Street View, North Korea | Hacker News Reader

Street View, North Korea

mapillary.com

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On the same note, here is a surreal 22 min drive through Pyongyang.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4hLctBvojE

It pairs well with a few Aphex Twin songs:

Heliosphan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4cLmbw6q0

Flim : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhHkUg-QCwk

Ageispolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOf6ICP3WAg

It is surreal because it almost makes it possible to forget how may people that regime has starving, worked to death and tortured.

Thanks for posting, this was eerie. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be brought up, from a small child, to unconditionally love one man and to unconditionally love everything about your country, even if you're starving.

After watching the drive, I watched this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xs--To414I. It gives a more in-depth look, and has interviews with officials and citizens.

Some of them you can tell they are fighting to say the "right" things. I wish everyone in that country well.

While there is no defending NK, blind nationalism and extremism exists in segments of the population in every country. Empirically unworkable self destructive implementation won't change an extremist's view in any society.

And while the path to such states of mind is different than NK, a household or self reinforcing group, a narrow choice of information sources, the unquestioned belief in a single writer can be just as effective in producing it as Kim Jong-un tragicomic techniques.

What struck me was the lack of life on the streets. Anywhere else I'd expect to see street vendors, buskers, flashy billboards and storefronts, people laughing, but there's none of that. The streets seem purely functional. But they're not bleak either - the landscaping is quite nice, actually.

Might just be confirmation bias on my part.

What you describe is capitalism!

There you have it, some North Koreans laughing:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/kxxn0by6wur...

Hope you enjoyed it.

BTW, this is the source of that image

http://jalopnik.com/the-hermit-kingdom-an-inside-view-of-nor...

Tbh, this looks mostly – except for maybe some missing logos at stores – just like my city, which is in Germany.

(Although Pyongyang looks, based on scale, a LOT larger)

According to "A Year in Pyongyang" (written by a Brit, see http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang_1.html), in the 80s under Kim Il Sung there were plenty of people laughing in the streets. He describes many workers as having an attitude similar to playful children, and in particular he describes actual kids as "the pampered citizens of North Korea": always laughing, always playing, pampered by everyone. Keep in mind this was an account that didn't downplay the harsh realities of life in NK. It was also the 80s; things may have changed a lot since then.

So yes, I think it is confirmation bias on your part. Life in NK is probably not like we think it is. It is bizarre to us, yes, but the average person probably doesn't live in fear of soldiers raiding their homes, or in dread the Beloved Leader orders them killed. In all likelihood, regardless of how actual life in NK is, those are all fantasies on our part; preconceptions of how life in a weird dictatorship actually is.

I think I, a Westerner, wouldn't like living in NK. At the same time, I really do not think it's a living hell for its citizens -- certainly not in the movie-style dictatorship we sometimes imagine it to be.

> At the same time, I really do not think it's a living hell for its citizens -- certainly not in the movie-style dictatorship we sometimes imagine it to be.

No, NK is a living hell.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/10...

> At a public hearing in London last week, Kim Song-Ju told of his four attempts to flee North Korea because of a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans during the 1990s.

> After crossing the icy Tumen river that marks the border with China in March 2006, Kim was caught by Chinese guards and forced back to North Korea.

> He described beatings in a North Korean detention camp and how he was ordered to search prisoners' excrement for money they were believed to have swallowed.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/17/north-korea-hum...

> North Korea's leadership is committing systematic and appalling human rights abuses against its own citizens on a scale unparalleled in the modern world, crimes against humanity with strong resemblances to those committed by the Nazis, a United Nations inquiry has concluded.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Commissio...

Let's read the account of someone who decided to move his family to North Korea - on purpose - and how that turned out for them.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/07/16/the-story-of-...

Oh Kil-nam is a South Korean man who received his PhD in Germany, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986.

At first it didn't seem all that bizarre but a few minutes in you start noticing some interesting things. For instance, the utter lack of traffic lights.

Then there's the bit at about 5:14 where two buses have just gone past a bus stop, but there's still at least a good 50 or so people just waiting there, queuing.

There are traffic lights – on the opposite side of the Intersection. (which is also common in some european countries, as it’s easier to see).

