Category: Korea-General Topics

There was deadly driving conditions this past weekend in Gyeongsangbuk-do:

Two massive pileups occurred within moments on a highway in the country’s southeast early Saturday, killing at least five people and injuring more than two dozen others, officials said. 

The first crash occurred at about 4:40 a.m., when some 10 vehicles, including cargo trucks, collided on a highway en route to Youngcheon, North Gyeongsang Province, 301 kilometers south of Seoul.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

South Korea continues to work on their illegal immigration problem:

The Ministry of Justice said Tuesday it will allow illegal aliens to re-enter Korea if they voluntarily leave the country by next June.

In an effort to tackle the rapid increase in foreigners who stay here illegally, the ministry also said it will toughen punishment for those hiring people who do not have the proper visas.

From July, people who are caught staying here illegally will be fined and may not be able to re-enter the country for years, the ministry said.

Departure can be delayed under certain circumstances, including recent births, pregnancy or other health conditions, it said.

Korea Times

I am not sure how popular this supposed movement actually is in South Korea, but the declining birth rate is probably little effected by it when compared to other factors like the cost and stress of educating children:

Bonnie Lee doesn’t care about finding a boyfriend or a fairy-tale wedding, and will decide her own happily-ever-after: “I’m a straight woman who is no longer interested in having relationships with men.”

She is not alone.

A growing number of South Korean women are banding together to reject rigid patriarchal norms and vowing never to wed, have children or even date and have sex.

“I’ve always felt that as a woman there are more disadvantages than advantages to being married,” said Lee, a 40-something professional who lives with her dog near Seoul.

Now she has gone even further, embracing the nation’s radical feminist movement called 4B, from the “four nos”: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.

Japan Times via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

Anyone surprised by this? I hope not because it is simple math that employers would cut back on employees if labor costs became too expensive due to forced minimum wage increases. This is especially true for all the mom and pop shops you see in South Korea:

The steep increase in the minimum wage caused 42,000 full-time jobs in convenience stores to disappear in 2018 as they were unable to pay the increased salaries, the Korea Association of Convenience Store Industry said Tuesday.

According to the association, the average number of jobs available per convenience store plummeted to five, down from 5.8 in 2017. The number of full-time staff who worked more than three to four days per week and received monthly wages fell from 2.3 to 1.1.

Chosun Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but young people in South Korea are already having a hard time finding a job and now even a convenience store job is harder to get.

Is it just me or once again these English language slogans are not very good?:

The listed names above are a shortlist of English slogans subject to an online poll to select one for the city of Daejeon. 

What is your choice and why? 

The poll will continue through Dec. 13 on the city’s opinion-collecting website. Each signed-up subscriber is entitled to cast a vote. 

The event is to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Daejeon winning “metropolitan city” status. 

The shortlist of 20 slogans was selected out of 2,900 through a multi-step review by experts and civilian panels.

Korea Times

Does anyone have any favorites or new suggestions for a Daejeon slogan?

Recently on PBS Frontline they actually featured Lee Se-dol taking on the A.I. computer and it was actually fascinating to watch. That is still the only time a human has beat an A.I. at the game Go:

South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol, who retired from professional Go competition last week after gaining worldwide fame in 2016 as the only human to defeat the artificial intelligence (AI) Go player AlphaGo, said his retirement was primarily motivated by the invincibility of AI Go programs.

“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” said Lee.

“Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated,” he said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency in Seoul on Monday.

AlphaGo, built by Google’s DeepMind Technologies, won four of its five matches against Lee in March 2016, but Lee’s sole win in Game 4 remains the only time a human has beaten the AI player.

Reflecting on the historic Game 4 on March 13, 2016, Lee attributed his win to a bug in the AlphaGo program.

In the game, Lee’s unexpected move at white 78 developed a white wedge between blacks at the center. The apparently embarrassed AlphaGo responded poorly on move 79, suddenly turning the game in Lee’s favor. AlphaGo then declared its surrender by displaying a “resign” message on the computer screen.

Lee’s white 78 is still praised as a “brilliant, divine” move that offered a ray of hope to humans frustrated by AIs.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is an interesting read about South Korea’s “Dirt Spoons” that are baring the effects of the poor economy in South Korea:

The sparse rooms, in premises called goshi-won, were previously mostly used by less well-off students to temporarily cut off from the outside world while they studied for civil service job tests.

Now they are increasingly becoming permanent homes to young people like Hwang, who identifies himself among the “dirt spoons”, those born to low-income families who have all but given up on social mobility.

“If I try hard enough and get a good job, will I ever be able to afford a house?” the 25-year-old said in his small, cluttered room where clothes were piled on the bed. “Will I ever be able to narrow the gap that’s already so big?”

The concept of dirt spoons and gold spoons, as those from better-off families are known, have been around for many years but exploded onto the political scene in recent years, undercutting support for liberal President Moon Jae-in.

Moon came to power in 2017 on a platform of social and economic justice, yet halfway through his five-year term, he has little progress to show the country’s youth who have borne the brunt of deepening inequality.

Reuters

You can read more at the link.