I kind of regret buying an OLED gaming monitor

Recently my previous gaming monitor was showing clear signs that it was breaking (after warming up for a minute or two after being turned on, the picture would disappear for a second every 10-or-so seconds, for all input devices, regardless of which input it was connected to, ie. be it DisplayPort or any of the HDMI ports), so I decided to buy a new one.

The previous one was a pretty high-end IPS gaming monitor, 120 Hz, g-sync. Picture quality was very good, and I had nothing to complain about, but alas, it was breaking and unusable.

Researching a bit about possible replacements, I noticed a very noticeable sale on a very high-end Asus OLED gaming monitor, which normally costs 1200€, but was on sale in a local online shop here for just 800€. After considering a few alternatives, I decided to purchase it, as the sale was too good to pass.

On paper this monitor is far superior in every aspect: 240 Hz, 0.03 ms pixel response time (the old one was 4 ms), g-sync, and of course being an OLED panel, pretty much infinite contrast: Blacks are actually black, not a very dark gray.

However, I am a bit disappointed and regretting the purchase a bit.

Yes, the picture has higher contrast, and blacks are really black (which really shows in games like Elite Dangerous), but it's actually not all that mind-blowing and awesome as people make it sound. After a while I don't even notice the difference. Sure, maybe the picture looks a tad bit more vivid and high-contrast, if I pay attention to that, but it's not all that different in practice.

Also, I literally have no use for a 240 Hz refresh rate compared to a 120 Hz. It brings me no benefit whatsoever. Nothing. Likewise for the 0.03 ms pixel response time. I see no practical difference in practical games.

So why am I regretting this? It's not like those things are drawbacks. Is it the high price (even if it was greatly reduced)?

No, it's not that. I was completely ready to pay the same amount for a good high-end IPS monitor.

The problem is the OLED technology. Particularly, the problem with pixel degradation.

Asus provides a 3-year warranty for the monitor, but only if you run the "pixel cleaning" process every 8 hours of use. Which the monitor automatically reminds you of with an OSD popup.

It's a bit annoying to suddenly get that popup in the middle of an intense gaming session. And if you run the pixel cleaning process, the monitor is unusable for 6 minutes.

Yes, you can make the interval longer, but that doesn't really solve the issue. You can even disable the reminder, but you do that at the risk of Asus deciding you didn't run it often enough and thus voiding your warranty.

I used my old IPS monitor also for my work at home, which consists of programming. Which, of course, means completely static elements on screen for hours and hours on end. I'm not sure I dare to use this OLED display for that work anymore, because of the dreaded OLED burn-in problem, even with the "pixel cleaning" process every 8 hours. I'm kind of worried that doing 8-hour days of work, with the static stuff on screen for that long, day after day, week after week, month after month, will degrade the pixels far quicker than they should.

IPS does not suffer from this problem. You can have a static picture being shown 24/7 for literally years, and while in some older IPS panels it might have left a temporary "ghost image", it was always that: Temporary. It would go away in minutes (particularly if you used a completely black screen). In more modern IPS panels you don't get that almost at all.

So it's an actual hassle. I have two choices: Just keep using this OLED display in the same way as I used my old IPS display, and perhaps risk uneven pixel degradation and image burn-in (regardless of the regular "pixel cleaning"), or set up myself a separate working space using a different monitor for that work.

I'm regretting this purchase. I'm not convinced the minor increase in image quality is really worth the hassle. In retrospect I should just have purchased a modern top-of-the-line 800€ IPS monitor. 

North Korea is the weirdest country in the world, part 3

The two previous articles:

• Part 1, where I describe the insane lengths to which North Korea goes to pretend like it's a rich prosperous country to foreign visitors and tourists, even though everybody knows it's all just a huge facade and acted show.
• Part 2, where I describe the North Korean concentration camps, and how insane that system is, outright resembling a dystopian sci-fi story.

Of course North Korea's weirdness does not end there. Let's take, for example, the huge dilapidated factories that are completely broken down and can't produce anything, but where every day thousands of people still pretend to work at, doing absolutely  nothing, because they are forced to.

