Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

The post never mentions a date, but this must have been around 2000-2004, since that is when the UK embassy was established. [1]

Some things have probably changed since then.

A fascinating read regardless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_Kingdom,...

View on HN

Meanwhile instead of some fancy building, their embassy over here is... Well, a little more domestic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_North_Korea,_London

The impression I got, from attending a school with a lot of diplomat kids, is that a lot of countries have embassies as a sort of foreign holiday for their ruling classes. Now NK being a bit antagonistic and paranoid might be an exception, but I distinctly got the impression that there were a lot of countries that didn't really do a lot of diplomatic work with the host countries, but the embassy meant they could send some families to go live in the west and have their school paid for by the state.

Those kinds of embassies don't need to be in the fancy embassy district.

The social and cultural dynamics you mention are indeed present in some cases.

Also most of the work is done by the CIA and NSA.

The NSA stays at home. There are some diplomatic normal folks to do the consularic work (visa, lost passports), the rest is secret service (recruiting agents, influencing the press, police, "diplomatic" ie secret communication, contacts to other embassies and the host).

And if it's a cross border offensive it's more likely to be Air Force Space Command (since, you know, cyberspace is right above regular space which is just a little higher than airspace :p)

(its just that electronic warfare is a natural extension of long range, lets call it, interference)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Operation...

The embassies are not my ballgame but I get the impression they are not there because a lot of diplomacy needs to be done all the time - but to already exist when the need for diplomacy arises.

Open channels of communication and all that.

An alternate explanation to your point is that countries would like to have the appearance of being as shadowy and influential as what the CIA has going on. I'll quote (AFKA) mos def [0] and also link to the 99% invisible episode in number stations [1]. Some countries broadcast codes nonstop A in case they ever need to, no one can tell they just started and B to have the appearance they have covert agents behind enemy lines, just to be spooky.

  Mentioned that he worked for the embassy
  People seem to find that interesting
  High status, intrigue and mystery
  Special code name on the hotel registry
  I love it when they say
  "Enjoy your stay"
  They say it how they mean it
  'Cause that's the way they been trained
  Show you to your room
  A suite with a view
  When, if anything at all
  Do not hesitate to call
  ...
  Salutations, congratulations
  Reservations, exclusive arrangements
  Dinner with the patrons, the scenery is amazing
  It's so outrageous, they whisper when they say it
  When it's really real it's even realer than "The Matrix"
  Classic, modern, ancient, flagrant
  Get a special thrill every time they get to say it
  Peace! I work with the embassy
  On behalf of imagination industry
  I come visit, you come visit
  Such a pleasure, official business
  La, la, la, la...
  (Boogey, boogey, man, man)

[0] https://genius.com/Yasiin-bey-the-embassy-lyrics

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/numbers-stations/

I went in once. They had an open-day demonstrating the skills of north Korean artists. The artwork was decent, and the experience a good one overall.

Every room had a picture of Kim, obviously.

Every public room in my state's DMVs has a picture of the governor, so that last bit may not mean as much as you think it does.

That just means that US and North Korea are weird in the same way.

What state do you live in? I can't imagine that happening here in Washington state, even if our DMVs are all one big room.

Amazing! Still a bloody expensive property, even 20 years ago.

Is that a flagpole in the front garden?

Just outside the embassy is another pole, but with lots of cameras and radio gear looking into the embassy.

Clearly the days of spycraft aren't over.

£1.3m. You’d struggle to get a 3 bed semi for that nowadays.

Amen. That's a studio flat. And by studio flat, I mean a room in an attic with no windows.

Kind of reminds me of some of the embassies of smaller countries in Ottawa when I lived there.

There are quite a few in houses like this along Somerset Street if I'm remembering correctly.

It's also normal for embassies of big countries in smaller countries.

In Dublin there are a few big embassy compounds (US, Russia, UK, Germany are the only ones I can think of). Everyone else, even big dogs like China and India, has a converted house or a floor in an office block. Lots of pictures on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diplomatic_missions_in...

It's like the mom and pop shop around the corner.

Except it's a house of horrors.

Curious if anyone knows of any more recent descriptions about what life is like in North Korea, like in the last 5-10 years. Most things I've read including this article are decades old.

How much have things changed there in terms of technology, food security etc?

After the famine in 90s both the party and the people realized that the state can't really guarantee any food security so it's mostly taken care of by free market as anywhere else in the world now. Trading goods may not be entirely legal, but is widely accepted.

Check "North Korea Confidential" by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson from 2015.

There's hours and hours of NK footage if you search for North Korea Travel / Vlog in simplified chinese. They tend to have much laxer guides/minders, fluent in mandarin vs western travellers with minders with shit English (and I presume more suspicious / cautious). Very few of Chinese vlogs have auto subtitles which can be translated to english unfortunately. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZgzAquCs-o&list=PLk70D7sV6Q...

