What’s wrong with the DPRK? The only source that life there is terrible are defector’s testimonies, which contradict each other on a daily basis and where the worst, most emotional stories are rewarded with fame and money. Often it’s the only way to make ends meats for them. If you come to the south from the north you are a nobody.
Furthermore, the DPRK has never threatened anyone. They have a 100% literacy rate (literally on the CIA website) and every citizen is guaranteed free healthcare, free education and a place to live. They use all of their arible land for food production but because of the sanctions and their mountainous terrain sometimes they have scarcities, but no one is starving. Their constitution is full of human and political rights and social gurantees.
And to proof that I don’t shill for any country calling itself socialist, I don’t like China at all (while still thinking that they are at least better for the world than the US).
And of course there are things to criticize the DPRK for, like the lack of LGBT rights and their weapons exports and hackergroups. But considering the sanctions (that even China upholds) they are in very dier need of foreign currency.
I would also encourage everybody to study the history of Korea.
one thing i might add is the fact that most if not all of the propagated lies about the dprk are projection. sexual slavery was a thing the american occupation forces engaged in massively and south korean dictator pak chong-hui was killed during a dinner party with a underage concubine present. later, haircut policing was a thing in the south during the 1980s under chon tu-hwan. the most prominent korean defector, pak yon-mi is a white supremacist btw.
i believe that the whole hacking thing is massively exaggerated by western media as part of their whole “the enemy is both weak and strong”-strategy. it is both a way to engineer further fear mongering against korea, as well as to mask their own incompetence. but even if im wrong and they are indeed from the dprk, i still find them quite based and funny tbh.
do you happen to have any resources on the lgbt situation within the county? i would love to educate myself on the topic.
i also slightly disagree with you on china. they never seized being a socialist state, but have sadly become revisionist since deng. that doesnt make them any less worthy of critical support though.
China meets all criteria of Lenin’s definition of an imperialist power, Marxism Today made a good explanation of it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc-3aE8mAlATheir loans might be a good alternative for third world nations to get away from the IMF but are still to further Chinese business interests.
I read/heard somewhere that homosexuality is forbidden in the DPRK but I am sorry to tell you I don’t know where. I would have to look into it freshly too. I mentioned it more to make clear that I don’t simp for any country and that it is possible to have a rational discussion with me.
hey, idk why you got removed, you were talking about an interesting topic.
i obviously didnt watch the stream, since i dont have so much free time on my hands, but having read the comments i believe to have more or less gotten the gist of what they are saying. its the usual talking points.
this old r/genzedong thread does imho a great job on providing evidence that china does in fact not fit lenins criteria for a imperialist nation, even if one were to assume that it has a capitalist economy. (cw coarse language though)
The only source that life there is terrible are defector’s testimonies, which contradict each other on a daily basis and where the worst, most emotional stories are rewarded with fame and money.
They turn most of their lights off at night to preserve power. They don’t really have energy resources themselves and it is very difficult for them to get foreign currencies. They are still a poor country but considering that they are the most sanctioned country in the history of sanctions they are doing about at well as they can.
That might be their real problem. I mean, everywhere else on the planet, the value of menial labor greatly exceeds the cost of the lighting a human needs to be able to work. If they are, indeed, only providing lighting during daylight hours, they are only utilizing 1/3 to 1/2 of the industrial capacity they have invested in. They bought a tractor plant, but because they won’t turn on the lights, it’s production is far short of its capacity.
For want of a lightbulb, the production was lost. For want of production, farming equipment was lost. For want of farming equipment, the harvest was lost. For want of a harvest, the people were lost.
If the value of electricity to run a lightbulb so greatly exceeds the value of human labor, I would expect that they would have human powered generators to convert low-value human labor into high-value lighting, so that other laborers would have the light they need to produce.
First, factory lights only account for a small fraction of the power consumed and second people sleep at night. And third, it doesn’t matter what the electricity costs if you don’t have enough coal/oil/gas.
The DPRK has no shortage of coal. It’s one of their export products. They currently produce 35 million tons a year, and only burn 10 million.
