Apple Cuts Orders From Samsung for iPhone Chips - NYTimes.com

According to Reuters (via the NYT), Apple may be cutting orders from Samsung, a competitor against whom it famously embroiled in an ongoing patent dispute. This may or may not be a sign that there are real consequences (that is, besides $1.1 billion court decisions) to their recent frenemy troubles, an indication that the relationship really is souring. 

Samsung and Apple kinda sorta need each other, and it might not be wise of Apple — which may need Samsung as a supplier as it rapidly expands a number of its products in the next couple years — to burn bridges. Then again, maybe Apple's goal is to make new bridges that render the old ones obsolete. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/technology/apple-cuts-orders-from-samsung-for-iphone-chips.html?_r=1&hpw

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Korean-Flavored Chevy Is Thrifty and City-Smart

Just as the Democrats make a big deal about Obama saved GM, the great American icon, the New York Times has an article on how one of Chevy's new star players has a Korea flavor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/automobiles/autoreviews/korean-flavored-chevy-is-thrifty-and-city-smart.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all


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North Korea rubberstamp assembly to hold rare second session: KCNA

While the outcome of North korea's rubber stamp sessions are ever in doubt, these days the contents sometimes are.

So what's the over/under on what will be "approved" in Pyongyang in a couple weeks? My bet is on an announcement of sweeping Chinese-style reforms, now that he seems to have the military party-whipped.

Other possibilities: Asia's next Disney theme park, diplomatic ties with Portugal and Argentina, or an official Coca-Cola bottlery.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE88318F20120904?irpc=932

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More KJU-as-Deng news?

The notion that Kim Jong-un might actually be trying economic reform in earnest -- a Chinese-style move toward socialism with North Korean characteristics, I guess -- Is gaining traction. 

According to the WaPo, even skeptics are becoming less skeptical. 

http://m.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-authoritarian-north-korea-hints-of-reform/2012/09/03/bb5d95ce-f275-11e1-adc6-

Under new leader Kim Jong Eun, North Korea in recent months has shifted its rhetoric to emphasize the economy rather than the military and is introducing small-scale agricultural reforms with tantalizing elements of capitalism, according to diplomats and defector groups with informants in the North.

The changes, which allow farmers to keep more of their crops and sell surpluses in the private market, are in the experimental stage and are easily reversible, analysts caution. But evenskeptical North Korea watchers say that Kim's emerging policies and style — and his frank acknowledgment of the country's economic problems — hint at an economic opening similar to China's in the late 1970s.87dfa8eff430_story.html

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Reverend Sun-myung Moon joins that great Burger King in the sky

Reverend Sun-myung Moon, the brightest star in the constellation of non-mainstream religious organizations in Korea (read: cults), has died. He was old, like teenager during the Great Depression old.

Reverend Moon is a complex figure who evokes positive and negative responses from different people, and sometimes even from the same individuals. On the one hand, he ran a giant heterodox church (read: cult) that had a tremendous amount of influence (with ownership of conservative news outlets like The Washington Times), connections, and power. There was a scandalous book entitled In the Shadow of the Moons by a Moon daughter-in-law that described the abuse she experienced within the family and estrangements from the Moon daughters.

On the other hand, well... On the other hand... um... Almost all the Moon followers (they hate being called "Moonies") that I've known from Korea have been really nice people. Like Mormon nice. (I know virtually none outside of Korea, but they could be like gay people in that they are what they are but they don't feel compelled to share that with everyone, in part because of perceived stigma.)

I've lived in Korea off and on since I was a teenager, and when I was much younger (pre-1998 economic crisis days) it seemed a high percentage of White foreigners with no familial connection to Korea were Unification Church members. Or Mormon missionaries. Or the military. It was a completely different world from today, where working in Korea seems only slightly more exotic or adventurous for a typical twenty-something North American than becoming a barista at the local Starbucks.

At any rate, a disproportionate number of "famous foreigners" in Korea were either Moonies or Mormons: Kyŏngsang dialect-talking Robert Holley and Lee Charm (the Tourism Minister) and self-styled TV clown Isaac Durst come to mind. Lee Charm in particular is a nice guy.

So I wonder if a heretical faith (read: cult) can be all bad if so many of the members seem like all right and upstanding people. I rarely talked about their faith with them (I have my hands full just being a Protestant/Catholic hybrid) but in other matters, I had no problems with them.

The only thing that really intrigued me about the Unification Church was their apparent emphasis on interracial unions, on display during the occasional "mass weddings." Korea today is far more open to 국제결혼 (i.e., interethnic marriage, literally international marriage) than it was just fifteen years ago, and Reverend Moon was nothing less than a pioneer in that regard.

A mass wedding of 4,600 couples in Ch'ŏnan, Korea, in August 2005.

