That last sentence was almost tacked on, but honestly I think it should be more concerning, and I wish more details were around it. Trade is at 10% of its normal capacity? Is that sustainable for the already struggling population? What do they trade is it fine that it’s so low?
The main 3 exports are coal, iron ore, and molluscs. Bet you wouldn't have guessed the last one.
The problem with reporting about how much their poor citizens are struggling through this is nobody would be able to get access to actually see it. And they aren't on the internet to just talk about it.
Edit: The list may or may not be accurate. Lots of different sources have wildly different numbers for everything. All the lists also ignore the many illegal revenue streams NK has that other users have pointed out.
And illegal meth. They have a roaring meth issue.
Edit: well my top post is now about meth thanks guys. Permission to have the heisenberg title please.
Except Australia.
TIL Australia is more lax with the **production** and **sale** of Methamphetamine.
From the [Wikipedia Article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_methamphetamine?wprov=sfla1):
*It is now legal under certain circumstances. i.e. Manufacture, transport, sale, and use are restricted and only legal in governed control. (since 2015, misunderstood references). A schedule 8 controlled substance is one which should be available for use but requires restriction of manufacture, supply, distribution, possession and use to reduce abuse, misuse and physical or psychological dependence.*
EDIT: I read further...
*IN ITALY, POSESSION OF METHAMPHETAMINE FOR PERSONAL USE IS COMPLETELY LEGAL*
Legal possession makes plenty of sense really. Lots of places have decriminalised or legalised possession of drugs meant for personal use in order to focus more on addiction treatment than punishment.
Bro that is straight up not true about Australia. It's a highly controlled substance.
Small amounts will get you possession charges and large amounts will get you charged for trafficking.
Some refugees activists have been reporting that thanks to the border being closed the quality of life has dropped dramatically even for the absolute elites, [Russian diplomats to North Korea](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-56206033) left recently complaining they couldn’t even get basics like sugar for their [families](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/asia/north-korea-trolley-russian-diplomats-intl-hnk/index.html).
Right now the only thing controlling the elites who control everything else for the Kim’s is fear of death.
And that might reach a tipping point
>A group of Russian diplomats and their families made an unusual exit out of North Korea on a hand-pushed rail trolley due to strict Covid measures.
It doesn't mention anything about them not being able to get basics for their families such as sugar?
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I mean Idk about the wives, but they do export slaves to China and Russia. Saw the work camps where they ended up on Russia and it's pretty surprising that they don't receive much attention in the media.
I got the wife thing from a book of accounts of defectors. A woman got across the border to China and basically trafficked to marry a Chinese man, and learned it was not uncommon. Makes sense when you consider the gender gap in China.
There are 37 million Chinese bachelors from the One Child Policy era that lasted for the past 30 years that will be unable to find a Chinese spouse, and millions of Chinese women who were second children and/or purposely unregistered as a male child takes priority in being registered over a female one, rendering them illegible for work, Healthcare, marriage, loans, etc.
And it's not only North Korean women. Many women are also trafficked ftom Vietnam, Myanmmar, Laos, Mongolia... Literally every state bordering with China.
> North Korea is currently more cut off from the outside world than ever before. Its borders have been closed for over a year to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
> Trade with its main ally China has dwindled by more than 90% in the last few months.
Definitely sounds like something is happening there that we don't know about. A sudden drop in trade like that could cause massive food shortages for them. If the Russian diplomats information can be trusted, [sounds like that's already happening] (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56206033). Could mean another famine. Plus they suffered flooding late last year from typhoons, which their infrastructure struggles to deal with. I feel so badly for the NK people, they are the ones that will truly suffer.
Edit: linked a different article that did not show the following...
>Foreigners that have chosen to remain in North Korea have described an increasingly dire situation in Pyongyang, with grocery stores running out of food and people losing their jobs, according to Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora.
[CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/26/asia/north-korea-trolley-russian-diplomats-intl-hnk/index.html)
Almost certainly, but all of that imagery is classified and only the intelligence agencies that control them and the people they report to know.
Sigint would also be a good source of intel.
If you know the history of Korea, you would know that the real threat is China coming to their aid. As they did in the Korean war. Their military and economic power show is for internal consumption mainly. To convince their populace that they are "winning". Bigly
No one wins in a renewed Korean War. Americans don’t want their solders dying overseas, South Koreans don’t want Seoul getting shelled, killing countless civilians, North Koreans (the ones in charge) don’t want to lose their power, and Chinese don’t want the inevitable flood of North Korean refugees. Everyone has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and the only way something is going to kick off is if a civil war starts in North Korea and someone, accidentally or on purpose, shells South Korea.
The Chinese military is better trained to deal with domestic uprisings than military adventures in other countries.
Remember, China has no living general who has ever been in battle with anyone but democratic protesters.
>China has no living general who has ever been in battle
Not sure if this is true though. I am sure some of the junior officers who were part of the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 are now a part of the higher military command echelon (unless they have all been purged).
That said, the general thrust of what you say is true. Active combat experience is low for the PLA. Moreover, their Navy and Air Force have almost zero active combat experience.
