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Street View, North Korea
- NathanKP 11y agoThis site's usage of browser is ridiculous. Every time you move forward or backwards it adds another history entry, making your back button pretty much useless. If they want to provide deep linking to a particular map location they should change the URL without writing to the history.
- moey 11y agoBrowsing on Safari like I never do, I thought it was a weird bug. Thanks for my sanity.
- udev 11y agoFirst world issues much? You've been presented with these rare images, that someone probably had to smuggle out of the country, took care to lay them on the map for your convenience, and you sit there dissatisfied with how the back button works.
- vladharbuz 11y agoGiving technical feedback doesn't mean one doesn't appreciate the content.
- coderdude 11y agoComplaining about the presentation of the linked content is sort of a meme here. Just for fun: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22my%20eyes%20hurt%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22my%20eyes%20hurt%22&sort=by...
- yellowapple 11y agoAnd for good reason. If you give something to a bunch of programmers, any programming deficiencies will be immediately and more-than-adequately addressed.
- hitekker 11y agoIf snarkiness tends to be this predictable, I wonder what kinds of data analysis can be done just using certain recurring phrases.
- bdcravens 11y agoNot seeing that issue in Chrome/OSX.
- nhunzaker 11y agoSeems like they're using window.history.replaceState, which replaces the current history state. This is in contrast to window.history.pushState which adds to the stack. I can't help but be curious if it's falling back to #hashurls for you (or something else). From my end, they've come up with a clever technique for persisting map state in a sharable way.
- mfo 11y agoI'm waiting for camp 14 street map : http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0143122916 http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0... This is real north korea :-)
- RankingMember 11y agoThat book was a huge eye-opener to me. It's practically a Nazi-level concentration camp situation, but because they're only doing it to their own people and one of their allies is China, the world does nothing.
- steve19 11y agono, because they have a shit ton of artillery aimed at Seoul, tunnels under the dmz that can be packed with explosives, possibly nukes (which even if fizzlers could do a lot of damage)... and China. there are in the perfect situation to do evil and get away with it. Even funding a insurgency would be difficult. the population is so downtrodden they must have forgotten what freedom is (think 1984). the penalty for disobedience is your entire family in a concentration camp.
- blakeja 11y agoYour entire family to the 8th or 9th generation.
- gscott 11y agoI worked with one lady who had a boyfriend in the U.S military stationed in South Korea. Turns out NK often sends over mortars, every time her boyfriend would have to end the conversation. Something which we never hear about.
- criley2 11y ago"The world does nothing" The world would have watched Hitler in peace too, had he not decided to blast through Belgium into Paris. After that the world watched China end the lives of tens of millions (as many as, or more than the entire NK population) during the Cultural Revolution. The world watches as Boko Haram and countless other organizations murder and rape their way across Africa. The world watches as Qatar puts on the most impressively visible modern example of slavery, and what does the world do? Remain excited with the sport and the event. The world watches as organized crime and cartels wage paramilitary war against the Mexican people, dropping busloads of kids into mass graves. The world watches as political islamic extremists take advantage of crumbling governments in Syria and Iraq to murder, steal, kidnap, and destroy across the region. Point is: the world watches a lot of things, and when someone like the US steps in, they are lambasted as no greater than the evil we expect them be willing to fight. North Korea remains unmolested purely because it does not molest other countries. If they do, China will aggressively end that behavior or implicitly allow the US to so through inaction.
- pdxandi 11y agoRIP browser history.
- hartator 11y agoI was expecting Google doing good but I guess I keep being disappointed.
- sim9 11y agoThe infrastructure is much better than India, Vietnam which happen to be massive suck ups to USA.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoTen lane roads are not infrastructure unless you have something to ride on that roads. India and Vietnam provide citizens with all kinds of bikes, tuktuks and motorollers. NK not so much. Having said that, no electricity during most of the day also not very infrastructure-ish. (If you wanted real totalitarian infrastructure, try Myanmar) Also, Vietnam fighted for their vision of freedom, won, and now is free to do whatever pleases.