There was a few playlist from central asian travellers and with Chinese business man exploring with more casual minders a few years back but I can't find them. I know a few PRC nationals who made the trip for business, TLDR is NK cities and towns feels like PRC in the 90s with energy of PRC in the 80s. Some of the villages/hamlets seem like PRC from the 70s (which I guess is what most ppl think of NK). Other era reference points probably not helpful for ppl without context of growing up in PRC. So it's worth scrubbing through some of the videos, a lot of it is city and keep in mind NK is 60% urbanized.

They won't let Americans in, except during the mas games, and even otherwise you can usually get in with a Chinese tour group. One of my American coworkers in Beijing went back in 2011 or so, and didn't have any problem, although I got the feeling it wasn't as interesting as she thought it would be.

Educationally speaking, the DPRK would catch up pretty quickly if they were able to liberalize their economy as much as China, even without all the help they could get from ROK, Japan, USA. It isn't Afghanistan (where liberalization wouldn't stick), or even Laos where there is a lot of work to do on modernizing society, which makes its current state even more depressing.

IMO NK in the unfortunate geographic situation where Kim's inherited the half of the peninsula with just not enough ariable land, but not so not enough that juche isn't viable. NK with water access could probably be an alright middle (or even upper middle) income country exporting their 5-10T mineral reserves. They had enough prexisting/rebuilt industry to perhaps even export higher value processed goods + not unserious effort at socialism to avoid dutch disease. Kims playing a solid hand poorly, but the cards are still enough not to fold. Which is sad.

this is a group from Brazil (so portuguese - you can use yt's autotranslate) who supports and studies NK - they have visited and on this live they show the pictures/videos and talk about life there, food, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQNQWwXA6_0

I clicked that and skipped through it and now YouTube's algorithm thinks I want to watch a whole bunch of Brazillian neo-hyper-Stalinist-cult tankie videos.

sounds like one to watch from my work account

https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E?si=WK1Gp62Hbx0624Wx

Documentary about getting s haircut in North Korea

You mean a shameless North Korean propaganda video with a ridiculously twisted version of history and reality?

Worth keeping in mind that NK has one of the most active / visible cyber teams on the planet, presumably including astro-turfing and propaganda.

Which means any conversation on the internet about NK is likely to be polluted with propaganda, even if none of the participants themselves are operatives - all it takes is someone unwittingly ingesting a bad fact once for that bad fact to get circulated.

Are you suggesting that boyboy, an Australian youtube channel that posts about everything, is a North Korean propagandist? Or is it me?

Anything said about north Korea that is not absolutely bonkers is propaganda?

boyboy doesn't have to be propagandist to regurgitate some factoids that were put out deliberately elsewhere as agi-prop.

that's the point, you poison the well once and everyone keeps drinking from it, forever.

which facts are wrong? genuinely want to correct my worldview

Would you care to elaborate with any source for this claim? Otherwise I have to crown this the dumbest thing that I've read on the internet this week. I see the HN moderation is doing a great job at keeping the triple digit IQs away.

It's so well known it would be easier for you to source your claim. Or you know, you could source the claim yourself. Obviously you didn't bother before posting.

When I say dragons fly over the rainbows, I need to source the claim. When I say that the sky is blue, it's you who needs to look it up if you doubt it so much.

My point stands then :)

deleted

Wasn't talking to you. Was talking to the person I replied to

My bad!

Check out the 2023 documentary Beyond Utopia for a glimpse. It’s currently on Hulu.

Heres some propaganda: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit... https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46164212.pdf https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-09-14/north-...

This is from 2019:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpdYcy8JtiisXTMb4zug_oCIB...

This book was published 2009, https://archive.org/details/nothing-to-envy-ordinary-lives-i..., and I can highly recommend it for anyone wanting to know a little about how life might have looked like growing up in North-Korea.

Honest and unpaid North Korea influencers (apparently trying to influence South Korea) can tell a bit :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzFoNe5rNMo

The pandemic has probably changed a lot. Virtually no foreigners have been there after 2019, so I guess the best we know is that we don't know.

Remember those marching formations, where a normal AK looked like a giant toy wielded by kids.

The German Wikipedia article (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Botschaft_Pj%C3%B6ngj...) has some more details. Most interesting: unified Germany initially wasn't interested in diplomatic relations with North Korea, so between 1991 and 2001, the only country actually using the building as an embassy was Sweden (although Germany had a "Schutzmachtvertretung" during this time - not sure what that means, but at least the lonely Swede had some company).

In case someone cares, the term 'Schutzmachtvertretung' contains three words, Schutz = protection, Macht = Power/Might and Vertretung = Representation.

Yeah, apparently this refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_power - Sweden is currently (or rather, I guess, was before the Covid pandemic) the protecting power for no less than 10 Western states (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, USA) in North Korea. And between 1991 and 2001 they were apparently also the protecting power for Germany.

