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South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

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Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#371

Post by adventured »

fleddr wrote: post #329
totoglazer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having visited all the countries mentioned within the last few years - definitely agree. Seoul is an incredible, modern city, unlike any other. Tokyo largely feels like it was frozen in time. Parts of Amsterdam have that sort of feel, but it’s definitely more mixed. Not crumbling, but old and making do since it’s fine.

I don't think Amsterdam is what is meant by the Netherlands. Amsterdam is basically a super old village built in a swamp that it interesting for its history, architecture, culture, and so on. Or for the red light district and weed shops, if you prefer that. It's not a display of infrastructure. The Netherlands has some of the best developed infrastructure nation-wide: roads, railways, and most famously its massive wa…

> By comparison, many parts of the US feel like a 3rd world country.

That's because you're comparing small nations to a nation that is better compared to the EU in size and diversity. The EU has dozens of third-world ghetto zones and the bottom 10% of the EU is exceptionally poor by first world standards.

The poorest areas of France also look like and function like the third-world, the quasi ghettos on the outskirts of eg Paris. It's more rare for large nations to not suffer from such poverty problems, and few accomplish that (Germany and Japan get close).

The largest population nations: Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, China, India, US, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Mexico

Do I need to point out the condition of the bottom 1/3 or 1/2 in most of those nations?

Ever read up on how the bottom quarter in Russia - Europe's largest nation by population - are faring the past decade (it's beyond dire, to put it politely)?

It's a small miracle the US isn't far worse off than it is.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#372

Post by Dig1t »

calmd wrote: post #7

SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…

I recently had this thought and I'm wondering if any experts in biology/genetics can chime in and help me. Yes it seems to me that this will be a problem faced by the developed world for the short-medium term future. But does evolution also play a role here as well? By creating a shrinking population, does that not sort of "select" for people with a natural inclination to have more children? How strongly is the desire to have more children tied to genetics?

I can imagine this problem solving itself on some timeline if that is the case e.g. people with a strong desire to have children have more kids, their genes are more prevalent while people inclined to have fewer kids sort of select themselves out of the gene pool by having 1 or 0 kids. This seems to me entirely possible, as I know genes can code for basically any arbitrary behavior, but I'm not an expert.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#373

Post by fleddr »

throaway3141593 wrote: post #365
fleddr wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should perhaps clarify that it's not just the level of economic development, rather specifically it's scale. For example, would you expect the Netherlands, smaller than a typical US state, to be the world's #2 food exporter? From a tiny country that is also extremely densely populated? To produce a number of mega corporations like Unilever, Shell (partly dutch), Philips, Heineken, the like...and this doesn't even b…

> Yet I'd still say the food export fact is a crazy one, as you would expect that to very much be surface-related. I would expect food production to be area-related. Rotterdam is Europe's busiest seaport, and one of the busiest seaports in the world, so I'm not the least bit surprised that the Netherlands is one of the world's top food exporters.

Perhaps you mean to imply that the bulk of this export is just throughput or transport. A lot of it is real produce, coming from the country itself:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

Which of course is surface-related, so the remarkable/surprising fact is the intensity of it, and the stunning yields.

"Feeding the world" from a very small surface and with very little human labor is quite a marvel. I think any farmer, from any other country in the world, will have their minds blown when they see it with their own eyes.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#374

Post by fleaaaa »

contra-doubts wrote: post #264

This article is wildly off-base and totally misrepresents South Korea, both factually and in tone. There are many ways that South Korea is a great country but this article misses the mark. Source: I've been married to a South Korean for 10 years. > South Korea was able to make these achievements without a citywide nor a nationwide lockdown. A large part of the country is literally in Level 4 lockdowns now (no gatheri…

This is quite true, I could say that as a korean. It's a mixture bag of canary version of modernity and archaic sentiment.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#375

Post by int_19h »

harpersealtako wrote: post #303
rat87 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU isn't one country The US is one country and disparate voting power between states(mainly in the Senate, to a lesser extent with the electoral college) is a real problem. I see little reason to make it worse. Although it's useful to rhetoric out how little sense the current system makes

The point of having both proportional and state-based voting is to incentivize both small and large states to stay in the union. The optimization is for political unity over perfectly representative democracy. It makes perfect sense when you consider the ideals and goals of its implementation -- that being a compromise in order to convince both small states and large states to cede large parts of their sovereignty to…

This made sense back when the states were actually mostly self-governing polities, and there were relatively few pertinent issues on the federal level. But this is no longer the case today, and in practice, EC and Senate result in a "tyranny of the minority", where the minority can not only veto the majority's agenda, but actually push their own instead.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#376

