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[Immortal]

Canadian checking in. Bashing the United States is one of our favorite pastimes!

Also I don't believe NK will do anything. I mean unless China begins to put real pressure on them and cut aid, then things may get quite ugly. There country doesn't even have enough fuel to run their tanks on their own.

[mainiac]

Nothing will come of this, I tell you this now. Nothing by way of military conflict anyway. The North Korean leadership isn't stupid - they know exactly what they're doing.

“Thou dost not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed”

[Loud Whispers]

Nothing will come of this, I tell you this now. Nothing by way of military conflict anyway. The North Korean leadership isn't stupid - they know exactly what they're doing.

“Thou dost not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed”

"Heads or tails?"

-HQ of every military operation, ever.

[mainiac]

Well that's probably taking things too far in the other direction but, hey, I've never been there so maybe you're right.

[Frumple]

Hey, it's a legit decision making method. Sometimes you just have two identically virtuous options, in which case rational decision making is unable to choose. So you choose an irrational method because there's not a justifiable reason to pick one choice over the other and either will do.

Point being that coin flip has probably done a better job over the generations than overthinking has.

... I'd actually be kinda' interested to see what the beneficial outcome of coin-based decision making has been in a statistical sense, thinking on it. Someone should start tracking those in the population and noting down which ones end well.

[Loud Whispers]

It gets better when you have a coin with two faces the same. No matter what side a coin toss'll land on the end result is you'll know which side you want staring back at you. Coin toss politics would be quite interesting indeed.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Point being that coin flip has probably done a better job over the generations than overthinking has.

... I'd actually be kinda' interested to see what the beneficial outcome of coin-based decision making has been in a statistical sense, thinking on it. Someone should start tracking those in the population and noting down which ones end well.

Coin-based decision making is probably a bad idea, but I've heard that flipping a coin to decide between two options is a good idea if you're indecisive, because while it is in the air you'll know what you really want to do.

[Lightningfalcon]

Hey, it's a legit decision making method. Sometimes you just have two identically virtuous options, in which case rational decision making is unable to choose. So you choose an irrational method because there's not a justifiable reason to pick one choice over the other and either will do.

Point being that coin flip has probably done a better job over the generations than overthinking has.

... I'd actually be kinda' interested to see what the beneficial outcome of coin-based decision making has been in a statistical sense, thinking on it. Someone should start tracking those in the population and noting down which ones end well.

We do that on our NROTC academic team (Or at least some of us do) when we are faced with a question where we are unable to decided between two answers.   Like the one we took last Friday.  We had a question where we had to place aluminum, copper, and silver in order according to conductivity.  Once I figured it out (Or at least I think I did), I came to the realization that the question was about as ambiguous as you could get.  WHAT order?  So it came down to a coin flip.

[Frumple]

Coin-based decision making is probably a bad idea, but I've heard that flipping a coin to decide between two options is a good idea if you're indecisive, because while it is in the air you'll know what you really want to do.

Yeah, more along those lines is what I meant. If you've got two (or a few, you can break it down pretty easy using a single coin) options that are as good or nearly as good (or at least you have no particularly strong reason to choose one over the other), then a coin flip can save some time. Mostly I'm just sorta' curious if reality has some kind of strange coin-flip bias where choices made like that (between two relatively good options) tend to come out better than not. Maybe it (reducing your field of choices to a small pool of acceptable ones and then choosing pseudo-randomly) is a more optimal strategy than actually deciding! I don't think anyone's actually ran the numbers, so... it could be.

Not sure if I'd use indecisive particularly, though. More of an ambivalence thing. Indecision would indicate sitting around and trying to figure out the better choice instead of just choosing and not really caring what the outcome is. Most of the decisions I make via coin flip (which, being fair, mostly revolve around what's for dinner) certainly aren't made in mid air, though. I just don't really care what I eat (well, among the foodstuffs I keep regularly) and flipping a coin is more fun than grabbing the first thing I pull out of the food bag* sometimes. Heads means the food that comes earlier in the alphabet, tails the one later.

