Yongho Kim

Category: mini-blog

  • I was feeling sick and going over my…

    I was feeling sick and going over my past reddit posts just to kill time until it’s time to sleep (to not mess up my sleep schedule), and found this post from a year ago that I think still makes sense.

    =============

    After 15 episodes in, Designated Survivor is feeling like a comical satire of the Trump administration. In some parts, there are parallel connections, and in some others, if we were to get inside Trump supporters’ minds, this is how they would imagine themselves – fighting the good fight to protect an embattled, post-apocalyptic America. In the 2000 movie The Cell, detectives enter a psychopath’s mind, materialized into a virtual-reality-of-sorts through a machine, where there are horrific depictions of their depraved thoughts, but in some scenes also some of them are represented beautifully because that’s how the psychopath feels about it internally. Now apply that mechanism to Trump and their supporters.

    For starters, he was never elected to public office prior to the presidency, and only became president due to a technicality. His swearing-in ceremony was the “largest in history”, and those present really believed in the legitimacy of his presidency.

    He has led a holy crusade against the ravaging mainstream media, who keeps running hit pieces on dear leader. The press secretary is misspeaking-machine-on-wheels (phase 1) and then improves and just outright lies to everyone on everything (phase 2) (Although for Trump it’s Phase 2 first)

    Let’s go on..

     

  • I recently noticed and was bewildered that the…

    I recently noticed and was bewildered that the coloring and notation of Western Avenue in LA changed to that of a highway, with the yellow color and the numbering “258” – looked it up and it turns out to be something known as an “unconstructed state highway” – “their routings have been defined by state law, but no route has been adopted by the California Department of Transportation” – whatever that means.

  • If we gotta rig the vote, lets rig it by sunshine, not race

    Since someone was bringing up Iowa in the thread:

    1. There are more poor people in California than in Iowa.
    2. I haven’t looked it up, but I would wager that California has more, and if not at least comparable, numbers of farmers as Iowa farmers.
    3. Iowa also has its share of major cities and a (three?) metropolis, where people live in relative comfort and in this so-called “coastal elite life” – although granted, such cities are fewer in number, and comparatively smaller, than in California.
    4. The electoral college equally screws up a bunch of these “small” states as it does other “large” states, while giving an edge to relatively large purple states (large, relatively speaking, when considering the totality of purple states) like Iowa or Pennsylvania.
    5. There is one sure thing Iowa has more of than California: the percentage of white people. This, despite the increasing influx of people of color and immigrants into the state.

    Of course, I must confess that I have maliciously concealed one crucial factor in this comparison – California gets way more sunlight than Iowa. Now THIS is a vote manipulation I can get behind, if we insist on this whole “helping out those in need by making their votes count more or less” thing. Make votes count proportionally inverse to the median temperature, at the county level. The colder the region, the more your vote counts. This way, everyone wins – even San Francisco would have the satisfaction of having beat their rival Los Angeles. Los Angeles can sacrifice for the greater good.

    Image: File:ElectoralCollege2016.svg, CC BY-SA

    Image: File:ElectoralCollege2008.svg, CC BY-SA

    Full Disclaimer: This post was typed while staying in Chicago in a 0 Degrees Fahrenheit January. My fingers are freezing and I can’t breathe. (0 F is -17 Degrees Celsius for you normies)

  • this is the first time i hear of…

    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…

    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…

    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…

    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…

    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…

    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.”.

  • Holy shit those Prop 10 numbers https vote…

    Holy shit those Prop 10 numbers

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

  • This newspaper is funny Friday ad strongly attacking…

    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

  • Online reception of the Trump’s latest citizenship comment…

    Online reception of the Trump’s latest citizenship comment is a bit mixed, because the Korean media (in this case, both peninsular and U.S. based) has long (20+ years?) established a standard buzzword to frame the issue: Expedition Birth (원정출산)

    The word Expedition has been combined with a few choice words to frame a couple topics that pertain to women and the Chinese people in the media. Expedition Shopping Trips, etc. There is a bit of a right-wing bias in the term, but it’s more strongly used as a click-baity keyword and I think even progressive media have sometimes used it as a way to summarize the whole topic.

    The expression produces a pretty vivid image in peoples minds and leads to a foregone conclusion: “Greedy, unpatriotic upper middle class women (as if devoid of their spouses) travel to the U.S. to get free citizenship, and avoid military service for their future son, and all kinds of “upper middle class benefits” to their child-to-be-born”.

    U.S. based Korean American media’s comment sections are abuzz with the keyword. I’m not sure if progressives have looked into, or developed counters to the frame.

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