At a time when dominant cultural discourse emphasized the virtues of Korea's "homogeneity," Moon was pairing Korean men and women with Whites, Blacks, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, etc., etc. A retired USFK friend from New York City, "C," who became quite cynical about religion during his time as a chaplain's assistant, was convinced that the real motivation behind all the interethnic couplings was not to promote global peace and love but to help the Unification Church permanently marginalize those wedding participants from their families, who would presumably reject their new son- or daughter-in-law because he/she was not Korean (or whatever race/ethnicity they were) so that the new couple would cling more closely to the Unification Church family.

Anyway, I have no idea what Unification Church doctrine says will happen to Moon Sun-myung now that he's dead. I just hope Jesus and his Dad have a good sense of humor. I'm pretty sure they are the forgiving type.

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Iran and North Korea sign technological cooperation agreement, deepening ties - The Washington Post

Dammit, Pyongyang and teheran, why you have to make me look stupid?! For years I have been mocking Dubya Bush for his "Axis of Evil" comments tying North Korea, Iran, and Iraq together into some sort of alliance.

Yes, it was an utterly ridiculous claim, given the intense enmity Iraq and Iran felt toward each other, but to those who were paying just a little attention, the occasional ties between North Korea and Iran made the whole idea seem plausible -- and frightening enough to go to war.

And here we are yet again, with North Korean leadership (but not Kim Jong-un himself) going to Iran to sign a cooperation deal. Of course, in some ways the "Axis of Evil" comments were self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing the remaining marginalized regimes toward each other since each of them has so few potential partners, but it still adds up to critics of Bush making us look silly.

Given Pyongyang's charm offensive lately, though, one has to wonder what they're thinking with all this. Maybe it's to remind us that, yeah, if we don't cooperate with North Korea, then th can still go and poke us in the eye and make life difficult. Mission accomplished.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iran-and-north-korea-sign-technological-cooperation-agreement-deepening-ties/2012/09/02/f4921588-f4b7-11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_story.html


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Apple supplier Foxconn improves worker conditions

If this is true and not just smoke and mirrors, then I'd say it's a big victory not just for Chinese workers but workers everywhere. For too long, China has been the "the world's factory" because of cheap labor, which translated into lax safety and poor worker conditions. Korean companies were as guilty -- if not more so -- of exploitation, and this eroded labor conditions at home as well, mostly in the wallet.

If Apple can make this the new normal, then maybe we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And maybe the next exploited areas (like India and Africa) will not go through such tough circumstances. 

One can hope.

One of Apple Inc.'s largest suppliers has improved worker health conditions and safety after a sweeping inspection by a labor watchdog group.

http://www.latimes.com/la-fi-apple-foxconn-20120822,0,2294653.story

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China eagerly buying up American assets

I am old enough to remember when Japan was the big scare in the 1980s, and now it could China. 

Check out this article from LA Times:

BEIJING — Facing a sharp economic slowdown at home, Chinese companies are plowing money into U.S. assets at a record pace, making huge bids for American energy, aviation, entertainment and other businesses.

http://www.latimes.com/la-fi-china-us-investing-20120825,0,7160518.story

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Hantaviruses explained

Did you know that the infamous and deadly hantavirus gets its name from a river in Korea? The Hantan River, to be precise.

From the Los Angeles Times:

During the Korean War, several thousand United Nations troops were stricken with a severe, mysterious disease called Korean hemorrhagic fever. It was characterized by high fever, internal bleeding, kidney failure and, frequently, death. The source of the illness remained a mystery for a quarter of a century until 1978, when South Korean virologist Ho-Wang Lee isolated and identified the causative virus from a specimen found in the Hantaan River area. The group of viruses it represented have since been called hantaviruses, after the Hantaan River virus. It was a member of this genus that caused the deaths of at least two visitors to Yosemite National Park this summer and led the National Park Service to warn 1,700 other visitors of the potential risk.

Hantaviruses are lethal RNA viruses of the family Bunyaviridae. They are spread primarily by mice -- particularly deer mice -- and related rodents and can be contracted by bites, but most commonly occur when a victim breathes in air contaminated with rodent urine or droppings -- such as in a cabin that has been empty for some time. In Yosemite, the encounters with the virus are believed to have occurred in permanent tents used to house visitors in the Curry Village area. There have been isolated reports of human-to-human transmission of the virus, but that appears to be extremely rare if it does indeed occur.

Actually, I knew this already, but it's a fun fact I like to share.

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Apple's award against Samsung too high?

Law professor Brian J. Love of Santa Clara University, writing in the Los Angeles Times, seems to think so:

The award, the third largest in the history of U.S. patent litigation, will likely cruise into first place next month when U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh decides what additional amount Apple should receive from Samsung based on the jury's finding that much of the infringement was "willful."