The sprawl of the city struck me as kind of odd, as did the intermixing of small and large buildings.

Well, to be fair, fewer than 10% of videos pair poorly with tracks from the Selected Ambient Works series.

This video includes the marked section on the map, starting at roughly 9'38". Note the building to the right of the road.

I wondered whether the photos were pulled from this official(ish) video, but it appears not...

South Korean and United States foreign policy is now reunification with North Korea, a switch from decades of "Sunshine Policy" under which relationships with NK did improve.

This is contextualized by a number of current events including the rise of China and revisionism of Russia, the fight over the Arctic, America's huge losses in cyberwarfare, the US's push for an Asian NATO, and Japan's reinterpretation of their Constitution to allow for anticipatory military strikes (even on behalf of allies) - basically the US's Pivot to Asia.

Policy and strategy thinktanks are discussing with NGOs and CSOs how to develop insurgencies in NK and how to inform and convince the youth and unengaged in SK to care about reunification. The US and international allies plan to target specific people (guards, officials) on human rights violations, rather than engaging the country diplomatically, in the hopes that an international criminal court approach can get officials and government employees to resist or be reluctant to take orders from higher up the chain. The US will be discussing the evolution of NK with Russia, who they believe will now be assisting NK at a faster clip with missile development.

An interesting note here is that every year has seen increasing activities from the US inside of NK. This past year CIA and State Department involvement in the development of The Interview (as leaked by the SONY emails, both by the SONY hackers #GOP and by Wikileaks) reveal how tensions are building between the countries, and how cyberwarfare is a highly asymmetric type of warfare.

We can expect to see a great deal more about North Korea, and need to hope that, as larger powers attempt to conquer NK and strip its government, that this can be done as peacefully as possible and without triggering all of the Cold War tripwires breeding in the world today.

> We can expect to see a great deal more about North Korea, and need to hope that, as larger powers attempt to conquer NK and strip its government, that this can be done as peacefully as possible and without triggering all of the Cold War tripwires breeding in the world today.

I immediately thought on reading this line of how NK is the last stranglehold where U.S. Commerce has not infiltrated. In fact, much of the talk of opening NK up is entirely orchestrated towards bringing in 'capitalism', not democracy. Democracy is the excuse we seem to be persuaded by. It is the "magazine" cover that corporate America likes to parade.

And this sickens me. Why? Because people are much less willing to give up their lives for corporate freedom than they are for a democratic leadership. And yet so many of our soldiers have died for this very pretense.

> And yet so many of our soldiers have died for this very pretense.

"America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall."

https://i.imgur.com/HsDHUWU.jpg

What struck me was the handwriting.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." -- Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, 1935.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

Fully agreed. The thing many of us don't always realize is that democracy is not needed for capitalism to work.

So if the push to topple the North Korean regime is merely to install capitalism...

I recognize a Soviet car: http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/-74CU7C3XYKmnkAtpVwiQA and http://mapillary.com/map/im/StWpR2MuX2z3Xhd1LWd9QQ, that's a 1979+ ВАЗ-2105 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%90%D0%97-2105 It looks (and is) dated, but actually was produced until recently and a common sight in Russia.

I wonder how they get there.

Wasn't the Soviet Union main trading partner of NK for quite a while?

Well the cold war was a whole lot of "if you trade with them you can't trade with us"...

I wonder more now non Soviet cars get there

Well, the volvos are pretty easy to explain. http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-v...

Aaaah ВАЗ aka VAZ aka Lada.

What is the difference between a Lada and a golf ball? You can drive a golf ball 200 meters.

How do Lada drivers recognize each other? They already met at the mechanic that morning.

What's a Lada on top of a hill? A miracle.

What' two Ladas on top of a hill? Science-fiction.

What's three Ladas on top of a hill? A weird place to build a Lada factory.

I grew up with these Lada jokes and for me Ladas were just something ridiculous and for some reason I can only remember them in this godawful cream colour tinged with rust around every possible edge. Then a couple of years back I visited Georgia and Armenia and I saw moderately well maintained Ladas in black and I have to say there was something very charming about them! Tbilisi can be pretty hilly and steep and I was pretty surprised to see Ladas zipping up and down them with ease, side by side with shiny BMWs and Mercedes[1]. I also loved the GAZ Volga, I think they're a bit rarer though.

