(no subject)
Mar. 18th, 2006 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumSaturday.
This morning was rainy. I was thinking of heading into town and looking around, but without anyone to wander with/play native guide the weather put me off. The light was poor, and no good photos were likely.
Right now it’s brighter, but coming up on evening, and I don’t want to be wandering about after dark. In Russia or Ukraine I’d not care so much, but here I don’t speak the language and it seems I could get lost. This isn’t really likely, as there are enough soldiers about that I can reasonably assume the local economy caters to them, and the cabbies are both prevalent, and able to get me back to the post.
Tomorrow, rain or shine, I go into town.
I saw something interesting on the plane coming over here. It was a piece of Korean news; I saw it a week ago, and I didn’t have paper handy, so some of the finer details may be lost in translation.
Seems the gov’t here passed (or is going to pass) a change in the capital gains tax code. It was a strange thing, and at first I thought I was mishearing it, but the story was long enough that I got it (and it was subtitled, and/or dubbed. I forget if this was English with hangul underneath, or vice-versa). If one makes a stock gain of more than five million won (which is $500,000, more or less) one pays no tax. If one makes a gain of less than that, one pays 30 percent.
The odd part wasn’t that one pays no tax above five million won (I think that silly, but it’s certainly consonant with the present ideas about what is supposed to benefit the economy, by encouraging the market…, we can leave the merits of that aside). No the odd part was that as soon as the transaction crosses that magical line, one pays zero tax. Not no tax on money above five million, but rather no tax on any of it.
Heck of a windfall.
Work here has been interesting. The exercise starts on the 27th. For reasons I have never understood rotations to Korea are all for at least three weeks, no matter how short the mission is. So I am helping whip some young soldiers into shape. One of the quirks of the sort of mission which exists, day in-day out, in places like Korea is that it leaves little time for basic soldiering (the mission is meeting people, checking units security, looking for threats to physical security, spotting espionage, and the like).
In the main this is ok. A year or so away from maintaining a humvee all the time isn’t a big deal, same for not humping a ruck. One doesn’t really forget how to pack the things one needs/uses/wants ready to hand.
Unless one doesn’t know what they are.
The kids here are just that, (with one exception, a guy who did what I did, i.e. joined the army late). Four of them are less than 21, and most of the rest not much past that. They came to Korea straight out of AIT. There are two three NCOs, apart from the First Sergeant.
Thursday was sergeants time. This is a morning, each week, when the team leader gets to have his team/squad, all to himself for needed training. The mess hall closes breakfast early, and small unit training gets done.
For the section I was with; I took it over. They were doing Common Task Training. The simple stuff you have to be able to do in your sleep, things like applying dressings, and evaluating casualties, maintaining a rifle. These days we add spot an IED, search a vehicle and the like.
They weren’t clueless, but the guy teaching the classes was a specialist, three years in the army. He was senior. The classes were too stiff, and no one was really absorbing the info.
The afternoon was spent doing Primary Maintainence, Checks and Services (PMCS) on humvees. That was fun. It was raining. They didn’t know how to do it. Lifting the hood was all one could depend on all of them to know how to do. One of the reports came back, “no deficiencies.” Ha. There is no such thing as a vehicle with no deficiencies. That was almost as good as the one with a “/” mark (minor defect, but not something which can’t wait to be fixed, much less deadline the vehicle. Things like an oil drip, or broken windshield wiper get a “/”) listed after, “Engine won’t start.”
So I’ve been playing crusty old sergeant.
It’s being a decent week. We’ll see what the exercise is like.
The post paper had an article on bullfighting, which is immensely popular here. There’s a five day bullfighting festival, which just ended. I suppose a better description would be bull-wrestling. The contestants grapple with the (blunted) horns of a bull.
Did I mention it’s two bulls doing this, no people involved? No. Oh, well yeah, it’s a show of which bull is the more dominant/stronger.
I’m off to chow now, but I’ll include these behind the cut
It’s a shot I took from the KTX bullet train out of Seoul.
So is this one but it's on a jump. because it's too big to just inflict on people
This morning was rainy. I was thinking of heading into town and looking around, but without anyone to wander with/play native guide the weather put me off. The light was poor, and no good photos were likely.
