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There’s a loud corner of Reddit where millennials look to get rich or die tryin’

“Y-O-F**KING-LO,” the teen wrote, flashing his trading statement. “900 to 55K in 12 days!”

On Reddit, he’s known as “World Chaos,” a Florida high schooler who earlier this year multiplied his money by betting against the S&P 500. His real name is Jeffrey Rozanski, and the 18-year-old’s appetite for risk would make many seasoned market players facepalm.

In one corner of the Internet, though, praise rained down. “You magnificent bastard,” read one reply. “Sailing away on your yacht while the rest of us f**kers who went long are looking for the nearest window.”

That was peak “WallStreetBets,” the Reddit forum where “YOLO” is the war cry, Martin Shkreli is a role model, and irreverent traders trawl for tickets to quick wealth. It has become what one member calls “the beating heart of millennial day traders.”

“It’s tasteless, hilarious and subversive,” said Erik Johnson, a 28-year-old manufacturing worker and forum regular from Boston. “And you definitely need to have a thick skin to partake.”

France prostitution: MPs outlaw paying for sex

French MPs have passed a law that makes it illegal to pay for sex and imposes fines of up to €3,750 (£3,027, $4,274) for those buying sexual acts. Those convicted would also have to attend classes to learn about the conditions faced by prostitutes.

It has taken more than two years to pass the controversial legislation because of differences between the two houses of parliament over the issue.

Some sex workers protested against the law during the final debate. The demonstrators outside parliament in Paris, numbering about 60, carried banners and placards one of which read: "Don't liberate me, I'll take care of myself", the AFP news agency reports.

The below is from an article I stumbled across while reading about the Wikileaks release of IMF transcripts.

The author, Paul Mason does offer some suggestions as to resolving the below situation, but I don't feel they deal with the issues described either, so have not included that part of the article.

Primarily this is because of the assumed benevolence and efficiency of an expanding government in creating a less complex financial system. Solutions to those kind of issues take us back far beyond the last 25-30 years of 'neoliberalism' as used as the frame of reference for Mason's article. Those topics are the sort of things that lead back to the era of the central banking's rise to power as unaccountable institutions and their shareholders that have control of the money supply, distribution and creation.

I do feel however that it is a decent introduction into the systemic problems that have massive implications for global, national, local economies and markets.

Neoliberalism is broken because four things that enabled a “heroic period” of growth, stability, global development and technological innovation have turned against the dynamism of the system as a whole.

The first is FIAT MONEY. If you detach money from both metals and real economic activity, and incentivise money creation as the driver of growth, then growth will happen; and financial complexity will increase; and asset wealth will begin to take over from wealth derived from productivity. And if you — as we did in the last 15 years — create a derivatives market several times the size of the economy, you create a finance system that must — by logic — at some point become too big for the physical economy that’s supporting it.

The second problem is FINANCIALISATION. Neoliberalism is the first mode of capitalism in which the capitalists decided they could not tolerate organised labour. The resulting collapse in wage bargaining power, aided by the doubling of the number of salaried workers in the world in 25 years, means wages have stagnated in the developed world. If you then replace wages as the driver of consumption with mass access to credit you create a mechanism whereby the collapse of an investment bank in Manhattan can empty a pub in Lambeth the next day.

The third problem is the GLOBAL IMBALANCES. By neoliberalism I mean the whole global system: the system whereby the USA borrows, China lends; the USA consumes; China produces. During the pre-2008 boom everybody suddenly got very worried about the imbalances, because the gross financial imbalance in the world economy was clearly the source of excess money that allowed cheap money plus financialisation. The 2008 collapse, in this sense, was a partial correction — but it still leaves the entire world economy trapped within the more fundamental imbalance — which has grown: the large cross-border holdings of unpayable debt, increasingly yielding negative returns, and destined to be wiped out in a spectacular cathartic moment.

