The 23 and Me discount is back! Act now to see your DNA!

The 23 and Me discount is back! Get your genome scanned for only $99! "DIYgenomics: @23andMe $99 discount returns through black friday; code B84YAG to be live 10 AM Wednesday for the new v3 chip" (total cost with subscription is around $160. Normal price is around $600) Lots of us did this 6 months ago and had great experiences.  Several of us have made lasting changes in our lives as a result.   Here's what we did:
http://nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com/321459.html  

This has got to warm the hell out of any marketing manager's heart... here we have a customer enthusiastically blogging about a coupon for a product he already bought, imploring all his friends to buy this product ASAP because he cares so much about it and linking to a self-compiled list of positive product testimonials.  People throw gobs of money at ad agencies in the hope of generating a sliver of this level of enthusiasm.  

Ski/snowboard season has started!

 Some friends and I are doing a last-minute roadtrip to Sugar Bowl Friday and Saturday this week.  It's all snowy and waiting for us!

Our car is full but others are welcome to join up with us at the resort.  

If you're local to the bay area and want to go sometime (or want to learn), let me know.  I want to build up a snow posse.  :-)

If you're wondering why snowboarding is so fascinating to me, read this.

On a separate note, I think the "lowering the cost of failure" approach I used to learning snowboarding, in which I wore lots of padding so that I would be less afraid to fall and would suffer less pain upon falling, is applicable to other parts of life as well.  Yesterday I bought some upper body armor that covers my back, shoulders, chest, and elbows.  This should further lower the cost of failure and ensure that I get to spend more time playing on the mountain and less time sore and miserable.  

South Korea should take over North Korea

I should preface this by saying that I am not well schooled in international relations.  I could be missing some key facts or concerns.  I could be totally off.  However, I'd like to think out loud in this post.  

After reading about recent North Korean shelling of South Korea, I was surprised at my intuitive reaction that South Korea should invade North Korea.  Generally I'm not very hawk-ish.  I was very opposed to the war in Iraq when it was being contemplated.  What's different?

One of the US's great failures in Iraq is that we did not follow up our invasion force with an administrative force who could take over the day-to-day operation of the society.  Furthermore, we banned anyone who had held significant administrative positions (the Ba'ath party) from holding positions in the new regime.  We also didn't have enough Arabic speakers to adeptly handle translation issues.  As a result, we essentially let the administrative functions of the government collapse, and the Iraqis were not impressed.  It's taken several long years, thousands of lives, and over two trillion dollars to crawl out of the deep hole we got ourselves into over there.

Korea could be different.  South and North Korea share the same language.  They are, geographically speaking, right next to each other.  South Koreans have relatives in North Korea.  People will care.   If South Korea had a halfway decent plan for absorbing North Korean administrative functions, it would be much easier for them to take over than it was for us to take over Iraq.  The situation is probably more similar to what happened when Germany reunified.  West Germany had to put in an enormous amount of money to reintegrate East Germany from an infrastructure perspective and a social perspective.  However, twenty years later the results are amazing.  Berlin is beautiful.  It feels strange to even write the words "West Germany" now.  

North Korea is probably one of the most dangerous regimes around.  Unlike Iraq, they actually have weapons of mass destruction, and they seem more fickle and irrational than just about any other regime on the planet.  They're not integrated into the global economy or social web; the closest thing they have to a friend is China.  This makes them more likely to take rash actions without regard for the consequences.

North Korea is also a humanitarian disaster; starvation is a common occurrence, and the government appears to not give a damn.  If there was a Child Protective Services for countries, North Korean citizens would long ago have been placed in a foster home.  In a sense this is what I'm proposing.

Sure, there are numerous countries in Africa that are just as messed up, but North Korea appears to be a low hanging fruit.  It would be easier to turn around North Korea than, say, Sudan.  I'm not saying that we should not have given humanitarian aid to Sudan -- what I'm saying is that it would be easier to bring North Korea up to first-world status than Sudan.  it would be a good use of South Korea's money.

Generally democracies are not in the habit of starting unprovoked wars, but in this case North Korea has already attacked the South, so the international community would probably find it relatively understandable if South Korea attacked back in an escalated manner.   Sure, many people would die, but in the long run these deaths will more than be outweighed by the end to lost generation after lost generation of North Korean citizens.  

If any of you have interesting articles you can point me towards about South Korea's long term strategy for dealing with the North, I'd love to see them.