But even without that enhancement, which could add another $2 billion to Samsung's tab, the jury's $1 billion-plus verdict breaks down to just under $48 for each of the roughly 22 million infringing phones sold by Samsung. To the jury, 50 bucks per phone must have sounded like a reasonable figure, and it may well to you too.

But it's not — it's way too high — and here's why: The average smartphone may arguably infringe as many as 250,000 patents, not to mention myriad copyrights and other design-related intellectual property. (Companies don't sift through every patent coming out of Washington before engineering and releasing a product; they create devices and battle claims as necessary.)

If you were to divide the average retail price of a smartphone — about $400 — by those 250,000 potentially applicable patents, you'd find that each one would account for just $0.0016 of the phone's value. And, in reality, even that's too much, once you factor in the costs of raw materials, labor, transportation and marketing, which also contribute to a phone's value.

Yet for infringing just a handful of Apple's patents, Samsung faces a minimum payment of $48 per phone, a shocking 30,000 times the average per patent value. Put another way, if the owners of all the 250,000 inventions that might be present in Samsung smartphones were awarded damages at the same level as Apple, Samsung would have to charge a ludicrous $2 million per phone just to break even.

But wait, you say, the San Jose jury no doubt included some level of punishment in its award, in order to "send a message." But, by law, patent damages are meant to compensate not punish, as the jury was expressly instructed.

I'm no lawyer (though I've played one on TV) but that seems like sound logic. I don't know if it holds any weight in a courtroom, though.

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Lee Myungbak administration wants two-track policy with Tokyo, dealing with economic and political issues separately

It's a little late in the game (his single five-year term ends in just under six months) but ROK President Lee Myungbak seems to have grown a pair.

A pair of hands, that is. He is making the case for a new "two-handed Japan policy" that shakes with the right and bitch slaps with the left.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The latest flare-up of a territorial dispute between South Korea and Japan shouldn't prevent economic cooperation between the two nations, Seoul's finance minister said in Moscow.

Responding to Tokyo's suggestion that it may reconsider agreements to bring the two economies closer together, Bahk Jae-wan said there should be a firewall between economic and political matters.

"The territorial issue and the issue of the mutual economic cooperation between our two countries should be dealt with as two separate issues," Mr. Bahk said in an interview Wednesday, ahead of a meeting of finance ministers from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

I'm not so sure how the Japanese are going to go for it. But to be fair, for as long as they've sought massive trade with Seoul while simultaneously claiming Tokto and ducking responsibility for the Comfort Women issue and other lingering issues from World War II, Tokyo has pretty much been operating from the same policy.

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Massive Typhoon Bolaven batters South Korea

In the US, the big weather news is Hurricane Isaac postponing the Republican National Convention in Tampa and possibly hitting Louisiana on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans (with damage to earthquake-reeling Haiti a secondary concern). The message is clear: Run as fast as you can from anything named Isaac.

But out in Asia, Typhoon Bolaven is wreaking havoc, first on Okinawa and now the Koreas (while Typhoon Tembin battered Taiwan). The above picture from BBC of a brick building having been felled on Wando Island by the typhoon has me scratching my head (not to mention that it turns the entire premise of The Three Little Pigs on its head).

The typhoon has reportedly ripped apart Chinese fishing boats off Korean waters near Cheju-do Island, leading to at least five deaths there and three deaths on the mainland. The above photo shows other Chinese vessels riding out the storm.

The capital region is apparently being spared the typhoon's hardest blows, but expect a lot of rain, wind, and slippery or flooded roads with idiot drivers. Ironically, bad weather like typhoons on Korean roads can actually reduce deaths because traffic jams force drivers to go slowly, whereas California drivers tend to speed up when conditions are bad so they can get out of the inclement weather more quickly.

So folks, stay dry and warm. Enjoy nature's display from your apartment window.

Large waves off Pusan

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North Korea sends its first Paralympian to the Paralympics, a Pandoran problem for Pyongyang

Perhaps as part if it recent charm offensive, North Korea is sending the country's first disabled athlete to the Paralympics. 

As the HuffPo notes, this is a bit ironic, considering the shoddy treatment the disabled have received in North Korea (or, as I might add, the way the Pyongyang regime produces disabled people through torture and abuse).

Still, I welcome Rim Jusong's participation. As the HuffPo suggests, maybe this really will inspire the folks back home. You see, the thing with opening all these Pandora boxes is that they're really hard to close when you're done with them. North Koreans are seeing the world -- and at some point they will insist on not going back. I'm holding out the possibility that the Swiss-educated, basketball-loving, writing on the wall-reading Kim Jong-un is counting on that. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/08/28/paralymipcs-2012-north-korea-rim-ju-song_n_1835661.html

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