I’ve passed this museum near Jeju Port on Jeju Island, South Korea, countless times while working. Today, I finally went inside.

At the 주정공장수용소 4·3역사관, the exhibitions tell the stories of civilians detained in the former alcohol factory’s warehouses during Jeju 4·3. One panel stayed with me: “Decades of Silence” — 침묵의 세월. The suffering didn’t simply end when the violence stopped.

Outside, the sky was clear, but I left with a heavy heart. A familiar place, and a history I needed to stop and listen to.

First post here, my Korean song playlist is getting old and I’d like to refresh it with recommendations from you guys.

Favorites of the moment:

Yerin Baek:
Why me?
0415
Maybe it’s not our fault

Youra:
Mimi

Yoo Jae Ha:
All his songs

If you happen to be into the same vibe, please introduce other artists.

I've heard about this system a lot and I can literally never understand it. Can a korean explain to me why jeonse is even a thing?

In my mind it is very simple. If you have a large sum, which I hear is about 50-80% of the value of the property. Why don't you just buy the house? Property in korea is expensive and goes up. So investing in a property is good. Why would you take so much risk when everyone knows korea has so much fraud. It is really difficult for me to understand.

Edit: I understand this system a little better now, but overall I have to say it still doesn't make that much sense. The landlords would have made way more money if they did traditional rent, investments are not that great these days. And the tenants take on a serious risk of losing the money to fraud.

ELI5 for graphs:

* 1st graph: Nominal GDP likely to reach 30% YoY in Q3. First time since the late 1970s

* 2nd graph: Korea's current account surplus in August reached 25% of GDP, 46.1 billion USD

* 3rd graph: Household debt has fallen from 100% of GDP to 80%, government debt back to 40% of GDP

* 4th graph: All domestic sectors of the economy have become a net saver in Q2

* 5th graph: Real national income growth has reached +15%, real GDP growth is expected to reach +4%.

RNI = measures real purchasing power rather than physical unit output by calculating total income earned by citizens and corps, regardless of where in the world that income was earned. It captures the trading gain from exports, while stripping out domestic inflation to ensure fake wealth is not measured.

Real GDP = measures 100% of the physical volume output of all final goods and services within a country using previous year prices, by stripping out inflation and deflation to see how many units were made (true economic growth). Useful to see growth across different years.

Nominal GDP: Total output is measured using current market prices and doesn't adjust for inflation. Useful to compare debt-to-GDP in today's dollars or total output of different countries in a given year.

I know it’s already autumn, but when will we finally get to see stunning fall foliage like in that photo, with leaves drifting down? I can’t wait to collect fallen leaves and press them. It’s such a lovely part of Korean autumn culture!🎋

Both the UN projections and Korea's statistics bureau projections in 2023 show Korea was not supposed to recover 0.8 TFR before 2030. Even this modest recovery projection was criticized and laughed at when it was first announced, the overwhelming opinion being Korea would continue downwards to 0.5.

The projections take into account the increased births from the echo boom cohort and also COVID-delayed marriages.

In reality, Korea's recovery is drawing an exponential curve, beating expectations by 20% recovering 0.9 10 years ahead of schedule, and is headed for 1.0 by 2028 which would be recovered almost 20 years ahead of schedule.

There are opinions that going from 0.72 to 0.91 is insignificant, but the cumulative birth gains from Jan 2024 to July 2026 is already 46,282 births. If we reach 1.0 in 2030 and then taper off and follow the more conservative UN estimates, we already end up with 2.1 million more people by 2100 than if we were to have followed the UN graph after 2023.