quant18
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 13 years ago
Incidentally, the author is pretty active on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=camz
> I didn't realise Forbes let you blog under their brand now
In fact that's been their exact business model for a while. Good March 2012 article on that:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/173743/what-t...
Comment · 13 years ago
Tech in Asia has an English summary & commentary about the train ticket plugins ban:
http://www.techinasia.com/negotiation-miit-orders-chinese-br...
Indeed there seems to be one plugin which hotlinks a js file from Github: http://www.ce.cn/cysc/tech/07hlw/guonei/201301/21/t20130121_...
But of course, blocking Github didn't affect any of the other plugins. So Phoenix TV is reporting that most other plugins are still actually working:
http://tech.ifeng.com/internet/detail_2013_01/21/21406667_0....
Comment · 14 years ago
My wild guess is: they might not have had any internet connection at all. But it really depends whether the Koryo Tours guys thought the extra cost would be worth it. I don't have any updated pricelist from Nosotek (the North Korean/Dutch joint venture outsourcing firm which wrote Pyongyang Racer), but back in 2010 they charged an extra €40 to €60 per day surcharge to clients if they wanted their team of two outsourced Pyongyang programmers to have direct internet access; otherwise the team would work "in a cleanroom environment and can not connect to the
internet" and all email contact would be with the Nosotek managers only.
http://www.nkeconwatch.com/nk-uploads/nosotek-pricelist.pdf
To put this in perspective, that charge is almost the same as the charge for one of the programmers themselves. My guess is, Nosotek most likely have to pay for a third guy from the government to watch the browsing habits of the first two, and that third guy has to belong to both the set of political reliables and the set of internet-savvy people --- two sets which are already small in North Korea and whose intersection is even smaller. Not to mention the cost of the extra computer and internet connection itself
More links about Nosotek:
http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/
Comment · 14 years ago
Certain US government mailing lists have this same problem. For example, the Federal Register table of contents listserv, which sends out daily mails consisting of links to government notices. Every few weeks, lawyers all over the country — plus us random wonks who also read the Federal Register for fun — get an autoreply from some other law firm telling us who quit or got laid off:
http://listserv.access.gpo.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1210C...
I'm only surprised it doesn't happen more often. I guess, given the intended audience, it's not so surprising that it doesn't get abused. But still, it would be incredibly easy to send out a fake email pretending to be the Federal Register. Imagine all the fun you could have issuing your own antidumping notices and arms control regulations.
Comment · 14 years ago
Quite a number of South Korean companies have set up shop in Kaesong Industrial Park, right over the DMZ in North Korea. There's 100+ factories employing more than 40,000 workers. There's buses going across to South Korea every day, though obviously they get cut off in times of tension. I don't think LG does anything directly at Kaesong, but there's certainly other electronics manufacturing going on there: 13 firms in total produced $59 million of electronics at Kaesong in 2010. Of some relevance to this discussion, Magic Micro has been making lamp assemblies for LCD monitors there since 2006. In short, it's not just canvas sacks and artificial flowers coming out of labour camps.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34093.pdf
No doubt, in any supply chain, the highest value-added steps are not occuring in Kaesong. As pointed out by others, labour costs can't explain the difference of hundreds of dollars on these monitors and so samstave's guess is likely wrong (though I don't think he deserves to be downvoted into oblivion). But companies don't decide to locate at Kaesong for cost reasons anyway; rather, they're there for nationalistic reasons about promoting reunification. The factories there apparently don't even break even in the absence of South Korean government subsidies, and the future of those subsidies is uncertain: http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/article....
(Another slightly more complex point is that companies manufacturing products at Kaesong likely have to accept lower margins on them --- exporting them runs into sanctions issues in many countries, meaning they have to be sold in the domestic market --- but I doubt that's what's going on here to make these monitors so cheap either).
For those who are interested in this kind of stuff, the blog http://www.nkeconwatch.com/ makes good reading