SoylentNews

There is an abundance of media and content available online, and in meatspace. This website contributes, and everyone on this site is a part of that. There are 15 stories this site will publish today, none I have touched. We will likely see several hundred comments and dozens of discussions. Many comments will be insightful or interesting, others will be funny, some will be less well received. There will be a small handful of journals like this one.

I try to contribute positively to this site. Perhaps not as much as I could or should, but I would rather do it well and have a constructive experience. When editing stories, I genuinely try to keep a wide scope of interests considered and choose quality submissions. These may not be the most commented on, but my intention is to publish content that is informative or interesting regardless of my own perspective on the subject.

However, most of the content I see and consume is certainly more of the entertainment variety. This is very different from the attitude I have on this site.

I would love to create content that is entertaining, having been in various bands and musical projects for many years in my teens and early 20's. I don't have any concern really over the number of people that would or have seen and enjoyed the music or other content. Some of my favorite musicians have extremely small audiences and short 'careers', it's about the art and expression, creating something from the imagination. It's still sad to see quality music being ignored regardless.

This is the problem. I'd much rather make serious content, to borrow a phrase 'stuff that matters'. People can and do make art and entertaining content far better than I could.

The state of journalism in the entire world is a shambles. There are so many events that need reviewing, context is always missing, contradictory reports are ignored. Every outlet with any reach with full-time 'journalists' are under the control of commercial interests and/or an incoherent bureaucratic mess of government oversight, perhaps wrapped in the guise of independence from government. There are people, by themselves and working with others to improve the situation. The work of people like Tom Secker[1] and Pearse Redmond[2] are quite outstanding examples of independent research and journalism on very important events. The community here seems to be trying. We don't have a big community though, much like Tom and Pearse, the shared perspectives rarely travel beyond a small community.

Options are available to even make a living from writing, I could do it tomorrow. But, I would be writing press releases and other commercial content generation for 'mainstream' consumption. It's not impossible to get work reporting on and for the public sector or political institutions. I can interpret the data, word things however you want to misrepresent it, or direct emphasis to the irrelevant, but that doesn't mean it's a worthwhile or constructive way to spend time and other resources.

Thankfully i've found myself in the situation where my employment is quite flexible, it's very hard work often, but I am not beholden to an employer. I have my morals and ethics and do business a certain way, which is honesty, there is no game. Working for multinationals and smaller companies who are staffed by people with no moral compass, intentionally or by process, i've been there. It's something I can't tolerate or be involved in anymore. A cog in the machine is not the place for me.

There are so many people now, more than ever creating art and writing for a living or as a major part of their lives. Perhaps now just the human experience. I don't feel like I really need to be a part of it, i'd like to spend my energy on the more tangible. It could be amazing, doing something i'm passionate about on a more spiritual sense, being able to focus on the creativity or reporting on current events.

In an ideal world, i'd love to do it all. Entertain, inform and build, be productive. Now though, I don't feel like i'm doing any of that.

The opportunities are numerous, but the downsides are immense. None of the opportunities, which would keep food on my plate, are actually positively contributing to society. Forgetting the aforementioned issues with 'writing' for a living. I can build more houses through subcontracting based on debt [public/private/foreign], for people to buy with more debt, to make sure house prices keep going up so the average home in London costs £1,000,000 by 2020 but the average wage stays around the £25,000 mark. Or it's build a broker/service company, with long winded service contracts and subcontractor agreements to extract as much money as possible from clients and contractors with as minimal obligation, none of it direct, all wrapped up in a nice advertising campaign of bullshit.

It's not about government regulation, it's about systemic corruption of government and the quarterly report obsessed private sector distorting any sense of fair trade and any semblance of actual investigative journalism or reporting. The regulations on smaller businesses don't actually matter as much. The access to discretionary enforcement of the regulations, minimal/zero risk access to multi-million funding, government grants and tailored projects for the 'big' everything. That's before we get onto the just straight up misinformation people in marketing and sales tell as part of their jobs. That's getting closer to the core of the problem.

Back a little more on topic before this hits a thousand words… Bearing all this in mind, I'm lost as to what to do. I'd love to contribute more to this site, it would be a dream to write every day. But really, shouldn't I be building homes for people, not houses for a bank? Shouldn't I be growing food for myself and my neighbors rather than installing some ambient lighting systems in a Michelin star restaurant?

The opportunity is there to make a positive contribution to society, but how can I find a direction?

