crossmr

https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/euro-med-human-rights-monitor/

Reposting things from reddit that have been posted there over 1000 times.

15 years in Korea, I saw before, and I see it now.

When I first got there, Korea was still a bit like the past in North America. It was still completely viable to have a 1 income household, and in fact most working women would say, at the time, they couldn’t wait to get married and have a kid so that they could retire and take care of their kid full time. The husband made more than enough money to support them, and how many people actually really want to work right?

Now, it’s a requirement that both work full time at very good paying jobs or you’re going to struggle significantly. The government thinks this is solely a money issue but it isn’t. It’s an everything issue.

1. Housing - Housing prices shot up 3-4x in a span of 10 years. Wages did not. It’s still a money issue, but it’s a pretty extreme one. Korea has a house ‘ladder’ type system with their jeonse deposit. It’s not as common now that interest rates are gone, but in the past, if you put down a big enough deposit you lived without any month to month rent. The landlord would invest the money you paid as deposit for 2 years and give you back the whole thing, you could turn around and save your money over those 2 years to then have an even bigger deposit and either keep moving to bigger and better houses or eventually saving up enough to buy your own house. This is now broken, but they didn’t exactly switch to a more worldly system. Many houses still require a massive deposit (maybe not quite as high) but also a high monthly rent. Be prepared to put down $100-$200k and still spend $1,500-3,000 a month for a good place. This is very bad in a place where wages have stagnated. The government has done nothing to really alleviate this situation.

2. Working hours - Working hours are still very long there, despite some shifts. Your standard work day is typically 9-6 or 7. And then you need to get home. Most people wouldn’t get home until close to 8 pm depending on what they do and how far away they live. The government has done nothing to address this. The most they’ve done is actually make a couple statutory holidays in lieu. In the past most holidays that fell on a weekend you just lost. Now about half of them you will actually get the Monday or Friday off.

3. Vacation time - most companies do not give extensive vacation time as you see in western countries. You might get a couple of days here and there, but for the most part a lot of companies all take some set time off during the summer and good luck booking any kind of reasonably priced recreation with you and 20 million of your closest friends all within the same few week period. The government has done nothing of note to address this.

4. Recreation and leisure - Spend a little time on google checking out things like water parks, beaches, fireworks, parks, science museums for kids, the cherry blossoms in the spring. What’s the first thing you’ll notice? The fact that you’d have to put western fire marshals on suicide watch over the amount of people at each of these events. The itaewon crush disaster could probably happen at several different activities each year in many different places. I went to Ikea once and it was a mess. Shoulder to shoulder through the entire store. An hour long lineup to get into the restaurant. It is very difficult to enjoy your life outside of the house there because everyone else in the country is trying to do that at the same time in the same limited venues. The government has done nothing to address this.

5. day to day cost of living - in the mid 2000s this was dirt cheap compared to western countries. This was the trade off. You went there, made less money, but the cost of living was so cheap you could still save quite a bit. Now it’s on par with western countries but wages haven’t kept up. Quality of life has taken a nosedive. Fewer leisure activities, fewer enjoyable things like ordering out, less money to spend on what little hobby and free time you have. The government has done nothing of note that has alleviated any of this.

The government simply refuses to address the core issues that make people unhappy in their day to day life. Even if you immediately tripled everyone’s salary, it wouldn’t change the fact that they spend too long at work and in what free time they have it’s impossible to go out and enjoy themselves.

Meanwhile soju is $1-2/bottle and you can still get $20-30 day rates in motels so getting day hammered and having an affair is still the most affordable fun you can have.

Removed by mod

As a Canadian that’s scarf weather.

We’ve definitely hit that low a few times, but we also hit that low with the wind quite frequently. It’s really not uncommon to hit -35 or lower but if it’s windy it’ll break -50 with the windchill.

France is pretty strict on that. Apparently men can’t wear trunk style swimming bottoms. I’m not sure how they handle the burkini vs rashguard issue. I know rashguards are very popular with a lot of east asians because they worry about skin cancer.

People who have Korean first can’t get it if they go abroad and get a new citizenship, going the other way there are ways for you to keep both. They changed the laws back in 2011.

Air pollution from China along with thinking about other people besides yourself helped with that. When the pandemic broke everyone already had a box or two of N95 masks in their house. The government also took immediate control over the mask industry and started rationing them.

