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Schmidt, Daughter Talk About North Korea Trip
Eric Schmidt attracted headlines when he visited North Korea, but until now he has said little about the trip. Today he broke his silence with a Google+ post. He says in part: "As the world becomes increasingly connected, the North Korean decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world and their economic growth. It will make it harder for them to catch up economically.
We made that alternative very, very clear. Once the internet starts in any country, citizens in that country can certainly build on top of it, but the government has to do one thing: open up the Internet first. They have to make it possible for people to use the Internet, which the government of North Korea has not yet done. It is their choice now, and in my view, it’s time for them to start, or they will remain behind." His daughter had some interesting things to say as well, "The best description we could come up with: it's like The Truman Show, at country scale."
"do I have to post this on google+? I wanted my friends to see it."
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Farmers in India can get weather and crop pricing information via SMS on their basic 'feature' phones. It is progress, even if it seems painfully slow to those of us who live in the west.
Eric Schmidt from Google goes to North Korea and tells them the path to prosperity is open up to the Internet? Are you fucking serious? Uh, Eric, you know what you should have told them the path to prosperity was; the North Korean government should completely and radically change from a multi-generational dictatorship to a representative Democracy and Capitalistic System, with the intent of reunification with their southern brothers. Close the Concentration Camps (Yes, I said Concentration Camps), get rid of the failed centralized economy, stop starving your citizens and stop trying to cling to power and accept that the citizens of NK probably would be much better off without the current NK government. Opening up to the Internet is probably about 15th on the list of things they should do.
Flying to NK and trying to convenience them to use Android Smart Phones or Google Applications for Dictatorships is pretty naive and well, fucking selfish. People are really starving and dying and giving them a couple of pointers on how to use the Internet is, well, dumb.
Linux O Muerte!
In that (quite interesting) post the author frequently wonders "WTF were they thinking?". E.g. did they think we would not notice that the screens on all the computers on both floors were identical? My wife is from China where not so long ago everthing was identical, down to the progaganda art on the wall. Her immediate answer when I asked her was "duh, they don't care what the delegates thought, the whole exercise is to show pictures to the local NK population about how the great foreign technical leaders liked the NK technical office". I think we tend to forget that: it isn't the delegates that Pyongyang is afraid of, its their own people.
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Eric Schmidt visits a farm and tells the farmer than his cows would be far better off with internet access. The farmer looks at him like he is fucking stupid. Where is the benefit for him in doing that?
You are so right on.
Most people here have never been to Korea and can't really understand the dynamics of what is going on in both South and North Korea.
There is very little chance that Eric Schmidt or any of his "people" saw anything that the North did not want them to see... Which is most of North Korea, which is in a state of extreme poverty on levels that most American, most Westerners simply can not understand.
This was a PR trip for the North Koreans, a way to leverage media in the West to believe that things are not as bad in the North as they really are.
As the US Government said, this was not a "useful" trip, it was a PR trip for the North Koreans, who continue to develop Nuclear Weapons at the cost of feeding their people.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They seem to go out of the way to try and impress foreigners with how awesome shit is, they just fail badly. I think it may be a case that they've been drinking their own kool aid for so long they forget the outside world doesn't buy the bullshit. They are used to their propaganda defining their reality, they don't have a good understanding of places where it doesn't.
I'm thinking Eric Schmidt was using North Korea as a way of saying : close the Internet and that's what you'll get. Maybe the real target of his message is the US.
Your 10 aircraft carriers are not securing shipping routes, and the US doesn't have a shortage of nuclear weapons sitting around not securing shipping routes either.
There is a huge difference between the US and North Korea. This isn't it.
I moved away from the US nearly 12 years ago.
I did not have to swim a river or crawl through barbed wire or a minefield under cover of darkness to do so.
In fact, before I left, the US government even supplied me at my request and for very low cost with an internationally-accepted document confirming my citizenship (so I could come back if I wanted) and asking people in other countries to treat me nicely (and telling me where to get help if they don't).
I don't see that happening so often in North Korea, do you?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
In my wildest dreams I don't envision the time when the name of Java programming language will be be whispered in fear by its former users who are permanently relegated to the jobs that have no effect on the rest of society.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.