[1] there's heaps of new-ish Mercedes, BMW, Audi etc (many right-hand drive) in Georgia which is confusing as it's not a wealthy country at all. I got talking to an Insurance guy who'd told me this is because Georgia is the end of the line for a chain of insurance fraud starting in the UK\Germany, where cars would be "stolen", claimed on insurance and then moved on + re-registered somehow in the next country. This process is repeated until they ended up in Georgia and were sold for a knockdown price because they'd already recouped their money many times over. Ex-USSR countries are really interesting and I'd thoroughly recommend them for a visit, just learn a couple of phrases in the local language or Russian to make things a little smoother :)

Ladas were a common sight in the UK on the early 80's. Especially in Scotland where they did well in the tough conditions. They were also cheap.

I've still not figured out how, if Top Gear was to be believed, how the BMW 3-series became the best-selling vehicle in the UK.

> Aaaah ВАЗ aka VAZ aka Lada.

a.k.a Fiat 124

BTW, Ladas were (still are) exported to the West and did reasonably well as low-cost vehicles.

I specifically checked to see that these are not Fiat's (at least the headlights are distinctively different)

Fiat 124 is VAZ-2101, later models were designed domestically until VAZ-2108, which was designed (partially) by Porsche

>I recognize a Soviet car:

wait until you see NK missiles :)

This site's usage of browser is ridiculous. Every time you move forward or backwards it adds another history entry, making your back button pretty much useless.

If they want to provide deep linking to a particular map location they should change the URL without writing to the history.

Browsing on Safari like I never do, I thought it was a weird bug. Thanks for my sanity.

First world issues much?

You've been presented with these rare images, that someone probably had to smuggle out of the country, took care to lay them on the map for your convenience, and you sit there dissatisfied with how the back button works.

Giving technical feedback doesn't mean one doesn't appreciate the content.

Complaining about the presentation of the linked content is sort of a meme here.

Just for fun: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22my%20eyes%20hurt%22&sort=by...

And for good reason. If you give something to a bunch of programmers, any programming deficiencies will be immediately and more-than-adequately addressed.

If snarkiness tends to be this predictable, I wonder what kinds of data analysis can be done just using certain recurring phrases.

Not seeing that issue in Chrome/OSX.

Seems like they're using window.history.replaceState, which replaces the current history state. This is in contrast to window.history.pushState which adds to the stack.

I can't help but be curious if it's falling back to #hashurls for you (or something else). From my end, they've come up with a clever technique for persisting map state in a sharable way.

I'm waiting for camp 14 street map : http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0...

This is real north korea :-)

That book was a huge eye-opener to me. It's practically a Nazi-level concentration camp situation, but because they're only doing it to their own people and one of their allies is China, the world does nothing.

no, because they have a shit ton of artillery aimed at Seoul, tunnels under the dmz that can be packed with explosives, possibly nukes (which even if fizzlers could do a lot of damage)... and China.

there are in the perfect situation to do evil and get away with it.

Even funding a insurgency would be difficult. the population is so downtrodden they must have forgotten what freedom is (think 1984). the penalty for disobedience is your entire family in a concentration camp.

Your entire family to the 8th or 9th generation.

I worked with one lady who had a boyfriend in the U.S military stationed in South Korea. Turns out NK often sends over mortars, every time her boyfriend would have to end the conversation. Something which we never hear about.

"The world does nothing"

The world would have watched Hitler in peace too, had he not decided to blast through Belgium into Paris. After that the world watched China end the lives of tens of millions (as many as, or more than the entire NK population) during the Cultural Revolution. The world watches as Boko Haram and countless other organizations murder and rape their way across Africa. The world watches as Qatar puts on the most impressively visible modern example of slavery, and what does the world do? Remain excited with the sport and the event. The world watches as organized crime and cartels wage paramilitary war against the Mexican people, dropping busloads of kids into mass graves. The world watches as political islamic extremists take advantage of crumbling governments in Syria and Iraq to murder, steal, kidnap, and destroy across the region.

Point is: the world watches a lot of things, and when someone like the US steps in, they are lambasted as no greater than the evil we expect them be willing to fight.

