Sanctions are not a siege: They target trade and finance. While they hurt the general population (that’s often the point), they are not the primary cause of famine when food distribution and production are controlled by the government.

If that was the case then DPRK would’ve had a famine already before sanctions. Yet, the famine directly coincides with the fall of USSR and the start of sanctions. Clearly the concept of cause and effect is just too complex for you to grasp.

Literally the first sentence from Harvard economists:

GDP was not designed to assess welfare or the well being of citizens. It was designed to measure production capacity and economic growth.

Keep on ignoring facts though as is your custom.

But GDP is the most basic measure of a nation’s capacity to produce wealth.

That’s a meaningless metric without the context of how the wealth is distributed. The whole reason occupied Korea is now in a social crisis is due to the fact that majority of the working population is unable to make ends meet. We don’t even have to make up defectors to find out how bad things are: 75% of young want to escape South Korean ‘Hell’

You’re rejecting

I’m rejecting the imbecilic narrative you’re trying to paint. I guess these types of arguments worked well for you when you were engaging with other fascists on reddit.

When you dismiss every source of information that contradicts the premise of a socialist utopia, you are not engaging in an honest debate; you are simply asserting an ideological fantasy. The evidence of systemic failure is overwhelming. Take care.

LMFAO literally what you’ve been doing throughout this whole discussion. The evidence of you being unable to engage with reality is overwhelming. Take care.

Nobody said sanctions have no effect—that’s a straw man. The point is that sanctions are not the primary cause of mass starvation.

They literally are, and plenty of studies have been done on the subject. Everybody with even a shred of intellectual honesty knows that sanctions are a modern form of siege warfare designed to starve the population.

Sanctions reduce external trade, but when a regime prioritizes the military over its citizens and uses an ideologically rigid farming system (Juche) that fails regardless of external trade, that is mismanagement.

Simply repeating nonsense over and over won’t make it true baby Goebbels.

The leadership decided to let millions starve rather than reform or appeal for help until it was too late.

Ah yes, the leadership was supposed to wave a magic wand around and replace all the food and fertilizer by wishing it into existence. The utter lack of capacity for critical thought on display here is truly stunning.

Sure, here’s the citation

Ah yes, defectors are obviously a reliable source of information who have no ulterior motives. Your intelligence continues to shine bright.

You’re swinging hard against standard economics here.

Buddy, any economist will tell you that GDP is not a measure of standard of living. The only one swinging hard here is you because you’re too ignorant to discuss the subject. Here, go educate yourself instead of continuing to make a clown of yourself in public https://hbr.org/2019/10/gdp-is-not-a-measure-of-human-well-being

This is the central ideological fantasy: A guarantee of low-quality, insufficient welfare is better than the risk of high-quality capitalism.

An amazing straw man you cobbled together there. The fantasy version if DPRK you’re describing sounds fascinating.

I’ll keep believing in the hard facts provided by the UN, the Bank of Korea, and 34,000 eyewitnesses who risked their lives to escape. You stick to the fantasy.

That’s adorable.

This is a spectacular attempt to shift blame. No serious historian blames the US trade embargo for the famine’s death toll.

No, it’s the basic fact of the situation which you, being the troll that you are, continue try to dance around.

This is a spectacular attempt to shift blame. No serious historian blames the US trade embargo for the famine’s death toll.

Yeah, no possible way being cut off from trade could affect the food supply in the country. If sanctions didn’t harm the populations of the target countries then the US wouldn’t be using them. Amazing how this basic detail escaped your genius mind.

Food was hoarded for the military and elite in Pyongyang while regional populations starved.

[citation needed]

A starving population that maintains its birth rate is not an economic win; it’s a social tragedy.

Except that north is no longer starving, while food insecurity is a real problem in the south which your own bleatings claim has a better economic situation 🤡 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12939-023-01937-z

This is a classic defensive move when your system has an objectively pathetic GDP.

GDP is not a measure of quality of life as any economist would tell you. There are actual measures like PQL for that.

GDP and GDP per Capita are the standard, baseline metrics for comparing economic output. While they don’t capture happiness or inequality perfectly (that’s what the Human Development Index, HDI, is for), they absolutely measure the size of the pie a country has to divide.

Economic output has fuck all to do with the standard of living. In fact, you can have very high economic output as we see in occpupied Korea achieved through brutal exploitation of the working population.

This is outright false. The DPRK guarantees these things on paper, but the quality is nonexistent for the vast majority of the population:

It’s not, but you’ve already made it clear that you’ll just make things up and ignore facts.

What the south doesn’t have is guarantees of access. You do not have a job guarantee and without a job you have nothing. That’s the elephant in the room that you artlessly danced around.

The Total Scoreboard: 34,000+ people have escaped North Korea for the South. Less than 30 have publicly documented returning.

Sure little buddy. You keep on believing that.