The fourth problem is FALLING PRODUCTIVITY. This is a multicausal secondary effect of the other problems:
- stagnant wages make it easier to open a coffee shop than invent a new process or machine
- the boom-bust cycles seriously mis-allocate capital, funneling it towards speculation rather than innovation
- consumption driven by cheap lending requires the creation of millions of bullshit jobs so that people can remain on the edge of the credit system, not excluded from it

Stagnant wages combined with cheap money policies in the face of every cyclical downturn creates, in the space of 20 years, three spectacular boom-bust cycles. In the first it was equities that were overvalued; in the second it was securitised financial instruments based on housing; in the third it is government debts. So that when you come later in your careers to write the history of these 20 years I predict you will remember the dotcom crash for Enron; the 2008 crash for Lehman Brothers; the next crash for China.

Each of these crashes wipes some more value and dynamism out of the economy. The dotcom crash destroyed the company pensions system; the 2008 crisis put the banking system on permanent life support, plunged an entire generation into lifetime debt, and took a chunk out of the welfare state; the next crash will involve debt write downs paid for out of the savings of ordinary people.

The outcomes? One, that the system holds together and the world’s households, workers and consumers are forced to pay, over a lifetime of indebtedness and low wages, for the dysfunctionality of the system. But you’ve seen this weekend the limits of that, with the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith. The entire 6-years fiscal framework of the British government has been founded on an arbitrary cap on welfare spending that one of the toughest conservatives of his generation found impossible to implement.

Duncan Smith faces the same problem Xi Jin Ping faces, and the hapless mandarins of the Republican and Democratic centre ground face. People are mad as hell and won’t take it much longer.

Carney, Draghi, the Banks of China and Japan are all engaged in one last round of monetary easing, but they are flashing up the warning cards: unless some kind of structural reform or debt write-off happens, monetary policy is running out of steam.

In 1990 Paul Romer formulated the basic challenge of information technology. Digital information has a near zero reproduction cost and under conditions of a free market and competition its price will fall close to zero. The non-rivalry inherent in information goods means that, once produced, they are abundant.

You can only maintain price, and therefore the price mechanism, by accepting something neoclassical economics says should be impossible: the permanent existence of market distortions: monopolies, patents, copyrights, the capture of positive externalities by corporations.

So when iTunes has 95% market share of online music the price of a track is 99p irrespective of supply, demand or quality. The price is set by Apple’s monopoly pricing power and both the producer and consumer must take the downside of an essentially rent-seeking monopolistic distribution platform.

The only problem is, competition and innovation will happen, so now we have Spotify: £9.99 a month for all the music you can listen to. If you want to make the minimum wage as a solo artist you need 1,500 plays on iTunes, but you need 1.1 million plays on Spotify.

Once you can reproduce someting via “command C, command V” you are in a post-marginalist world. Because the tenet of marginalism is that everything economic is scarce, and that anything abundant is beyond the frame of economic thinking.

Put simply: information corrodes the price mechanism and the defensive walls — monopolies, IP, encryption etc etc — are always corroded. If you don’t believe me look up the market share of a company called Blackberry.

That’s problem number one. The second challenge is: information corrodes the link between hours of work and wages. It makes high-value work modular, driven by targets; and it makes low-value work difficult to place a market value. Millions of people’s wages in the developed world are determined not by the market but by an artificial floor placed under them for the purposes of a) social cohesion b) inclusion in the financialised consumption system.

Challenge number three is we already have a growing, dynamic post-market sector. Wikipedia — a £3bn minus sign on the global advertising economy, powered by 27,000 regular writers, produced for free, consumed for free; Linux, which runs the top 500 supercomputers in the world; Apache which runs half of all web servers. And numerous quietly spectacular good enough tools and solutions produced and maintained for free.

Source: "From Adam Smith to Duncan Smith" by Paul Mason of Mosquito Ridge

The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative

EgyptAir hijack: Man surrenders at Larnaca airport

Falkland Islands fears new ruling expanding Argentina's sea control

Can Micro Bit replicate BBC Micro success?

Pet insurance claims hit record number

US pulls Tanzanian aid worth $470m over Zanzibar vote

White House to commit $116m to heroin and opioid abuse epidemic

Iraq dossier looms over lone MI6 Eurosceptic

Debate-Ducking Hillary Clinton in '08: Candidates Should Be Tough Enough to Debate "Anytime, Anywhere"

A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.

Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.

Too spicy for SoylentNews... not spicy enough for your job:

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds".