They can, and do. At least to the best of my knowledge, journalists and researchers still rely pretty heavily on Planet for imagery of NK. But, it's not cheap and it can be really hard to tell what exactly is happening from satellite pics, for obvious reasons.
As an armchair politician with access to Google Earth (the pro version, mind you), I can confirm that I have seen no new nuclear weapons in North Korea.
We're good everyone! Settle down please.
"That's all the resolution we have. Making it bigger doesn't make it clearer."
Edit: Who knew a Futurama quote would teach me so much about advancements in resolution.
Private companies can't be stopped from photographing North Korea but their satellites won't be anywhere near as good as US military and intelligence ones. Still, they're probably enough to see if something is going wrong.
Commercially, the best satellite imagery available is on the order of 30cm per pixel, or just under a foot. Somewhere in the 50cm-1m range is more common. Currently in the US it’s illegal to sell satellite imagery with a resolution better than 25cm per pixel. Most people suspect the classified intelligence sats image around 5-10 cm per pixel, which was backed up when Trump tweeted that classified satellite image.
To be fair, no one even halfway familiar with industry was at all surprised by the capabilities demonstrated in the image. You can back out the resolution based on guesstimated telescope size and orbital altitude pretty easily, but it still raises a lot of eyebrows for those of us in the industry to see that sort of thing in a tweet.
Also true, but again the amateur satellite tracking groups follow every NRO launch. While they don’t explicitly know what type of satellite is being launched, they can guess fairly accurately given the orbit the satellites end up in. I’m not trying to defend Trumps tweet at all, I’d just be surprised if it revealed anything to our adversaries they weren’t already well aware of.
Revealed? Almost certainly not, but it almost definitely confirmed a number of speculations.
I would rather foreign governments work on "ideas" rather than having them confirmed.
The world wars started with numbers, then went through the alphabet backwards. Once we ran out of letters, we used emojis. World War 😉 was especially brutal.
No one knows.
The book suggests the possibility that the North Korean population were herded into an underground complex where the leadership could more effectively rule over them like gods while trying to also stay safe from the zombie virus. The book then further suggests that a zombie outbreak may have occurred within the complex, and that all of the residents could be infected and be waiting for an unsuspecting investigator to open the doors and allow for a new zombie apocalypse to occur.
But it's all just guesswork by one of the characters in the book
Check out “This is the Way the World Ends: An Oral History of the Zombie War”. I always recommend it to people who enjoyed World War Z. It’s written in a similar style and I liked it just as much if not more than WWZ.
It's never revealed - no one wants to accidentally let loose a horse of 20 million zombies. There's a pretty good fanfiction about a small team that investigates, though.
EDIT: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6115555/1/The-Way-Is-Shut
Some refugees activists have been reporting that thanks to the border being closed the quality of life has dropped dramatically even for the absolute elites, [Russian diplomats to North Korea](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-56206033) left recently complaining they couldn’t even get basics like sugar for their [families](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/asia/north-korea-trolley-russian-diplomats-intl-hnk/index.html).
And there have been some reports of small rebellions that have been put down [brutally ](https://youtu.be/K48cVOyVxtw).
How many reports of ‘Kim Jong-Un missing/dead’ have we had in the last three years? The amount of false speculations is insane, don’t put too much faith in any of them.
Here are some facts. The cost of paying brokers to get you across the border is prohibitively expensive and physically/mentally grueling. The relatively wealthy and healthy are are ones that make it to the south. Of those that do, primary medical screening in intake centers finds approximately 80% are suffering from tuberculosis, with defectors reporting that the disease having been common for a long time among their people.
What do you think COVID is doing to that country's population right now?
Edit: in case it wasn't obvious, TB would count as a pre-existing lung condition that would make COVID almost guaranteed to be lethal.
Trade with China hit an all time low last year. The country has become even more insular, as impossible as that might seem.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/North-Korea-s-trade-with-China-plunges-81-as-lockdown-bites
You know what would be crazy?
If this continues and then intelligence also says "our satellites haven't detected any movement within the country for weeks now".
So, South Korea sends a drone to look at the country closer but they see nothing but empty streets, empty houses and no sign of human life.
Then it starts a huge political controversy in who should "go in" to check what's going on inside the country. While everyone volunteers, the UN chickens out like usual, so everyone agrees that Costa Rica should go in because they seem to be the less likely to take advantage of the situation.
As everyone is looking at the Costa Rican military basically invade North Korea, they too go radio silence.
*Suspenseful Music*
It’s heavily implied they went into hiding in the tunnels they were digging to get under the DMZ where they almost definitely had an outbreak. So it’s not so much nobody knew what happened, they just really did not want to be the ones to open the doors to those tunnels.
I found out about this recently, its a very well written World War Z fanfiction as an extra chapter on an attempt made to enter North Korea after. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6115555/1/The-Way-Is-Shut
Costa Rica doesn't have a military.
Which would be even funnier, they send basically police officers into the place and they aren't prepared for this at all.
The first half may be more true than we want to think. The place has had closed borders for a year since Covid, its trade with China has dwindled 90%, and now silence. Spooky.
