Documentary about getting s haircut in North Korea
Which means any conversation on the internet about NK is likely to be polluted with propaganda, even if none of the participants themselves are operatives - all it takes is someone unwittingly ingesting a bad fact once for that bad fact to get circulated.
When I say dragons fly over the rainbows, I need to source the claim. When I say that the sky is blue, it's you who needs to look it up if you doubt it so much.
Anything said about north Korea that is not absolutely bonkers is propaganda?
that's the point, you poison the well once and everyone keeps drinking from it, forever.
Check "North Korea Confidential" by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson from 2015.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpdYcy8JtiisXTMb4zug_oCIB...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZgzAquCs-o&list=PLk70D7sV6Q...
There was a few playlist from central asian travellers and with Chinese business man exploring with more casual minders a few years back but I can't find them. I know a few PRC nationals who made the trip for business, TLDR is NK cities and towns feels like PRC in the 90s with energy of PRC in the 80s. Some of the villages/hamlets seem like PRC from the 70s (which I guess is what most ppl think of NK). Other era reference points probably not helpful for ppl without context of growing up in PRC. So it's worth scrubbing through some of the videos, a lot of it is city and keep in mind NK is 60% urbanized.
Educationally speaking, the DPRK would catch up pretty quickly if they were able to liberalize their economy as much as China, even without all the help they could get from ROK, Japan, USA. It isn't Afghanistan (where liberalization wouldn't stick), or even Laos where there is a lot of work to do on modernizing society, which makes its current state even more depressing.
How much have things changed there in terms of technology, food security etc?