Ever heard of Mr. Kanny cereals? I noticed these at a Lotte Mart one night a couple of weeks ago, and while they didn’t appeal at all — they seemed to be some kind of Italian corn breakfast cereal — something stood out about them. The Italian equivalent of “This Product Contains Only” was visible and easy enough to translate, but the next line was covered up by a little green strip of what looked like some kind of colored tape. We peeled off the green stuff on one box, starting on one said (which had a word that looked …
Tag: economics
There You Go Again, Reality
In the story I’m now working on (working title Capped), some software glitches (actually, algorithms in weak-AI software used on the stock exchange) causes a massive, worldwide economic crash (and especially one specific part of the world economic system) in the space of a few minutes. Ooops, then it happened in real life. Well, not as catastrophic (thank goodness) and not worldwide, and not with AIs exactly, but something eerily similar. So now I have to find a way that these circuit breakers could crash, or be overridden. Or something. That is, if my story is going to work in …
Clean Reinstalls? What?
Today I went to the Woori Bank to get my 공인 인중서, which is, basically, a little electronic certificate that I need to have in order to file my taxes. (Which I can only do on paper now: the electronic tax filing through my workplace closed a week ago, and the office assistants either didn’t know, or assumed that foreigners couldn’t do it, or forgot to tell me when it was announced. After a little discussion in which I mentioned I’d done it before (with a different office assistant who is now gone), and it’s much easier with a 공인 …
Minerva, Censorship, Schlerosis, and IPs
Events in Korea these days remind me a fair bit of that Demosthenes/Locke subplot in Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game. If you haven’t read the novel, well, basically a couple of really smart kids hijack the world political debate by posting pseudonymously online, using personae that are, in fact, quite different from their own personalities, sometimes quite consciously, to determine the way the global debate plays out. I’ve posted in the past about the Korean internet, censorship, and the odious “Real-Name System” that has essentially eliminated all possibility of real anonymity online at many websites in Korea by requiring …
Various Bitlets
I’m subscribed to a couple of hundred feeds over at Newsgator, but I have been seriously, seriously behind on nearly all of them — including the feeds of some close friends. I was just overwhelmed over the past year or so, and fell behind on everything. Anyway, in the past few days I chopped the items in the feeds from over 10,000 to just about 800 at present. That’s not bad, and I’m sure I’ll have to cull some more feeds and drop things I’m not reading, but if I can get it to 200-300 items a day, I’ll be …