It looks like there will be a lot of snow men being made in Seoul this New Year’s Day:

 Seoul residents battled through the heaviest snowfall recorded for December since 1981, as a winter storm dumped more than 10 centimeters Saturday, with more snow expected in many parts of the country ahead of the new year.

A heavy snow advisory was in effect for the entire capital, except for southwestern Seoul, parts of Gyeonggi Province and most parts of the eastern province of Gangwon earlier in the day, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration.

As of 4 p.m., the advisory remained in effect for most parts of Gangwon, with up to 1 to 4 centimeters of snowfall per hour pounding the inland and mountainous areas of the province.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The last Open Thread of 2023. I hope everyone has a fantastic 2024, however with a U.S. Presidential election coming in the new year expect it to be a crazy one. Hopefully though it doesn’t get as crazy as the last election year in 2020 got.

The police have caught the people who actually committed the crime, but not the person who paid them to do it yet:

Police are hunting down the mastermind who commissioned a teen to spray paint 44-meter-long graffiti on the walls of a historic palace in central Seoul earlier this month, officials said Tuesday.

A 17-year-old, only identified by his surname Im, was arrested last week after spray painting the phrase “free movie” in Korean on both sides of the western gate to Gyeongbok Palace and palace walls near the National Palace Museum of Korea on Dec. 16. 

Investigators have since found that Im was paid 100,000 won to commit the crime.

In an effort to track down the mastermind, police have conducted digital forensics on Im’s mobile phone, looked into the bank account used for the crime, and are scrutinizing the dialogue the two had on the messenger Telegram, according to national police chief Yoon Hee-keun.

But officials said they are having difficulty tracking down the mastermind due to strong security features of the messaging app and its server being based overseas.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

As usual the numbers in the article are used to provoke a reaction that women are being treated unfairly in Korean workplaces, however without further information these numbers do not prove that point. For example are Korean women primarily working in lower wage occupations compared to males? This article doesn’t say, but I suspect that is probably the biggest reason for the wage gap. If someone did a study that showed males were making more than females in the same occupation with the same hours worked and time in service then it would be a meaningful study:

While the wage gap between men and women is narrowing slowly in Korea, female workers still make only 70 percent of what their male counterparts earned per hour last year, according to a report co-published by the gender and labor ministries on Wednesday.

The average hourly wage of female workers was 18,113 won ($14) in 2022, while male workers earned 25,886 won, according to the “Women’s Economic Activity White Paper 2023.” This means that even though they work the same amount of time, women earn only 70 percent of what men receive.

However, the general wage gap has narrowed gradually, from 64.8 percent in 2012 to 65.9 percent in 2017, 69.8 percent in 2021, and 70 percent in 2022. Last year, the average monthly wage of men was 4.12 million won, compared to 2.68 million won for women.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Considering all the criticism past elections have been receiving that is impacting public confidence in elections, hand counts verifid by a machine count I think is the most effective way of maintaining election creditability which is what Korea plans to do:

The National Election Commission (NEC) said Wednesday it will introduce a manual ballot counting system for general elections in April in an effort to ensure transparency and prevent potential election rigging.

Currently, machines are used to sort out and count votes. 

Under the envisioned new system, however, ballots will first be sorted out by machines, and election staff will manually check all of them before putting them into the counting machines.

“It is meant to boost transparency and credibility over the course of the elections to prevent vote-rigging suspicions,” the commission said, adding that repeated suspicions over election fraud have “hampered national unity and fostered the boycott of election results.”

It is expected to take longer for the commission to confirm election results under the new system, and the commission will significantly beef up personnel for the process.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.