[1] Tom Secker's work can be found at:
Spy Culture
Investigating the Terror
Boiling Frogs Post
[2] Pearse Redmond's work can be found at:
Porkins Policy Review

_{[Not a big news story but one that set me off ("I've been writing a lot today but all I got was this lousy journal entry"). My own thoughts on velvet revolutions maybe could have made a journal entry but meh the stuff I've got is too obvious. There's other stuff too (the US transsexual the cops murdered (white btw, some ppl must be wearing very strong sunglasses), China reverting to full-on communist dystopia, "Problems of Democracy" (named as a nod to the old US DoD/CIA publication "Problems of Communism"), and something titled "Sinking the Ocean") but all are too complicated and/or unfinished; been hammering away instead of doing sensible things (like checking the 9 SN notifications and 60 or so unread stories, and I'm beat now).]}

Quoting the RT news item (might be good to read it all) quoting Varoufakis:

“The European Union is disintegrating, and it is doing so quite fast,” he [Varoufakis] said. “The process of depoliticizing decision making at the heart of Europe, at our core European institutions” has been ongoing for decades, he said, adding that the EU’s “bureaucratic, technocratic decision-making process” has amounted to “authoritarianism.”

I've realized (some time after writing the following but before posting it) that Varoufakis more than likely knows all of this —he's a smart guy afaik— and maybe he thinks he can do better or add a touch to it or promulgate the core of it more widely into the left. Good for him (and maybe everybody else too), not so much in the quote but in the rest of the linked article he gets the main points right and I'm not going to stand in his way but I'll still say what I say (and I think others would too but that's an assumption although a fairly secure one).

The movement Varoufakis is asking for in the article already exists, it's called the alternative right (or new right) and he's more than welcome to join (I know he partially has of sorts with the Syriza & ANEL combo thing) but he has to leave behind his fear of walls because proper walls would and should keep the roof up above our heads :)

I know he wouldn't be the first.

I know of a person who at least claims to be communist/marxist who votes for the same alternative right party as me (a light™ version though, but decidedly not anything like an old-school conservative party and not particularly ideological). The communist is only voting for them because of their stance against immigration. There should be a lot more like him by now. In fact many of the alternative right parties are very much centrist or even leftist on some issues, much more so than one would think from eating the garbage served by MSM as well as all the competing non-alt-right parties.

The simple general summary of alt-right politics is: "people want to keep what they had and which they and those before them fought for, thank you very much".

That might sound conservative but the "conservatives" (in Europe as in the US) are rotting away what should be preserved (the puns are illustrative as well as true so I'll leave them there). Issues like "immigration", and/or welfare, and/or tuition fees, and/or international treaties all point back to the central issue of sovereignty which in turn is tightly coupled with freedom and actual democracy: rule by the people (which is what Varoufakis is asking for).

Also note that the "conservatives" (Republicans, Tories, whatever) are doing the damage together with their "supposed enemies" the social democrats (or still worse: "christian" democrats) and labor movements, even Corbin (and maybe not Yaroufakis either) doesn't seem to get exactly what is going on yet —that's ideology for you.

When you realize they're all operating way past their sell-by date (and they don't keep) you vote alternative. Sucks for those in the US, they've got none but have to make do with weird ones be it Green ("yuck") or Libertarian ("need more meds") or maybe Trump as a King Kong Godzilla hybrid.

_{[feel free to skip over these personal tidbits]
While I've never been voting to the left myself I've long long ago voted for a socially and partially financially libertarian party before I figured out they (locally, but later on the same happened in Britain) were predominantly idiots and liars pandering to the powers-that-be.}

_{Sure I was a better person back then, perhaps. And I was an even better person when I was a four year old. That's what experience, knowledge, and insight should do to people if you ask me; they should wise up. The fact they don't always do is quite depressing for the rest of us but oh boy must they live charmed lives or be incredibly dense. Sorry to any insulted septuagenarians (I know at least one which should be deeply insulted and rightfully so) but it's true :P
[personal stuff done with]}

Anyway the EU in the form as it exists will not, can not, and should not continue to exist. It is more broken that functional and it has created bigger problems than it solved. It has much more in common with nazism and international/soviet communism and their shared feverish and quite deranged dreams of "unity" (under their boot) than anything remotely democratic. The sensible things can be done without them on a completely voluntary opt-in basis. Forced "cooperation" isn't, and neither is forced "charity".