Democracy is a joke, says China – just look at Donald Trump

“The rise of a racist in the US political area worries the whole world,” the party-controlled Global Times crowed this week ahead of of Trump’s victory in the latest round of primaries. “He has even been called another Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler by some western media.” It added, darkly: “Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for western democracy.”

Trump, or “Chuanpu” as they call him in China, has been a gift to Communist party spin doctors paid to convince the country’s 1.4 billion citizens that rule of the people is a sure path to chaos and destruction.

“They are relishing this moment,” says Zhou Fengsuo, a US-based democracy activist who fled his native China following the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. “They are very happy. They are laughing over this. To them [Trump] is a good character to show the deficiencies of the democratic system, that such a person could become president. It is just unbelievable. Beijing is definitely gloating over this.”

[...] Chinese newspapers, which have previously pounced on the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan revolution as evidence of the dangers of democracy, have wasted no time in hyping the potential turmoil that Trump’s rise could bring.

An editorial in the Chinese-language edition of the Global Times noted with glee that fighting had broken out at Trump rallies in what was supposedly one of the world’s “most developed and mature democratic election systems”.

[...] An editorial on another government-run website claimed Trump had “humiliated” the US political system. “He has turned the election into a prank,” it said.

WATCH: Florida Deputy Illegally Arrests PINAC Reporter Protesting At High School
Broadcast by honoryouroath + YouTube

Florida Sheriff’s deputies illegally enforced the “school safety zones” trespassing law against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray, outside of a St. Augustine high school earlier today. Gray complied with law enforcement orders, and is currently being held in the northeastern Florida St. Johns County jail, but oddly no charges are listed with his mugshot, unlike all of the other suspects as you can see below.

The St. Johns Sheriff’s Office has wanted to detain Gray for many months now, after the local schools Superintendent declared him persona non grata, even though Gray has a son currently attending St. Augustine High School and two other children in the system.

Jeff Gray was arrested while protesting with a sign in hand, the SLAPP lawsuit filed against him by St. Johns Schools last December. The legal action was filed along with 38 SLAPP letters sent to his home address by certified mail, one of which invoked Florida Statute 810.0975 and its “school safety zones.”

“How are you doing, Mr. Gray?” asked the Florida deputy as he got out of his patrol car, wearing street clothing, to which Jeff responded, “Pretty good. How are you?” “May I ask you why are you here?” asked the St. Johns sheriff’s deputy. “I am peacefully assembling and peacefully protesting,” replied Gray. “Ok. Do you realize [that] this is a violation of your no trespass order that was issued. Correct?” asked the deputy.

“No, it’s not actually. There’s a provision that that says “shall not infringe on the right to peacefully assemble and protest If you look in the statute, it’s right there,” said Gray, whose HonorYourOath YouTube page is famously filled with instances like these where the reporter very carefully expresses to the officers his statutory or constitutional rights, and he re-iterated for emphasis, “In the statute. That’s why I’m here.”

“This is within the 500 foot safety rule, so i’m putting you under arrest for violation of that trespass order,” replied the Florida deputy who seemed to suddenly remember that Gray is a reporter and would in all likelihood be recording the scene, “If you would, put your sign down, turn your phone off, put your hands behind your back, turn around please. Put your hands together like you’re praying, please.”

Gray surrendered to detainment. “If you look at the statute, there’s a provision…” said Gray as the sheriff’s deputy cuffed him. But Jeff Gray is right. The last sentence of the “School Safety Zones” statute reads: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to abridge or infringe upon the right of any person to peaceably assemble and protest.”

It's been a month since the Soylent News Folding@Home team was established, and we've made major strides. As of the time of writing, we are currently in 1684th place, and rising quickly. Thanks for everybody's participation!

Currently, we have 33 active folders contributing 83 CPUs to the effort. We've completed a grand total of 2516 work units. Our top 10 folders are:

1. Beldin65
2. kurenai.tsubasa
3. tibman
4. LTKKane
5. Kymation
6. cmn32480
7. Runaway1956
8. SirFinkus
9. NotSanguine
10. crutchy_work

According to extremeoverclocking.com we'll be in the top 1000 in about 1.2 months.

Hillary Clinton Falsely Credits Reagans With Starting ‘National Conversation’ on HIV/AIDS

Edit: BBC picked up on the story.