iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I do think it's helpful to remember thst a lot of people on here are just having one long continuous argument with what they perceive as some homogeneous bloc of people and it barely matters who you are or what you said, they are just gonna have their argument with you anyway.

040

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 15h

yeah and even to the extent supply isn't fixed it would fire up demand to build a smaller number of massive homes rather than more small ones, encourage people to knock flats together etc etc

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 16h

whereas I can fully believe that there was a decent bit of overcharging going on. So maybe this will actually help a *little* bit, if it makes it harder to do that? I have zero economics, sorry if I am committing some kind of rudimentary fallacy

000

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 16h

oh yeah i just mean that the stable position is surely not going to be 'this place is 20p less than anywhere else'. Maybe supermarkets can use as a loss-leader to a very small extent but apart from that....

210

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 16h

but surely the outcome *should* be that price differences just get flattened, right? If petrol is petrol and the market was working properly there shouldn't really be much variation, no?

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 16h

got a real french fry on their shoulder

010

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 16h

I do quite enjoy the comedy stylings of Gianmarco Soresi and I hope he is not getting notifications from this thread

120

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 16h

It's psychologically quite interesting that you lot can't help but infer the "we're better" even where the people you're arguing with have been at great pains to emphasise how much they *aren't* massive fans of the UK, and have been giving lots of examples of other comparable countries

210

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 17h

It's certainly funny when you do it

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 17h

I rate the United Kingdom *extremely* lowly but I still think we deserve a better calibre of nemesis than these morons. "Uh...the colors on your flag are stupid! Blam! Owned!"

010

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 17h

So do Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands.... There's a thousand things wrong with the UK but the fact *that* is your go-to jibe suggests you are either ignorant or you haven't updated your political views in two and a half centuries.

330

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Tell him you're fine with the breakup but he has to come round and collect his stuff

081

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Yeah the whole idea of the horseshoe is that the extremes of the left-right spectrum are close together in some other dimension, and so the furthest point from that (generally perceived) negative is the centre (of L-R). OP has fully misunderstood the term.

010

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Congratulations councillor! Time to update your bluesky bio i think....

010

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I'm sure the disanalogy is obvious to you in those examples

000

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

One might just as well ask "how can you trust a party that only lets people who pay for the right to have a say to let everyone have a vote" or "how can you trust a party that demands people sign an agreement not to campaign against the party to let opposition parties exist when in power".

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Letting a self-selecting tiny minority of the country decide on your policies is NOT *actual* democracy and any argument that treats the two things as the same is mistaken. Just playing with words. Office politics are not politics. Internal democracy among a few thousand people is not Democracy.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Internal party democracy is not democracy. And it's actually a pretty poor substitute for it. If you have actual democracy - with genuine options for different parties to vote for, easy to set up new parties etc, then you don't need to put so much weight on internal policy debates.

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There's definitely something in this but I feel that even framing their appeal as offering 'solutions' to 'problems' is not quite right. They offer, at most, *validation* of the feeling. And you can always get a hearing by telling people you understand and that someone else is to blame.

0160

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is correct though! Having an (entirely imaginary) state line between you and the sea doesn't necessarily stop a place from being on the coast. Having an actual whole mountain range probably does though.

120

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Good job identifying two people talking across each other early in proceedings!

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The prices are entirely fictional. For every euro you increase housing benefit, rents go up 66c.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I don't know what sense of 'perfectly' you mean but my point wa more that there is so much intervention already (in the form of planning, housing benefits, regulation etc) that refusing to do another intervention like rent controls on the basis that you can't mess with supply and demand is mad.

200

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

But yeah, my understanding is that if price was the main thing that was constraining new supply we definitely wouldn't have a housing shortage now.

000

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I'm certainly not an expert. I do have a thread (and a follow) from the other day to recommend though: bsky.app/profile/beth...

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

(I've followed JBM for years but I prefer it when he does data journalism )

000

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Yeah, even people who are in favour (like me) are quite willing to concede that the first generation type controls did more harm than good in many cases. Almost nobody is advocating for these kinds of policies. It's like doing a meta study on 'psychistry: good or bad?' but including lobotomies.

230

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Housing isn't a properly functioning market anywhere and probably never can be.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

These franchise names are really getting out of control

"Glasgow Warriors and Ulster butt heads in this URC matchup from Scotstoun Stadium."

14610

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Get Ray Winstone on comms for the full effect

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Arguably, by moving to America, he is.

030

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think it's less rare in British English. Possibly most often encountered in the phrase 'a signal failure' but hard to estimate prevalence given dual meaning.

000

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Okay, I feel you're either ignoring or not getting what I'm saying so think I am probably just gonna leave it there.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Supporters of nationalism love talking about 'democracy being denied' and pretending that the obstacle is the UK PM, or the tories, or something. But ultimately we're nowhere near the point of that being the issue. The fundamental obstacle to indy is that half the country doesn't want it.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

we should be a totally separate country on the basis of all of the things you point out. But a majority of scots disagreed in 2014, and as far as we can tell a majority of scots continue to disagree. Until the indy movement *starts* to reckon with that, it's gonna be stuck in this stupid doom loop.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Scotland isn't anywhere near as different as you seem to think. Reform doing upsettingly well up here. The far right marching in many of our cities. On average we're a bit less conservative, but the difference between us and them isn't nearly 'a chasm'. And again - you are entitled to think that

200

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

But my point is that getting 42% of the vote in a holyrood election is NOT evidence that most people's minds have been shifted. Not by brexit, not by anything.

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

But we had a referendum to decide this already. So unless there's evidence of a significant shift in people's opinions it's hard to justify having another one.

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yeah. I've always been pretty careful with my number and really didn't get any spam for years but recently it's gotten really regular.

000

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

So that small part of the city charges, on its own, is probably fairly equivalent to what Rangers did, yeah.

210

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

BTW the bits of the city report about 'image rights' are relatively small beer compared to the sponsorship stuff but the 'dual contracts' thing is really similar to what Rangers got done for in the end.

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Sure but just relevant on the principle of 'you can't strip titles because we won them on the pitch' which was exactly what all the Juve players said about it. And yeah, if rangers hadn't gone under I think there potentially would have been a movement to strip them of the titles they won too....

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

So do you think that Labour getting a majority of MPs across the whole UK means they have a mandate to do everything in their manifesto?

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

No, it's saying it happened but unfairly. Have a read of the calciopoli stuff from italy, when Juve got stripped of a title for 'trying to influence referee selection'. The actual provable effect on the title was pretty disputable. But the cheating was clear.

110

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Again, I genuinely am sorry for how you must be feeling.

100

Big Fez @bigfez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

the opposite, really! And they've pretty much decided not to.

100