They had strict mask regulations, people stayed home, they closed most businesses that would help spread it, things like home delivery for groceries was already a pretty big thing in Korea at the time, and the delivery food business is massive there. Initially, outside of an outbreak caused by a church cult, numbers were very low in Korea.

They only started going up when they allowed the kids to go back to school, but were still generally very low because people were pretty careful. They also had public free government testing and home test kits were pretty easily available. If you tested positive on a home kit, you just walked over to the local outdoor testing center, stepped up and got tested, they texted you the results the next day along with instructions on how long to quarantine and then they sent you a care package of some food, masks, blood oxygen monitors, etc.

Sure, lived there 15 years and obtained dual citizenship.

I’ve now lived long term in my third country, so I am certainly in a position to compare living in multiple countries. If we want to focus just on depression, it’s a mixed bag.

Do Koreans work longer than other countries. Yes certainly. Statistics support that. Are they necessarily working ‘harder’? Not always. It depends a lot job to job, company to company.

To me the biggest thing contributing to overwork is the lack of holidays. For the longest time most statutory/bank holidays were not given additional days off if they fell on the weekend. Combine that with most companies not just giving you 2-4 weeks that you can use whenever you want, and most people worked a lot with little down time. Most companies would have a bit of time off in the summer, but they’d all take it at the same time and the prices would sky rocket meaning it was hard to enjoy what little time off you had.

This is not universal though. I know some larger companies had programs where people got specific days of the month off in addition and some had other half days on top of that.

focus on collective and ignoring individual needs and problems

This is a tough one. While they certainly do that in Korea, and things are changing in that regard as they’re acknowledging individualism more, it has certainly lead to a lot of efficiencies. As an example, to exchange a driver’s license in Korea it takes about 30 minutes and costs $10-15. In the UK you need to send it away, it costs £45, and takes 3+ weeks for them to process. If there are any issues, like say someone at the DVLA told you that your license officially printed in both English and Korean didn’t need a translation and then some jobsworth at the DVLA decided it did upon receipt, it has to be first sent back to you before you can go correct it.

For the most part bureaucratic stuff in Korea, while often talked about on the internet, is far easier to deal with, and much faster than it is in any of the other countries I’ve lived in. They also have a solid, central clearing house for making complaints about any organization in the country, government or private, and it can be done in just about any language.

The biggest issue I see contributing to poor quality of life is the density. Even when you have free time, you can’t enjoy anything outside of your house there. Want to go to the part? so did 1500 other people. Want to check out the cherry blossoms? Sure thing. Tag along wit your 5000 neighbours. Hit up ikea? Sure hope you like walking through it shoulder to shoulder without the ability to actually look at anything.

The density also means that no really has the ability to spread out and relax. Everyone lives in apartments/condos. Very few have yards. Those are the real day to day negatives that drag people down. I worked in companies as a proper employee and managed people as well, and while it was tough at times, it would have been so much better if it was possible to really enjoy your life outside of that. People want to, but it’s just very difficult in a small space with so many people.

Being a programmer is a lot like being a tradesperson. A tradesperson has a lot of flexibility in what they can do. They can work for a company, work freelance, or start their own business.

Programming gives you the same flexibility, the most important bit being that you can do it for yourself.

AI is going to struggle with larger complex tasks for a long time coming. While you can go to it and say ‘write me a script to convert a png to a jpg’ you can’t go to it and say ‘Write me a suite of tools to support business X’ or ‘make me a fun and creative game’ A good programmer isn’t going to be out of work for a long time.

It looks like the cause of death should be mental illness

jerky, granola, lots of vegetables are fairly stable and can be eaten raw. Carrots, garden peas, green beans, lettuce (you can eat that in the first day or two before it wilts), apples,

It depends on the fruit. Look at a banana funny and it’ll go rotten. Apples are pretty stable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ0eWm5PxkU

Seems appropriate

No editorials or articles which are little more than third party editorials.

Editorials usually end up as:

Someone has an opinion, this isn’t news.

Articles which are little more than:

This bloke has an opinion and I’m going to write about it! (which is often a negative topic) also isn’t news and something that worldnews on reddit struggled with. The sub was constantly flooded with topics which were just: Joe Blowhard thinks everyone sucks and some other right wing nonsense.

There was no news there either than a third party stating that someone else had an opinion.