> For several hours each night, the glass façade acts as a giant LED screen to project slogans and short videos to citizens of Pyongyang.
Examples:
Offtopic, but every time I watch a documentary on North Korea I am happy to see that so much of the old Berlin subway rolling stock seems to lead a nice retirement live there - according to Wikipedia, they use 220 Class D cars from the 50ies and 60ies (132 in active service) in the Pyongyang Metro, and another 120 Class G cars from the 70ies were converted into trains for the Korean State Railway. [0]
"Inside". Proceeds to show three photots.
Well, it does say "from" the inside rather than "of" the inside.
"If you're building a skyscraper out of reinforced concrete, the only way for it to be stable is to design it in the shape of a pyramid."
Except the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are standard supertalls built out of reinforced concrete?
But not "standard" reinforced concrete:
> Due to the huge cost of importing steel, the towers were constructed on a cheaper radical design of super high-strength reinforced concrete. High-strength concrete is a material familiar to Asian contractors and twice as effective as steel in sway reduction; however, it makes the building twice as heavy on its foundation as a comparable steel building. Supported by 23-by-23 metre concrete cores and an outer ring of widely spaced super columns, the towers use a sophisticated structural system that accommodates its slender profile and provides 560,000 square metres of column-free office space. [0]
Looking in Wikipedia, they still have a section that diminishes with the height and they are made of some special "super high-strength reinforced concrete".
Even by using this special reinforced concrete, the towers are twice heavier than if they had used a steel structure.
> "There is a kind of North Korean-ness about it," he said.
I take it, monumental effort for close to zero functionality is North-Korean.
Anytime I see a picture of North Korea I think
1) is the person now banned? 2) did insiders get punished?
For this one, I worry for those insiders. They made their choice but I can’t imagine Kim is happy this got out.
The article isn’t exactly hard hitting. It debunks myths that make North Korea look bad, doesn’t talk about how many people died making it, etc
I mean , none of these photos is rare at all…
https://nationalpost.com/news/new-photos-reveal-inside-of-no...
2012
Yeah, they seem to be re-reporting a story from 2012. Here's an archived post from 2012 with the same picture of the same tour guide (Simon Cockerell) at the top of the hotel: https://web.archive.org/web/20141110072645/http://koryogroup...
Makes sense. From the article:
> Cockerell began running tours to North Korea with the company Koryo Tours in 2002 ...
> Ten years later, Cockerell met a North Korean who was working in China, and that man had the contacts necessary to arrange a visit.
Though the article has some later information:
> No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
Those are the same internal photos. Where are all of these other photos you allude to?
Nothing is rare on the Internet. It's a pet bugbear of mine.
It is a term journalists like to use to convey that they're doing important work or that you're reading something valuable. I see them use this kind of language for many things, hoping that readers fall for it.
I mean I guess compared to photos of the Eiffel tower...
Check out that magnificent skyline
Reminder of the developer's maxim: A beautiful building is a fully rented one.
This should be your reminder that economic sanctions really does nothing but starve ordinary people to death while doing nothing to the ruling regime and, in many cases, strengthens support for it as those enacting the sanctions are (with merit) seen as the enemy.
Back in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later Secretry of State was asked about the 500,000 Iraqi children who died due to economic sanctions and she replied "we think the price was worth it" [1].
The next century for the Korean peninsula is going to be interesting. Looming large is the collapse of South Korea. The current fertility rate is the lowest in the world at ~0.71 children per woman. What that means is if you take 50 men and 50 women in 3 generations you have 8 people. We haven't seen anything like this before.
I, too, find NOrth Korea fascinating but what I find more fascinating is how and what we talk about with North Korea and how it's never about the starvation and death we directly cause.
Preventing the north korean regime from having the funds to grow its military presence seems like a fair use of economic sanctions to me - sadly, even if there is an economic cost to its people.
You're not responding to the comment you're trying to reply to. The claim is that it does not actually do that, only starves ordinary people.
I thought the context of the previous response was that sanctions do nothing to the regime i.e. in terms of strengthening, weakening, or getting rid of. The North korean dictatorship remains in place so that is agreeable. However, North korean military presence (seen as distinct from the regime presence) has seemingly faltered dramatically.
Do sanctions force North Korea to adopt ridiculous internal agricultural policies which leads to frequent famines?
That chart does not at all show that it follows South Korea! It is massively behind and has suffered a debilitating famine in the 90s. That on top of the spurious data collecting in North Korea that probably skews those numbers.
The people against sanctions want countries around the world to be forced to trade with North Korea. We don't have to be forced to trade with anyone. Free trade is earned, not a right for all the dictators of the world.
