When was the last time the USD passed the euro in value? And it's rapidly honing in on the GBP.

Any services charged in USD are particularly painful to purchase now.

Once upon a time I knew a fellow teaching In Korea who was paid in dollars. This was because he taught at a college in a very small town back when the only McDonald's in Korea was in Seoul. Man was he making out until the locals looking over his shoulder at the bank started complaining about it and they started paying him in won.

Maybe the lemmings will stop coming over for low pay?   

is he trying to be more hip with the kids so he can better equip them against the dangers of korea?

Do you recall when that old poster CO2 clued him into how to make memes? 

yes, and i strongly wish he had not done that 

Most teachers used to be paid in $$ pre-IMF.  When the won dropped to something like 1800 (if memory serves), the hagwons refused to pay in dollars.  Teachers left in droves because they were unable to pay bills back home.  Midnight runs were so commonplace that most of the people on planes out of here were English teachers.  My friend got his first uni job with just a BA because so many people left.

I did my first year just before the IMF period. Didn’t know and never heard of a single ESL teacher that was paid in dollars. There was a big deal made about marquee foreign baseball players being paid in dollars, though. There was at least one guy whose pay in dollars equaled that of the rest of the team almost, because of how much it was costing to pay him in dollars. They wanted him to alter the terms of his contract but he understandably wouldn’t. There were a lot of midnight runs but to say most of the passengers on planes out of here were English teachers is obviously horesh*t. It’s not like South Korea came to a screeching halt commerce wise during that period. I think this would be a good opportunity for you to realize that whatever old timer told you those stories likes to exaggerate greatly. Take them with a grain of salt. Seriously, most of the outgoing passengers on planes were ESL teachers fleeing? 

I can believe it.

I was paid 2.0 mill Korean in cash in hand (literally a brick) every month for my first 3 years here. No paperwork. No medical insurance. A student dropped their desk and it broke my toe? Zip to hospital, x-rays, wraps, back to finish that day's classes (a pub high chair brought in the next day to prop up the waygook).

When I worked for more than half a decade on Jeju (the hagwons there have their own rules), I found myself with a base salary of 2.45 mill for 30 hours weekly, but that 9pm-10pm some weekdays and 3 hour elite 9am-noon Saturday class putting my salary over 3 mill for over 5 years, making it hard to blow my salary. Unlike today, i often could not go a month through my paycheque, at least, not months without trips to Busan or Seoul. These days,... a weekend in a big city, and the basics bought, puts the monthly budget in order.

Whatever. Teaching remains as enjoyable as ever. :)

What in God’s name are you addressing?  Nothing you wrote about in any way at all addresses the claims made above. I also got paid in a brick of won. I also broke a toe in class and went to the hospital for an x-ray and confirmed it was just a broken toe and went back to work. What job is going to send you home with a broken toe?  It was my big toe and it hurt, but it was in no way debilitating.  I can’t even imagine telling that story, but you’ve brought it up multiple times here.  Do you even concern yourself at all with your posts being germane to the discussion at hand, or is any post an invitation to share oft repeated and unrelated events from your own life? 

Seriously, where are you from? "You have a broken bone in your foot. Go back and finish your work shift." Really? Not in Canada.

I prefaced my original comments by talking about "NO MEDICAL INSURANCE".

Watch NBC, CBS & ABC and there are plenty of reports of the high costs of basic medical care, of expensive medical insurance, of people with broken bones turned away from hospitals. America has got it wrong about basic medical care (they allow just as much as can't be sued, not a stitch more).

You can’t be serious?  In Canada you would expect a broken toe to get you sent home from a job where you could sit?  Stop trying to milk this having to work with a broken toe story for sympathy. I bet you got crutches and played it up. Probably a lot of eye rolling from your coworkers that day. 

The US dollar will likely remain strong in years to come. That's not because the US is doing great economically but because it's doing better than the other major economies of the world.

One clear advantage the US has is demographics. The working age population is still increasing in the US (though the increase has slowed down in recent years). China, Japan, and the EU are all experiencing a decrease in their working age population.

"When the working age population growth flips negative an economy is basically doomed." (@7:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnDjNpjRuAQ&t=440s

In 2002, i didn't realize/ bat an eye, at the lack of deductions. I was a newbie in Asia and took the 2.0 mill brick of cash for three years before going in 2006 to a 2.6 mill job in little ol' Hadong for three more years with deductions galore! (Tax, health insurance, gas at my duplex). Whatever. I went to the Pohang International Fireworks Festival when there. It was awesome! Funds from those years sent me to Guam for a new year's celebration, 9 days in all!

Epic.