- sim9 11y agoYou dont see many cars I guese because the population is low, even on the streets there are less number of people. By the way the cleanliness and stable roads are much better than India and Vietname and even some US cities. I dont agree with your electricity outage comment since you provided no proof of that.
- saryant 11y agoYou're taking one tiny stretch of (empty) road as evidence of the quality of infrastructure across the entire country. India has 2.53 million kilometers of paved road. Vietnam has 148,000 km. The CIA's 2006 estimate for North Korea was 724 kilometers.
- psykovsky 11y agoDoesn't google/bing maps have NK satellite photos? We could always verify the CIA number to a great extent if said imagery exists. EDIT: Gotta love the fog/haze over Pyongyang on Google Maps https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyongyang,+Coreia+do+Norte/@39.0291382,125.7421118,21886m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x357e02dae64f4337:0xd40677e21771aa95!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyongyang,+Coreia+do+Norte...
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- themeek 11y agoSouth Korean and United States foreign policy is now reunification with North Korea, a switch from decades of "Sunshine Policy" under which relationships with NK did improve. This is contextualized by a number of current events including the rise of China and revisionism of Russia, the fight over the Arctic, America's huge losses in cyberwarfare, the US's push for an Asian NATO, and Japan's reinterpretation of their Constitution to allow for anticipatory military strikes (even on behalf of allies) - basically the US's Pivot to Asia. Policy and strategy thinktanks are discussing with NGOs and CSOs how to develop insurgencies in NK and how to inform and convince the youth and unengaged in SK to care about reunification. The US and international allies plan to target specific people (guards, officials) on human rights violations, rather than engaging the country diplomatically, in the hopes that an international criminal court approach can get officials and government employees to resist or be reluctant to take orders from higher up the chain. The US will be discussing the evolution of NK with Russia, who they believe will now be assisting NK at a faster clip with missile development. An interesting note here is that every year has seen increasing activities from the US inside of NK. This past year CIA and State Department involvement in the development of The Interview (as leaked by the SONY emails, both by the SONY hackers #GOP and by Wikileaks) reveal how tensions are building between the countries, and how cyberwarfare is a highly asymmetric type of warfare. We can expect to see a great deal more about North Korea, and need to hope that, as larger powers attempt to conquer NK and strip its government, that this can be done as peacefully as possible and without triggering all of the Cold War tripwires breeding in the world today.
- nashashmi 11y ago> We can expect to see a great deal more about North Korea, and need to hope that, as larger powers attempt to conquer NK and strip its government, that this can be done as peacefully as possible and without triggering all of the Cold War tripwires breeding in the world today. I immediately thought on reading this line of how NK is the last stranglehold where U.S. Commerce has not infiltrated. In fact, much of the talk of opening NK up is entirely orchestrated towards bringing in 'capitalism', not democracy. Democracy is the excuse we seem to be persuaded by. It is the "magazine" cover that corporate America likes to parade. And this sickens me. Why? Because people are much less willing to give up their lives for corporate freedom than they are for a democratic leadership. And yet so many of our soldiers have died for this very pretense.
- S4M 11y agoOK, so North Korea is showing off a part of Kaeson Street, which I guess is the main avenue in Pyongyang. It looks OK, but I am pretty sure it's just the facade of the country NK wants to show to the outside; I am not sure the rest looks so nice. Also, there are almost no cars.
- crdoconnor 11y agoIt's better than the rest, but even the rest of North Korea sure as hell looks a lot better than many 3rd world countries. The western media gives an exaggerated view of the level of poverty there, partly by subtly pretending that it's still 1994.
- avodonosov 11y agoThe empty roads and this red Lada car remind me of the times of my childhood in Soviet Union :)
- listic 11y agoI recognize a Soviet car: http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/-74CU7C3XYKmnkAtpVwiQA http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/-74CU7C3XYKmnkAtpVwiQA and http://mapillary.com/map/im/StWpR2MuX2z3Xhd1LWd9QQ http://mapillary.com/map/im/StWpR2MuX2z3Xhd1LWd9QQ, that's a 1979+ ВАЗ-2105 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%90%D0%97-2105 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%90%D0%97-2105 It looks (and is) dated, but actually was produced until recently and a common sight in Russia. I wonder how they get there.
