Hey North Korea, Settle Down It's Not 1950

The big news this week out of North Korea is that the country released a "Defence Development Exhibition" video where Kim Jong-un's nourished soldiers showed off how they're able to withstand sledgehammers to the forearms, attacks with 2X4s (those things aren't cheap, Jong-un...very ballsy sacrificing boards for this video) and great feats of strength.

It's some strong, compelling content that plays very well on social media platforms where people love to see people do Jackass stunts for their government. The bad news for Big Daddy Jong-un and dictators around the world who like to show off their strongman competitors is that there are things called robot dogs with sniper rifles that were introduced to the world this past weekend at a U.S.-based weaponry trade show.

Once again, Big Daddy Kim and his boys are showing how they're living in 1950 instead of getting with the times. The days of training Jeong-hoon, Hyun- woo and Sung-ho into killing machines are quickly becoming things of the past now that we have robot dogs that don't have feelings, retirement plans and can pick off humans from 1,300 yards out.

So while Big Daddy K and his band of dictatoring Korean bad boys are sticking to living in 1950, the civilized world is busy creating toys for gamers to use in warfare from the confines of some military base. Yes, BDK has his own hacking army out there ripping off cryptocurrency and doing other bad boy stuff, but he's yet to have a robot dog military parade.

via Ghost Robotics

What's up with this whole Defence Development Exhibition. Military analysts say it's all about upstaging a South Korean military exhibition. “North Korea must have purposefully timed their defence exhibition this week to gain traction from the international community ahead of South Korea’s scheduled show to sell their weapons systems abroad,” Cho Jin-soo, former president of the Korean Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences, told Reuters. “They are piggybacking on the South to sell the weapons and delivering a message of ‘forget me not.’”

And so you get a bunch of North Korean fighters who survive on hot dogs and whatever else they can scrounge up, laying on broken glass and taking sledgehammers to rocks on their chests.

That's where we are right now in the worldwide arms race.