North Korea Fires Rockets at South Korean Island
When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR was dismembered in 1989, there was a peaceful transition to democracy in my country, Hungary.<p>A lot of people say that "we should have made a revolution", what they mean is that the "free", externally imposed peaceful transition may not have been the best thing in the long run.<p>Now that I'm older, approaching 30, I'm learning what this mean. Basically, we got rid of the soviets, we got ourselves a democracy, but the political and economic system hasn't changed <i>enough</i>. We have very high levels of debt, we don't have good politicians or political parties, we have lots of corruption, high and constantly changing taxes, high administrative overhead, the so-called redistribution factor is 50% (meaning every second dollar produced is eaten up by the gov't and then redistributed to its network of "friendly" companies through gov't jobs, projects and grants or sent abroad to pay interest). Yesterday I went to a meeting where I learned that the buzzword "innovation" is defined in hungarian state documents as getting a gov't grant and then doing something with that.<p>We're doing a startup, and one of the first question we usually get is "which grant did you get?". When we say we didn't, that we bootstrapped ourselves people think we're crazy.<p>I don't know whether we would have been better off with a not-so-peaceful transition, and nobody wants violence in their country, but we definitely need some kind of politico-economic "revolution". Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think we don't have the necessary political resources (good people on the state side) for that. I don't think a smart and good-intentioned person today goes into politics here.<p>So, based on my experiences here --- given how much they're behind economically, politically and technically --- unless the North Koreans overthrow Kim Jong-il themselves, they're pretty much fucked for the next 50-100 years, because no externally imposed force will magically fix their system for free. Their best bet is to unite with South Korea in a painful way (eg. forget their own laws, taxes, gov't agencies and crappy gov't run companies, which means tons of people loose their job, and adopt what they have in South Korea), the way East Germany united with West Germany.<p>Of course, I'm just a programmer, so what do I know =)