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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."
>Why is nuclear deterrence sensible when America does it, but "crazy" when NK does it?
I think being able to ensure any victory over you by your enemies is Pyrrhic at best is perfectly sane.
What makes NK seem crazy is the dictatorship, its methods of controlling the population, and the unnecessary hardship put upon the average North Korean to sustain it. And the loony and obvious propaganda, of course.
Then again, threatening a superpower more or less capable of ending human civilization when all you can do is wipe out a city or two... that's like your average bar scrapper picking a fight with an MMA champ to impress a girl. Most likely you're insignificant enough that it's not worth the trouble to drop you so long as you don't throw the first punch, but there's a risk you're going to get dead very fast.
In that sense, while it's still comparable to MAD, NK vs. USA isn't quite the same as USA vs. USSR in terms of 'sanity'.