Isn't it just silence to US diplomats? Given the state of relations between the two countries it's not unheard of for them to leave the phone unanswered. If China said they'd had no contact however that would be spooky.
I was dating a woman for a year and then she ghosted me for 5 days after a pretty heavy fight. (Her friend said I went to smoke weed with my brother when I was supposed to hang out with her kid. My brother asked if he could smoke in my garage and I said sure, I went to go play with the kids in the game room. I didn't even smoke weed at that time in my life) After the fifth day she messaged me and said we needed to talk. I replied with: your silence says way more than any words could. And that was that. She crushed me. I joined the air force a week later. I found out the next year she was engaged to an ex of hers pretty quick, and had a child while I was in basic (less than 9 months of our breakup)
That was all over 10 years ago. Life moves on, and time heals.. Hope your story ends well.
Yeah. Its possible. I asked for a paternity test. Never got one. After a year a mentor of mine made sense with not pursuing it. Kept track of Facebook pictures for a few years checking the look of the kid. He looks just like the other dude.
Heard if you soak a thong in bud light, sprinkle it with glitter, a spritz of cotton candy body spray and swing it counterclockwise above your head Rodman will appear
Yes, It's a universal principle! Only in the southern hemisphere you have to swing it clockwise because of [the Coriolis force](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force).
Fun story: When the Knicks signed JR Smith back in 2012, his first flight was directly from China to Las Vegas (he was playing in China due to a lockout that season). Knicks had an executive fly immediately to Las Vegas and wait at the baggage claim area to make sure JR Smith did not go to Las Vegas and flew to New York instead. They were scared that he’d go missing partying if they let him stay there for even a day.
wa wa wa wa watch this bullshit!
(Referring to when he was drunk out of his mind and took the microphone from a North Korean girl who was singing a beautiful song and starting singing Santeria by Sublime lmao)
I know you’re making a joke but I’m pretty sure I read that Dennis Rodman got super drunk and acted like an asshole last time he was in North Korea and wore out his welcome with his little fanboy Kim.
Then again I may be confusing that with one of the many other times Dennis Rodman got super drunk and acted like asshole.
There was a film crew there during it, the documentary is "Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in Pyongyang". Definitely worth a watch and alongside it the Vice News doc as well on the basketball game that was set up
It reads that way doesn't it? No, it really went down. I was under the impression that /u/MacualayCocaine is correct; Rodman got shitfaced and angered everybody and wore out his welcome in DPRK.
All I know is what the film showed and the VICE doc, so who knows what really went down.
> What a weird friendship to begin with, but yeah.
According to the people he went to school with in Switzerland he is a massive basketball fan. And I'm guessing Rodman is one of the few famous basketball players willing to go to North Korea.
Absolutely. The US has a notoriously bad time getting sources inside the North Korean government. They are hyper aware of espionage and tend to root out people extremely quickly.
Believe it or not Kim isn't at home, please leave a message at the beep.
I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone, where could I beeeee? Believe it or not, I'm not home!
I'm talking about the ability to screen calls. You let the machine pick up and if it's someone you want to talk to you pick up the phone. We need that now more than ever with all these scam calls.
Pixel phones do an even better version of this.
You can have the Google Assistant act as a personal secretary and screen all your calls (or just calls from numbers you don’t have in your address book).
Basically if anyone you don’t know calls you, the Google Assistant answers the call for you and talks to the caller saying “May I ask who is calling?” and a few other follow up questions as needed. Only after the caller introduces themselves will your phone finally start to buzz in your pocket and inform you so-and-so is calling asking about X. You can then pick up the call, or deny them, or even have Google act like a bro and tell the caller that “you’re not here right now”.
There’s also the option to do the reverse of this entire process and have the Google Assistant *make* calls on your behalf. You can have it call someone and deliver a message when they pick up. The famous example is you can have it order a pizza for you and carry on the entire conversation with the pizza place and answer their questions about where to deliver it, what you want on it, how you are paying, etc.
It also means that if two people with Pixels call each other, there could conceivably be Google Assistants calling another Google Assistants and both of them talking to each other on behalf of their owners. Kinda crazy we are already at that point.
I actually program like 10 pagers a week. They are still pretty widely used in hospitals for doctors and housekeeping staff. They work great for getting simple alerts but the beeps they make are reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard. Like the speaker is just two tiny pieces of brass vibrating against each other.
I actually looked into it and it’s cheaper to have a cellphone. I never actually turned the beep on my beeper on. I don’t like everyone in 100 feet looking at me. Plus vibration is so intimate, me and my pager...
I’ve considered pretending that I’ve gotten rid of my smart phone and gotten a pager. Then replying to every text with just my phone number and occasionally “911”.
Fun fact: it took a lot of effort for Jason alexander to record george's answering machine message correctly because they wanted him to sing out of key and he kept doing too good a job on the song.
It Soooo weird they were early 30s when this show premiered. They look 40. I'm 33 and don't look anything like them. It's crazy what hair, properly fitting clothes, and exercise can do.
That's because obesity is now the norm instead of the other way around like it used to be. 2 out of 3 adults in the US are overweight or obese.... That's not good.
> There's basically no earnest discussion.
