Daily Archives: July 10, 2017

FaZe Rain Explains His Absence From YouTube

Nordan FaZe Rain Shat speaks on his decrease in ad revenue on recent YouTube videos throughout his channel, and why he took a hiatus.

One of the owners of FaZe Clan, Rain discusses the fact thathis channel has been hit hard by a lack of revenue in recent months.

Multiple full-time YouTubers have expressed their discontent with the new way the platform handles revenue for potentially explicit content, and Rain has been plaguedwith the same issue.

He begins with the fact that his channel, one now with five million subscribers, has been making less than ten percent of what it originally had been.

Although he makes similar content to his roommates, Rain goes on to mention how he believes he is being treated unfairly by the platform.

Hows that going to make me feel? It makes me feel as if Im being mistreated or not being treated the same way. It makes me feel all these things and for what? For me being myself?

Continuing on, he assumes that he started to generate less revenue when he was uploading vape content, and quit using that genre for its potential adult oriented tag.

Later, he goes on to rant against the recent change in the YouTube platform. Rain originally loved being able to be himself while uploading videos, yet he believes the push for creators to fit into a character role has left a sour feeling for many in the community.

Fulfillment from having the ability to upload videos that he enjoys and provide for his family/ friends is his main drive and resents the fact that he may need to change his content in order to continue making money from uploading.

The full video can be found below, with his explanation beginning at the fourteen-minute mark.

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Now that he has found a new outlook on the situation, Rain believes that he has nowhere to go but up.

With his state of mind regained, motivation will become second nature again for the veteran content creator.

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Originally posted here:

FaZe Rain Explains His Absence From YouTube - Dexerto

Nest just launched in Australia, and its Google-connected, Alphabet-backed smart home products want to make your life safer and more comfortable. Here's how much you'll pay for one or more of Nest's new connected home gadgets, and when and how you'll be able to get hold of one.

One important note: the new Nest Cam IQ isn't being sold in Australia at launch, nor is the original Nest Learning Thermostat.

The Nest Protect is a connected smoke and carbon monoxide alarm that's a lot more serious than your regular $15 Bunnings special when it comes to monitoring the air inside your home. Its industrial-grade smoke sensor isn't too different to the one you'd find in a regular smoke alarm, though; what's different is all the extras that it packs in. The Protect checks itself regularly, has an internal microphone and speaker for two-way communication, and can be entirely controlled from your phone and also lights up a dark empty room with a soft night light when it detects motion.

The Nest Protect will be $189 in Australia, and it's on sale from today.

The microUSB-powered Nest Cam Indoor is a Wi-Fi connected, hard-wired (for power, at least) security camera with a 130-degree wide-angle lens and 1080p imaging sensor for daylight, low-light and night-time recording with the help of a bank of super-bright infrared LEDs. Nest's cameras also have a built-in microphone and speaker, so you can have a two-way chat with whoever's within around 6 metres distance of the camera itself.

Nest's Cam Indoor and Outdoor cameras have adjustable bit-rate streaming, so you can upload in 360p, 720p or 1080p depending on how good your 'net is and how many you have uploading simultaneously around your house. Bit-rates are dynamically adjusted on the fly, too, so you'll get a lower bandwidth and more compressed video if your home internet upload is struggling.

The Nest Cam Indoor will be $319.95 in Australia, and it's on sale from today.

The Nest Cam Outdoor has the exact same internal components as the Indoor version a 130-degree wide-angle lens and a 1080p HD image sensor, with the ability to zoom up to 8x digitally on live and archival video as well as the same infrared night vision. Because the Outdoor is hard-wired, it's actively capturing video and storing it in your Nest account for three hours (and for up to 30 days, if you're subscribed to Nest Aware), unlike entirely wireless outdoor cameras that activate based on motion or noise. It's also IP65 rated, so can handle some pretty seriously harsh weather conditions, and mounts to your wall with a solid magnetic puck.

The Nest Cam Outdoor will be $319.95 in Australia, and it too is on sale from today.

Nest Aware is the cloud-based subscription service that ties together all of Nest's remote-recording security cameras, with 10 days of recording history that you can scrub through in real time on your phone, and the ability to pre-select activity zones (like doors or windows) for alerts. You can also add on extra cameras for 50 per cent of the original asking price for each extra subscription.

