Seoul's mayor found dead, hours after he was reported missing | Hacker News Reader

Seoul's mayor found dead, hours after he was reported missing

cnn.com

54 pointsgdeglin23 comments

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Likely suicide.

I had a recent covid-insanity-related thought on the topic of suicide.

For the non-religious, suicide is going to sleep forever instead of just for the night.

What if there was an option to go to sleep for a decade? Would people want that? Would it be even legal to research?

Seems like it would have applications for space travel.

I wonder what the moral implications would be... (and Judge Dredd would have predicted this).

There could be a small "future tourism" market for people wealthy enough to afford it and willing to leave behind everything and everyone they know.

As a way for people to escape a bad present in hopes of a better future, I don't think it would make much sense. The only people who could afford it probably have a pretty good present.

In Japan there are specialists called "night-moving agents" that helps people to disappear from life situations they are unable to cope with.

They are called "johatsu" or "evaporated" people.

Sounds like the vacuum cleaner guy from Breaking Bad.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-04-25/japans-evaporated-peo...

Here's an article of a book I found on it.

Sounds a lot like one of the standalone-ish arcs of Transmetropolitan: https://comicsalliance.com/the-issue-transmetropolitan-anoth...

disoptimal for society- the sleeper will wake with irrelevant skills and no safety net

But a big bankroll if they invested well.

Ten years isn't enough to safely "invest well" — you could be buying the next Apple or Google, but for all you know, you might be buying the next Theranos or WeWork. If you diversify, ten years likely won't give you that big a bankroll unless you start out with a fairly-hefty one.

EDIT: And even if you do diversity with a hefty bankroll, you could be investing in, say, late 2007, just before the start of the Great Recession and its attendant massacre of so many stock prices — or in February 2000, just before the dot-com bubble started to deflate (a painful memory for many of us).

On average, the S&P 500 will double your money in 10 years.

But point taken; if the years are not average you might wake up broke.

Just go back to sleep :-)

Orson Scott Card explores the idea of long sleeps in some of his short stories, with a drug called "somec", and yes, space travel is featured quite a bit. I haven't read them in many years, but I have fond memories of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_(short_story_collect...

From most religion point of views suicide is a taboo and a big no since you go straight to hell for that. That is why most of the countries with strong religious affiliation the suicide rate is significantly lower than other less religious countries for examples Korea and Japan.

Fun facts, there is a group of seven young men believed to live between the time of Jesus and Muhammad, so called The Seven Sleepers. They and a single dog, are reportedly slept in a cave for exactly 300 years (309 years adjusted for lunar calendar) as mentioned in the Quran. The interesting part is that this story is not mentioned in the New or Old Testaments due the time it happened. This story famously becomes part of the very difficult questions, created by the Jews of Madinah (old city name Hijaz) to help the non-believers Arabs to challenge Muhammad of his authenticity as one of the prophets sent by God. The story is recalled in one of the Chapters of the Quran, Al-Kahfi (meaning the The Cave).

Catholicism does not teach that you go straight to hell for suicide. In the past, some Catholics had that idea and taught it.

The article doesn’t elaborate, is this thought to be an accident while hiking or is there a chance it was more sinister? He was found in the mountains, but there’s no other details. The political details about his likeliness of being a force for change in the upcoming presidential election certainly implies funny business would be worth considering.

There was recent alleged sexual harassment between him and his secretary so its presumed to be suicide.

A bit more information from the NY Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/world/asia/seoul-mayor-de...

> His disappearance came a day after a secretary in the mayor’s office told the police that he had been sexually harassing her since 2017, two Seoul television stations reported, attributing the information to unidentified police sources.

> Mr. Park, 64, had canceled his official schedule for Thursday and called in sick to City Hall. His daughter told the police that he had left home after leaving a cryptic, “will-like message,” according to Yonhap, the national news agency, which cited an anonymous police source.

> When Mr. Park had not returned home after five hours, his daughter called the police.

More (scraps of) information here at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/53346831

“Nearly 600 police officers and firefighters, along with three rescue dogs, were deployed to search for the mayor.”

This looks like a typo or a very surprising number of rescue dogs.

I don't understand.

Which part?

why are three dogs surprising? should we expect a lot more

Isn't the image weird? 600 people in the search party, split across many directions and only 3 of them have rescue dogs. Given the importance of the event, and the effectiveness of rescue dogs (actually a dog found the mayor), one would have to assume that it's a typo.

Even a 30-man search and rescue party would generally have more than 3 dogs.

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