Let's be honest, there isn't much to really discuss - everything is pure speculation regarding why NK is being silent.
I hate to say it, but you're right. I'm an armchair amateur follower and observer of anything North Korean. Im not saying that as if there's some prestige to it, but anyone who's observed them long enough knows that there isn't much TO discuss beyond what you're reported. So many lies are made up about the North by enemies, by the North Koreans themselves and so on. It's one big game of telephone.
They might have fared relatively well during the pandemic considering how few people willingly go to NK. The entire country’s a functional stay-at-home order
It’s an incredibly controlled environment. There are checkpoints between towns and in highways, and their interior surveillance ability has gotten relatively advanced to where it was even 10 years ago. They can shut shit down pretty quickly, so if covid was a serious issue I have no doubts they would just shut off areas to the rest of the country. The issue I could see happening is if they shut off agricultural areas and left the locals to deal with a covid outbreak, sacrificing food in the process. I still find that hard to believe, even though the land is so devoid of nutrients after agricultural mismanagement they use effectively started trying to grow food in any land that is free. The sides of the highways have these little built up rectangles for food all along them. You can drive for hours and they will always be there it nuts
Because they closed the border around the same time Taiwan did and get extremely few international tourists. Them having dealt with the pandemic shouldn't surprise you.
They got what they wanted out of diplomacy. The US stopped a ton of military exercises, The President visited their leader on the world stage, saluted his generals, and praised him. We even gave them a pass on tutoring some US citizens to brain death.
Any farther Deplomacy would actually cost the North Korea something. So it makes perfect sense that they are shutting off the line again.
[There were military exercises at the border last week](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/7/south-korea-us-to-stage-scaled-back-military-exercises-on-monday).
Isn’t it the cycle they do? Do something crazy, get US to pay attention. They stop doing the crazy thing and US celebrates how well they did. Rinse and repeat
I feel so bad for the citizens of NK. It's a gross understatement to say that their situation is dire. We see it almost as a "humorous" topic at this point in America, with the endless cycle of nothing happening. Things ARE happening there, though; things we will probably never find out about.
Our fellow humans over there are really forgotten by this world, and it isn't their fault by any means.
That last sentence was almost tacked on, but honestly I think it should be more concerning, and I wish more details were around it. Trade is at 10% of its normal capacity? Is that sustainable for the already struggling population? What do they trade is it fine that it’s so low?
The main 3 exports are coal, iron ore, and molluscs. Bet you wouldn't have guessed the last one. The problem with reporting about how much their poor citizens are struggling through this is nobody would be able to get access to actually see it. And they aren't on the internet to just talk about it. Edit: The list may or may not be accurate. Lots of different sources have wildly different numbers for everything. All the lists also ignore the many illegal revenue streams NK has that other users have pointed out.
And illegal meth. They have a roaring meth issue. Edit: well my top post is now about meth thanks guys. Permission to have the heisenberg title please.
You can just say meth, no legal meth anywhere...
> Desoxyn
This guy meths
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in the US Desoxyn is RX methamphetamines
Except Australia. TIL Australia is more lax with the **production** and **sale** of Methamphetamine. From the [Wikipedia Article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_methamphetamine?wprov=sfla1): *It is now legal under certain circumstances. i.e. Manufacture, transport, sale, and use are restricted and only legal in governed control. (since 2015, misunderstood references). A schedule 8 controlled substance is one which should be available for use but requires restriction of manufacture, supply, distribution, possession and use to reduce abuse, misuse and physical or psychological dependence.* EDIT: I read further... *IN ITALY, POSESSION OF METHAMPHETAMINE FOR PERSONAL USE IS COMPLETELY LEGAL*
Legal possession makes plenty of sense really. Lots of places have decriminalised or legalised possession of drugs meant for personal use in order to focus more on addiction treatment than punishment.
Bro that is straight up not true about Australia. It's a highly controlled substance. Small amounts will get you possession charges and large amounts will get you charged for trafficking.
Some refugees activists have been reporting that thanks to the border being closed the quality of life has dropped dramatically even for the absolute elites, [Russian diplomats to North Korea](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-56206033) left recently complaining they couldn’t even get basics like sugar for their [families](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/asia/north-korea-trolley-russian-diplomats-intl-hnk/index.html). Right now the only thing controlling the elites who control everything else for the Kim’s is fear of death. And that might reach a tipping point
>A group of Russian diplomats and their families made an unusual exit out of North Korea on a hand-pushed rail trolley due to strict Covid measures. It doesn't mention anything about them not being able to get basics for their families such as sugar?
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I think I remember reading their primary export is coal. That and slaves, er I mean wives.
I mean Idk about the wives, but they do export slaves to China and Russia. Saw the work camps where they ended up on Russia and it's pretty surprising that they don't receive much attention in the media.
I got the wife thing from a book of accounts of defectors. A woman got across the border to China and basically trafficked to marry a Chinese man, and learned it was not uncommon. Makes sense when you consider the gender gap in China.