North Korea remains unmolested purely because it does not molest other countries. If they do, China will aggressively end that behavior or implicitly allow the US to so through inaction.

Generally speaking I agree with you. However when you get to the "someone like the US steps in", I would like to make a few notes. 1. there is no other nation "like the US" but USA. Not even China or Russia have the kind of global presence and military power. Not saying that the US would be able to win a war against these nations, just pointing out that how you phrased it like the US taking steps is like any other nations taking steps, and this is simply not true. 2. Another issue with the US stepping in, is that from experience when the US steps in, that doesn't end well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu

and of course, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=315&v=0ypIwK6OlFc

I do not in any circumstances blame any leader personally for these things, and I definitely do not associate the actions of the US with the citizens of the US, and I also know that even if the US would've been the most peaceful, least aggressive superpower, some other nation might've done worse things. But I think that the world would be a much better place if the US would've "stepped in" in different ways, or even if they would've not done anything of what in the links are mentioned. (and of course I only scratched the surface here)

"the world does nothing."

What would you have the world do? Invade like the US did to Iraq, causing a million deaths?

It's actually a bit silly of me to refer to "the world" as though it's one coherent, unified entity. The U.N. is closer to what I was imagining, but regardless, what I'd like to see is a strong push for North Korea to open it's borders in exchange for a lightening of sanctions. The NK leadership's power is retained almost entirely through keeping people in the dark.

On a wackier, cantankerous note, I also envision a scheme of dropping solar-charged epaper tablets and blasting the entire country with free WiFi to make locking down knowledge about the outside world impossible.

I'm firmly against outright military intervention (no drones either).

If only stuff were as easy (regarding your epaper-plan). Propaganda has been there since ages. It does not work well on foreign nations, because people are suspicious of everything their enemies say. WWII would not have changed a bit if all Germans had known of Auschwitz (many did - people got news from the BBC after all!). Kim Jong Un has lived in Europe, and apparently, he did not like what he saw. People's minds are very complicated.

> what I'd like to see is a strong push for North Korea to open it's borders in exchange for a lightening of sanctions.

What would the value be to the NK leadership to do that? Worrying about the well being of the population? I think they've made it pretty clear that's not really high on the list of priorities.

As you said, they stay in power by keeping people in the dark. No one voluntarily gives up power.

Also, you might find the Frontline story on North Korea interesting.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-nort...

>The U.N. is closer to what I was imagining, but regardless, what I'd like to see is a strong push for North Korea to open it's borders in exchange for a lightening of sanctions.

That wouldn't fly with them. Their entire governmental ideology is based upon something called "Juche" which means 'self reliance'. It would kinda be like asking the US to give up the first amendment in exchange for some trade goodies. Just not gonna happen.

>The NK leadership's power is retained almost entirely through keeping people in the dark.

This isn't true. People are not in the dark as much as you might think. They are vaguely aware of what goes on outside the country's borders. It would be impossible for them not to be. This is partly why a year ago the NK government released a list of "best places in the world to live". China was #1 because North Koreans are able to watch the Chinese get rich and the government couldn't deny it.

The leadership's power is predicated mostly upon two things :

A) Propaganda that makes the citizens afraid of the outside world - US and Japan mostly. Unfortunately, when the US does shit like invade Iraq, saber rattle Iran, and sticks nukes on the 38th parallel (did you not wonder why NK developed nukes? THAT'S why), it's not that hard to convince North Koreans that they are under mortal threat. The strong censorship helps a lot with this, but the propaganda would probably still hold pretty well without it.

B) A gift economy. The leader showers his underlings with maseratis. He showers his underlings with jewellery. He showers his underlings with alcohol. Etcetera. All the way down. The hierarchy is very well cemented in by strong ties of loyalty. Chop off the head and all of that remains.

>On a wackier, cantankerous note, I also envision a scheme of dropping solar-charged epaper tablets and blasting the entire country with free WiFi to make locking down knowledge about the outside world impossible.

This type of thing has been going on for a long time (hell, we've had short wave radios for how long?). It doesn't really seem to be working.

Yes, the North Koreans get this stuff sometimes, but seeing a DVD of Friends doesn't immediately inspire them to overthrow their government and the smart ones are rightfully terrified of owning such contraband.

