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Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

electricity supply remains so patchy that the most-sought-after apartments are the ones on the lower stories. Who wants a 20th-floor walk-up?

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In Pyongyang apparently the higher you go the cheaper apartments get and its common for older people with less money to get trapped up there for months/years. Even when there is power people don't take the elevators for the fear of getting stuck in them.

You can buy an apartment on the highest floor for about $200 ( obviously a huge sum of money for most north koreans) but apartments on lower floor can from anywhere between $3000-$20,000

This is somewhat true in New York also, where some buildings are 7 floors with no elevators.

Can they be bought by foreigners? i do have 200$ spare

Given that any tourists are always accompanied by at least one handler, I would say no.

But if you are a foreigner with some official business there, then you can live there, but as is written in this article, the prices might not be low for non-Koreans.

This seems somewhat strange, if the lower level apartments are that valuable, it seems that investing in a generator would make the entire apartment's value go up. A 150kW Onan setup is a couple hundred thousand, but it would mean that the apartments and elevators always work.

It's time consuming to get generators like that in the US.

I imagine that getting them in an embargoed country like North Korea is expensive and difficult. Competent operations and maintenance is probably tough too.

Agreed but reliable generators are a key component to fielding an effective military, and the leadership seems to spend lavishly on the military. Perhaps it would motivate a local capability to build such generation capacity? I don't know, just guessing here.

>, it seems that investing in a generator would make the entire apartment's value go up.

Fuel is rationed and is only available to govt vehicles with a 'ration card' . You can't just walk up to a gas station and get fuel for your generator.

And ofcourse, people who can afford to buy fuel in black market are already living in posher areas like Joong-gu district/Eundok village.

First, I realize I'm in "engineer mode" which is a point where I think about solutions without considering the politics. So I don't expect this to ever happen, that said I can walk through my reasoning here.

The GP exposed a very wide price difference between apartments on the lower floors and the ones on the upper floors. So the problem statement (in isolation) was "recapture value of upper level apartments" and the reasoning there was that in developed countries upper floor apartments seem more valuable than lower floor ones.

The primary reason for this price discrepancy was power outages and then a non-functioning elevator.

So electricity generation is pretty well known, and the costs are modest, the questions are implementation vs environment.

Generators are available that run on a wide variety of fuels, unlike vehicles you can readily run them on gasoline, diesel, bio-diesel, alcohol, propane, or natural gas (methane).

As the use would be intermittent (assuming the power is available most of the time) any process that slowly accumulated fuel for the generators could be consumed during periods of need. If rationing petroleum products make them unusable collecting waste oil from restaurants to make bio diesel might be an option, or fermenting the trimmings from doing the lawn work for alcohol, or even capturing methane from a digester attached to the apartments very own sewer/septic system.

If electricity generation is simply off the table it is always possible to lift people mechanically. A good elevator/lift will be counter balanced so that with the operator it tends to rise "up" when the brake is removed, and 'down' when passengers are present. (note mechanically operated elevators need an operator). For "up" capacity without power you could hire a dozen people to pedal bicycle like transmissions attached to the elevator winch. Since we're serving the 1% here you can probably pay (on a temporary basis) a number of the 99% for 20 minute stints of pedalling, 40 minutes rest.

No one mentioned if the lower floors had power when power was out, if they don't and the only barrier to making the upper floors valuable is reliable lift service, that seems doable even in a very constrained environment. And if you recapture value so that a $200 apartment becomes a $20,000 apartment, that is a lot of value to recapture.

Good point.

I appreciate the fact that this was an "engineer mode" thought experiment, but stepping back from that for a moment: a hidden room full of poor people pedaling to power an elevator for wealthy passengers is an uncannily dystopian image.

Fair enough, if you believe western propaganda the situation is already pretty dystopian. Does a room full of people providing mechanical energy in the face of shortages and being paid for it, more or less dystopian than a room full of people who are simply staring at the walls slowly starving to death?

Is that more or less dystopian than the folks I've seen in India breaking stones with a hammer into small piles of gravel?

I get that none of it is necessary in a world which is over flowing with wealth except that it is locked up by the .1%. Do you think Marx or Lenin bought into a communist state where there even was a 1%? As an engineer you work with what you have, not with what you imagine could be, in the hope that you can move the situation forward into something that would be more to your general liking.

So yes, it would suck rocks if the only work you could find in a city was providing motive force for elevators when the power was out. The only thing that would suck worse than that would be that you could find no work at all in a city and were considering a life of crime to avoid starving.

Also reminiscent of Black Mirror.

What good is a generator if you can't buy anything to fuel it with?

North Korea is under embargo, meaning that fuel is ridiculously expensive.

They're actually not as short of many goods as you've probably been led to believe (they're not starving for instance, and they have access to a pretty wide variety of manufactured goods), but fuel is in very short supply.

>they're not starving for instance

Source? North Korean malnutrition and starvation is widely documented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine#Stunted_gr...

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/10/166760055/hunger-still-haunts-...

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/04/23/2012...

How do the 1 percent tolerate outages? They buy expensive goods, drive cars, visit gyms, but at home they are on the same level as the 99%. I doubt it.

>How do the 1 percent tolerate outages?

Depends on the area you live, more elite== less power cuts. Some 'priority' areas like the area around juche tower and Joong-gu district get no power cuts, some have private inverters.

For some it's a crash pad if they're in the area with a real home elsewhere. Hard to notice outages if you only experience one a year vs. being a full time resident.

We're still talking about the elite of a failed state, they aren't global elite. A middle class South Korean certainly has a more elite lifestyle.

that's the way it is in developing countries. People have tremendous individual wealth but can't buy clean air, better transportation, electriicity or a rich cultural environment (e. g. public goods).

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