Post by yongjik »

devchix wrote: post #352
yongjik wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err... I don't think your second point necessarily follows the first point. For a country to become "angry an belligerent, with massive chip on shoulder," it needs (1) angry, desperate people, and (2) someone who would gain politically by fanning the hatred (often in a self-reinforcing cycle). I think the anti-Japanese sentiment didn't really took off because, once you start looking into the matter, you'd rapidly rea…

You're right, thanks for the nuanced view. I guess my impression here is that modern Korea, with its own cultural identity: dress, food, language, literature, history ... would not have been if the US hadn't entered WWII. I don't mean to create indebtors, it's an observation on how a country+culture could survive or disappear on a turn. And given what tenuous a beginning it had, it's amazing that South Korea is the e…

Well, it's fun to speculate about "what if" - East Asia would look very different if the US had never entered the war, but I don't think the Korean culture would have just disappeared (not sure if that's what you mean).

Do you know Korean has more speakers than Italian? It's very hard to eliminate the identity of dozens of millions of people, and Japan was definitely not planning to kill off Koreans even at the height of its madness. We enjoyed the dubious honor of being the "secondary citizen", close enough to be "civilized" (= assimilated) into the Japanese culture, unlike those other, savage Asians. "内鮮一体", as the Japanese Empire said: "The inland (Japan) and Chosen (Korea) are one body."

I think the "worst case" result would have been something like Brittany or Scotland, having a shared identity but largely becoming a part of a bigger, dominant culture.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#377

Post by rjzzleep »

soperj wrote: post #111
rjzzleep wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about South Korea, but looking at some other asian countries, there are a couple of things, I think the housing part falls into number 3 but is only a small part of the whole: 1. Having children without being married has a bunch of problems, and in some countries like singapore gets punished for it in lack of certain social services 2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their husband ta…

>2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some aspects as bad as or worse than in the US. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, looks like Korea has a year, just split into maternity and parental, and Japan has a year off for both mother and father, although the father seldom takes it. Which countries are comparable to the US?

Where did you get this number from ?

I see 90 days. 60 paid full and if its anything like other Asian countries there a pretty low limit for the partial paid part. Maybe you can take a year but you will almost certainly not keep your job afterwards. I guess 45 days after birth is much better than most US jurisdictions.

If the father does get it and doesn’t take it it will most certainly also be because of fear of punishment down the road.

And funny you should say Japan, because from what I hear most people wouldn’t dare take time off.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#378

Post by int_19h »

oblio wrote: post #356
tuatoru wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regiona…

The thing is, many countries have cultures based on opposition. There's a reason most national days are celebrations of an independence war. So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.

It's long overdue for humanity to ditch the dangerous baggage that is Romantic nationalism.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#379

Post by princeb »

spothedog1 wrote: post #190
csomar wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Immigration has become an issue lately because a human (or a bare-human) is worth much less. 1.000 years ago a bare illiterate human had some considerable value. He could work in the field or he could fight. More humans, more food and production. More humans, more manpower to fight your enemies. Now a bare semi-educated human is a liability. Which is why most countries are refusing their entrance. Times h…

This is inaccurate. More people, even low skilled ones are still a huge benefit to your society. They buy goods and services in the local economy increasing demand and work tax paying jobs. Immigrants children grow up to greatly out earn their parents pay way more in taxes than they their parents. The only immigrant group that could be considered a liability are older low skilled workers who have passed the age to ha…

> They buy goods and services

the wonder of economic development is that as a country's quality of life and wealth increases, consumption increases.

the typical american probably consumes about 4000x as much energy as the typical DRC. we still have a long, long way to go before we can accommodate the whole world living like an american.

even as population growth stalls, or even reverses course, the ability of humans to keep expanding its appetite for the finer things in life can never be quelled.

Re: South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

#380

Post by presentation »

_RPL5_ wrote: post #344
presentation wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Tokyo - on the surface certain lines have dated exteriors on their trains and stations, but they are maintained so much better and built with much more care to the surrounding environment that it's impossible for me to compare with NYC. NYC's trains are constantly late, always go out of service, are deafeningly loud, incredibly slow, filthy, don't have great coverage outside of the Manhattan core and genera…

I have not been to Japan, but I have read several fairly detailed accounts coming from multiple travel bloggers. One thing they all pointed out is that Japan is full of what by our standards would be considered semi-antique technology like trolleys from the 1950s and computers and fax machines from the 1990s, that are all still being used, and maintained in really good condition. Living in Tokyo, do you notice this a…

Old technologies do stay in use for a long time, and while it’s annoying to need to send a fax occasionally, they’ve made it brilliantly easy to do by providing fax services for Ikebukuro is the nearest place to where I live that has a reputation for being “dangerous”, with a homeless population and a large yakuza-dominated nightlife district, but by that I mean there’s like 20 harmless old drunk men around in the plaza sitting around, and a high concentration of sex shops - not dangerous at all though by foreign standards (small women can still feel safe walking around at 3am if they felt like it).
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