Author: yonghokim

this is the first time i hear of Prager U but it seems they make among the most easily rebutted right wing arguments on the internet – after youtube comments. not sure if they are a menace for giving the right wing something to link, or a blessing for giving too many people the worst argumentative tools.

Post-friday ca39 schedule is all over the place:
-OC: every day but today is at 5pm
-LA: Tuesday but seems it could be any time between 4pm and 7pm?
-SB: Wednesday 4pm

Someone saying they never saw or expected the email from me on Wednesday (I usually have been sending it over KakaoTalk, but felt that this time it didn’t merit the level of “urgency” in an instant message), gave me a glimpse of what is going on with all these people communicating over Instagram or Facebook messages.

The email economy has collapsed for a sector of the population.

There is the failure of most email systems (hopefully excluding gmail) to control spam, that was the first wave of push away from email. Then, there was the gradual takeover of legal, semi-legal and even opt-in email communications overriding legitimate person-to-person emails. Instead of clearing up the mess (which is a lot of work and used to be highly technical in the early days), people simply moved to another platform that was newer, and therefore had fewer irrelevant messages. No business sends promotional content over Instagram or Facebook messaging.. yet. They already have their own venue – timeline posts, in which they are focusing all their attention. Which explains why get out the vote text message communications is so effective.

It may also explain why instead of revamping the gmail interface, Inbox was created in a way to allows you to only focus your attention to emails that matter, where there’s the “personal stream” akin to social media messaging, and “email stream” which is the classic email. In a sense, Inbox made email too social media-like, which would have turned off traditional email users.

That means, that just like how people moved away from email, as social media advertising becomes increasingly crowded, businesses will eye non-timeline advertising. “Can we put an ad on the side of where users look at their individual messages?” “How about an ad in between individual messages?” Social media platforms probably know that that would be the beginning of the end of their relevancy as a platform, and try to keep the businesses busy with timeline advertising. How long will that last..

For people awaiting final #CA39 results it’s going to be an interesting next few days. I don’t know if they’ve been doing this every year, but this year the OC Registrar will be posting updates on late ballots every day. Los Angeles and San Bernardino haven’t posted an update since Tuesday eve. Are they going on a weekly schedule? If that were the case, it would mean that every day we would get an OC update with increasing Republican numbers while the Democratic leaning LA and half-and-half SB stay static.. until a longer-paced, bigger update.

PD: Ah I see, San Bernardino’s next update will be on Friday 4pm. I can’t find LA’s reporting schedule.

I was looking at numbers for #CA39 in the Orange County Registrar, assuming that it would have the quickest turnaround. Then I found a Twitter account that was showing numbers consistently lower than the OC Registrar, and it hit me: each county registrar reports only on their own county’s results. So CA39 shows up in three county’s reports separately.

I see the Korean Press was only looking at OC numbers as well, as they reported the difference as 55% vs 45% (even at the time of the reporting last night, the district-wide difference was actually 53/47).

Still, Republican candidate Young Kim holds a lead over Gil Cisneros, at 51.3 vs 48.7% (4,000 votes difference) without including the late ballots. It’s not impossible, but it will be pretty tough to reverse the trend in late ballots.

Late ballots estimate from NYT:

I think Trump said “if Dems win the house, there will be a wave of crimes, alien invasions, and violence.. lots of violence. And it’s gonna be your fault, not mine.”.

Tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018

Holy shit those Prop 10 numbers

https://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/ballot-measures

This newspaper is funny:

• Friday ad, strongly attacking Trump -> inserts small disclaimer “may not reflect opinions of our newspaper”
• Wednesday ad, more uplifting tone, not as aggressive -> no disclaimer
• Friday ad, strongly attacking -> inserts small disclaimer

the sad state of my Instant Messenger accounts

I mostly use SMS, Slack and KakaoTalk for my daily messaging. Colleagues use Slack; us-based contacts use SMS and I get them via Hangouts, but for the past 4 years I haven’t been able to figure out how to set Hangouts (instead of Android’s built-in “Messages” app) as the default program for outgoing SMS, so I can’t integrate it with my address book or recent calls log. (I prefer Hangouts because I can type from the computer as well) Unless I’m responding to a recent incoming convo, to initiate an SMS convo I need to scroll through all my chat history to find the thread that belongs to the person or group, or manually type the number. I have no idea why sometimes some messages would be receives by Messages instead of Hangouts. Remaining Korean contacts are on KakoTalk.

I then have:

• A WeChat account made because a friend was traveling through China. I have 2 contacts on the app.
• A WhatsApp account made because most of the people I contacted to practice the language only had a WhatsApp account (which reveals your cell phone number.. what he heck?)
• A Telegram account made for the sole purpose of participating in a hobby-related group notification list. I have no contacts in the account (My contacts from 5 years ago seem to not have been reestablished when I refused to share my address book)
• A Signal account made for the sole purpose of talking with one person for work
• I never agreed to make a Facebook Messenger account, but Facebook made one anyway and someone kept messaging me time-sensitive stuff through the Messenger account

I can’t delete any of these accounts because they do have a marginal use case, and they sit on the phone consuming data, storage and RAM.

Excellent.

So I keep hearing about this mythical “reasonable and afraid” crowd who we can establish reasonable conversations with.

Let’s see:

• I see how the Korean media covers their activities and their positions, and I want to throw up. It’s disgusting.
• I go to their website, and I want to puke. It’s worse in online spaces.
• Same with their flyers.

Look, if we were leading a movement and a sympathetic media outlet was posting racist shit, we would condemn it and talk with the business in question so they would immediately stop the hate speech. If the media outlet refuses to collaborate, we would publicly announce that we do not consider them our allies.

Have the antis done that? If so what hopes do we have of establishing reasonable conversations with these people?