I'd be more optimistic about this strategy, too, if propaganda didn't work so well on American citizens, who have all of those things and yet still believe absurd lies fed to them by their leaders.

The empty roads and this red Lada car remind me of the times of my childhood in Soviet Union :)

Notice that there is no ad in the streets !

Yes, a breath of fresh utopia!

And everyone drive a Mercedes! Magical place.

There are no ads in the streets of São Paulo either:

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

That's pretty much the only thing I miss about the life in the USSR: no ads. I wonder if we could ever claim back our visual field and have more control over what's allowed in the streets.

I can't help but notice great the condition of the roads are (probably due to the very few cars there). This road in particular looks well looked after. For a country that has a lot of starving citizens, it is quite surprising. Take a drive through most streets in Los Angeles and you will experience what a poorly maintained road feels like in a supposedly first-world country. Same goes for some roads in my city here in Australia, poorly constructed to the point where heavy rain is enough to put massive potholes into a main road.

You can see the same in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan - perfect tarmac in the capital, but outside of it, the road is lousy, even on transit routes (Iran-Uzbekistan) - we cycled there in 2013: http://poab.org/log/c/0/60#2

OK, so North Korea is showing off a part of Kaeson Street, which I guess is the main avenue in Pyongyang. It looks OK, but I am pretty sure it's just the facade of the country NK wants to show to the outside; I am not sure the rest looks so nice. Also, there are almost no cars.

It's better than the rest, but even the rest of North Korea sure as hell looks a lot better than many 3rd world countries.

The western media gives an exaggerated view of the level of poverty there, partly by subtly pretending that it's still 1994.

RIP browser history.

Wow, streets are so clean, not a single piece of trash. I wish we had this here in Brooklyn.

The infrastructure is much better than India, Vietnam which happen to be massive suck ups to USA.

Ten lane roads are not infrastructure unless you have something to ride on that roads. India and Vietnam provide citizens with all kinds of bikes, tuktuks and motorollers. NK not so much.

Having said that, no electricity during most of the day also not very infrastructure-ish.

(If you wanted real totalitarian infrastructure, try Myanmar)

Also, Vietnam fighted for their vision of freedom, won, and now is free to do whatever pleases.

You dont see many cars I guese because the population is low, even on the streets there are less number of people. By the way the cleanliness and stable roads are much better than India and Vietname and even some US cities. I dont agree with your electricity outage comment since you provided no proof of that.

You're taking one tiny stretch of (empty) road as evidence of the quality of infrastructure across the entire country.

India has 2.53 million kilometers of paved road. Vietnam has 148,000 km. The CIA's 2006 estimate for North Korea was 724 kilometers.

Doesn't google/bing maps have NK satellite photos? We could always verify the CIA number to a great extent if said imagery exists.

EDIT: Gotta love the fog/haze over Pyongyang on Google Maps

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyongyang,+Coreia+do+Norte...

yeah thats cause India in 1000x larger than NK. please use some logic.

So we'll compare Vietnam, which is 2.7x larger than North Korea. Vietnam still has 200x more paved roads than North Korea.

Measuring paved road per capita, Vietnam still comes out several orders of magnitude ahead.

North Korea actually has sizable population. Imagine Seoul with all the area, NK has same population in all the country. It's just it is partially rural, partially in death camps, partially tries not to attract attention. That's why you aren't seeing anybody.

Well I guess we found the one member of HN that hails from NK. Welcome!

I think you mean, "Welcome, Dear Leader!"

>Ten lane roads are not infrastructure unless you have something to ride on that roads. India and Vietnam provide citizens with all kinds of bikes, tuktuks and motorollers. NK not so much.

The embargo makes oil very expensive in NK. Hence the costs of running a vehicle are prohibitive.

>Having said that, no electricity during most of the day

They get pretty frequent seconds-long brownouts, but they do have electricity during the day.

Maybe the capital gets electricity all day, but I have read from specialists that provincial towns get a few hours of power per day. Same with e.g. water.

> Having said that, no electricity during most of the day also not very infrastructure-ish.

Who told you that? Have you lived in NK?

I was expecting Google doing good but I guess I keep being disappointed.

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