jk

life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there

[jk @normal_guy99]

@pipelineclub100 This is bollocks

[jk @normal_guy99]

This 10O%

[Herb Brubanter @HBrubanter]

Flashman by George Mcdonald Fraser.

The entire Flashman series should be required reading as part of school history lessons.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Bottom line

You lose votes by cutting benefits and boosting defence

And losing votes is the more important to you

Shame on you

[Owen @Owennfa]

I hate private equity.

Like, genuinely HATE it.

Not investing. Not business. I hate the specific model where a firm borrows money to buy a company, puts that debt on the company's books, pays itself fees out of the profits, and walks away rich whether it survives or not.

Toys R Us was profitable when they bought it. $5 billion in debt later, 33,000 people were out of work with zero severance.

The firms didn't lose. They never do. The debt isn't theirs.

Nobody's saying capitalism is the problem.

I'm saying there's a version of it where you can bankrupt a company on purpose, and it's legal, and it works every time.

[jk @normal_guy99]

@Richard08156270 Played there and it was one of the most miserable rounds of my life.

[Mike Pesca @pescami]

Ordinary Abundance. This is the greatest thing I've read in weeks. No kidding. This should win a Pulitzer in a category not yet invented. https://t.co/iqnoACNt6z

[jk @normal_guy99]

@ibroxrocks @BigJY1872 100% agree and I can feel myself getting there

[jk @normal_guy99]

@SimonMagus Which is why I always try to use the local shops as often as possible

[jk @normal_guy99]

@theiaincameron It’s a cool place - locals jump off the bridge into the river (once they have collected enough tourist $s)

[jk @normal_guy99]

@TJiMTS Agree on the benefits but you’re assuming that companies have the cash to pay for 12% pension contributions and health insurance.

[jk @normal_guy99]

@israel_ajoje Where are they saying this extra money will come from? What changes to suddenly find extra billions?

[jk @normal_guy99]

@dsav1988 @ygceojennie @BBCScotlandNews This has to be bait - nobody is this stupid

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

There is great confusion about what Decolonization and indeed Colonization means.
The fact is: it means very little except 'a culture or mindset you dont like.' For whatever reason. And that usually means: the West. Since the West decolonized long ago, it really means the Western liberal democracies. It is a smart criticism because it means nothing, and hence it is hard to disagree with nothing and furthermore since the West itself is embroiled in a mix of moral fuddlement, political paralysis and cultural self hatred, you can be sure that Western leaders are very embarrassed by the very use of the word and many in the West will actually agree - even though they are not sure what they are agreeing with. it is a very useful rhetorical tool because Westerns are always going to be worried to answer in any meaningful way other than guilt and shame; and it is a growing industry - perfect for endless conferences. Like this one.
The reality of empires and colonies is something else entirely.
In early modern times, the Ottoman Turks conquered colonized enslaved exploited murdered and forcefully converted millions and ruled a vast tricontinental empire for four centuries; the Western powers led by Spain Portugal France and Britain later joined by Italy Germany Belgium also conquered colonized enslaved exploited murdered and converted using missionaries huge empires across the continents.
The Iberians lost much of their empires first; the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate started to decolonize with the Greek war of independence in 1820s and totally disintegrated in 1918; the British and French decolonized between 1940s and Sixties.
You could argue the Americans and Soviets comported themselves like anti-imperial imperialists during the Cold War and after - and indeed today's America toys at times with neo-tsarist expansionism - Greenland etc .
Thats it - noone in the Legacy Powers Britain or France etc seems keen on colonizing anything now; there are almost no colonizations left to decolonize - though many love to denounce their own country's past which is for some a most enjoyable enriching and virtuous pastime.
But in real life, empire and colonization are happening, often perpetrated by the very proponents of antiWest rhetoric. Russia is attempting to retake its limotrophic empire in Ukraine right now the old -fashioned way: by conquest and killing; a phalanx of Middle East neo-imperial powers are engaged in tournaments of power in failing states like Somalia, Libya and benighted Sudan; Iran established an informal empire across Iraq Syria Lebanon Yemen in its Six Armies strategy - its final destiny as yet undecided on the battlefield of the Third Gulf War; and Turkish leaders now regularly and openly declare their wish to reassert Ottomanist power in former Ottoman vilayets Syria Lebanon Israel, and former Ottoman cities Damascus Beirut Jerusalem....
So imperialism and colonialism just mean: other people, but never you.

[jk @normal_guy99]

@RFCGW Yeah just had a ton of them in the pub - bunch of cvnts - Dublin version

[Alan Smith @AlanJLSmith]

‘Hammer the rich’ - the combined IHT threshold for a married couple (including your home) is £1m, including pension from April.

£500k buys you a 2 bed flat in a London suburb or a 3 bed semi in Croydon.

£500k in a pension buys you about £20k a year income.

If that’s what Labour consider ‘rich’, we’re more even cooked than I thought.

[Andrew Gallimore @alieninsect]

Good example of why it’s important to understand the difference between something that is complex vs complicated.

Complexity emerges from the dynamic interactions between components of a system, often governed by extremely simple rules. The patterns and dynamics that emerge from a complex system sit at the boundary between order and chaos and are often highly variable, hard to predict, and incredibly beautiful. Starling murmurations and snowflakes are complex but they are not complicated. “Soccer” isn’t complicated but it is exquisitely complex.

Complicatedness, on the other hand, is introduced into a system, often by large numbers of different rules, procedures, plans, etc. An aircraft is extremely complicated but it is not complex.

Since designing a system with truly complex emergent behaviour is extremely difficult, sometimes complicatedness is used as a kind of cheap substitute to make something appear more “complex” than it really is.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[jk @normal_guy99]

@GaryLineker Guess you don’t watch Celtic often then Gary…..

[jk @normal_guy99]

@RollingHedge Grim