This is arguably the most insane sentence in your post. Estimates range from 600,000 to 3 million deaths during that famine. A state that cannot feed its people to the point where 5-10% of the population starves to death has not “successfully weathered” anything; it has failed its most basic function. Framing mass starvation as “resilience” against US imperialism is incredibly disrespectful to the victims of that regime’s mismanagement.

What part of the north having been dependent on the trade that the US cut them off from are you struggling with there? Most of the arable land land is in the south, and DPRK had to figure out how to produce food in the mountains. The fact that you call that mismanagement exposes that you’re a just a troll.

Where is this data coming from?

From the fact that people are actually having children in DPRK unlike in the south

Since the early 1990s, the birth rate has been fairly stable, with an average of 2 children per woman, down from an average of 3 in the early 1980s.

Trying to use GDP to measure the quality of the economy is sheer idiocy and no serious economist would suggest doing that. In fact, GDP was never meant to do that.

Even with “growth” from selling artillery shells to Russia, the average North Korean lives on a fraction of the income of a South Korean.

People in DPRK have guaranteed housing, jobs, food, healthcare, and public transportation. None of these things are available to people in the south by default. Measuring income without accounting for the cost of living further illustrates just how utterly unequipped you are to discuss the subject you’re attempting to debate here.

There is a reason 34,000 people have defected from North to South, and basically zero have gone the other way. People vote with their feet.

Meanwhile in the real world https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/18/asia/north-korea-defectors-return-intl-hnk-dst

You’re an utter ignoramus and you have no business opining on the subject. Take the L and move on.

I’ve literally been contextualizing the article throughout this whole discussion for you. At least we can agree that continuing this is pointless. Bye.

And once again, what the article is actually talking is how LLMs are being sold to investors. At this point, I get the impression that you simply lack basic reading comprehension to understand the article you’re commending on.

The title is not false. If you actually bothered to read the article, you’d see that the argument being made is that the AI tech companies are selling a vision to their investors that’s at odds with the research. The current LLM based approach to AI cannot achieve general intelligence.

it’s easy to miss stuff like that when rearranging the flow of the text, but feel free to engage with what I said though instead of nitpicking

imagine thinking that your drivel needs a sophisticated rebuttal

The situation in occupied Korea is a perfect case study of how late stage capitalism literally consumes its own future. The so-called economic miracle is built on a foundation that’s cracking wide open.

Let’s start with the economy. While everyone sees global brands like Samsung and Hyundai, the reality is a brutal, two-tiered system completely dominated by chaebol conglomerates. They suck up all the talent and capital, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps in a world of insecure, low-wage gig work. This is why you have a generation of the most educated young people in the country’s history drowning in debt and unable to find stable jobs. They call it Hell Joseon for a reason. The system demands you run this insane rat race from birth, only to find there’s no cheese at the end.

This leads directly to the collapsing birth rate which is a rational, collective strike against a system that makes having children an economic death sentence. With insane housing costs, crippling debt, and a viciously patriarchal corporate culture that ends women’s careers if they have kids, people are simply opting out. It’s the most damning vote of no confidence a society can possibly make.

And this is where the death spiral kicks in. A shrinking young population means fewer workers to pay taxes and support a rapidly aging society. The national pension system is a Ponzi scheme mathematically guaranteed to fail. We’re looking at a future where the state can’t pay pensions, fund healthcare, or even staff its own military. The very foundations of the social contract are dissolving.

All of this is supercharged by insane inequality. You have the golden spoon class with their inherited wealth and chaebol connections, and the dirt spoon majority struggling to get by. The result is intense intergenerational and gender conflict, pitting everyone against each other for a shrinking piece of the pie, which is exactly how the capitalist class maintains control.

It’s not hard to see how it all connects. A predatory economic model creates hopelessness, which kills the demographic future, which then makes the economy completely unsustainable, leading to state collapse.

Now, contrast this with the North. Western media won’t talk about this, but the DPRK successfully weathered the Arduous March in the 90s. The real trigger for that crisis was the collapse of the USSR, their main trading partner and economic lifeline. This sudden shock, combined with being cut off from global trade by the US, sent their economy into a tailspin. But they survived that total collapse of their established trade system. Now, with the US empire visibly fraying, the DPRK’s key alliances are strengthening. As Russia and China renew economic ties and tourism picks up, the North is seeing real growth and an optimistic mood about a future less constrained by American sanctions. They are building a resilience that the South, for all its flashy tech, completely lacks.

From a socialist perspective, the internal failure of the Southern capitalist state could create the conditions for peaceful reunification. We’re looking at a scenario where the South’s economy is in shambles, its social fabric is torn, and its people are utterly disillusioned with the empty promises of consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, the North is emerging from the worst of its isolation with a growing economy and a stable population.

