
Samsung chief staves off arrest, prosecutor keeps chasing - richardboegli
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-politics-samsung-lee-idUSKBN1522UY
======
brilliantcode
As a Korean, I can't help but feel saddened by the omnipresence of _chaebol_
or family run conglomerates.

I was born in a hospital run by Hyundai with equipments manufactured by
Hyundai. The apartment block was built by Hyundai. Every morning, a bustling
crowd of dads get into a Hyundai car, driving on roads paved by Hyundai, spend
the next 14+ hours in Hyundai offices, factories, shipyards. If you were not
of conscription age you were attending a school built by Hyundai reading a
textbook funded by Hyundai justifying the sacrifice of millions of Korean
labourers, now cast aside and shunned into a life of poverty. If you were due
for military service the next 2+ years would be spent working in Hyundai built
facilities and Hyundai Rotem (also built the Canada Line Skytrain in
Vancouver) manufactured tanks. When you are finished you would return to your
post-secondary studies sponsored by Hyundai with campus built by Hyundai
subsidiaries. We called it, Republic of Hyundai, 7th largest city in South
Korea. If you lived in Seoul, it was Samsung Empire.

When your business makes up over a quarter of South Korea's GDP, you are
simply untouchable, from the law.

North Korea has Kim Jong Un, South Korea has 12 of them, all happily hidden
away under the veil of "capitalism" and "democracy" giving rise to the second
highest suicide rate after Guyana, a small South American country with 170x
smaller GDP.

~~~
throwaway122916
As someone who has never been to Korea, I don't understand why this chaebol
structure is bad.

Korea has one of the best R&D stories worldwide, one of the most innovative
places in the world, one of the best life expectancies worldwide, and amazing
tech everywhere. All while having few natural resources and having gone
through an extremely destructive war relatively recently. Korean middle class
is much larger than that of U.S. and lower class much smaller.

Whenever I come across Korean engineers, they're always very knowledgeable and
hard working.

Korean manhwa is arguably more innovative than the Japanese counterpart.

So guess my question is: what is not to like?

Even if it were a Monarchy, if the results are pretty good why not just leave
it the way it is?

~~~
yongjik
> Whenever I come across Korean engineers, they're always very knowledgeable
> and hard working.

Emphasis on "hard working". Like, "come six days a week at 7 am, go home at 11
pm" hard working. There's a large variation, but such a condition can still be
found in many places.

> Korean manhwa is arguably more innovative than the Japanese counterpart.

And Korean comic artists probably make 1/10 of what Japanese ones make.

Of course if you just consume the products and culture of Korea, it seems
great. (And cheap!) Not so great when you are the one working in these
conditions.

* Yes, these brutal conditions played a role in rapid industrialization, so one might argue that they were a "necessary" sacrifice to escape poverty, but those days are gone and now such a condition actively harms the country. South Korea's firtility rate is 1.24 as of 2015, because many people don't have time to love, get married, and raise kids. (I'm serious.) At this rate, soon the country will be filled with 70+ year olds, and then the economy won't sustain itself: the whole country will collapse like a deck of cards.

------
r00fus
Looks like the saga is very likely to continue and plague Samsung and Lee.

> "The only thing that has changed is that he won't be detained now,"
> commented Park Jung-hoon, a fund manager at HDC Asset Management, adding
> that uncertainties were likely to linger.

Does anyone see similarities between this and the Note7 debacle? It seems that
reality is just not friendly to Samsung right now.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
The Note7 debacle and this political crisis are both products of Korea's
corrupt _chaebol_ structure [1] (a polite way of saying "oligarchies").

Samsung sourced its batteries, virtually exclusively, from Samsung SDI [2].
Samsung SDI is very likely controlled by Lee's family members. That implies
these bids weren't competitive. The upshot is less emphasis on function than
family.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol)

[2] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-sdi-batteries-
idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-sdi-batteries-
idUSKBN13I2NM)

~~~
r00fus
Wasn't the (technical) issue with the Note7 that Samsung tried to fit too much
battery in too small an enclosure? (ie, 10 lbs of sugar in a 5 lb bag).

It'd be interesting to see how the Chaebol structure may have contributed to
this... unfortunately we'll likely never know.

~~~
Steko
The technical issue was the result of a top down demand on engineers who
weren't given enough time to deliver/test a safe design. I'm not sure how this
can be directly attributed to the chaebol structure although the Lee heir in
question was also pushing the Note 7 redesign effort.

------
JumpCrisscross
Does anyone know if there is a family or commercial connection between the
judge who dismissed Lee's arrest warrant and the Lee family? It's terrible
that my mind goes there first, but such is the state of Park's Korea.

~~~
MikusR
Does anyone know if there is a family or commercial connection between the
prosecutor who asks for Lee's arrest warrant and the competitors to Lee
family? It's terrible that my mind goes there first, but such is the state of
Park's Korea.

~~~
hotgoldminer
Why is this reply so similar to the one above? How long have the bots been on
HN?

~~~
Jach
If you pay attention to the differences you see it as a satirical remark on
the sloppy thinking, not a bot. A long tradition on HN.