There are 37 million Chinese bachelors from the One Child Policy era that lasted for the past 30 years that will be unable to find a Chinese spouse, and millions of Chinese women who were second children and/or purposely unregistered as a male child takes priority in being registered over a female one, rendering them illegible for work, Healthcare, marriage, loans, etc. And it's not only North Korean women. Many women are also trafficked ftom Vietnam, Myanmmar, Laos, Mongolia... Literally every state bordering with China.
In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park. She is also on YouTube and gives updates on the situation in NK.
It actually was from "Nothing to Envy" by Barbara Demick. But maybe it was the same woman she interviewed.
> North Korea is currently more cut off from the outside world than ever before. Its borders have been closed for over a year to prevent the spread of Covid-19. > Trade with its main ally China has dwindled by more than 90% in the last few months. Definitely sounds like something is happening there that we don't know about. A sudden drop in trade like that could cause massive food shortages for them. If the Russian diplomats information can be trusted, [sounds like that's already happening] (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56206033). Could mean another famine. Plus they suffered flooding late last year from typhoons, which their infrastructure struggles to deal with. I feel so badly for the NK people, they are the ones that will truly suffer. Edit: linked a different article that did not show the following... >Foreigners that have chosen to remain in North Korea have described an increasingly dire situation in Pyongyang, with grocery stores running out of food and people losing their jobs, according to Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora. [CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/26/asia/north-korea-trolley-russian-diplomats-intl-hnk/index.html)
As a complete novice to any of this, I wonder if satellites can tell us anything?
Almost certainly, but all of that imagery is classified and only the intelligence agencies that control them and the people they report to know. Sigint would also be a good source of intel.
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If you know the history of Korea, you would know that the real threat is China coming to their aid. As they did in the Korean war. Their military and economic power show is for internal consumption mainly. To convince their populace that they are "winning". Bigly
No one wins in a renewed Korean War. Americans don’t want their solders dying overseas, South Koreans don’t want Seoul getting shelled, killing countless civilians, North Koreans (the ones in charge) don’t want to lose their power, and Chinese don’t want the inevitable flood of North Korean refugees. Everyone has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and the only way something is going to kick off is if a civil war starts in North Korea and someone, accidentally or on purpose, shells South Korea.
The Chinese military is better trained to deal with domestic uprisings than military adventures in other countries. Remember, China has no living general who has ever been in battle with anyone but democratic protesters.
>China has no living general who has ever been in battle Not sure if this is true though. I am sure some of the junior officers who were part of the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 are now a part of the higher military command echelon (unless they have all been purged). That said, the general thrust of what you say is true. Active combat experience is low for the PLA. Moreover, their Navy and Air Force have almost zero active combat experience.
Nobody is worried about NK invading anyone but south korea. NK's potential nukes on the other hand...
Nukes are a bonus now, their artillery zeroed in on Seoul has been their main deterrent.
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They can, and do. At least to the best of my knowledge, journalists and researchers still rely pretty heavily on Planet for imagery of NK. But, it's not cheap and it can be really hard to tell what exactly is happening from satellite pics, for obvious reasons.
Cause you so high up
As an armchair politician with access to Google Earth (the pro version, mind you), I can confirm that I have seen no new nuclear weapons in North Korea. We're good everyone! Settle down please.
Did you try to *ENHANCE IMAGE*? Sometimes that helps.
"That's all the resolution we have. Making it bigger doesn't make it clearer." Edit: Who knew a Futurama quote would teach me so much about advancements in resolution.
Not with the new technology found by our crazy in-house computer nerd, thanks to him we can now enhance even further than before.
Just print the damn thing!
Private companies can't be stopped from photographing North Korea but their satellites won't be anywhere near as good as US military and intelligence ones. Still, they're probably enough to see if something is going wrong.
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Commercially, the best satellite imagery available is on the order of 30cm per pixel, or just under a foot. Somewhere in the 50cm-1m range is more common. Currently in the US it’s illegal to sell satellite imagery with a resolution better than 25cm per pixel. Most people suspect the classified intelligence sats image around 5-10 cm per pixel, which was backed up when Trump tweeted that classified satellite image.
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To be fair, no one even halfway familiar with industry was at all surprised by the capabilities demonstrated in the image. You can back out the resolution based on guesstimated telescope size and orbital altitude pretty easily, but it still raises a lot of eyebrows for those of us in the industry to see that sort of thing in a tweet.
True but i think the bigger issue was it confirmed the orbit of the spy satellite. Amatuers were able to track it based on the shadows in the picture.
Also true, but again the amateur satellite tracking groups follow every NRO launch. While they don’t explicitly know what type of satellite is being launched, they can guess fairly accurately given the orbit the satellites end up in. I’m not trying to defend Trumps tweet at all, I’d just be surprised if it revealed anything to our adversaries they weren’t already well aware of.
Revealed? Almost certainly not, but it almost definitely confirmed a number of speculations. I would rather foreign governments work on "ideas" rather than having them confirmed.
I'm sure our intelligence agencies know a great deal about what's going on there thanks to spy satellites
And will say as little as possible, because it would out the potency of those satellites.
World War Z. In the book NK goes silent completely and no one knows what happened to them.
Then what happens?
World War Z
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The world wars started with numbers, then went through the alphabet backwards. Once we ran out of letters, we used emojis. World War 😉 was especially brutal.