The chaos from a social collapse in the South could force a radical reevaluation, breaking the power of the chaebol and US imperial influence permanently. This power vacuum could be fertile ground for a genuine, pan-Korean movement. The two halves could finally meet on new terms. They could build a new, unified Korea from the ground up, one that rejects the brutal neoliberal inequality of the South. It would be a difficult, monumental task, but the only true liberation for the Korean people lies in a single, independent, and socialist Korea, finally free from the colonial division imposed upon them.

dronie go home

^ and here we a great example of a self referential comment

My point is that the problem is systemic, and all corporations end up leaning towards similar practices in the end because that’s what the selection pressures under capitalism drive them to.

If you’re using a modern computer then you’re buying it from one of the handful megacorps around. Apple isn’t really special in this regard.

does that run on Asahi though, I couldn’t figure out how to

Erlang isn’t special because it’s functional, but rather it’s functional because that was the only way to make its specific architecture work. Joe Armstrong and his team at Ericsson set out to build a system with nine nines of reliability. They quickly realized that to have a system that never goes down, you need to be able to let parts of it crash and restart without taking down the rest. That requirement for total isolation forced their hand on the architecture, which in turn dictated the language features.

The specialness is entirely in the BEAM VM itself, which acts less like a language runtime like the JVM or CLR, and more like a mini operating system. In almost every other environment, threads share a giant heap of memory. If one thread corrupts that memory, the whole ship sinks. In Erlang, every single virtual process has its own tiny, private heap. This is the killer architectural feature that makes Erlang special. Because nothing is shared, the VM can garbage collect a single process without stopping the world, and if a process crashes, it takes its private memory with it, leaving the rest of the system untouched.

The functional programming aspect is just the necessary glue to make a shared nothing architecture usable. If you had mutable state scattered everywhere, you couldn’t trivially restart a process to a known good state. So, they stripped out mutation to enforce isolation. The result is that Erlang creates a distributed system inside a single chip. It treats two processes running on the same core with the same level of mistrust and isolation as two servers running on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Learning functional style can be a bit of a brain teaser, and I would highly recommend it. Once you learn to think in this style it will help you write imperative code as well because you’re going to have a whole new perspective on state management.

And yeah there are functional languages that don’t rely on using a VM, Carp is a good example https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp

RISCV would be a huge step forward, and there are projects like this one working on making a high performance architecture using it. But I’d argue that we should really be rethinking the way we do programming as well.

The problem goes deeper than just the translation layer because modern chips are still contorting themselves to maintain a fiction for a legacy architecture. We are basically burning silicon and electricity to pretend that modern hardware acts like a PDP-11 from the 1970s because that is what C expects. C assumes a serial abstract machine where one thing happens after another in a flat memory space, but real hardware hasn’t worked that way in decades. To bridge that gap, modern processors have to implement insane amounts of instruction level parallelism just to keep the execution units busy.

This obsession with pretending to be a simple serial machine also causes security nightmares like Meltdown and Spectre. When the processor speculates past an access check and guesses wrong, it throws the work away, but that discarded work leaves side effects in the cache that attackers can measure. It’s a massive security liability introduced solely to let programmers believe they are writing low level code when they are actually writing for a legacy abstraction. on top of that, you have things like the register rename engine, which is a huge consumer of power and die area, running constantly to manage dependencies in scalar code. If we could actually code for the hardware, like how GPUs handle explicit threading, we wouldn’t need all this dark silicon wasting power on renaming and speculation just to extract speed from a language that refuses to acknowledge how modern computers actually work. This is a fantastic read on the whole thing https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3212477.3212479

We can look at Erlang OTP for an example of a language platform looks like when it stops lying about hardware and actually embraces how modern chips work. Erlang was designed from the ground up for massive concurrency and fault tolerance. In C, creating a thread is an expensive OS-level operation, and managing shared memory between them is a nightmare that requires complex locking using mutexes and forces the CPU to work overtime maintaining cache coherency.

Meanwhile, in the Erlang world, you don’t have threads sharing memory. Instead, you have lightweight processes, that use something like 300 words of memory, that share nothing and only communicate by sending messages. Because the data is immutable and isolated, the CPU doesn’t have to waste cycles worrying about one core overwriting what another core is reading. You don’t need complex hardware logic to guess what happens next because the parallelism is explicit in the code, not hidden. The Erlang VM basically spins up a scheduler on each physical core and just churns through these millions of tiny processes. It feeds the hardware independent, parallel chunks of work without the illusion of serial execution which is exactly what it wants. So, if you designed a whole stack from hardware to software around this idea, you could get a far better overall architecture.

it’s all ARM now, there’s software x86 emulation on macos. I guess you could run x86 vm on Linux, but not sure how fast that will be.

The main problem is you’re pretty limited with software since you can only run stuff that’s been compiled against it.

I got one from a startup I worked at a couple of years ago, and then when the whole Silicon Valley bank crash happened they laid me off, but let me keep it. And yeah Asashi is still pretty barebones mainly cause you can basically just use open source apps on it that can be compiled against it. I’m really hoping to see something like M series from China but using RISCV and with Linux.