Blue is Me

Tag: controversy

  • Why appearance matters in Korea, NBA HOF, removing the headphone jack

    I want to talk about several recent topics that have occured recently. In my video blogs I’ve already talked about stuff like why I think Hollywood discriminates against Asians, why I don’t like present day feminism, why I like Korean girls more than Chinese girls, why I support banning guns, why the media is biased towards Westerners, etc
    Today I have a few topics I want to talk about…

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    Why Appearance matters in Korea

    Firstly, I’ve lived in Korea almost 2 years now, and I will leave Korea end of this year. At that time I will talk about my experiences here and why I decided to leave, but I want to talk about something I hinted at in my video of what makes Korea so special and unique. Its not just Korea seems to have a lot more couples on the street than other countries, probably the first thing a foreigner notices when they visit Korea is how everyone is always dressed up. The girls more so than the guys usually, but Koreans are known for caring a lot about appearance much more than any other Asian or other nationality in general. How did it come to be this way? Why don’t Americans or Chinese care about appearance as much?

    This is more speculation than actual research because I’m not writing a thesis here, but I think the reason is because Korea is a really small and competitive country. When everyone graduates university at a high level, and everyone is Korean, one of the only ways to differentiate yourself is appearance. And that has lead to present day Korea where Korean girls get pressure to get plastic surgery, just to find a boyfriend or get a job, or anything. Because Korea doesn’t have any laws against a company discriminating based on appearance, this has led to competition to become prettier and prettier. And when everyone else is pretty, its a peer pressure affect that causes other people to feel that they should become pretty as well.

    China has not gone through the same thing because its a bigger country, more diverse, and was totally communist at one point. Because of those reasons, Chinese people have become more accepting of different appearances, and its not as important because one of the good things that came out of communism is that old Confucian society where women were treated far below men, was erased and replaced by a society where the women worked, dressed the same as men, and treated exactly the same as men. This is the gender equality that all the progressives talk about these days, its essentially done by communism.

    As for America, appearance used to be important back in the 1940s and 1950s when men were definitely higher than women and everyone wore suits, dresses, hats, etc for going outside. In those days everyone was dressed up outside. The counter culture revolution of the 1960s basically changed the US into a society where everyone dresses differently and people became more accepting of different appearances. That’s why you hardly ever see people dress up when they go outside in the USA anymore.

    In Korea now, its still a patriarchal society, the men still have power (despite the fact that the Korean president is a woman it doesn’t mean sexism is gone), they have the highest gender wage gap out of all OECD countries, and its not uncommon to see the average Korean girl holding onto her boyfriends arms wearing a nice dress or skirt, high heels and fully dressed up while the guy is only wearing casual jeans or shorts. There’s a huge gender disparity here.

    Now I actually think caring about appearance is important. I’m not saying people should go out and get plastic surgery, but when people care about the aesthetics of everything in their world from their phones (oh its slimmer!), their computers (wow rose gold!), architecture (eiffel tower, chrysler building, golden gate bridge), paintings (Mona Lisa), etc how can everyone care about aesthetics of everything in the world BUT when people care about other people’s appearance in the Western world, it is considered “shallow”?? In Korea, its totally normal to say oh you should put on more makeup, or you should dress a little better, which in our Western world would be considered sexist comments. But its the total opposite in our world, where even calling someone pretty can be considered offensive, and people are told not to care about others appearance because it is “shallow”? But why? I realize that personality is important, it definitely is, but humans have eyes, and we care about how everything else looks, why is it so bad to care about how other humans look as well? I think that caring about your own looks or other people’s looks is totally normal, as long as its not the ONLY thing you care about. If it is, then that can be considered shallow or superficial but like me, I care about both appearance and personality and I think both are really important in our daily lives. This is one of the things I like about Korea, is that they care about appearance, and I feel that every other country doesn’t care about appearance enough because they want to pretend that somehow we have eyes for everything else but not for other humans. Makes no sense.

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    Yao Ming, Shaq and Iverson get into the Hall of Fame

    This years NBA hall of fame class is headlined by Yao Ming, Shaq and Iverson. A lot of people have expressed that Yao Ming, didn’t belong in the Hall of fame, but they don’t realize that Yao Ming caused 1.3b people to get involved in basketball, that its the BASKETBALL hall of fame not the NBA hall of fame (the same reason why Arvydas Sabonis got in), and that he was actually a decent player that was All NBA 2nd team a bunch of times. He averaged 19/9/1.5/2 over his career, and if you compare to Alonzo Mourning who people agree is a HOFer, he averaged 17/8.5/1/3 over his career, so Yao’s stats are comparable to Mournings.

    I think Shaq is definitely a top 5 center of all time, but people overrate his dominance. The thing is Shaq never had an equal during his time. His prime is around 2000-2005 and around that time, the best centers, Ewing, Hakeem and Robinson were all retiring or past their primes. The second best center of the 2000s, Dwight Howard and maybe Yao Ming, weren’t even in their primes yet. I would say Shaq got lucky that his era wasn’t that competitive at the center position. Kareem for example, had to deal with Wilt, Moses, Willis, Cowens, Unseld, Thurmond, Gilmore, Lanier, Walton, Parish, and later in his career Hakeem and Ewing as well. If people want to ding Wilt’s career for weak competition, they should ding Shaq’s career for weak competition.

    As for Iverson, yeah I think he’s overrated, but I can understand why he’s so popular. He’s definitely one of them most inefficient shooting guards, only 42% FG which is worse than Kobe’s at 45% or John Havlicek at 44% and both of those guys shot a lot as well. So by stats you can say wow Iverson was terrible and missed a lot. But because people related to his style, his swagger, his attitude, his height, and his heart they really supported him because he was a small dude and that always makes him an underdog. That’s why even though ESPN rated him #48 best player of all time, I put him a bit higher at #30, because I can understand why he missed a lot of his shots, but that doesn’t make him necessarily a terrible player, it just means he’s not the greatest shooter.

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    I don’t like 4K and high resolution displays

    Why are people obsessed with the ppi of a display when 20 years ago they had a 640×480 screen on a CRT monitor and nobody was complaining back then? Wasn’t DVD considered good picture quality back then? Its only 480p now. People’s eyes didn’t get any better as time goes on.
    Now because of Apple introducing the iPhone 4 with Retina display, (and Macbook with Retina) everything has super high resolution now. And now I have to read reviews where they give laptops a “minus” because they “only” have a 1080p display, a display that was basically high definition TV before is now “low resolution”. Incredible.
    The larger the display the more battery it sucks up. now you might think this is offset by the bigger battery but that is in reality not the case. Thats why smaller phones get better battery life. try comparing the iPhone SE to iPhone 6 for example.
    Most of the media that we have, Facebook pictures, and YouTube video, are always compressed. on a 4K screen on high res screen you would have to either get 4K stream or get the original pictures from a friend somehow, else the resulting quality on a high res screen is going to look like crap.
    Why don’t people care about audio as much? so everyone is a videophile but being an audiophile is a small part of the audience? why? if people can tell the difference between a Full HD TV and a 4K TV why can’t they tell the difference between mp3s and flacs? Why give your eyes such good treatment but not your ears? thats why I care so much about my headphones, speakers, portable amps, DACs, high res audio files and stuff, but not many people seem to care about it.

    This leads to my next topic….
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    Apple got rid of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. All chaos ensues.

    There are two camps divided on this issue, one side supports Apple’s decision and says that wireless is the future and the 3.5mm is an old legacy standard,and the other side says 3.5mm can never be replaced.
    What do you think my decision would be, knowing that I’m an audiophile and musician? Well of course I’m gonna say the 3.5mm headphone or AUX jack should not go away, at least not right now.

    There are several reasons why wireless cannot replace the headphone jack:

    1. Wireless has inherent latency issues, and anyone who’s used Ethernet over Wifi knows that wired is always faster and transmits data much faster than wireless. Because of this inherent advantage and the fact that we listen to digital music, wireless can never sound as good as wired. So wired headphones will always sound better than a wireless headphone at the same price point.

    2. Wireless headphones have to be recharged. The Apple Airpods last 5 hours. That’s actually not a lot of you go on a lot of trips and travel a lot. That might be the time it takes on a train from one city to another. I actually spend 11 hours in a bus going from Bosnia to Serbia so I know thats not enough. Having to always charge something is a hassle. And wired has infinite battery life obviously.

    3. Because its wireless, they cannot add any external headphone amplifier or DAC or noise cancellation to the audio chain unless they build it onto the headphone itself, which will decrease the battery life. I know lightning headphones or USB-C headphones can have these things built in as well, but those don’t have the same wide compatibility as a traditional headphone with a 3.5mm connection. Also, I still have not seen a wireless planar magnetic headphones or high impedance headphone, if that is possible to make one wireless at all.

    4. Musicians, Engineers, Audiophiles etc we have too many legacy audio or musical equipment like a hifi stereo system, mixers, record players etc that just don’t work with wireless or even old laptops and devices. Because of this huge incompatibility issue, Bluetooth will never be as widespread as wired. Furthermore, people in 3rd world countries are not going to give up their cheap wired headphones for wireless ones anytime soon.

    You cannot compare the removal of the headphone jack to the floppy disk drive or cassette drive and optical drive because those are storage formats and newer formats can always replace old formats and the newer formats were always strictly better than the older ones its replacing. The headphone jack is a way of enjoying audio, so removing that jack and saying you have to go wireless, is akin to removing the speakers from a phone, and saying, hey you have to use Bluetooth speakers now because having mono or stereo speakers is old and legacy.
    And Yes I realize you can use a dongle with the new iPhone 7, but you can’t charge your phone at the same time, and you have to make sure not to lose the dongle on a trip else you’re screwed.

  • Thoughts on confidence and feminism

    This is gonna be another post that will show people more of who I am; following on a very open and honest post that I made, and another post last year where I explained my biggest strength.

    I am a very well-read person, and I often read Wikipedia articles in my spare time, because I like reading about various things. Everything peaks my interest. I’ve read articles ranging from history (Opium Wars, Battle of Stalingrad, Huaihai campaign, etc), politics (communism, socialism, dictatorships, etc), technology (Acorn Archimedes, Intel 8080 microprocessor, Lisp programming language, etc), food (history of ketchup, mustard, black pepper, etc), amongst various other things.

    The last 20 Articles I’ve read highlight my range of interests (you can google these):

    1. Maddox (writer) – internet blogger
    2. Ungulate – a group of mammals
    3. Camera Obscura – an early type of camera
    4. Hypercard – an old standard for web app development
    5. St Elmo’s Fire – a natural weather phenomenon
    6. Designworks USA – a design company now owned by BMW
    7. SteamOS – an operating system for PC games
    8. Longines – a swiss watch company
    9. Hatoful Boyfriend – a dating simulation game
    10. Beringia – an old land bridge between Siberia and Alaska
    11. Fight of the Century – a fight between Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier
    12. Jim Morrison – former lead singer of The Doors
    13. Corset – a piece of clothing females used to wear
    14. Bird’s eye figure – a type of wood decoration
    15. Leeroy Jenkins – an circa 2006 internet meme
    16. String theory – an alternate theory of the universe
    17. Duane Allman – a former guitarist who founded the Allman Brothers and died at only 24
    18. Atari Jaguar – a failed video game console from the early 90s
    19. Smartbook – a device that is a laptop form factor with an ARM processor (not x86)
    20. Sean Plott – an former pro gamer and active youtube streamer

    So yes, I know a lot about a variety of things in the world.

    But I don’t know how to get a girlfriend. It’s not something you can learn in school, its not something I can learn on Wikipedia, and I wasn’t born with the ability to make good conversation. My last post highlighted why so many girls were ignoring me for apparently no reason, and my best theory is that I am just not that interesting. I need to improve my conversation skills.

    Because I have a lot of friends who *are* good talkers, I know the most important things is to have a good sense of humor, and being confident. Those are the most attractive attributes. I’m not a naturally outgoing guy. Although I am good at making public speeches (Toastmasters, presentations, performing), I am very quiet at making conversation in groups, and perhaps the most awkward situation you can put me in is to make conversation with a group of girls. Korean girls especially, are very quiet by nature so its very difficult to make that connection with them.

    My shyness is deep rooted… I used to be so shy in high school that I would lock myself in the restrooms just to avoid talking to people in the hallway. That’s how shy I was. I opened up a little in university when I joined all the clubs and Toastmasters and AIESEC, but I am still not naturally charismatic. I know I need to be more confident, and I am not aggressive enough, and too “nice”, and too afraid to offend people with jokes or physical contact, which is why I think I fail so much at the relationship aspect of things. But I will try to improve on this.

    Conservative
    I realized one of the main reasons why I like Korea so much is because its so conformist. All the guys and girls dress and act similar. As some people may know, I’m a steadfast conservative, and have been since 2009. I’m all for lower taxes, smaller government, rights to freedom, etc but I also want to go back to the US 1950s culture, where everyone was conformist. Back then, all the men wore suits and hats, all the women stayed at home and wore dresses, and I think everyone was more polite and skinnier for sure (thanks childhood obesity) back then as well. So that was an ideal for me, despite the fact that back then people were more racist. But hey, its not so different than Korea is now. Everyone dresses well, people are racist against non-Koreans, and everyone is polite. But I’m not a progressive, and I feel like the more we ‘move forward’, the more chaotic it gets. San Francisco was a little too diverse for me.

    Feminism
    For all of history, the guy has always been more dominant than the woman. It’s just natural. Males have always hunted, women have always gathered. The history books are dominated by (mostly white) males. And yes, I am kind of conservative in the traditional sense, so I will admit that I don’t understand feminism too well. There are people who think the progress made by women especially western women is good for society and for all societies, but I beg to differ.

    I want to talk about is how politically correct the climate in the US is right now. I’m in Korea right now, where the women aren’t exactly equal to men here. Korean women know that they are treated unequally from men, for example they have to wear makeup all the time and men don’t, but they don’t seem to be starting any protests or petitions for this to change. Some Korean girls that I talked to want to be housewives and stay at home and do cooking and housework and all that traditional stuff.

    My point is, it depends on the culture. Not every woman in the world wants to be as strong or stronger than the man. Why? Because in those cultures the men have more responsibility and the woman might not want to take on those responsibilities. Yes, in many senses, Korea is what the US was like back in the 1950s when women mostly stayed at home. And last time I checked, the 1950s, as “unequal” as they were, was a pretty good decade economically in the US! Even though mostly the men were working! and how many women complained about it at that time? Certainly not as many as today.

    I mean, I think men like girls who are feminine and do traditional women roles, and I think women like guys who are masculine and do traditional men roles. It’s the way animals have always been. You never see a female lion doing the work of a male lion do you? Or the male lion doing a female lion’s work? It’s the way humans have always been. It’s the way society always has been until the 1970s feminist movement. So, yeah, 50 years ago, ask any guy if the woman should be at home doing housework, and he will say yes. If you ask a guy now, they will probably say ‘No, because woman should be empowered, etc’. But I bet many guys are saying that because of the social climate now, and not because they actually like stronger, more independent women.

    I think starting from 2013 or 2014 I started to notice more and more feminism going around, like the stuff about Gamergate, and withdrawing GTA 5 from shelves because you can assault women and Female Thor, and all these other things came up that were basically people complaining about things that had been around for a long time, like video games and movies and comic books and putting their feminist slant on it because they were not treated ‘equally’.

    I think all of this is unnecessary.. I mean people didn’t have a problem with the other GTAs, and with online video games and comic books and movies back then, and now there’s a petition to put a woman on a $20 bill? that’s just overkill. I don’t know why these issues suddenly came up its not like all these things suddenly changed or something its just that feminists all of a sudden started complaining about them now.

    So yeah, thats my traditional conservative view on feminism. I know many people will hate on me for having this traditional view, but hey, it’s my opinion. And it’s freedom of speech. I don’t think its “wrong” to have a view that has been commonplace for most of human history. This is why they have a conservative and liberal party in most republics.