June 10, 2009
- Kim Jong Il’s CafePress Shop (Web Newser)
- China: Pyongyang just wants attention (Asia Times)
- Russian general says new US-Russian arms pact not to go below 1,500 nuclear warheads each (AP)
- Could the U.S. Be Drawn into a New Korean War? (TIME)
- Photo of the Day: Best of May 2009 (National Geographic)
- BRICs Buying IMF Bonds to Join “Big Leagues,” Goldman Says (Bloomberg)
- Chinese Investment Surges, Countering Record Export Slump (Bloomberg)
- China to Speed Australian Investment After Rio Rebuff (Bloomberg)
- China Seeks Currency Debate, Says No One Wants to Dump Dollar (Bloomberg)
- Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates (WSJ)
Blast from 1933. These are illuminating pieces from TIME mag: JAPAN: Fascists & Boom :: SOUTH AFRICA: Off Gold! :: AGRICULTURE: Mortgage Respite
Wiki entries: Purple Mangosteen :: Durian
June 6, 2009
- N. Korea Follows Nuclear Test With a Favor for Captive Americans (Washington Post)
- At Border, S. Koreans Heed a Blustery Neighbor (NY Times)
- China After Tiananmen (Reason)
- A new KFC opens everyday in China (CNN Video)
- Ireland Loses Iceland Stigma as Euro Ensures No Return to Past (Bloomberg)
- India Feels Less Vulnerable as Outsourcing Presses On (NY Times)
- Tech Company Helps South Korean Students Ace Entrance Tests (NY Times)
- China’s Dumbest Move Yet (The Motley Fool)
- Clark Howard: Can China own us? (CNN) — interesting numbers, crazy conclusion
And here is the info nugget of the day from the above NYT piece:
Last year, South Korea spent 55 trillion won, 6 percent of its gross domestic product, on public education. But private education expenditures amounted to an additional 20 trillion won, a burden that has been cited as a factor in South Korea’s low birth rate. Eight of every 10 students from elementary school through high school take after-school classes from private tutors or at cram schools, online or offline. Offline cram school courses cost up to five times as much as their online counterparts.
June 4, 2009
- Brazil’s Atlantic Playground (NY Times in 1989)
- Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany (NY Times)
- Let Me Hear My Brother! (World Policy Journal in 2003) — about Turkey/Greece
- Internet Statistics: China logging on (Shanghaiist)
- Investment accord to seal FTA between ASEAN and Korea (Straits Times)
- Taiwan aims to build air hub (Straits Times)
- Taiwan, China to schedule regular flights (Straits Times)
- New Japanese satellite to detect missile (Straits Times)
- Inland free trade area starts construction in SW China (Xinhua)
- Chinese mainland organizes industry purchasing tours of Taiwan (Xinhua)
- Socotra Island’s beautiful and bizarre landscape (LA Times)
- Taiwan To Lift Limits On Investment In Mainland High-end Semiconductor Industry (China Tech News)
- Iraq halts clearing landmines even as huge toll keeps rising (McClatchy)
Wiki entry of the day: Kabuki
June 2, 2009
- Why China Isn’t “The Next Silicon Valley†(TechCrunch) — bad title, interesting thesis
- New Growth in China’s Pearl River Delta? (NewsWeek)
- GM Shanghai Ties May Ease Bankruptcy Impact on Sales (Bloomberg)
- Taiwan Dollar, Stocks Rise on $2 Billion China Buying Mission (Bloomberg)
- China’s Yu Tells U.S. Not to Be Complacent About Debt (Bloomberg)
- Pyongyang chokes on sweet capitalism (Asia Times)
Today’s must read funny piece is a blast from The Onion past circa 2006: N. Korea Detonates 40 Years Of GDP
Wiki entries of the day: Liaodi Pagoda :: Winter melon
May 31, 2009
- A softer approach to North Korea (NY Times in 2005)
- Border calm as tensions rise on Korean peninsula (AP)
- Kim Jong Il’s provocations to the West may hide a rational purpose (Times Online)
- China, Japan on collision course over rare-earth metals (The Australian) :: it is an update to a previous story
- New Vietnam port heralds US service (AFP)
- Potential of US Copyright Agenda to Endanger Freedom of Expression in China (IP Osgoode)
- New Law In Korea Means Google Bans The Uploading Of Music On Any Blog (Techdirt) — I noted this quagmire two years ago in this footnote
And here are two somewhat conflicting articles on the economy in North Korea. The first is from Newsweek which says, “the North doesn’t have to rely on the black market to support itself.”
Yet a new piece from AFP discusses just how much regular/common/normal folk depend on black and grey markets to obtain consumer goods. Thus, the tie breaker goes to the interview with Andrei Lankov whose statements seem to affirm the AFP report.
- Flood Across the Border: China and a North Korean refugee crisis (Nixon Center – PDF)
- The Dear Leader, On a Platter (Washington Post)
- Forgetting Pyongyang (National Interest)
- To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It (New York Times)
- China’s Anger at North Korea Test Signals Shift (WSJ)
- China’s Software Outsourcing Export Growth Slowed In First Four Months Of 2009 (China Tech News)
- A note on Japanese household debt (Bank of International Settlements – PDF)
- Interview of the week: multilingual professor Andrei Lankov talks about North Korea with The Browser. A must read.