- detaro 11y agoWasn't the Soviet Union main trading partner of NK for quite a while?
- digi_owl 11y agoWell the cold war was a whole lot of "if you trade with them you can't trade with us"...
- avodonosov 11y agoI wonder more now non Soviet cars get there
- jfoutz 11y agoWell, the volvos are pretty easy to explain. http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-volvos-it-bough-1629521713 http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-v...
- colinbartlett 11y agoAaaah ВАЗ aka VAZ aka Lada. What is the difference between a Lada and a golf ball? You can drive a golf ball 200 meters. How do Lada drivers recognize each other? They already met at the mechanic that morning.
- Simsor 11y agoWhat's a Lada on top of a hill? A miracle. What' two Ladas on top of a hill? Science-fiction. What's three Ladas on top of a hill? A weird place to build a Lada factory.
- sunseb 11y agoNotice that there is no ad in the streets !
- orthecreedence 11y agoYes, a breath of fresh utopia!
- thought_alarm 11y agoAnd everyone drive a Mercedes! Magical place.
- nandemo 11y agoThere are no ads in the streets of São Paulo either: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-outdoor.html http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
- mojuba 11y agoThat's pretty much the only thing I miss about the life in the USSR: no ads. I wonder if we could ever claim back our visual field and have more control over what's allowed in the streets.
- recibe 11y agoWhat a shame North Korea isn't teeming with enormous fossil fuel burning automobiles carrying around a single individual. I knew something was wrong when my 7th grade political science instructor showed us how the DPRK can't manage to waste electricity on lights like everyone else. But, lets avoid that conversation.
- rdtsc 11y agoOn the same note, here is a surreal 22 min drive through Pyongyang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4hLctBvojE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4hLctBvojE It pairs well with a few Aphex Twin songs: Heliosphan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4cLmbw6q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4cLmbw6q0 Flim : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhHkUg-QCwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhHkUg-QCwk Ageispolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOf6ICP3WAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOf6ICP3WAg It is surreal because it almost makes it possible to forget how may people that regime has starving, worked to death and tortured.
- orthecreedence 11y agoThanks for posting, this was eerie. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be brought up, from a small child, to unconditionally love one man and to unconditionally love everything about your country, even if you're starving. After watching the drive, I watched this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xs--To414I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xs--To414I. It gives a more in-depth look, and has interviews with officials and citizens. Some of them you can tell they are fighting to say the "right" things. I wish everyone in that country well.
- whybroke 11y agoWhile there is no defending NK, blind nationalism and extremism exists in segments of the population in every country. Empirically unworkable self destructive implementation won't change an extremist's view in any society. And while the path to such states of mind is different than NK, a household or self reinforcing group, a narrow choice of information sources, the unquestioned belief in a single writer can be just as effective in producing it as Kim Jong-un tragicomic techniques.
- profmonocle 11y agoWhat struck me was the lack of life on the streets. Anywhere else I'd expect to see street vendors, buskers, flashy billboards and storefronts, people laughing, but there's none of that. The streets seem purely functional. But they're not bleak either - the landscaping is quite nice, actually. Might just be confirmation bias on my part.
- usaphp 11y agoWow, streets are so clean, not a single piece of trash. I wish we had this here in Brooklyn.
- DigitalSea 11y agoI can't help but notice great the condition of the roads are (probably due to the very few cars there). This road in particular looks well looked after. For a country that has a lot of starving citizens, it is quite surprising. Take a drive through most streets in Los Angeles and you will experience what a poorly maintained road feels like in a supposedly first-world country. Same goes for some roads in my city here in Australia, poorly constructed to the point where heavy rain is enough to put massive potholes into a main road.
- peletiah 11y agoYou can see the same in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan - perfect tarmac in the capital, but outside of it, the road is lousy, even on transit routes (Iran-Uzbekistan) - we cycled there in 2013: http://poab.org/log/c/0/60#2 http://poab.org/log/c/0/60#2