_{Alternative Internet Archive link. I notice that some people are doing various things to attempt to secure documentation and others again are talking openly about lists of people and actions. A single particularly offensive incident but there are tens of thousands more "hidden" away (even if Rotherham should be unique which is kind of a wild assumption).}

The EU is the failure of the totalitarians (authoritarians is too weak a description for them) no matter what political color and ideology they hide behind. We got there quicker than the US that's all.

Now if only more actual nazis, few as they are, could realize that the powers they imagine fighting themselves against are the marriage of the descendants of the old nazis and and the old commies, and if they (as well as the far left) could in such a manner realize their own folly then we would be even better off here in the alt-right camp.

The door is still open for now.

Sort of off topic: if anyone has any particularly insightful to say (or link to) regarding the velvet revolutions at the fall of the Soviet empire then I'm all ears, especially if it's anything non-obvious. Living through it in western Europe (as well as as before it) only goes so far and a few years later I moved elsewhere out of Europe for some years before returning so there might even be things in the aftermath that I've completely missed (although I don't think so).

The situation in Europe is already violent (still mostly from the "refugees") so it won't be exactly the same but there are some similarities, maybe, if the governments know what's good for them.

P.s. fuck Turkey & pipsqueak "Adolf" Erdogan ("Hitler in falsetto"), I hope Russia nukes him (I know they won't, and yes I'm exaggerating) :)

I've taken the liberty of setting up a folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington's.

There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.

Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!

That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.

On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.

tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319

Wait, what?

Alex Jones: Banning order for fan who tweeted he loved presenter

A fan who bombarded the BBC's Alex Jones with tweets declaring he was in love with her has been banned from any contact with the Welsh TV presenter.

Shane Goldsmith sent the 38-year-old One Show star a string of messages for 17 months and waited outside the BBC's headquarters to tell her he loved her.

A judge imposed a restraining order which also bars him from the BBC's New Broadcasting House in central London.

Mr Goldsmith, 44, was formally cleared of a single charge of harassment.

'Armani Communist' divides China

When Liu Bo attended a regional communist party event as the official ambassador of local students it wasn't his youthful demeanour which made the biggest impression.

Nor was it the remarks which the 14-year-old made to the Shenzhen People's Political Consultative Conference, calling for the greater use of non-exam based assessments in the Chinese education system.
What made people stare, and what rapidly become a major topic of conversation as photos of Liu spread across Chinese social media this week, was what he was wearing.

Around his neck was a red scarf of the type worn by Chairman Mao's Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and now standard issue wear for the Communist Party Youth League. But Liu had paired that with what was taken to be an Armani suit, because of the lapel badge he was wearing with the distinctive logo of the Italian luxury brand.

In the eyes of many Chinese observers this was not so much a wardrobe malfunction as a clash of ideologies in a single outfit. Some on China's micro blogging platform Weibo dubbed Liu the "Armani Youngster" and attacked his choice of clothing.

PM left red nosed by censorship protest

When Malaysian police warned activist and graphic designer Fahmi Reza that his Twitter account was under surveillance after he posted an image of the prime minister, Najib Razak, as a clown, they probably hoped such behaviour would stop.

But then members of an art collective, Grupa posted even more clownish images of the premier to express their solidarity with him and to champion the ideal of free speech.

The pictures have spread across social media with the hashtag #KitaSemuaPenghasut which translates as "we are all seditious".

Fahmi's mockery of the prime minister was part of a wider reaction to news last week, when the country's attorney-general cleared Mr Najib of any corruption relating to a long-running financial scandal.

too-lazy-to-sub dept.

James Reinders: Parallelism Has Crossed a Threshold

Is the parallel everything era here? What happens when you can assume parallel cores? In the second half of our in-depth interview, Intel’s James Reinders discusses the fading out of single-core machines and the ramifications of the democratization of parallel computing, remarking “we don’t need to worry about single-core processors anymore and that’s pretty significant in the world of programming for this next decade.” Other topics covered include the intentions behind OpenHPC and trends to watch in 2016.

First half: A Conversation with James Reinders

So, looks like the 16.02 site upgrade is mostly going to be a features upgrade rather than a bugfix upgrade, though there's some of that as well. There's one thing going in that there's an outside chance may annoy some people though: the new mobile layout. To be very clear on this, the mobile layout will be served to anyone with a horizontal screen (not browser window) resolution of 800 pixels or less. The only way you'll see it on your desktop is if you're still running 800x600 or lower resolution, in which case you really should get with the whole 21st century technology thing.

