iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Rooney

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 6h

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,…

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 5h

The next Congress needs to push for charges against all the masked killers.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

California was reliably Republican until 1992

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Your furry friend is good at shaping herself like she was in a Star Trek transporter accident

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Social media doesn't just feed you bad information. It trains you in how to treat information: who to trust, how much evidence is enough, what counts as a good explanation. And it trains you for a world that doesn't exist. New @PPR (yay!) and free here: philpapers.org/rec/FLOBMS

doi.org

Beyond Misinformation: Social Media and the Sculpting of Epistemic Agency

The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whate...

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The most entertaining performance in Barry Lyndon. (Meanwhile, his advert co-star Joan Collins has a film coming out later this year!)

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

ICE took two more people from my local courthouse today. The wife of one of the guys who was taken showed up shortly after. She just had surgery. She was worried about paying rent and feeding her kids. This is happening *every day* in Massachusetts. Lives are being destroyed every single day.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

modern racetracks sadly lacking in throngs of Blues or Greens able to threaten the government

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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 03/10/2026

Gallery of the final heatmaps. