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Samsung Sets New Guidelines For Alcoholic Beverages
jones_supa writes "To tame the vigorous drinking habits of the Koreans, the parent company, Samsung Group, implemented a strict code of conduct for staff dinners at Samsung. Deeply ingrained in South Korean business culture, hoesik is a hierarchical bonding experience which usually involves free-flowing alcohol, often forced upon lower-ranked staff who are expected to serve and entertain their superiors. The new rules banned rituals like beolju, or forcing drinks on others, and sabalju — the mixing of several different beverages to make a potent punch. An employee of nine years, said the company had implemented a rule known as '1-1-9', which restricts hoesik to one sitting, one type of alcohol and a cut-off point of 9pm in order to prevent excessive drinking. Samsung's move comes as South Korea has more broadly made some steps towards tackling excessive alcohol consumption and drink-induced violence. South Koreans are by far the heaviest drinkers in Asia and the biggest consumers of spirits in the world, according to the World Health Organization."
What a bunch of party poopers.
- An Irishman.
You are, obviously, forgetting North Korea. North Korea, number 1, even in spirits.
PS: The above comment is not supposed to be taken as fact, for any reason.
Keep your mores to yourself, you constipated Puritans.
As a nerdy engineer, I have to travel to South Korea for product support. Those guys can match me with Johnny Walker when I'm drinking beer. It's astounding - I don't know how they are alive.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, 'the Irish of Asia.'"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards. 'The Irish of Asia.'" -- P. J. O'Rourke
Mind you, P. J. is of Irish extraction, so he meant that as a mix of compliment and self-deprecation.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
No mention of Soju being banned, so all is good...
So all you are supposed to do is talk?
What is wrong with mixing alcohols? it is not like it makes it stronger.
If you are just drinking straight alcohol, and variety does not matter you are doing it just to get drunk.
What does Samsung have against class or taste?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
When word of this new policy came down, there was one common response among the young employees: Toga! Toga! Toga!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I went and visited a 55 year old Chinese investor. When I'd last studied business-in-Asia in the late 1980s, this /. article describes what it was like in every Asian city. I asked my host if that's what I was going to have to prepare for. No, he said, it's not like that anymore. He explained: " I mean, it used to be like that. But those guys are all dead."
Gently reply
Yeah, they can drink. When I was there, they drank my boss under the table, and he outweighed the heaviest of them by a factor of 2 at least. Fortunately for me I was low enough on the totem pole not to be expected to match drink for drink.
Samsung is probably the top electronics manufacturer in the world right now. All your geek gadgets either came from them or contain parts made by them.
This isn't the kind of anecdote you bring math to.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Login, click on "Recent" and start moderating. As AC you have no right to bitch what so ever.
Tomorrow is another day...
Now I understand why that "Gangnam Style" video is hilarious when drunk, but incomprehensible when sober.
No sig for the moment.
I knew it will come to that as soon as I heard that 'kidney for iPad, liver for Galaxy' ring got busted in China...
Not to be out done Apple has replaced the water in their water coolers with Everclear.
For Asians, the Koreans can out drink them all, but as a big white guy trying to wash down god knows what food was put in front of me, I literally drank them under the table. You see, its impolite to pour your own drink, if you want some, you fill some other persons glass and they fill yours. The food was terrible, and I did not want to be impolite and not eat it, so with every bite came a sip. It got to the point there some of the people at the business dinner could not get up out of their chairs.
I was told at the end of the night, "You drink very well!"
If you get drunk and get laid, you won't be a nerd anymore.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A double of Johnny Walker has about the same alcohol content as a pint of beer (i.e. 500ml at 5% has the same alcohol as 50ml at 50%) - if that makes you feel better :-)
Just remember:
1. Don't ask your Korean friends for drinking contest.
2. When they give dinner at 6pm eat it. That's the last meal you'll get for the day. The rest of the evening would be liquid.
3. Don't wasted on your first bar. That's just the beginning of your "evening" tour.
4. When they offer you "nuclear-bear", just say no.
5. The same if they offer you orange juice at the end. Ask what inside those juice other than the orange.
Prepare a headache pill for the next morning, cause you still have 3 days more for your training seasons. Don't fall for "farewell party", you'll miss your plane the next day... (that's all that i remember. I think.)
First it turns out that the Unicorn is North Korean, and now this. Bad day for South Korea.