Right now it’s brighter, but coming up on evening, and I don’t want to be wandering about after dark. In Russia or Ukraine I’d not care so much, but here I don’t speak the language and it seems I could get lost. This isn’t really likely, as there are enough soldiers about that I can reasonably assume the local economy caters to them, and the cabbies are both prevalent, and able to get me back to the post.
Tomorrow, rain or shine, I go into town.
I saw something interesting on the plane coming over here. It was a piece of Korean news; I saw it a week ago, and I didn’t have paper handy, so some of the finer details may be lost in translation.
Seems the gov’t here passed (or is going to pass) a change in the capital gains tax code. It was a strange thing, and at first I thought I was mishearing it, but the story was long enough that I got it (and it was subtitled, and/or dubbed. I forget if this was English with hangul underneath, or vice-versa). If one makes a stock gain of more than five million won (which is $500,000, more or less) one pays no tax. If one makes a gain of less than that, one pays 30 percent.
The odd part wasn’t that one pays no tax above five million won (I think that silly, but it’s certainly consonant with the present ideas about what is supposed to benefit the economy, by encouraging the market…, we can leave the merits of that aside). No the odd part was that as soon as the transaction crosses that magical line, one pays zero tax. Not no tax on money above five million, but rather no tax on any of it.
Heck of a windfall.
Work here has been interesting. The exercise starts on the 27th. For reasons I have never understood rotations to Korea are all for at least three weeks, no matter how short the mission is. So I am helping whip some young soldiers into shape. One of the quirks of the sort of mission which exists, day in-day out, in places like Korea is that it leaves little time for basic soldiering (the mission is meeting people, checking units security, looking for threats to physical security, spotting espionage, and the like).
In the main this is ok. A year or so away from maintaining a humvee all the time isn’t a big deal, same for not humping a ruck. One doesn’t really forget how to pack the things one needs/uses/wants ready to hand.
Unless one doesn’t know what they are.
The kids here are just that, (with one exception, a guy who did what I did, i.e. joined the army late). Four of them are less than 21, and most of the rest not much past that. They came to Korea straight out of AIT. There are two three NCOs, apart from the First Sergeant.
Thursday was sergeants time. This is a morning, each week, when the team leader gets to have his team/squad, all to himself for needed training. The mess hall closes breakfast early, and small unit training gets done.
For the section I was with; I took it over. They were doing Common Task Training. The simple stuff you have to be able to do in your sleep, things like applying dressings, and evaluating casualties, maintaining a rifle. These days we add spot an IED, search a vehicle and the like.
They weren’t clueless, but the guy teaching the classes was a specialist, three years in the army. He was senior. The classes were too stiff, and no one was really absorbing the info.
The afternoon was spent doing Primary Maintainence, Checks and Services (PMCS) on humvees. That was fun. It was raining. They didn’t know how to do it. Lifting the hood was all one could depend on all of them to know how to do. One of the reports came back, “no deficiencies.” Ha. There is no such thing as a vehicle with no deficiencies. That was almost as good as the one with a “/” mark (minor defect, but not something which can’t wait to be fixed, much less deadline the vehicle. Things like an oil drip, or broken windshield wiper get a “/”) listed after, “Engine won’t start.”
So I’ve been playing crusty old sergeant.
It’s being a decent week. We’ll see what the exercise is like.
The post paper had an article on bullfighting, which is immensely popular here. There’s a five day bullfighting festival, which just ended. I suppose a better description would be bull-wrestling. The contestants grapple with the (blunted) horns of a bull.
Did I mention it’s two bulls doing this, no people involved? No. Oh, well yeah, it’s a show of which bull is the more dominant/stronger.
I’m off to chow now, but I’ll include these behind the cut
It’s a shot I took from the KTX bullet train out of Seoul.
So is this one but it's on a jump. because it's too big to just inflict on people
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-18 02:56 pm (UTC)Mindme
Is teaching English right now and has been there awhile.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-18 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-18 11:05 pm (UTC)http://pics.livejournal.com/pecunium/pic/0007s29x/
no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 08:13 am (UTC)I am assuming you had no problem seeing them. Or did you search them out in some wise?
TK
no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 10:09 am (UTC)What broke was that you appended the slash to the URL, if you leave off that last slash then LJ treats it as an image. If you include the slash it views the img src tag as a standard link, and won't display anything at all. The code behind the LJ Scrapbook is "odd" for lack of a better word, and has some gotchas just like that one.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 10:11 am (UTC)Feah! Worse because I've done it right before.
Thanks.
TK