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Seoul Is Reinventing Itself As a Techno-Utopia (wired.com)
mirandakatz writes: Seoul is struggling: Its birth rate is at an all-time low, college graduates are having enormous trouble finding jobs, and trust in government is not high. But South Korea is also, in many ways, cutting edge -- and it wants to use that future-thinking power to build its capital into a techno-utopia. As Susan Crawford details at Backchannel, that begins with a powerful data analysis tool known as the "The Digital Civic Mayor's Office." Crawford writes that "this dashboard seemed like a potential green shoot of democracy -- a city doing what it can to show citizens why government should be trusted and that their quality of life, including the quality of the air they breathe, the prices of the apples they eat, and the traffic jams they face daily, is important."
It's a MAD situation, I think it's fairly comparable to the Cold War in that respect.
The North seems crazy, but under it all they do want to live, and they will NEVER have enough power to take over so much as a child's playground without being immediately obliterated.
In that light, investment in Seoul isn't unwise. The city won't get destroyed because war isn't really all that likely. In fact, giving North Korea a juicier target to threaten kind of stabilizes the situation, since if there was a chance to take out North Korea without collateral damage... someone might be inclined to try it.