We're going to be doing the site upgrade the first weekend of February but if you want to give it a look early head over to https://dev.soylentnews.org/ and have a look around. Bear in mind we ain't foisting beta code on you lot with this, we're foisting pre-alpha code that took all of maybe half an hour to do up on you. This is not what the finished product will look like, it's just something to make life easier on mobile users while we write up something that doesn't suck. If it sucks too hard and you all bitch that you want the old layout back though, it's a matter of minutes to fix and revert until we have something worth calling a proper mobile interface.

Let me know what you think here.

Sensors, not CPUs, are the tech that swings the smartphone market

Flash back a quarter of a century: I’m sourcing components for a consumer virtual reality system. An accelerometer is an absolute necessity in a head-mounted display, because it senses the motion of the head. Accelerometers exist in silicon, but priced at US$25 apiece, their only customer is the automotive industry - sensors used to trigger deployment of the airbags in a crash.

In the end, I invented my own sensor, because silicon accelerometers cost too much.

A few hundred million smartphones later, accelerometers and gyroscopes have become cheap as chips. Literally. From twenty-five dollars to less than twenty-five cents, the conjunction of Moore’s Law and Steve Jobs made these sensors cheap and abundant.

With many smartphones using high-quality accelerometer/gyroscope sensors, the groundwork had been laid for Google’s Cardboard - really no more than a cheap set of plastic lenses set at the right distance from a smartphone screen. Everything else about the Cardboard experience happened inside the smartphone - because the smartphone suddenly had the right suite of sensors to generate a head-tracking display.

Theoretically, Google’s Cardboard should give you the same smooth virtual reality experience as Samsung’s Gear VR. But it’s like chalk and cheese: Cardboard does the job, but it always feels as though you’re fighting the hardware, where Gear VR feels as comfortable as an old shoe.

The reason for that lies with the sensors built into Gear VR. Oculus CTO John Carmack worked with Samsung to specify an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor suite that could feed Samsung's flagship Galaxy S6 smartmobe with a thousand updates a second. The average sensors, on a typical smartphone - even the very powerful Galaxy S6 - won’t come anywhere near that.

Head tracking can only be as good as the sensors used to track the head. The proof of this is the difference between Galaxy S6 in Cardboard, and Galaxy S6 in Gear VR - try both and see for yourself.

This is one bleeding edge in the smartphone sensor arms race. Within the next eighteen months, every high-end smartphone will specify incredibly sensitive and fast accelerometers and gyroscopes. Smartphones work well both in the palm of your hand and when mounted over your eyes. Every major manufacturer will have their own Gear VR-like plastic case for wearing their latest top-of-the-line handset. Except at the very high end - the province of serious gamers and information designers - smartphones and VR will become entirely interchangeable.

[...] Back during the Cold War, the Soviets were caught out shining laser beams onto the windows at the White House, reading voices out of the reflections. The White House responded by pointing speakers at their windows, playing music just loud enough to drown out any other signal. We may need a new app for our smartphones, one that keeps just enough music piping out its speaker to confound anyone using our newly sensitive accelerometers against us.

Rouhani in Europe: Italy covers nudes for Iran president

Italian hospitality for the visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has stretched to covering up nude statues.

Mr Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi spoke at Rome's Capitoline Museum after Italian firms signed business deals with Iran.

But several nudes there were hidden to avoid offending the Iranian president.

Italy also chose not to serve wine at official meals, a gesture France, where Mr Rouhani travels next, has refused to copy.

An Islamic republic, Iran has strict laws governing the consumption of alcohol.

Mr Rouhani is in Europe on a five-day tour seeking to boost economic ties after the implementation of a deal on rolling back Iran's nuclear activity saw sanctions lifted.

"Iran is the safest and most stable country of the entire region," the Iranian president told Italian business leaders.

He also stressed growth would be key to combating extremism, saying "unemployment creates soldiers for terrorists".

Monday saw contracts worth around €17bn ($18.4bn; £12bn) signed between Iran and Italian companies.

On Tuesday, Mr Rouhani also met Pope Francis, who urged Iran to work with other Middle Eastern countries against terrorism and arms trafficking, the Vatican said.

Mighty No. 9 Suffers Another Delay, Inafune "Sincerely Sorry" for Disappointing Fans

Mighty No. 9, Keiji Inafune's spiritual successor to Mega Man, has been delayed again. The announcement was made in an update to Kickstarter backers, where Inafune--who created Mega Man along with a number of iconic properties for Capcom, before leaving in 2010--explained developer Comcept encountered "critical" issues in the game's online matchmaking.

Keiji Inafune’s Mighty No. 9 delayed … again

Mighty No. 9 is a lesson for future Kickstarters