iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

That is for ghost stories. Not podcast interviews.

030

You can also use a circular polariser to help remove some of the shine. (You can use a linear polariser too, but there’s a risk this will fuck up the autofocus on your camera).

Top tip: if you want to look better move the light to one side. If you’re 12 O’clock and the camera is at 6 O’Clock you want the light between 7 and 8 O’clock - and slightly above eye height.

310

Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 20h

God that is so embarrassing, so embarrassingly behind the trend I mean! Don’t people realise we’re clipping the tiny mics to silly things now? Where have they been all this time? In a cave?!

TickTock thing, man being interviewed by someone holding a tiny mic clipped to a washing up brush

TickTock thing, Zohran Mamdani speaking into a tiny mics clipped clipped to a New York Metro card.

TikTok thing - lady talking into a tiny mics clipped to a fork, in a cafe.

110

Reposted by Colin Elves

It's important to remember that the AI doom scenario assumes not only that intelligence is a single well-defined thing, but also that intelligence solves literally every single problem, and that in every conflict overwhelming intelligence always wins. This is just not how anything works.

9328101

I think the FCDO has to tell the HO to stop trying to cause international incidents on a fairly regular basis. Usually when it’s trying to do things for nakedly political reasons with little evidential basis.

0142

Hardware manufacturers. I started wondering recently if I should buy some Epson stock.

000

The (possibly optimistic) alternative take is an increase in value for human creativity. AI is really good at reproducing the median output so anything that is sufficiently standardised or documented it can do quite well. What it’s not good at (at all) is novelty.

000

bsky.app/profile/coli...

They’re made for walking on babies? The Baby Crusher boots are on sale?

Chris Smith @ledredman.bsky.social · 4h

Reposted by Colin Elves

The higher education sector brings in about £27 billion in foreign earnings to the UK. It's about the same as the car industry. The home office is arbitrarily cutting the income from foreign students in higher education by about 10%. Racism makes us all poorer.

185

Chris Millard @chrismillard83.bsky.social · 5h

Abolish the Home Office.

000

Reposted by Colin Elves

what is insane about university policy these days is how institutions make sweeping changes to all parts of their practice on the assumption or suspicion of what government policy might look like in the future - and the government is still not being clear or proactive or specific

Universities are revoking offers en masse made to international applicants from countries including Nigeria and Pakistan as they fear the UK government’s visa crackdown will result in a ban on their recruiting international students

1199

You ever do the sheep numbers? Yan, tan, tethera etc.

140

I think maybe I see the problem now. These people are simply incapable of understanding the difference between utility and entertainment; between the things you need to do, where a frictionless experience is the ideal, and things you like to do, where friction is desired; between work and play.

The Keminaissance is real.

Olga Nesterova @onestpress.onestnetwork.com · 22h

Reposted by Colin Elves

Navi Pillay receives the news while at the Courtroom 600, Nuremberg Palace of Justice The speech is worth listening to. Video by Sec Gen, Amnesty International, Agnes Callamard

281287444

At least tobacco gets heavily taxed.

Every company and organisation should be required to publish the salary and compensation package it pays every staff member against their official job title so that workers know what everyone else doing their job is getting paid and can therefore negotiate their wages with full market knowledge.

I’m starting to think that taxing the billionaires till the pips squeak and using that money for public investment might be better for the economy than letting those idiots horde all that gold like botoxed dragons.

040

But I thought Britain already had a theory of growth: Step 1 - reduce public spending. Step 2 - ??? Step 3 - growth.

000

I don’t get why they’re burning all this cash and credibility just to suck up to a deeply unpopular man. Trump’s polling numbers absolutely suck even *within* the US and he’s near universally hated everywhere else - why are they so keen to associate their businesses with him?

100

When did we suddenly decide not only were companies no longer responsible for the dangerous products they sell and the harm those products do, but for some reason they aren’t even responsible when they are active participants in that harm? Was it when the money involved got real big?

13010

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 7h

Interesting how we have gone from social media companies saying “we just provide the platform, we are not responsible for the content (that we promote) on our platform” to AI companies saying “we just create the models, we are not responsible for what those models do (following our instructions)”

183

Reposted by Colin Elves

‘Mob rule’ is also, of course, an insulting way of referring to democracy.

2222747

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 20h

As I have repeatedly said: the Meta Pervert glasses will not be banned until people start wearing them to protests and using them to record and to dox police officers.