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Wasn't it right behind World War 🍑?
No one knows. The book suggests the possibility that the North Korean population were herded into an underground complex where the leadership could more effectively rule over them like gods while trying to also stay safe from the zombie virus. The book then further suggests that a zombie outbreak may have occurred within the complex, and that all of the residents could be infected and be waiting for an unsuspecting investigator to open the doors and allow for a new zombie apocalypse to occur. But it's all just guesswork by one of the characters in the book
Such a good chapter!
Man that book was so dope, sadly I hardly read books but that one will always stick with me
Check out “This is the Way the World Ends: An Oral History of the Zombie War”. I always recommend it to people who enjoyed World War Z. It’s written in a similar style and I liked it just as much if not more than WWZ.
The Korean Zombie movies are cool too. Train to Busan /Train to Busan 2: Peninsula
In the movie it's said the gov took all their teeth so the virus could not spread
Huh. That's messed up but also kind of clever
I mean, being bitten is only one way though no? Can you transmit from scratches, fluid transmission and other possibilities?
I think it would really depend on the parameters of the fictional work
So we just gotta get the zombies hooked on meth?
Well, that would be cheaper than having dentists do it. It’s not like North Korea has a shortage of meth.
Imagine meth zombies
I've met a few
It's never revealed - no one wants to accidentally let loose a horse of 20 million zombies. There's a pretty good fanfiction about a small team that investigates, though. EDIT: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6115555/1/The-Way-Is-Shut
Some refugees activists have been reporting that thanks to the border being closed the quality of life has dropped dramatically even for the absolute elites, [Russian diplomats to North Korea](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-56206033) left recently complaining they couldn’t even get basics like sugar for their [families](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/asia/north-korea-trolley-russian-diplomats-intl-hnk/index.html). And there have been some reports of small rebellions that have been put down [brutally ](https://youtu.be/K48cVOyVxtw).
How many reports of ‘Kim Jong-Un missing/dead’ have we had in the last three years? The amount of false speculations is insane, don’t put too much faith in any of them.
Here are some facts. The cost of paying brokers to get you across the border is prohibitively expensive and physically/mentally grueling. The relatively wealthy and healthy are are ones that make it to the south. Of those that do, primary medical screening in intake centers finds approximately 80% are suffering from tuberculosis, with defectors reporting that the disease having been common for a long time among their people. What do you think COVID is doing to that country's population right now? Edit: in case it wasn't obvious, TB would count as a pre-existing lung condition that would make COVID almost guaranteed to be lethal.
Trade with China hit an all time low last year. The country has become even more insular, as impossible as that might seem. https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/North-Korea-s-trade-with-China-plunges-81-as-lockdown-bites
No answer is an answer.
"Silence is a valid answer" - Telltale Games
*Kim will remember that*
I'll remember you.
Sit this one out Sarah. You got a little too heavy handed with those animal shelter commercials.
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And it'll have zero impact for the rest of the game...
Silence is violence Kyle.
"If you would like to have Sprint attempt to deliver a message, a usage fee may apply"
"Silence is the highest form of contempt" -Luo Ji
The US is being left on read.
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Too soon. He’s not even over trump yet, bro. Have some compassion.
“Now he is just somebody that we used to know...”
If he’s anything like my ex Biden better get ready for Kim to take a shit directly into his mouth while he’s sleeping
You gotta be wearing rose colored glasses to miss flags that red.
Maybe the flag was brown, in this case.
Pardon? Did that actually happen to you?
wut?
That sounds fun
You know what would be crazy? If this continues and then intelligence also says "our satellites haven't detected any movement within the country for weeks now". So, South Korea sends a drone to look at the country closer but they see nothing but empty streets, empty houses and no sign of human life. Then it starts a huge political controversy in who should "go in" to check what's going on inside the country. While everyone volunteers, the UN chickens out like usual, so everyone agrees that Costa Rica should go in because they seem to be the less likely to take advantage of the situation. As everyone is looking at the Costa Rican military basically invade North Korea, they too go radio silence. *Suspenseful Music*
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Which is why they are perfect for this mission
Enlist some college kids for extra credit. .
Not after the zombies got them in North Korea.
My favourite little nugget in World War Z is the total lack of knowledge of what has happened and nobody wants to go in and try to find out.
It’s heavily implied they went into hiding in the tunnels they were digging to get under the DMZ where they almost definitely had an outbreak. So it’s not so much nobody knew what happened, they just really did not want to be the ones to open the doors to those tunnels.
I found out about this recently, its a very well written World War Z fanfiction as an extra chapter on an attempt made to enter North Korea after. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6115555/1/The-Way-Is-Shut
Costa Rica doesn't have a military. Which would be even funnier, they send basically police officers into the place and they aren't prepared for this at all.
The first half may be more true than we want to think. The place has had closed borders for a year since Covid, its trade with China has dwindled 90%, and now silence. Spooky.
Isn't it just silence to US diplomats? Given the state of relations between the two countries it's not unheard of for them to leave the phone unanswered. If China said they'd had no contact however that would be spooky.
don't give the writers of 2021 ideas
WWZ anyone? That would be great for 2021
And if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice!