A monthly subscription to Nest Aware will set you back $14 a month, and you can start and stop the subscription any time you want which makes a lot of sense if you're going on holiday and want that extra peace of mind.

Now this is the interesting part. Nest is teaming up with iSelect to sell its products in Australia in something that iSelect is calling the "Life Admin Store". You'll be able to buy any of the Nest products outright, or bundled at a discount with iSelect's other partners like Optus, Sumo Power and Mate Communicate.

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Last week South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced he would take Elon Musk up on his offer to power the state, with the world's largest lithium ion battery set to be installed in collaboration with French renewable company Neoen and the State Government. But will it solve the state's power woes? Australian experts weigh in below.

Tailgating is the leading cause of rear-end crashes, with half of drivers failing to keep a safe following distance, a new report has revealed.

Read more:

Nest Protect, Nest Cam Indoor, Nest Cam Outdoor: Australian Price & Release Date - Gizmodo Australia

Jason Kander doesnt feel like a loser.

He doesnt feel much like a millennial either, whatever that means.

But having lost his bid to represent Missouri in the United States Senate at the age of 35 last year, he is, technically, both of those things. And so, on a recent Wednesday evening, one of the oldest, losing-est millennials in American politics headed to the annual gathering of the High School Democrats of America to speak about, what else, the future of their party.

We are, believe it or not, in the same generation, Kander, now 36, told the group of about 100 17-year-olds seated in a George Washington University auditorium. Its our generation that will have to fix all this stuff.

He might seem like an odd person to deliver this message, considering that voters decided against sending him to Washington to be the fixer of things. But Kander still has a lot to offer and Democrats arent in a position to turn away young talent.

The Army veteran and former Missouri secretary of state rose to national prominence thanks to a quirky campaign ad in which he assembled a rifle blindfolded; he went on to outperform Hillary Clinton by 16 percentage points in his state, winning over about 200,000 voters who also pulled the lever for Donald Trump. But in the end, he came up just short against the Republican incumbent, Sen. Roy Blunt.

Kander wasted no time turning a loss into a win. He started a nonprofit aimed at fighting voter suppression, giving him a campaign-like infrastructure to raise money for Democratic candidates and speak at events throughout the country. In the past six months he has been to Iowa and New Hampshire twice and attended events in Colorado, Arizona and Tennessee, to name a few. He has even visited Wisconsin as many times as Clinton did during the presidential campaign (once).

So when Kander speaks in front of groups such as this, they dont ask what gives him the right to lecture anyone about the path forward. Instead, people say things like this:

Im wondering, a young woman from New York broached during his Q&A segment, if you will ever run for president.

Kander seemed unfazed by the question or the applause it generated. It is always very flattering when people ask that, he replied. Im just really focused on making sure we still hold elections. And then maybe one day Ill be in one.

Democrats are desperate for something, for someone, to get excited about and these days, some of their most thrilling figures are losers. None more so than Jason Kander.

In 1996, the author Michael Lewis spent 10 months following the presidential candidates he knew would never win, for a book he titled Trail Fever. He wanted to call it Losers, he wrote later, but the publisher said no.

Never mind that the losers, and their passions, told you a great deal more about American political life in 1996 than the winners with their pollsters, he wrote in an afterword. It was the losers, he contended, who took real risks, who shaped debates and from whom the focus-grouped weenies who actually won stole their best ideas.

Today, with their party out of power in the White House and Congress, some Democrats are chanting Bernie would have won about Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who lost. Others are looking to Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), now best known as the also-rans in the race for Democratic National Committee chair, as leaders of the future.

Im biased, but I think that you can accomplish more with a transformative loss than with 100 mundane victories, said Tom Perriello, the young liberal who maintained such hero status after losing the central Virginia congressional seat he held for one term that he was hailed as a game-changer when he entered the 2017 Democratic gubernatorial primary (which he lost).

Hows that?

Well, said P.G. Sittenfeld, a 32-year old councilman from Cincinnati who last year lost the Democratic Senate primary in Ohio, even a losing campaign can show theres a hunger for fresh voices.

[Beto ORourke is a Mexico-loving liberal in Texas. Can he really beat Ted Cruz?]

Sittenfeld didnt become a senator, but his voice mail is full of Democrats urging him to run for the House of Representatives. Perriello didnt get to become governor, but hes stumping for the Democratic nominee, Ralph Northam, and he takes pride in helping the state party lurch leftward.

