[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Roger Rambo

Someone willing to fight suicidally and aggressively is more dangerious in the short term. Long term it's easier to kill him. Though since a war probably wouldn't last long enough for the North Koreans to be concerned about a long term...

Most likely they would be shot since they have significantly less value than a normal commando with specific S&D objectives - I believe NK commando doctrine is to simply cause as much damage and possible, then die while doing so.

I wouldn't quite say that. Special forces units often get the highest quality personnel and the most training, but they're hardly super soldiers. They're specialists with highly specific missions. Namely get behind enemy lines, move fast and hit hard. If a special forces unit ever gets bogged in a firefight with regular infantry behind enemy lines, they're in a pretty FUBAR situation. Commando units are two small and lightly armed to survive a stand up fire fight with regular infantry.

Combat doctrine for commandos are often psychological in nature when contacted during their retreat : cause as much damage as possible to slow down chasers, and move back.

...although it'd certainly be a good idea to assign ROK special forces teams, particularly the counter terrorist ones. I'm thinking that one thing the North Korean infiltrators would try to do is something similar in the Mumbai attacks, with ununiformed attackers raising as much havoc as possible. Although there's likely to be far more of them, and much better coordinated.

If they do it, China is going to break ties with them. The Chinese are one that does not tolerate this kind of terrorist elements involving civilian meatshields.

Though given the Koreans history at COIN ops during Vietnam...being a captured ununiformed North Korean infiltrator is bound to not be pleasant experiance.

So.....the POW will be forced to voice-act shoujo manga aloud in front of their captors?

Originally Posted by Jinto

I would say thats a convenient excuse right? Besides, the growths statitistics are flawed in that they include the growth of the virtual bubble (which makes up most of the statistical growth and is responsible for the future inflation - using several indirections on its way to make it look plausible).
An economy doesn't automatically crash when it doesn't grow for a decade. The real problem is debt, to be able to repay rising debt, economy growth is the driving factor and thus wanting more investment (which creates more debt)....
This is basically a competition who can live best at the cutting edge balancing on a knife's edge (celebrating deregulation). This however makes the whole system terribly chaotic (and you don't need to ask an oracle to predict who is hit worst in such a chaos... certainly not the scam masters).

It is supposed to be a convenient excuse : for the people who are pumping in the money, namely the government who are using taxpayers' cash, AND the banks who are lending the money they are helping taxpayers to safekeep. So the person at the bottom of the food chain is the citizen himself

The thing is, the debt-system we have used has been in place for close to a century since the start of the British Empire's decline, WWI/WWII and the entire of Cold War itself. WWI has caused plenty of damage to Europe and France that technically speaking, it is technically impossible for Germany at that time to repay the entire reparation according to the Treaty of Versailles, making the entire Europe in debt. Then came WWII which US sold arms and materiel on credit to the frontlines, namely Europe.

Then we have the Cold War, which by then, the whole world is in debt, and the communist countries dropped themselves into it thanks to collectivisation and the focus on output, driving them into losses and losses.

Though the US removed the peg of the dollar to gold in 1970 and giving it virtual control of the entire's world economy, it is already in bad debt. And the subsequent crises are simply worsening it along with inflation : in short, Grisham' Law has already come true and the pieces of paper we have in our hands, on a macroeconomic scale, is worthless and as good as bad money. The reason why it is given a value is because someone else is holding onto our debt, and we are holding onto someone else's.

I do realise that this is how the world works and it is disgusting, but the problem is that we have gotten so deep into this mess that digging our way out would mean to rebuild the entire financial system from scratch; the best we could do right now is to tighten regulations, however the corporations would move to countries with less regulation and deprive our government of corporate tax, which is usually larger than how much an average citizen pays altogether.

It is an irony that the business entities are those who create the pitfalls and the citizens clean up the mess. Though virtual bubbles create short-term benefits for a period of economic boom, and facilitates liquidity of money, the crashes they cause are huge when the time comes to repay the debt : the bank lends but is bogged down by the huge number of bad debts that it has to fold.

Investment companies are so concerned about liquidity (what they bought that can be sold) that they forget that they are helping to forment a bubble. In the context of science, air is the most viscous and fluid out of the three basic states of matter, and when it is all air in the bubble, it simply bursts due to differences in low external pressure (market reality) and high internal pressure (market expectation).