While not commonly used in the rest of the world due to abundant oil and gas supplies, coal liquefaction and gasification are relatively simple and proven technologies. Having coal provides a (somewhat dirty) source of gas and liquid fuels, if utilized for that purpose.
Apparently, electricity is considerably more valuable in DPRK than the opportunity cost of shutting down the entire country overnight. I would think that the factories producing tractors and equipment for converting non-arable land into cropland would be a sufficiently high enough priority to justify burning some excess coal, but apparently not.
Their average height is much lower than people from South Korea. The most likely cause is malnutrition. When malnutrition affects even the military, your civilians aren’t doing well.
If you’re looking for sources, there are plenty of links should you search for “north korean vs south korean height”. The difference is pretty dramatic for 75 years of isolation.
I just think of division as how many times the right expression fits inside the left expression. 0.5 fits into 0.25 only 0.5 aka 1/2 times, because only half of it fits.
They are actually built like that, but they have a built-in projector that makes them appear flat to an outside observer. When they crash the projector usually breaks, which is why they then look bent.
This is the answer. Here in this US checks are still widely used, and sometimes, thanks to processing fees, the only payment except cash someone will accept. Mobile payments, though available, haven’t really taken off here like in Europe.
I used bank deposits. First through the mail, then through electronic-but-not-Internet payment systems and finally online and mobile banking. Also bank authorizations.
Checks were never big here, but they had been phased out completely in the 00s. I haven’t actually seen one since the nineties. I have never owned a check book.
This is funny, my son works at a printing place that prints, among other things, checks. And they apparently make a LOT of checks. He’s 25 and was confused why so many people need checks.
This. I can tell you from a banking standpoint we were ordering FAR fewer registers and other check stuff over the years and before I left they had reduced the amount we even could order to like 10 books per order, so not at lot and old ladies would come take them all.
Yes, my wife and my employers both pay using checks as well as printed invoices after direct deposits.
My entire family uses checks to pay each other. I’m not going to Venmo my dad $15,000. And his back doesn’t let me transfer funds to him for since idiotic reason.
Man, I would never pay rent or a mortgage payment with a deposit. I did that once, and they claimed I didn’t pay several times, and I had no receipt. I had to pay my bank $20 to provide proof of deposit (several times) Fuck that. Also fuck US Bank.
In ye old days I would fill out a slip of paper and mail it to the bank.
Deposit is probably the wrong word. It’s more a transfer order? Deposit is what came up when I translated my local term, but it’s not like I stuffed cash in an envelope or anything.
I don’t know about that guy but you can’t even get cheque books in NZ anymore. They were phased out, mostly because electronic payments are ubiquitous and most places already stopped accepting cheques a decade or two back.
I’m mid 40s and didn’t get a credit card until I was 25. And I couldn’t even pay for any utilities, rent or car payments with it. And still can’t. Online bill pay wasn’t a thing until like after the recession.
It’s mainly in the USA it seems. In South Africa, we have had internet banking since 1995. So businesses stopped using checks around that time. Phone banking with DTMF was popular around that time as well. Bank transfers we used more than checks for businesses before then.
For individuals, debit cards became the default around the same time. Same functionality as a credit card, without the credit.
Then Internet banking became mainstream for individuals around the 2000s when everyone got access to the internet on their phones.
Cash remained popular throughout since ATM infrastructure was very good in South Africa.
How is this possible? How did you pay your bills before online billpay systems - did you pay them all by phone?
We had something called an ‘acceptgiro’, it was basically a pre-filled money transfer order. Usually the amount, beneficiary and some reference number were pre-printed. All you had to do was sign it and mail it to the bank (which usually was free, you had pre-paid envelopes from the bank). It was usually attached to the bill, basically a tear-off part of the bill that you signed, stuffed into an envelope and mailed.
For recurring payments you usually give the other party ongoing permission to directly take it from your account. This is still extremely common and how I pay 99.999% of my bills. For things like mortgages, rent and insurance it’s usually required to pay in this way. Basically, my monthly bills get paid without me even having to think about it.
memes
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.