*I keep most of my canned food and non-perishables in a single large bag (I think it was originally a laundry bag or something, I'unno.), which I reasonably refer to as the food bag. Lunch generally consists of reaching into the bag and cooking whatever comes out, but sometimes I flip for it.

[Another]

Coin based decisions are known to be as good as theoretically possible when your success depends on you being statistically unpredictable. Like in some games or anything that can be modelled by a game (in the probability theory sense) with known rules.

Classical example is rock-paper-scissors. Pure random choice is unbeatable (while not winning either) and every deterministic strategy is worse because it will fail in the long run when your adversary figures out what it is. Games with more complex fixed known rules like poker may require going like 72% for one decision, 26% for another an 2% for a third to be truly theoretically optimal but that can be reduced to 7 coin flips.

I think there are a few theoretical scenarios where doing this on a battlefield can be not a bad idea in tactical sense though I'd say that is never a good method for strategical decisions.

I really hope that NK does not think they are just playing a game of chicken with acceptable to them high stakes. Classical (limited) madness may be not as dangerous.

[NobodyPro]

They don't want the population exposed to delusional propoganda. An example is how they change stories about US soldiers to try to further their agenda to get US troops off the peninsula. There have been 3 official cases where rape charges have been brought against US soldiers in the last 10 years in South Korea. Only one was found to be a legitimate crime against a South Korean civilian. There have been several other incidents where claims were made and later the accuser has been found to be "influenced" by political and financial forces. The NK propoganda news service frequently reports that US soldiers ride around raping and shooting civilians and the law enforcement who tries to stop them are also gunned down. Considering how NK intentionally keeps it's people uneducated, it is likely that a large portion of their population believes most of the B.S. that NK spouts. I can post sources for examples of these crazy stories if anyone is doubtful.

The statement recalled that GIs in south Korea went on shooting spree against passers-by and when police rushed to the scene, informed of the incident, they drove their truck over them, before taking to flight.

[shadenight123]

The armistice between North and South being scrapped means what?
Does it mean North and South are now back at 'War' status, thus meaning there's another war going on in the world?
And should Nukes be actually used...
How much of North Korea would remain by the next hour?

[Fniff]

I think it's less declaring war and more in the grey area of "we're definitely shaping up for war, and all our treaties are cut off, but we're not going to attack you just yet."

[RedKing]

And de jure state of war doesn't mean they're required to start shooting at each other.

For instance, Andorra was still technically at war with Germany until 1958. Costa Rica was at war with Germany from 1918 UNTIL 1945. One of the longest examples was the Isles of Scilly, which were omitted from the Treaty of Westminster and so were technically at war with the Netherlands from 1651 to 1986.

There's an apocryphal story that Sweden declared war on San Marino during the Napoleonic era, and nobody remembered to ever sign a formal peace treaty, so they're still at war.

[Strife26]

The Korean War never formally ended. NK is taking increasingly hardline steps, according to most sources, in an effort to instil a sense of crisis in domestic populations.

In the event that a nuclear weapon was used, it'd almost certainly be of a tactical sort (due to their limited proficiency, especially in delivery system), which is nothing to sneeze at. However, I would doubt that the united states would respond by turning the entirety of the State into a glowing crater, for lots of reasons, but foremost because permanently fucking up the peninsula isn't a good thing. I think that seeing an attack on a SK/US troop concentration much more likely.

Casualty-wise, you're almost going to certainly see fairly heavy causalities amongst Republic of Korea troops as well as the US troops currently there, shortly followed by utterly disastrous causalities amongst PRK troops as superior air power, technology, reinforcements, artillery, ect. ect. ect. come into play.

Unknown numbers of civilian death, but almost certainly noticeable, especially in early stage shelling. PRK arty ain't known for accuracy.


Exactly what effect NK commando forces would have is pretty tough to guess, but I'd guess that the RoK would be up to policing the country, at least after the first shock is over.

And finally, there'd be a country of very impoverished, very unskilled workers to try to absorb into the region, which would destabilize both China and South Korea to heck and back.