This short documentary about Korean fashion is on its surface about the many looks cultivated by Korean designers, but it's especially interesting as an analysis of what late-stage capitalism looks like in a homogenous culture. Read the rest

Devo founder (and vintner) Gerald Casale sent us a photo of this counterfeit "Dump on Trump" quarter passed off to his wife at a Los Angeles grocery store yesterday:

Yesterday my wife paid cash for some groceries and, as both of us always do when we have pocket change, put the change in a bowl in our kitchen. Later she noticed that one of the quarters in the bowl showed Trump’s profile with a slogan “Take a Dump On Trump”. We’re not sure but she thinks she must have received it when she bought groceries at our neighborhood Whole Foods in Santa Monica. If you saw this coin in reality there’s no way you think it’s not real until you notice Trump’s head in place of George Washington.

And here's a news report about a woman in Amarillo, Texas who also was lucky enough to receive a Dump Trump Quarter!

(Thanks to Jeff Winner of the wonderful Raymond Scott Archives for the tip.) Read the rest

Ken Shirriff embarked upon a teardown of counterfeit Apple laptop chargers. On the outside, they're typo-free and very convincing. Inside, though, they're a dangerous mangle of cheap parts and inexplicably bad decisions.

The most important feature of a charger is the isolation between the potentially-dangerous AC input and the low-voltage output… The counterfeit MagSafe charger has a dangerously small distance between the low voltage side (top) and the high voltage side (bottom). This is why you shouldn't buy counterfeit chargers.

I'm puzzled as to why counterfeit chargers never manage to have sufficient clearance distances. They use simple, low-complexity circuits so the circuit board layout should be straightforward. Except in the smallest cube phone chargers, they aren't fighting for every millimeter of space. It shouldn't take much additional effort to make the boards safer.

It appears that someone put decals on this $10 bill to pass it off as a $50. I'm sure most marks wouldn't notice that Hamilton's face is on the bill when it should be Grant, especially in another country where the currency is less familiar. Read the rest

Instead of giving six men hammers, they hired five men to open the cardboard box containing the 127 fake iPhones and one man to drive an excavator over the phones.

(Thanks, Joly MacFie!) Read the rest

Andy Ihnatko explains what's going on in the image above, which was snapped and submitted to him by a reader in Taiwan. Read the rest