The party is yearning to figure out its next-generation leaders, said Brian Fallon, who was Hillary Clintons campaign spokesman. Theres a void, and people are hungry to figure out who could potentially fill it.

And Kander has raised his profile so much since the election that many have been wondering whether he might be better off than had he won.

I dont know about that, said Abe Rakov, Kanders former campaign manager and longtime political guru. But from his personal perspective, he is happier than Ive ever seen him. Hes fighting the battles he wants to every day and doesnt have to do some of the things hed have to had he won.

In 2016, Kander was widely considered the best Democratic recruit running for Senate. He had the look: young and fit, a guy comfortable in a skinny tie or fatigues. He had the life story: Married to his high school sweetheart, he had joined the military after 9/11, served in Afghanistan and came home to enter politics, eventually becoming the first millennial to hold statewide office in the country.

And perhaps most impressive for a politician, he kind of seemed like a normal guy.

Thats a compliment reserved only for politicians, Kander said, eating sliders at a Foggy Bottom TGI Fridays recently. You never hear someone say: You know what I love about my accountant? Hes just a normal guy. Thats how low the bar is for people in politics.

But to a lot of folks in the Democratic Party, theres nothing normal about his charisma.

There is a reflectiveness, a coolness, a reasonable approach to talking about politics that he shares with President Obama, said Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the Obama White House. And bear in mind: Obama did lose his first race for federal office, too, said Dan Pfeiffer, another veteran of the 44th presidents communications shop.

[Jon Tester could teach Democrats a lot about rural America if he can keep his Senate seat]

The night Kander lost, he stood in front of a ballroom of supporters in a neatly pressed suit to offer a concession speech he hadnt bothered to prepare beforehand. He urged young people not to give up on politics, that it would personally offend him if they did.

Youve got to pick yourself up, he said. Thats what Im going to do.

Shortly thereafter, Trump began proclaiming, without a shred of evidence, that millions had voted illegally to rob him of a popular-vote victory and Kander found his new mission.

Thats the biggest lie a sitting president has ever told, he says now.

Kander saw potential for genuine harm in this groundless boast: Republicans, he feared, could use this bogus claim to usher in efforts to make it more difficult for some people to vote, such as stringent photo-ID requirements. He wanted to be the guy to keep that from happening.

So he created Let America Vote, an organization dedicated to ousting Republicans he considered to be on the wrong side of the issue. So far, the group has raised nearly $2million and has more than 50,000 people nationwide signed up to volunteer.

Its a platform that has kept Kander in the public eye, especially now that Trump has moved forward with establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Tasked with proving the presidents claims of voter fraud, Kris Kobach, commission vice chairman and Kansas secretary of state, recently asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to provide him with all of their voter data a request that many have pushed back against.

Hes like a bizarro me, Kander said of his neighbor-state political colleague. One of us is working for good, and the other is Kris Kobach.

Meanwhile, Kander has a contract to talk politics on CNN and has developed a knack for jousting with far-right-wing bloviators on Twitter. He speaks to Democratic groups about progressive values and what it took to almost win in a red state being a progressive (Voters are okay with you believing something they dont believe, as long as they think you genuinely believe it, and you believe it because you care about them.), and tries to remind a despondent party that maybe there are still some reasons for optimism.

Or, if you will, hope.

Before speaking to the High School Democrats, Kander made a surprise appearance at a rally against the Republicans health-care bill, held outside the Capitol. Police tape kept him, and protesters, away from the building where he might have been casting a vote to save Obamacare, had things broken differently for him in November.

Yet in this crowd, it was as if he had won that race and was on his way to something bigger. Mobs of young activists hounded him for photos.

Can I take a snap with you? asked Jessica Blum, 23.

Can I take a snap, too? asked Meghan Mahoney, also 23.

Kander moved on, to join the hosts of the popular liberal podcast Pod Save America as they did a broadcast from the scene, and the young activists walked away, uploading their photos to social media.

Its just really refreshing to see someone like Jason out here, Blum said. Hes hope at a moment when there isnt any hope.

If he runs for something again, Im moving there to help him, Mahoney said. Wherever it is. I dont care. Im there.

Dave Weigel contributed to this report.

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Jason Kander lost a big Senate race. In today's Democratic Party, he's still a rising star. - Washington Post