By "a period in the nineties", you mean "since the nineties", right? So basically for the past 35 years North Korea has been heavily lagging in life expectancy.
Another way to put that is it's been 75 years since Korea split, and half that time North Korea has been much worse than south Korea.
Let's not even get into what that chart would look like if humanitarian aid wasn't shipped during those famines.
North Korea has roughly the equal third largest standing army in the world. North Korea has nuclear weapons. What exactly have we prevented?
My point is that economic sanctions never work against enemies. They only work against allies. Apartheid South Africa is the example that springs to mind.
Take the economic sanctions against Russia after it's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. What have they done exactly? Russia is now basically a war economy. It still has energy exports because there's always a market for that.
I don’t get why you’re trying to characterize NKs military as strong when it is objectively not so. The goal for stability in the region is for SK to have a stronger military. If we want to look at whether sancions have progressed that goal, then we would need to evaluate the relative strength of the two since the time sanctions went into place. How large of a standing army they have is not your kpi
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The idea that the sanctions ‘we’ (I will treat ‘we’ as the western world) place on NK directly cause NK starvation and death needs an exuberant amount of evidence.
NK literally and figuratively puts guns to the heads of their citizens and kill’s people trying to escape from the country.
NK “government” (quotes since they act like a gang) forces a cult following of Kim Jong-(Il, Un).
NK aligned with USSR and China and tried to out Communism. But like USSR and CCP, the centralization of power into a single leader squashed the good hopes of communism and turned into totalitarianism (absolutely power corrupts absolutely).
How about ‘we’ treat NK as a grown up country that has responsibility for the welfare of its people? “We” are not responsible for the starvation in NK, just like all the how all the villains in movies say “You’re forcing me to do <horrendous act>!” No, really, you’re doing it yourself because you’re insane and care about other things over the lives of people.
The failed military coup in SK changed my view on the country quite a lot. Reading up on their presidents where the legacy seem to be if they are sentenced to death after impeachement or not ...
It is like the cracyness in NK makes people assume SK is sane.
I feel you on SK and demographics, but 3 generations is still a very long time these days. We're talking close to 200 years before anything like a population collapse.
Only if you count as "people dying and then the next". After a parcel of a population reaches adulthood, another generation is already expected. See the delta between GenX, Millenials, GenZ, and so on. I'd say that scenario is closer to 40 years.
The "coming sooner" problem with such low fertility rate is the bell-curve of your population by age. It starts to center on lower-productivity ages, more medical resources are needed. The system can't sustain itself with a thinner base on age.
if their economic situation is the result of sanctions by the West, why is trade with China insufficient to turn around their economy?
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This sounds apocryphal, do you have any sources?
Spent 10 minutes on the Googles with a variety of search terms and couldn't find anything. There's a bunch of NK apartment collapses (but nothing specifically about concrete / balconies) and one in SK[0] which sounds plausible but obviously they weren't left in the concrete and chainsawed when dead.
I recall it was reported in the Sunday Observer in the early 1990s but I have struggled to find any references
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Man, people will believe anything they get told about the DPRK won't they?
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A very smart comment. You'll get upvoted both by trump-lovers and trump-haters!
Wouldn't he be downvoted by Trump haters?
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Maybe if the North Korean people had the most basic of civil liberties and could communicate in any way with the outside world people would be less inclined “stereotype/orientalize”.
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Pretty strange that almost your entire posting history is playing defense for North Korea.
Did you happen to read their username?
Because I find media manipulation infuriating.
Pfft, amateurs. America has more "hotels of doom" than that. Almost every medium and big city has some abandoned office building with drug addicted squatters. The koreans forgot to add them.
The article could do with more mentions of "doom", "propaganda", and other synonyms for evil. Maybe even an "allegedly" quote from a non-existent source?
It was literally the tallest building in North Korea AND the tallest unoccupied building in the world for a long time(2nd only to a building in china now).
If you have hundreds of skyscrapers, an unoccupied one isn't crazy. But that's not North Korea. Trying to find equivalence here is ludicrous.
Parent comment is probably more annoyance at the propaganda Americans are exposed to without realizing it, making us all think that communism and Russia and China and North Korea are scary monsters in the closet that are going to get us. I think you’d find it difficult to find an American who both dislikes communism and can have more than a couple sentences of why they feel that way. And I think most every American is pretty oblivious to the equally and sometime more shitty things that the US does and completely fails to keep in mind that we’re literally genociding countries and have done so since forever
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Next time you read an article in the Economist about how "Xi hates this one trick", pay attention to the attribution of the sources. It's all carefully written to frame unsubstantiated statements as facts, and to be able to deny it later.
Thanks, annoying the article didn’t include photos