Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

mrsteinberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 328 posts

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#71

Post by [deleted] »

germandiago wrote: post #55
mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots. What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out. The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially,…

You described quite well a few things here.

[deleted]

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#72

Post by fallingknife »

MiroF wrote: post #30
germandiago wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to value different things. If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal (NK in this case). Or you have to be treated like an animal in the customs to even make medicines or food in. I have seen this elsewhere, believe me. Those people that live from that deserve... I will not say what they deserve, bu…

> If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal Cuba does not have a major hunger problem at all and has a higher life expectancy than the US. Lumping Cuba and North Korea together is silly & misguided.

The life expectancy figures are manipulated: https://www.econlib.org/about-that-cuban-life-expectancy/

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#73

Post by 908B64B197 »

reaperducer wrote: post #62
908B64B197 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the reason it's harder to work in a resort or operate a taxi in Cuba than it is to become a "doctor". The former has access to foreign currency with a real value. The later can hope to maybe get an exit visa (the government will loan it's "doctors" to foreign regimes in exchange for real currencies).

I'm curious why you put the word doctor in quotation marks, as if to imply they are substandard. It was always my understanding that while Cuba lacks a lot of things that many other countries take for granted, that the quality of its doctors was outstanding. I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic. Is this not true, or no longer true? Have I been under a false impressio…

> Is this not true, or no longer true? Have I been under a false impression for all this time?

Annecdotal evidence, but an acquintance of mine (who is an MD) encountered Cuban "doctors" in South America and wasn't impressed at all.

> I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic.

The thing is that Cuba made a lot of claims about their handling of the pandemic, but as with every communist country out there it's hard to really know what's really going on.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#74

Post by tacocataco »

germandiago wrote: post #61
x3iv130f wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition is the correct one for what Communism strives to be. A communal ownership of things. It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.

And it will be like this until the end of the days.

So you claim to know what's going to happen till the end of days?

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#75

Post by morticiansflame »

germandiago wrote: post #28
decafninja wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this too. Their mantra is usually something along the lines of "don't believe everything you see in the corrupt Western/South Korean media". What gives? I can understand different countries have different pros and cons, different people value different things, and something an American might find unpalatable might not be considered so bad somewhere else. But North Korea seems to stand out as being one of ve…

People tend to value different things. If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal (NK in this case). Or you have to be treated like an animal in the customs to even make medicines or food in. I have seen this elsewhere, believe me. Those people that live from that deserve... I will not say what they deserve, bu…

Regarding the haircut thing: that's actually a myth: https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E

Unfortunately it's myths like this that are shown as evidence of the /entire/ narrative around NK being false, by those who treat NK as a socialist paradise. There is a lot of poor journalism on the topic (see: myth that NK claimed to fire a rocket into the sun, myth that NK claimed to have found a unicorn, claims that KJU doesn't poop, etc) and as such it's easy to simply say that it's all made up.

Certainly not justifying those arguments at all; this just shows how easy it is for the less-critical on any side of an issue to believe whatever they want because of a few counterexamples.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#76

Post by darkwater »

mrtksn wrote: post #52
germandiago wrote: post #22

This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part. None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.

I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots. What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out. The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially,…

You missed to clarify that tourists use pesos convertibles which are artificially tied 1:1 to USD (1USD, 1 convertible) and that are basically what casas and taxi drivers accept. But you can totally go to local restaurants as a tourist (we did it a few times during our 3 weeks stay). And yeah, it can be sad to see how people lives there, and many try to flee but as you said makes you think about the real, deep impact of consumerism.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#77

Post by beepbooptheory »

germandiago wrote: post #57
germandiago wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> If you treat people and the history of their social relations like so many petri dishes, and nothing more can be believed or assured than inputting variables and observing the output, I can see how you would have your conceits. It is just, to me, a lonely and empty way to think about humanity. Want to believe we can do better, or really just believe anything at all, which it doesn't seem your worldview would allow.…

Ok, you are right, I will study the histories of those countries in your list, and try to see what happened to them! Thank you for your point of view, it's invaluable.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#78

Post by jonway »

germandiago wrote: post #47
beepbooptheory wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... if you can't believe in something that hasn't yet existed, how does anything come to be at all? Or do you deny that there is any theoretical thought behind communism at all? Is it just something people suddenly found themselves doing, and it failed and that was that? How does someone dream of things that are better? How can you have faith in anything at all? Is not the love you feel towards your friends and…

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't necessarily disagree with your comment overall but there are a lot of problems with your list and your methodology.

1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others.

2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen date) to the present day.

3: There have been many non-communist and non-socialst nations which where bad and there are still such regimes in existence today.

Eliminating "communism" or "socialism" was not a cure for anything. Many of these countries share different traits which would have a much greater effect on their stability.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#79

Post by oh_sigh »

drekk wrote: post #69
warning26 wrote: post #14

Really interesting article! On a related note, one oddity I often see online (and, once, in person) are the die-hard groups of westerners who insist that North Korea is actually a paradise on earth and any claim to the contrary is some kind of evil capitalist propaganda. Utterly baffling, when there are so many sources like this article indicating otherwise.

One thing I find more odd is how American audiences treat the DPRK while also supporting the continued military puppet state that is the ROK. There were also a "lot of sources" supporting WMDs in Iraq. When what you're saying is the state department narrative it's not going to receive pushback. The US killed 20% of Koreans on the peninsula and reduced it all to rubble. Forgive my skepticism at the "humanitarian inten…

You may find it odd because Americans for the most part don't actually have a problem with "military puppet states", if certain aspects of freedom and human rights are agreeable and pass their muster.

Feel free to look at the differences in health and life outcomes for North vs South Koreans, while entirely obscuring the systems of government, and you will see why the North Koreans are reviled throughout most of the rational/non-psychopathic world.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#80

Post by MiroF »

fallingknife wrote: post #72
MiroF wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal Cuba does not have a major hunger problem at all and has a higher life expectancy than the US. Lumping Cuba and North Korea together is silly & misguided.

The life expectancy figures are manipulated: https://www.econlib.org/about-that-cuban-life-expectancy/

I don't know that having a high abortion rate is "manipulation", they are of course going to have a high rate relative to the rest of Latin America. I cannot find a sourcing for the specific rate of abortion they cite.

The first "manipulation" identified would not impact Cuba's position as 1st in life expectancy in Latin America, as they concede in their article.

Post reply on HN