I wonder who works in those embassies. Are there some British dudes just living there that go to the embassy every day for work? Where do they buy food? What do their residences look like? Do have spouses and children? Where do they work and go to school? Do they enjoy life there?

Some of your questions are answered in the actual article... no mention of spouses or kids, so most probably they don't come along.

Intelligence officers. Even your average friendly embassy is full of them. In this case it was probably more to handle secure channels of high level communication rather that recruiting agents. He even mentioned at the beginning that this was the official purpose for the mission.

If you want to arrange something quickly between nations you go through their respective three letter agencies.

You’d wonder less if you had read the article.

Why would anyone in their right mind accept a job like this? It's a lot like taking a job that requires you to live in a prison for several years.

If you read the article, they were allowed to travel freely.

Personally I would have loved the job. Seems like they had lots of free time. Very secure country without much crime. Really not much to worry about, just a bit isolating. Plus some cool stories to tell when you are back home.

Sure, not the type of job for people with family.

>If you read the article, they were allowed to travel freely.

What good is that in North Korea? The whole country is basically a prison, and after what happened to Otto, anyone with any sense of self-preservation should want to avoid the place.

In my grade school years I moved with my parents to Saudi Arabia for a couple years. It was voluntary on their part, my father had the opportunity to move their for his work (for a US company).

Saudi Arabia isn't North Korea, but it's still a lot less free than most developed countries, especially for females like my mother, who were not allowed to drive or work, could not go out alone, and legally forced to wear a stupid black thing in insanely hot weather while all the males of the country wore comfy white clothing.

I don't know the full story of their financials, but all I know is we got free housing, 1 free trip to the US every year, and 3 free vacations per year anywhere in the world, flights, lodging, and all expenses covered. We did lots of things that I believe they wouldn't have been able to do on their own money at the time. They also rented out their house in the US for extra income.

I wouldn't be surprised if diplomats who voluntarily take posts in North Korea also get a shitton of compensation benefits like that.

Don't Americans working in Saudi Arabia generally live in a large, separate compound, where they don't have to mingle with Saudi society and don't have to follow normal Saudi laws (like the dress code for women)? That's probably a little different from living in an embassy, which is just a single building.

Being an astronaut on the ISS is the most "in a prison" setting imaginable. Get out of that small box and you will die in seconds. It is also a dangerous, unhealthy and demanding job. And yet, it is also one of the most sought after job.

Less prestigious jobs but also desirable to some are sailors, or worse, submariners, and people working in Antarctica and other remote, hostile places.

Speaking about countries, North Korea is an oppressive dictatorship, but at least, it is not at war, and crime is limited. There are countries where your freedoms are just as or even more limited because you risk getting killed, mugged, kidnapped, etc... if you leave your armored vehicle and armed escort.

The positives of living in North Korea includes getting familiar with one of the most secretive culture in the world. There are some reports about North Koreans being quite joyful. People can have really shitty lives: war, crippling diseases, etc... and still find joy, so that shouldn't be surprising. And also, the article mentions travels, so, not really a prison.

And of course, there is the obvious aspect of compensation, which is probably substantial.

I can't tell if this comment was AI-generated.

It is not, but as a non native English speaker, and considering how good LLMs are at the technical aspects of writing (spelling, grammar, syntax, choice of words, etc...), I take it as a compliment.

In most cases it’s accepting orders

Orders? Diplomatic service (in the UK and other democratic nations) isn't part of the military; it's a civilian job. The guards might be soldiers, but the rest of the jobs aren't to my knowledge.

If someone is offered a particular posting but chooses not to accept it without good reason then I expect they won’t be offered anything better (more important, prestigious or more enjoyable).

(Saying that, I remember reading once that high-flying UK diplomats might be offered something less desirable as a ‘test of nerve’ - to see whether they had enough confidence and self belief to hold out for something better. It’s a never-ending test of character and ability to know which way the wind is blowing, I suppose)

Sounds like a good way of keeping young people from being interested in a career in that field.

They likely go to specialized shops for foreigners where you may only pay with US$-backed coupons, and can purchase most of stuff you can commonly buy in Japan.

> There were a handful of shops that catered for foreigners. All transactions had to be in Euros as possession of local currency by foreigners was forbidden. A lot of the items were imported from China and from time to time, local fresh produce would make a rare appearance. Meat was always in short supply.

Here's a video of what one of those shops looks like by an Indonesian diplomat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYJ9u0sEE4

Lankov has described the coupon system in some detail. I believe Cuba has a similar system with CUC or had it until recently. I'm not sure at which point NK ditched coupons for Euros.

A clue about the time might be

> The World Food Programme (whose Head at the time was an American called Reagan!)

But I can't find him here or elsewhere:

https://www.wfp.org/previous-executive-directors

That must be a misspelling of Richard Ragan. He headed the North Korean World Food Programme from 2003 to 2005 according to Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ragan

Sounds like this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ragan

Reply on news.ycombinator.com