Re: Still not convinced
"When you keep setting off nuclear bombs while shouting to the world that you'll start launching them at people any minute now, how exactly is hacking a few banks to steal a few million dollars going to make things worse?"
The one is theatre (if the norks were to launch a nuke outside their own borders, they'd find Chinese and Russian nukes parked in their front yard as well as american ones.)
It distracts from what they're actually doing - amongst other things, the world's most sophisticated currency counterfeiting operations, massive levels of methamphetamine exports, various other gangster activities. This cyber-ops stuff is just branching out.
The general concensus is that China "tolerate" the Norks - and not because of the USA being in Seoul (if the Koreas are united, the UN mandate expires and USA troops get to go home) or because S.Korea is wealthy. The _real_ risk is 20-something million starving people heading north looking for food, which is something that noone's equipped to handle.(*)
Bear in mind that North Korea is a creation of Stalin, not Mao and that Russia has historically been the Norks' largest trading partners.
(*) It's arguable that if the chinese high speed rail network was built into Shenyang "just so", then it could be used as a logistical jumping off point to ensure not only that food and medical supplies can be gotten to the border rapidly, but that refugees can be moved away from the area to better-equipped locations too. That's somewhere in the future though. If the chinese do it in a blatently obvious fashion before other expansion is done then the Norks might get nervous and start throwing a hissy-fit. As it stands the lines running close to the border are all low speed ones.