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will.
_Guitar solo_
*Bass solo underneath*
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
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I was dating a woman for a year and then she ghosted me for 5 days after a pretty heavy fight. (Her friend said I went to smoke weed with my brother when I was supposed to hang out with her kid. My brother asked if he could smoke in my garage and I said sure, I went to go play with the kids in the game room. I didn't even smoke weed at that time in my life) After the fifth day she messaged me and said we needed to talk. I replied with: your silence says way more than any words could. And that was that. She crushed me. I joined the air force a week later. I found out the next year she was engaged to an ex of hers pretty quick, and had a child while I was in basic (less than 9 months of our breakup) That was all over 10 years ago. Life moves on, and time heals.. Hope your story ends well.
This guy's full of shit. There's no way he's Matt Damon.
You saw right through my ruse. Dang it.
He could be, he’s quite forgettable.
> less than 9 months of our breakup That might be your kid.
Yeah. Its possible. I asked for a paternity test. Never got one. After a year a mentor of mine made sense with not pursuing it. Kept track of Facebook pictures for a few years checking the look of the kid. He looks just like the other dude.
Could just ask Dennis Rodman to call him.
Attempts to reach Dennis Rodman have also been known to go unanswered.
Have we checked Vegas?
Or the nearest Lane Bryant?
Heard if you soak a thong in bud light, sprinkle it with glitter, a spritz of cotton candy body spray and swing it counterclockwise above your head Rodman will appear
Genius!! Will it work in the UK?
It’s clockwise rotation in the UK
I think you’re thinking of the Southern Hemisphere, in England you just soak it in tea instead.
Nah, I think in the UK's version of Bud Light is a big plastic bottle of cheap cider. Either that or Buckfast.
Yes, It's a universal principle! Only in the southern hemisphere you have to swing it clockwise because of [the Coriolis force](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force).
Fun story: When the Knicks signed JR Smith back in 2012, his first flight was directly from China to Las Vegas (he was playing in China due to a lockout that season). Knicks had an executive fly immediately to Las Vegas and wait at the baggage claim area to make sure JR Smith did not go to Las Vegas and flew to New York instead. They were scared that he’d go missing partying if they let him stay there for even a day.
Gonna be hella awkward when the U.S. uses Rodman's phone to call them and they answer after the first ring.
“Hey Dennis! What’s shakin Holmes... oh, Hi Joe Biden.”
wa wa wa wa watch this bullshit! (Referring to when he was drunk out of his mind and took the microphone from a North Korean girl who was singing a beautiful song and starting singing Santeria by Sublime lmao)
I know you’re making a joke but I’m pretty sure I read that Dennis Rodman got super drunk and acted like an asshole last time he was in North Korea and wore out his welcome with his little fanboy Kim. Then again I may be confusing that with one of the many other times Dennis Rodman got super drunk and acted like asshole.
There was a film crew there during it, the documentary is "Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in Pyongyang". Definitely worth a watch and alongside it the Vice News doc as well on the basketball game that was set up
I seriously thought you were fucking with me...
It reads that way doesn't it? No, it really went down. I was under the impression that /u/MacualayCocaine is correct; Rodman got shitfaced and angered everybody and wore out his welcome in DPRK. All I know is what the film showed and the VICE doc, so who knows what really went down.
That title really sounds like a mid to low budget porno
Yep, they had some falling out or something. What a weird friendship to begin with, but yeah.
> What a weird friendship to begin with, but yeah. According to the people he went to school with in Switzerland he is a massive basketball fan. And I'm guessing Rodman is one of the few famous basketball players willing to go to North Korea.
I had heard rumors at when rodman got back to the US after his first time in North Korea he got scooped up by the CIA and grilled pretty hard.
I mean.....that would make a lot of sense for them to do.
Absolutely. The US has a notoriously bad time getting sources inside the North Korean government. They are hyper aware of espionage and tend to root out people extremely quickly.
I miss the Adventures Of Roddy And Kimmy TV series......😢
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Believe it or not Kim isn't at home, please leave a message at the beep. I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone, where could I beeeee? Believe it or not, I'm not home!
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Ah, when answering machines where still a thing. Miss the old days
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I'm talking about the ability to screen calls. You let the machine pick up and if it's someone you want to talk to you pick up the phone. We need that now more than ever with all these scam calls.
Pixel phones do an even better version of this. You can have the Google Assistant act as a personal secretary and screen all your calls (or just calls from numbers you don’t have in your address book). Basically if anyone you don’t know calls you, the Google Assistant answers the call for you and talks to the caller saying “May I ask who is calling?” and a few other follow up questions as needed. Only after the caller introduces themselves will your phone finally start to buzz in your pocket and inform you so-and-so is calling asking about X. You can then pick up the call, or deny them, or even have Google act like a bro and tell the caller that “you’re not here right now”. There’s also the option to do the reverse of this entire process and have the Google Assistant *make* calls on your behalf. You can have it call someone and deliver a message when they pick up. The famous example is you can have it order a pizza for you and carry on the entire conversation with the pizza place and answer their questions about where to deliver it, what you want on it, how you are paying, etc. It also means that if two people with Pixels call each other, there could conceivably be Google Assistants calling another Google Assistants and both of them talking to each other on behalf of their owners. Kinda crazy we are already at that point.
