Generally when one refers to a country as being “occupied”, the implication is that the people there are poor off as a result, especially relative to a neighboring country whose land is presumably being considered occupied, which in this case is implicitly North Korea due to the history of how the two countries split. It is therefore not in bad faith to directly ask whether the people there are better or worse off as a result.

You also seem to be hyper-fixated on one possible meaning of prosperous, which is “wealth and GDP”, when there are lots of other means related to flourishing in general. The original commenter was perfectly free to provide an answer along the lines of, “North Korea is the more prosperous country because X.” where X is a list of ways in which the people there are flourishing, and this would have been a valid answer (if not necessarily a correct one).

Alternatively, if they think that South Korea is better off but this does not matter because it is still less ethical than North Korea, then they could have taken the opportunity to be up front about that.

So in short, this question could have been used in all sorts of ways to provide an answer that clarified the commenter’s position. It is a shame that we never heard from them exactly what their thoughts were.

If it makes you feel better, you are emphatically not my enemy. 😀

I didn’t say the people of South Korea are being subjugated.

Quote the comment that started all of this:

Is anyone really surprised one of the biggest companies in occupied korea would do this??

I acknowledge that this is not your comment, but you stepped in and answered a question directed at this person, so you should not act so surprised that you have become associated with their position, especially since you continue to work really hard to do everything except actually state your own opinion, except insofar that “everything is too complicated for anyone to have an opinion” counts as an opinion.

I will take from your attempt to throw a “Gotchya!” at me that you acknowledge that you are unwilling to state your own opinion on the matter.

If you don’t feel like stating your opinion on which country is better off and why, then you could just say that outright or say nothing. You really don’t have to go to all of this trouble to pontificate about how it is unreasonable to even consider the matter. 😜

Do I need to explain to you what that means, or do you have a clue about South Korean history and US foreign policy?

I appreciate you showing me how not to make a point in “a pointlessly hostile and asshole way”!

I appreciate your honesty in admitting that you consider human well-being to be irrelevant!

No point in putting the lit torch away when you can use it to roast meanwhile!

Agreed, but I am a little annoyed that they held up all of Pop!_OS for COSMIC.

The question is whether they will release it before or after Ubuntu 26.04 LTS…

You should read it as “beta of the LTS release”, in which case it is not so strange.

China takes care of its people

Unless you are an Uyghur.

I think that you may have mistaken this community for [email protected].

I created a script that I dropped into /etc/cron.hourly which does the following:

1. Use rsync to mirror my root partition to a btrfs partition on another hard drive (which only updates modified files).
2. Use btrfs subvolume snapshot to create a snapshot of that mirror (which only uses additional storage for modified files).
3. Moves “old” snapshots into a trash directory so I can delete them later if I want to save space.

It is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import os
import pathlib
import shutil
import subprocess
import sys

import portalocker

DATETIME_FORMAT = '%Y-%m-%d-%H%M'
BACKUP_DIRECTORY = pathlib.Path('/backups/internal')
MIRROR_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'mirror'
SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'snapshots'
TRASH_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'trash'

EXCLUDED = [
    '/backups',
    '/dev',
    '/media',
    '/lost+found',
    '/mnt',
    '/nix',
    '/proc',
    '/run',
    '/sys',
    '/tmp',
    '/var',

    '/home/*/.cache',
    '/home/*/.local/share/flatpak',
    '/home/*/.local/share/Trash',
    '/home/*/.steam',
    '/home/*/Downloads',
    '/home/*/Trash',
]

OPTIONS = [
    '-avAXH',
    '--delete',
    '--delete-excluded',
    '--numeric-ids',
    '--relative',
    '--progress',
]

def execute(command, *options):
    print('>', command, *options)
    subprocess.run((command,) + options).check_returncode()

execute(
    '/usr/bin/mount',
    '-o', 'rw,remount',
    BACKUP_DIRECTORY,
)

try:
    with portalocker.Lock(os.path.join(BACKUP_DIRECTORY,'lock')):
        execute(
            '/usr/bin/rsync',
            '/',
            MIRROR_DIRECTORY,
            *(
                OPTIONS
                +
                [f'--exclude={excluded_path}' for excluded_path in EXCLUDED]
            )
        )

        execute(
            '/usr/bin/btrfs',
            'subvolume',
            'snapshot',
            '-r',
            MIRROR_DIRECTORY,
            SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY / datetime.now().strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT),
        )

        snapshot_datetimes = sorted(
            (
                datetime.strptime(filename, DATETIME_FORMAT)
                for filename in os.listdir(SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY)
            ),
        )

        # Keep the last 24 hours of snapshot_datetimes
        one_day_ago = datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1] >= one_day_ago:
            snapshot_datetimes.pop()

        # Helper function for selecting all of the snapshot_datetimes for a given day/month
        def prune_all_with(get_metric):
            this = get_metric(snapshot_datetimes[-1])
            snapshot_datetimes.pop()
            while snapshot_datetimes and get_metric(snapshot_datetimes[-1]) == this:
                snapshot = SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY / snapshot_datetimes[-1].strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)
                snapshot_datetimes.pop()
                execute('/usr/bin/btrfs', 'property', 'set', '-ts', snapshot, 'ro', 'false')
                shutil.move(snapshot, TRASH_DIRECTORY)

        # Keep daily snapshot_datetimes for the last month
        last_daily_to_keep = datetime.now().date() - timedelta(days=30)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1].date() >= last_daily_to_keep:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date())

        # Keep weekly snapshot_datetimes for the last three month
        last_weekly_to_keep = datetime.now().date() - timedelta(days=90)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1].date() >= last_weekly_to_keep:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date().isocalendar().week)

        # Keep monthly snapshot_datetimes forever
        while snapshot_datetimes:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date().month)
except portalocker.AlreadyLocked:
    sys.exit('Backup already in progress.')
finally:
    execute(
        '/usr/bin/mount',
        '-o', 'ro,remount',
        BACKUP_DIRECTORY,
    )

Yeah, there is nothing more annoying in general when starting to type text into a co-workers desktop than having random letters show up rather than having the cursor move around.