And no, that's not some people trying to defraud the government to get a salary while actually doing nothing. They are doing it because the government forces them to, and are not doing it willingly.

You see, all the way back during the early years of the first Supreme Leader, Kim Il Sung (ie. some years after the second World War), North Korea adopted a very Soviet-style form of economy, where every single citizen is provided a job by the government, in exchange for the government also providing them a complimentary home, food and a monetary allowance for everyday expenses.

And just like in the Soviet Union, refusing to work was illegal and would easily land you in one of those concentration camps (although North Korea made this even stricter than the Soviet Union ever did.)

This system worked surprisingly well for several decades, and in fact for quite a while North Korea was much richer than South Korea of the time was (before this wealth status made a complete swap some time in the era from about the 70's to the 90's).

However, some time in the mid-90's things changed, and the economy of the country completely collapsed. Deals with the United States and several other countries fell through, and those countries stopped exporting oil and raw materials to North Korea. The economic collapse was so drastic that it ended up causing millions of North Korean citizens to die of starvation because the government couldn't provide for them anymore.

Factory after factory stopped production because of the sheer lack of this oil and raw materials. There was literally nothing to do. Some factories could keep up using locally mined and produced materials, but only some of them. A large number of factories, however, just stopped completely, and started to become more and more decrepit and dilapidated because of lack of maintenance, and after some years they became so broken that they couldn't have restarted production even if the supply of raw materials problem had been fixed. All the machines and infrastructure just broke and rusted. These factories were a complete loss.

However, and this is where the weirdness starts, the law about refusing to work didn't change. People were still mandated a job by the government, and they were still mandated to do that job or face the concentration camps.

The thing is: There were no new jobs to reassign those people to. Thus, they just didn't. In other words, most of those workers were never reassigned, and had to still attend, by law, those same factories that they were originally assigned to, because nobody had changed that mandate. The guards and government officials at the factories were still making a head count, were still looking if anybody was failing to appear for work, were still enforcing the mandated job at that factory assigned to each citizen, because nobody was telling those government officials otherwise either (and if they failed to do their duty as commanded, it would be them facing the concentration camps.)

So for decades, from about the mid-90's forward, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens have been going every day, six days a week, for 12 hours per day, to those crumbling factories, going through the initial rituals of praising Dear Leader, then sitting at their designated place for 12 hours doing absolutely nothing, and then at the end of the work day going through the mandated struggle sessions (yes, those are also a thing there), and going home.

And all that for an absolute pitiable allowance and an abysmal amount of food (that's just a small fraction of what it was in the heyday of the system.)

Indeed, all those tens or even hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens are pretending to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, doing absolutely nothing, because the guards and government officials are forcing them to, they themselves not being able to stop it because else they themselves would be facing the consequences, and because nobody higher-up in the government has bothered to change the system.

Although something has changed in the last few years, actually.

You see, for almost all of its existence, North Korea has had a huge black market consisting of people doing privately business with each other, secretly from the government. For example a fisherman could secretly sell fish to people for money, a housewife could secretly sew clothes and sell them to people, and the black market for illegally imported western goods is huge (yes, somehow some people do manage to smuggle illegal items into the country, past all the security measures. And by "illegal" we are not talking about drugs, tobacco or booze, but about everyday items common in the west that are not officially allowed, such as snacks, books, small electronics and so on. Heck, some even own entire VHS players and have some western movies in VHS format, something highly illegal in the country.)

In the past few years the North Korean government has got a great idea: Rather than try to fight the black market, take advantage of it!

They are doing that by telling those factory workers (both in the factories that don't produce anything and some of those that do) to go to out there and sell stuff to people for profit, and bring a certain amount of money back to the factory. Besides the threat of the concentration camps if they refuse or fail to do so, they have the bonus incentive that the citizen can keep any extra money that he makes from those sales. In other words, the higher the price that the worker can get from the items, the more money he himself  will earn. How generous!

(Unfortunately, and very unsurprisingly, people are not actually making much money this way. They can barely get enough to cover the required amount they need to bring back. Very rarely will people buy the stuff for a significantly higher price. But they need to keep selling or face the concentration camps.)