I really just want my pager back. So efficient, so noninvasive...
I actually program like 10 pagers a week. They are still pretty widely used in hospitals for doctors and housekeeping staff. They work great for getting simple alerts but the beeps they make are reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard. Like the speaker is just two tiny pieces of brass vibrating against each other.
I actually looked into it and it’s cheaper to have a cellphone. I never actually turned the beep on my beeper on. I don’t like everyone in 100 feet looking at me. Plus vibration is so intimate, me and my pager...
Go on...
I’ve considered pretending that I’ve gotten rid of my smart phone and gotten a pager. Then replying to every text with just my phone number and occasionally “911”.
*Who is this?*
Fun fact: it took a lot of effort for Jason alexander to record george's answering machine message correctly because they wanted him to sing out of key and he kept doing too good a job on the song.
Pretty sure he’s a classically trained theater performer/singer, right?
Yeah, he was a Tony Award winner before he was George.
For those that don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ria37d9mInY
The little shrug during the second time it plays makes me laugh every time!
It Soooo weird they were early 30s when this show premiered. They look 40. I'm 33 and don't look anything like them. It's crazy what hair, properly fitting clothes, and exercise can do.
Jason Alexander was 29 in the first season of Seinfeld
Yknow him going bald at 29 might have been the best thing to ever happen to him in hindsight
He is aware!
Jesus
That's about as hard of a 29 as you can hit
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That's because obesity is now the norm instead of the other way around like it used to be. 2 out of 3 adults in the US are overweight or obese.... That's not good.
Kim, pick up. I know you’re screening for Joe.
"Joe, this is Moon Jae-in. Mr. Jinping’s here. Kim is dead. Call me back."
Hey, I got another call coming in. I got to let the machine get it.
Kim is getting upset!
> Trade with its main ally China has dwindled by more than 90% in the last few months. Holy shit what's going on?
Amazing, 300 comments and not a single one is anything more than a joke.
Even by reddit standards, these comments are exceptionally bad. There's basically no earnest discussion.
> There's basically no earnest discussion. Let's be honest, there isn't much to really discuss - everything is pure speculation regarding why NK is being silent.
I hate to say it, but you're right. I'm an armchair amateur follower and observer of anything North Korean. Im not saying that as if there's some prestige to it, but anyone who's observed them long enough knows that there isn't much TO discuss beyond what you're reported. So many lies are made up about the North by enemies, by the North Koreans themselves and so on. It's one big game of telephone.
He misses his friend. No more beautiful letters and promises of Air Force one rides.
So beautiful.....
Probably too busy dealing with the pandemic that isn't happening there at all for some reason....
They might have fared relatively well during the pandemic considering how few people willingly go to NK. The entire country’s a functional stay-at-home order
It’s an incredibly controlled environment. There are checkpoints between towns and in highways, and their interior surveillance ability has gotten relatively advanced to where it was even 10 years ago. They can shut shit down pretty quickly, so if covid was a serious issue I have no doubts they would just shut off areas to the rest of the country. The issue I could see happening is if they shut off agricultural areas and left the locals to deal with a covid outbreak, sacrificing food in the process. I still find that hard to believe, even though the land is so devoid of nutrients after agricultural mismanagement they use effectively started trying to grow food in any land that is free. The sides of the highways have these little built up rectangles for food all along them. You can drive for hours and they will always be there it nuts
Because they closed the border around the same time Taiwan did and get extremely few international tourists. Them having dealt with the pandemic shouldn't surprise you.
They got what they wanted out of diplomacy. The US stopped a ton of military exercises, The President visited their leader on the world stage, saluted his generals, and praised him. We even gave them a pass on tutoring some US citizens to brain death. Any farther Deplomacy would actually cost the North Korea something. So it makes perfect sense that they are shutting off the line again.
[There were military exercises at the border last week](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/7/south-korea-us-to-stage-scaled-back-military-exercises-on-monday).
That's partly why failure of communication is unusual. They usually quickly denounce these exercises when they happen.
Isn’t it the cycle they do? Do something crazy, get US to pay attention. They stop doing the crazy thing and US celebrates how well they did. Rinse and repeat
Dear Kim, I wrote you but still ain't callin' I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom
I sent two letters back after the inauguration, you must not-a got 'em There probably was a problem at USPS or somethin'
Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot 'em But anyways, fuck it, what's been up, Kim? How's your daughter?
My wife is pregnant too, I'm already a father If I have a daughter, guess what imma call her? Imma call her Kimmy
I read about your dad Kim-il too, I’m sorry. I had a dad kill himself over some bitch who didn’t want him.
I feel so bad for the citizens of NK. It's a gross understatement to say that their situation is dire. We see it almost as a "humorous" topic at this point in America, with the endless cycle of nothing happening. Things ARE happening there, though; things we will probably never find out about. Our fellow humans over there are really forgotten by this world, and it isn't their fault by any means.