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A bunch of links that will not make the cut in today's article. I will tidy up and add some more later. While Vice certainly covers drugs more than other news outlets, most of these just didn't fit with the hard facts focus of this year's article, and I didn't want to overuse any particular news source. There will be plenty more to find on aggregators like Google News today.

http://www.vice.com/read/how-decriminalizing-drugs-could-reduce-islamic-terrorism-in-france-and-belgium
http://www.vice.com/read/war-on-drugs-tool-of-minority-oppression
http://www.vice.com/read/luxury-weed-uk
http://www.vice.com/read/veterans-affairs-hospitals-still-wont-give-veterans-weed-medical-marijuana
http://www.vice.com/read/a-prosecutors-regret-how-i-got-someone-life-in-prison-for-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/why-do-the-irish-take-more-drugs-than-any-other-country-in-eu
http://www.vice.com/read/how-parents-talk-to-their-kids-about-drugs-in-2016
http://www.vice.com/read/this-drug-smuggler-and-hippie-mafia-leader-was-an-og-in-the-weed-legalization-movement
http://www.vice.com/read/the-worst-time-i-ever-did-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/a-professional-stoner-explains-how-to-smoke-pot-properly-in-2016
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36055297
http://www.vice.com/read/what-the-un-still-gets-wrong-about-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/yes-you-can-be-allergic-to-pot
http://www.vice.com/read/drugs-have-been-used-in-pretty-much-every-war-ever-shooting-up
http://www.vice.com/read/the-war-on-drugs-isnt-even-working-in-prison
http://www.vice.com/read/a-cannabis-cook-explains-how-youre-making-edibles-wrong

Reuters reports:

Top gold consumer China launched a yuan-denominated gold benchmark on Tuesday, in an ambitious move to exert more control over pricing of the metal and influence in the global bullion market.

The benchmark is a culmination of efforts by China over the last few years to reform its domestic gold market, attempting to gain a bigger say in the bullion industry, long dominated by London where the global spot benchmark price is set.

As the world's top producer, importer and consumer of gold, China has baulked at depending on a dollar price in international transactions, and believes its market weight should entitle it to set the price of gold.

ZeroHedge continues:

The mechanics of the Shanghai fix are comparable to those of London: the benchmark price will be set twice a day based on a few minutes of trading in each session. The London benchmark, quoted in dollars per ounce, is set via a twice-daily auction on an electronic platform with 12 participants.

The 18 trading members in the yuan price-setting process includes China's big four state-owned banks, foreign banks Standard Chartered and ANZ, the world's top jewelry retailer Chow Tai Fook and two of China's top gold miners.

The first copy of Random Scribblings came about a week ago, and I was happy that there only needed to be some very minor changes to some of the graphics, and the cover needed to be completely redone. They shipped the corrected copy Monday, so I'll probably get it next Monday.
        I'm releasing it on June nineteenth, and having a book release party at George Ranks from noon to two. I'll have copies of books for sale, including the new one that won't be in bookstores until late July at the earliest.
        I'm also raffling off a hardcover copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows. No purchase is necessary but food and drink will be available. I may raffle off a copy of the new book as well.
        So if you're in Springfield Sunday the nineteenth, drop by and say "hi". You may get a free book out of it!

As reported by CBS Local:

“What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there are — there’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama told Fox News. “There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”

As written on a Reuters blog by Peter Van Buren last year:

Employees at the highest levels of access are expected to apply the highest levels of judgment, based on the standards in Executive Order 13526. The government’s basic nondisclosure agreement makes clear the rule is “marked or unmarked classified information.”

In addition, the use of retroactive classification has been tested and approved by the courts, and employees are regularly held accountable for releasing information that was unclassified when they released it, but classified retroactively.

Back on the Fox via CBS story:

“There isn’t a president who’s taken more terrorists off the field than me, over the last seven-and-a-half years,” Obama explained to Fox News. “I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So let’s be very clear about how much I prioritize this: this is my number one job.”

I glanced at yet another smartphone article. The specs table lists support for up to 200 GB of expandable storage for the Samsung Galaxy S7, and 2 TB for the HTC 10 and LG G5. 2 TB SD cards don't exist yet.

2 TB (actually 2 TiB) has been the theoretical maximum capacity for the SD standard for some years now. Although there was an update to the standard recently, it only specified larger block sizes and faster speeds, not capacities greater than 2 TiB. Newer SD cards could hit the limit soon... think 3D QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND, or just the 3D TLC which will become ubiquitous in SSDs soon. Currently, the largest SD card is 512 GB, and the largest MicroSD card is 200 GB. A Falcon 9 Heavy full of 512 GB SD cards would make for some fast data transmission.

All three of the smartphones I mentioned come with a 2560x1440 screen and 4 GB of RAM. Samsung could be the first manufacturer to bump that to 6 GB as soon as next year. With unnecessary specs like these, it's inevitable that they will market smartphones as VR inserts or desktop replacements.

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

People try to put us d-down
Hard for us to get around
Things kids say sound awful c-c-cold
'cause I didn't die before I got old

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all f-fade away
I can't dig what kids all s-s-say
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all fu-fu-fu go away
Forgot what I was going to say
I'm not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

People try to put us d-down
Hard for us to g-g-get around
Things they say sound awful c-c-cold
I didn't die before I got old

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

If you were lucky, you started out in this business writing code because you thought it was fun. You sat down with your first computer ecstatic with all of the possibilities, all of the cool things you could do by programming a computer. It was something to learn and something to master, and you thought, "Wow, this is fun. I can make a great career if I get very good a this."

-- Michael C. Feathers, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, Prentice Hall, 2013.

I suppose they call it a career because you career from disaster to disaster...