BF2S Forums First World Problems

not reading anything different to capital cities in the west? lol ...

the price of property in the seoul area has gone up something like 70x in the space of 2-3 generations. hence the need for immense family hand-me-downs and frustration at dwindling social mobility. there really is no comparison to how fast the economy and development here took off, from third world africa levels of economic activity to 10th largest economy in about 30 years.

most banks and mortgage lenders here will actually lend based on a 1-2% deposit. i don't know much about germany but in the UK you need 10-20% to even be considered by a bank, plus a very healthy salary. korean lending has to be insane because the property market and cost-of-living is supercharged compared to stagnating average wages.

bear in mind that korea's 'hours worked' are the highest in the OECD, by quite a margin. they're fourth globally, only behind costa rica, mexico and colombia. germany's is the lowest. so, erm, very comparable, i guess. koreans work as if they're still an impoverished developing country, even though they're now at the top table.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/6DBV
(this data might not be perfect or comprehensive globally, but it's a good general indicator).

they work 2x as many hours as your average german and property is about 4x as expensive relative to the average salary. 'subtle differences', indeed. you try working 60 hours a week for that average salary of $33,000 USD, in a city where a first apartment costs half a million $.

but otherwise, yes, it's as i said: here is a particularly concentrated form of the malaises seen anywhere under 'late capitalism'. just here you can see the material changes within the span of a single three-generation family household. from war-torn and famine-struck peasantry to multimillionaires, often times based on where your grandparents had their cabbage patch in 1973. – or more often not.

I never understood the obsession with cramming styles of learning popular in many asian countries. Doesn't make for smarter kids.

up to now in this stage of their development, they haven't needed innovators, disruptors, creatives, etc. they've needed to build a large, stable middle-class of professionals, corporate drones, services workers, etc. as well as emphasizing science and technology roles. a lot of that stuff can be acquired through rote learning and cramming. you might not get brilliant technicians, engineers, accountants and surveyors, etc, through cramming but you'll get capable ones. 'independent thinking' isn't required for the vast majority of professional roles.

you'll actually find that a lot of the senior and elite roles in samsung and so on, the high-level innovation stuff, the solid-state, semiconductor, type stuff, they employ americans or germans, at least for short whiles to acquire their expertise. such tech-sector jobs are one of the very few ways to get a good employment visa here if you're a westerner.

also: confucianism. for most of their long histories they were very hierarchical societies with a lawyer/scholar class responsible for running the state. admittance to the large bureaucracy and 'educated', literate/numerate lifestyles was via an extremely rote-memorization-heavy examinations process. you can still see this in the civil service exams processes in china, korea, etc, today. 100,000s apply every year for a tiny number of posts.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-08 09:11:53)

cram schools are overwhelmingly the preserve of the rich, the upper class, or the very upwardly mobile. they're expensive as hell, especially considering most of the extra-curricular schools in language/math/science tuition will be employing young tutors who went away to ivy league colleges, etc. name brands matter and command a high premium.

it's like private after-school tuition in the west. rich and fussy parents arrange it for their struggling kids. even somewhat dim kids from good households can go far with the extra push and exams guidance.

because everyone has to do it to keep up. in an incredibly competitive society with a vanishingly small number of 'elite' positions at schools/companies, even amongst the monied and well-off there is an insane crush and chokepoint. even rich kids from nice spacious apartments get miserable when they're at school for 14 hours a day, when all to look forward to in life is being crushed in yet more competitive environments. and that's the 'lucky' ones.

a lot of these kids shoulder senses of shame/guilt, family burdens. there's still such a thing as bringing 'dishonour' on your family if you drop-out of society or don't earn all the expected garlands. it's a huge amount of expectation to internalise. and all of your peers aren't really 'friends' in such an environment: they're competitors. the whole thing sounds nightmarish to be honest.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-08 09:38:07)

there is low crime and violence, yeah, absolutely. that's partly because of ruthless authoritarianism in very recent memory, though. you're less inclined to be anti-social in public or to get into drunken brawls when there's military police and a ruthless state apparatus.


"A Police officer checking a man's hair length during a nationwide crackdown on men with long hair and women wearing short skirts in Myeong-dong, Seoul, S. Korea 1970s [Colorized]"

there are forms of crime but a lot of it is de facto tolerated. people talk a lot about the efficiency of the japanese justice system, and so on, but it doesn't actually stand up to much scrutiny. the 'good crime stats' actually belie quite an unjust reality, e.g. in the japanese system, anything that goes through to official public prosecution is basically a de facto guilty judgment, guilty-unless-remarkably-proven-otherwise. similarly, cops on the street level can be bribed or encouraged to look the other way if you're from the right family/influential position. the 'low crime' stats are covering for a lot.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-08 11:25:56)

All work has dignity.

Last edited by SuperJail Warden (2022-03-09 06:15:16)

So, obviously conservatives are all aflutter that Joe Biden is personally raising gas prices, apparently in a bid to force us to buy electric (this part isn't even a joke), but I saw one bragging today about the 20 mpg their Grand Marquis gets in comparison to that of your basic lifted pickups.

DesertFox- wrote:

So, obviously conservatives are all aflutter that Joe Biden is personally raising gas prices, apparently in a bid to force us to buy electric (this part isn't even a joke), but I saw one bragging today about the 20 mpg their Grand Marquis gets in comparison to that of your basic lifted pickups.

Obviously profligate emissions are stupid, what do people even use lifted pickups for besides highway rollovers?

SKs emissions are 50% higher with much lower landmass and less primary production, and SK seems to be doing nothing about cutting coal.

So what is the ideal metric?

Lets cut per capita emissions by 50% and triple the population. Global warming solved!

You need to pick a reasonable metric, per capita makes no sense when already over-populated countries get a win and countries can just boost their population to 'meet their emission targets', it makes no sense at all.

The basic problem is too many people on too little land. Whatever technological solution we find will be negated by an ever expanding population.
Besides global warming asian and african countries invariably expand until they're in starvation, its insanity.

Australia produces three times as much food as it consumes, that will hit our 'per capita' emissions.

I think a starting point for sustainability should be nations should be able to feed themselves, not shift their carbon emissions abroad and then point fingers like, er, Korea

With more than 51 million people, South Korea is the third most densely populated country in the world. More than 80 percent of Koreans live in urban areas and more than 50 percent live within, or in the direct vicinity of, the capital city of Seoul.

With its growing economy and limited arable land, South Korea is the eighth-largest agricultural importer in the world. In 2017, those imports totaled $25 billion, led by beef, corn, food preparations, pork, and fresh fruit.

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/us-agricu … outh-korea

Stop importing beef you fat fucks.

I'm not really fat though