Two excellent blogs about East Asia: on the ground in China is Evan Osnos of The New Yorker; and the very informative North Korea Economy Watch (Site)
Encyclopedia entries: Feng Guifen (Britannica) :: Kashgar (Wiki)
May 28, 2009
Today is the annual Dragon Boat festival, so it feels a bit like a weekend.
Here are some other things happening on the mainland:
- Top political advisor meets KMT chairman (Xinhua)
- 2 or 3 more overseas banks to go local (Xinhua)
- China to ease controls on investment approval, top planner says (Xinhua)
- Vice Premier: China hopes for more investment from multinationals (Xinhua)
- China debates its bond with North Korea (LA Times)
- How The New “Yuan Carry Trade” Will Add To China’s Global Muscle (Daily Markets)
- Tenants of China’s ‘Optics Valley’ eye broader terrain (EE Times)
And in other areas of East Asia:
- ‘Peace clock’ gets set back to one (Japan Times)
- “150-day battle’: N. Korea succession drama? (MSNBC)
- Is North Korea About to Blow Up the World? (AWC)
Wiki entry of the day: Language planning
May 24, 2009
A few interesting stories on North Korea:
- North Korea conducts nuclear test (BBC)
- Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea’s Veil (WSJ)
- North Korea to allow limited access to “the internet” on cellphones (Engadget)
May 17, 2009
Author Charlie Stross recently posted a speech he made regarding the near-future and gaming.
I can’t say much about gaming (because I’m too cool to play anymore), but he does have some interesting things to say about wireless technology and semiconductor fab limits.
I think he is spot on regarding where the wireless stack is heading (driven by “smart” on-the-fly software drivers).
However, I am perplexed as to his position on the limits of semiconductor processes. I too recognize what the designers at big firm like Intel have been saying: there are limits that will eventually be run into. However, Stross believes that there is only another couple magnitudes in performance that can be squeezed from the next several generations of CPUs and GPUs.
To be fair he does suggest that someone could get the multicore approach to eventually pay off in applications outside specific niches (e.g. graphics, finance). But what about graphene? What about optics? What about improvements in bus interfaces, RAM speeds, SSDs, etc.?
And on the software side, what about OS virtualization and shard-based redundancies? Even if it becomes nigh impossible to scale and squeeze performance from XXX amounts of cores, most applications will probably become thread tolerant and OS/application crashes may simply become a thing of the past (for what it is worth, Vista has only crashed on me once in the past 6 months). Stability is a performance gains that will manifest itself more as hard drive throughput speeds increase.
Rose-tinted glasses?
Also, I’m still not sold on his heads-up display/glasses scenario. He has high hopes for it in his book Accelerando, but the whole near-term prospects remind me of what author William Gibson said: the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. Has Stross ever been to the rural parts of developing countries?
Perhaps some members of the digerati may adopt this technology on the margins in the coming decade, but they would only be able to in dense, developed cities. And don’t count on Japanese and Korean customers to be always leading the way.
Why?
Their populations are declining and the kids being born now will be saddled with huge amounts of debt they will have to pay for. Japans debt-to-GDP is more than 200% now and while Korea is not that high (yet), is saddled with the same institutional problems that will make it hard to pay for and deploy the gee-whiz “smart” infrastructure that Stross envisions and what is needed to make glasses-based HUDs usable. Similar doom and gloom for the US is spelled out here.
Be sure to also check out this sneak peak of Larrabee and an interesting discussion on building a single-server MMORPG.
March 9, 2009
Apparently a number of Asian countries are racing to devalue their currencies in an effort to boost exports.
While a weaker currency can help boost sales it can only do so for a temporary period of time, if at all.
Take for instance South Korea, which has experienced a large drop in the past 2 months alone — a depreciation of nearly 20%.
A number of pundits have suggested this will help spur exports but the problem is that everyone they are exporting to is broke. In addition, because the country is very small (the size of Indiana) it is must import large amounts of resources for internal consumption. Thus a weak currency really hurts the importation side of the equation.
A quick illustration
Let’s go back a year, when there was a “stable” exchange rate for the Korean Won to the USD: 1000 to 1. Assuming that the US, one of Korea’s largest trading partners, was not undergoing a contraction, a weaker won would allow Korean manufactures like LG or Samsung to export products at relatively lower prices. It can still do so, but no one is buying their products, even at a lower price.
The exchange rate has been at least 1200 to 1 for the past 6 months and for a large portion of the time 1400. Worse yet, for the past two weeks the exchange rate has been more than 1500 to 1.
Yet even at half price, the Korean manufacturing firms are still posting terrible earnings.
Simultaneously Korean consumers are not getting the benefit of deflating commodity prices like oil.
So while oil has dropped from a high of $147 last July to around $45 over the past couple of months, a weak Korean Won has not been bueno for the Lee’s and Kim’s because their purchasing power has declined… meaning it currently costs them 50% more to buy the same amount of oil. Thus the average family and business is earning less and paying more. A crappy situation.
A recent Bloomberg piece covers this at length and notes that other countries are also adopting weak currency positions which is so incredibly inane considering there is no export market right now.
See also: So that’s why they are screwed?