041

Reposted by Colin Elves

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Taxing Entrepreneurial Wealth: Evidence from
Norway, 2021-2025
Marius A. K. Ring
WORKING PAPER 35854|
DOl 10.3386/w35854
ISSUE DATE October 2026
Whether imposing higher taxes on business owners adversely affects business activity by constraining investment and inducing capitalist flight is a central question in the ongoing debate on how to tax the ultra wealthy. To shed new light, I exploit a series of related Norwegian reforms during 2021-2024 that increased dividend tax rates, removed migration-related capital gains tax loopholes, and nearly doubled the effective marginal tax rate on business wealth. These reforms spurred international debate and, allegedly, an "exodus" of Norwegian billionaires (Financial Times,
2023). While I document clear effects on migration, these responses are concentrated among the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution and mostly confined to 2022 and 2023. My results indicate that at most 100 individuals left due to the reforms. I find no evidence of significant outmigration or reduced inflows of startup founders or inventors. I estimate that absent any outmigration, wealth tax revenues would have increased by 75% from 2021 to 2024. Reform-driven outmigration lowers the revenue gain to 71.5%. My findings further show that outmigrating owners' firms remain economically active and do not reduce investment. In a broader set of analyses, I examine whether business outcomes are affected, regardless of whether owners outmigrate, since firms may reduce investment both due to liquidity constraints or distortions to owners' savings decisions. I compare firms owned by Norwegian individuals subject to the wealth tax with firms owned by foreigners and other tax-exempt entities. By merging historical ownership data from Orbis with the Norwegian shareholder register, I perform these analyses on both Norwegian and foreign-domiciled firms.
Across settings, I find no evidence that Norwegian-owned firms pay out more dividends or invest less after the reforms,…

99100644301

Worth remembering: not only is Trump the Right Wing’s guy, but as a nation we are now powerless to do anything about Trump because of Brexit: the Right Wing’s favoured project. We *had* global power and influence as a major power in the EU, but we gave it up. They made us weak and helpless.

JWexTheSpa @jwsidders.bsky.social · 7h

Reposted by Colin Elves

Today let’s remember the UK right’s collective adoration of Donald Trump. They championed him, said he was far better than the alternative, that he would deliver a New Jerusalem while owning the Libs. As with every other major call of the last 20 years, they were totally and unequivocally wrong.

411431

Reposted by Colin Elves

Eli Rodriguez @liex.bsky.social · 7h

"which I named my personal exec team" god these fucking losers just wanna feel like they're tony stark so bad

11064

Reposted by Colin Elves

thomas irvine @ahermitsvino.bsky.social · 11h

Their "agents" are literally The Wallet Inspector and still they're loyal

21353

It’s never “Trump makes dubious claim prices will fall” or “Reform announces unworkable plan to deport thousands”. For various reasons we as a society have abandoned scepticism for claims favourable to financial elites, reserving it for points of consensus like “vaccines good” or “racism bad”.

131

Part of why he does that (and why our previous government did that too) is because the media will report the announcement as if the future claims were true. It’s always “Diesel Prices to fall after Russia deal” or “Reform UK government will deport hundreds of thousands of foreign born criminals”

121

Trump doesn’t care if diesel prices go down or not. He doesn’t care if Russia exports more diesel or if the strait of Hormuz is open or closed. He’s only interested in opportunities to say “prices will fall because of me, because of this thing I just did”. Whether they do or not is irrelevant.

211

My assumption is that the diesel was never really supposed to come. Like our previous government’s habit of endlessly announcing new policies, schemes, investments, etc that never came to fruition: the announcement *is* the point. It’s only about the headline and bogus claim of lower prices.

121

Colin Elves @colinelves.bsky.social · 16h

Absolutely one of the weirdest things about Trump is how much he hates and despises dogs, and I don’t mean figuratively, he hates literal dogs - that’s why he uses it as an insult so much.

140

They got a guy called Reince Preibus over there. They got a muthafucker called Markwayne Mullens, they got a Saxby Chambliss. I swear they must just dig their hands into a bag full of scrabble tiles snd call the child whatever comes out.

Colin Elves @colinelves.bsky.social · 16h

To be brutally honest I’m just surprised they haven’t yet started forcing the people on death row to fight to the death on pay per view.

Colin Elves @colinelves.bsky.social · 16h

I was quite hopeful about a Burnham premiership, but now I’m worried he’s the most gullible man on the planet. What’s to stop someone convincing him the moon is a hollow orb filled with magic cheese and he should swap Wales for a seat on Elon Musk’s Nazi Lunar rocket? Absolutely nothing.

000

Colin Elves @colinelves.bsky.social · 18h

I think it’s probably just a good that people are forced to be habitually polite as opposed to getting into the habit of acting like an arsehole. You only have to look at X dot com to see what happens when people get away with being an arsehole all the time.

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 18h

Reposted by Colin Elves

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

391173408

Reposted by Colin Elves

one dozen bats at a keyboard @panasonicdx4500.bsky.social · 22h

the Catholic Church racking up PR wins by saying shit like “we shouldn’t bring back public executions” and “your Claude app isn’t sentient”

255396919

Colin Elves @colinelves.bsky.social · 19h

It doesn’t really matter what it is, but if Restore are campaigning for it then you know it’s going to be the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard. Those people *the* worst track record in policies.