North Korea has become a lot more liberal than many people realize internally.
There’s some business there today, they all have cellphones, many of them Chinese cellphones. Traders are building houses, a burgeoning middle class importing luxury goods from China. (European goods are still only for the absolute elite.)
And that was all before Russia decided to start shipping them oil and food and say F You to the sanctions.
The new neighborhoods that the regime is building for scientists and engineers also look pretty nice.
(There are a few newssites that report from North Korea, sometimes with sources inside the country. The Chinese border is pretty porous these days.)
Nah, North Korea isn’t a paradise, but it isn’t the hellhole it used to be around 2000.
If I had to choose between living in India and NK, no question I’d go for being a Nork.
And shit, unlike the South Koreans, they’re actually still having kids instead of being too depressed and busy to even think about the future.