You don't understand, they were matching by _volume_ ;)
The new rules banned rituals like beolju, or forcing drinks on others,
Wait... Samsung allowed that practice before?
How despicable and unbecoming of a professional enterprise....
You are, of course, assuming that everyone wants an iPhone. Some people actually want something else, be it for better or worse.
I am not a beer drinker, but I do have a penchant for tequila (nothing with Cuervo in the name as a rule except for shots, in a plastic bottle, or mescal- basically start at El Jimador and work your way up). I used to carry one or two bottle of tequila with me on my frequent trips to Asia (PRC/Korea/Japan/HK/Taiwan/Singapore) so that when local coworkers would complain that I wouldn't drink with them (I would drink vodka when they were drinking beer, so I wasn't drinking with them- at least in Korea we would drink soju together, but my Japanese coworkers generally wouldn't drink shochu except with meals), I would pull out one (or both, if there were more than 4 of us) of the bottles and tell them this was the night that we would drink together.
They usually discovered before the end of the night that beer, even good beer, is just alcohol on training wheels ;-). What amazed me was the women who would keep up with no problem while the men were headed off to the subway.
I'm Irish.
Even in my family you dont drink pints (or liters) of whiskey... You drink shots, or "fingers" if its a sipping whiskey.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Their glasses were certainly smaller than mine, but I simply couldn't believe the sheer quantity of whiskey they were able to put down. They definitely did not drink 2 liters each, but they certainly did seem to take down a whole 5th each. I had nowhere near the equivalent in beer (wouldn't that be a whole case?).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm a native Korean, Samsung Electronics employee for the last couple of years, although the following text does not represent my employer.
Actually the reason behind this seems to be twofold - health (you can't expect somebody who drunk heavily to perform adequately next day), cultural (Samsung isn't simply a Korean company anymore), and probably legal (the company is liable if drinking was part of the routine job, and it didn't do anything about it).
Decades ago, the only people working for Samsung (and probably most Korean companies) were mostly male Koreans aged somewhere around 30 to 50. (In the eighties, Korean women had a difficult time getting jobs on large corporates (except as secretaries or factory production workers) and were routinely fired for getting married) The only thing that they could do in common was drinking. Considering that Asian people have a blurry boundary between personal and professional issues, drinking (and for executives, playing glof) was a very essential task for successful working. Actually, companies even had "drinking VP"s who's job was to drink with business contacts every night, and nothing else.
Fast forward to 2012. Samsung now has some 300k employees, and more than half of those people are non-Koreans. Many employees have their spouse also working, which means somebody has to take care of their kids if they have to drink late. There are many non-Korean people everywhere, even on the Korean campuses. Business contacts are no longer limited to Asian countries. Suddenly, it doesn't make much sense to socialize by drinking heavily. You can't expect to be able to socialize with other people if they don't drink much, or don't drink at all.
The problem was that this "heavy drinking" thing was a sort of a "tradition". Many people, especially junior/senior management people who were working for Korean companies for decades, found themselves uncomfortable to socialize with other people without excessive soju or whisky or whatever. So, corporate policy kicks in, and tries to change the culture. Not only by simply banning "drinking", but by trying to suggest alternative methods (e.g., sports activities or doing charity work).
Some 'tussin will get her ass back on the street in no time!
Somehow this doesn't come as a surprise, as Samsung announced just a week ago that they'll open a new R&D site at the Aalto University campus in Otaniemi. Samsung would've been bankrupt by the end of the year had they offered the MSc (Tech) undergrads all the spirits they can handle.
I mean - hey. When working in France, I had a 2,5-hour lunch break to enable the liver to do salutory ethanol-breaking-down work. A job at Samsung HQ, however, sounds even more interesting.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I heard that 'kidney for iPad, liver for Galaxy' ring got busted in China.
I heard that if you want a Microsoft Surface, you have to get your brain removed...
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Hmm, that article suggests that our ancestors started in Asia and then continued evolving in Africa. So yes, we're all African, and also all Asian, and presumably all Pangean at the end of the day.
My blog
If you get drunk and get laid, you won't be a nerd anymore.
Pissed or screwed, I will always be a nerd and I wouldn't have it any other way. :)
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
You missed the point of the absurdity, so I'll take it one further: we're all from the ocean at the end of the day.