? You know when they run out of battery.
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Dec 25, 2014 22:40
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Cockmaster posted:That reminds me: A little while ago, Elon Musk put forth a proposal to create a global broadband ISP with hundreds of low-orbiting satellites. Sneaking that into North Korea could make for some fun times. Elon Musk is a bit of an idiot, because such a system would perform worse than just about all countries infrastructure. Also it'd be pricy as hell to run. Don't really see a bunch of outsiders being willing to cover buying and maintaining the ground stations for North Koreans as long as the current regime is in power. And when it ain't, people wouldn't need the slow satellites system.
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Dec 25, 2014 22:51
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My Imaginary GF posted:http://www.o3bnetworks.com North Korea has infrastructure. It's reserved for the use of high government officials and tourists. As such, the only way that'll actually go forward is regime change to allow its usage, rather than the utterly underfunded plan to develop a slow satellite network and expect receivers to be granted to the residents.
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Dec 25, 2014 23:06
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Main Paineframe posted:Depends on whether anyone seen or reported picking them up, watching them, or having them in their possession goes to a prison camp forever! And, of course, the fact that North Korea can force down or shoot down the plane(s) doing it, unless you think the US military is going to fly military aircraft directly through North Korean airspace so that they can drop propaganda on North Korean towns and cities. Yea that's a major thing. Effectively maintaining information flow through the whole country costs as much as a major ongoing military operation, were you to attempt it.
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Dec 26, 2014 00:02
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TheImmigrant posted:Korea is not very wheelchair friendly in general. Yeah oddly enough, America has some of the best wheelchair accessibility in the world.
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Dec 29, 2014 04:46
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ropa posted:what's so odd about being so fat you can't walk in america? The fact that there's plenty of fatter countries with worse accessibility you moron?
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Dec 29, 2014 19:00
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North Korea and South Korea's mere exxistence is an ongoing provocation to each other.
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Jan 28, 2015 03:26
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Chomskyan posted:The North's claim to the rest of the Korean Peninsula is substantively different from it's claim to it's own territorial waters. The later is supported by international law. And yes, the naval exercises go back decades, they have always been provocative and are often the cause of very dangerous clashes between the North and South. Just because the US policy of being stupid and provactive is long standing doesn't mean it's legitimate. There is nothing illegitimate about US policy. Maybe North Korea should actually sign a peace settlement at some point if they're mad that their continued declared enemies are actively training.
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Jan 28, 2015 04:02
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Main Paineframe posted:Wasn't it the South that never did that? No party to the war has done so, no serious peace agreement has ever actually been done. The South never signed the armistice, because the United Nations Command signed for its side and the North Koreans and Chinese signed for the other side.
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Jan 28, 2015 04:24
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Chomskyan posted:Lol fishmech. Now use your google skills to find out the actual reason why the South didn't sign the armistice. Lol chomskyan. Defend North Korea's idiotic actions some more. Rent-A-Cop posted:The 12 mile limit does not include islands. You don't get to claim legal ownership of other people's homes because they happen to be near your coast. But poor little North Korea wants that sea. 
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Jan 28, 2015 04:29
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WarpedNaba posted:Tell that to Argentina. Well the Argentines are just sore losers.
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Jan 28, 2015 06:16
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Honestly though the whole deal with Argentines wanting to capture the Falklands was because the murderous military regime demanding some way to improve their internal standing.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:16
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Mercury_Storm posted:They have nuclear weapons. Also China. Also it would be a huge clusterfuck that would put tons of South Koreans in immediate danger. Nuclear weapons have nothing to do with it, NK's best case scenario with them is they manage to blow up their own base/city or two with it, since they only have huge bombs with low yields and no way to adequately transport them.
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May 13, 2015 13:41
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Cerebral Bore posted:Arrest and deport like million desperate people fleeing for their lives? Yeah, that sure sounds feasible. Also China should build a minefield 1000 km long apparently. Well that's what South Korea has on their border which is why they aren't worried about refugees 
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May 13, 2015 23:44
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Grouchio posted:BBC news has this on the front page as of now. If tensions don't fall by Sunday, we could see the real thing. North Korea does not have the ability to nuke anywhere that ain't within their own borders, just FYI.
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Aug 21, 2015 15:46
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Halloween Jack posted:Actually, what do we know about their ability to deploy nuclear devices or chemical/biological weapons beyond their borders? Bennett considered the absolute worst-case scenario to be if North Korea successfully attacked another country (possibly even the United States) with a nuclear weapon. Well they do have working missiles that have enough distance in them to cover South Korea. They don't have nuclear warheads to go with, and they probably don't have sufficiently working biological or chemical warheads to use instead (they're tricky to build so that they successfully deploy your chemical/biological agent). If they're going to lob anything at south korea it'll probably just be conventional explosives.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:58
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Philthy posted:Glad I'm not in media right now, all these reporters are right on the DMZ line. That's going to get vaporized by both sides within the first minute of action. At least move to a city 100 miles away or something. All the stuff is geared to hit targets on either side of the DMZ when "the first minute of action" happens, because the DMZ itself is already a massive danger to be in in 90% of its length due to mines etc.
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Aug 21, 2015 22:21
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm not sure how to quantify "economic suicide" wrt North Korea at this point. How's this for criteria: When North Korea's leaders have to start living like working class Americans because even the gravy train for just like 50 people tops can't be kept up.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:15
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sparatuvs posted:Until the 80's NK was richer and more developed than ROK. Note: this is because in the late 70s, Kim Il Sung started to flake out on trade deals and dump way too many resources into monuments to his own vanity. One of the reasons North Korea got so screwed in the 90s was because the Soviet Union/Russia was the only people deigning to give them normal trade deals anymore, because they'd burnt their bridges with first the west, and then the Eastern European countries that had been ideologically aligned. If North Korea had just stuck, essentially, to playing by the rules, it'd be a lot better off today. Kurtofan posted:why was south korea so poor? Roughly, the current North was and is rich in minerals and industry, while the South was mostly rich in farming land. It took quite some time for the South to build up its own industry, heavily reliant on import and export, under the authoritarian but anti-Soviet leaders they had. Now, the North can't take advantage of all its mineral wealth because of the fact that they can't afford energy and so on. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 23:00
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Uh, I really don't believe the police state in the south was better until like the 70s at the earliest.
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Aug 24, 2015 19:28
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Also North Korea really was a decent place to live for a bit. Like sure not compared to the literal US but easily better than a lot of the Soviet Bloc, and better than South Korea. And then Kim Il Sung decided to make himself a god complete with ridiculous monuments and woops! Devoting way too much resources to that quickly results in a shithole.
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Aug 24, 2015 20:08
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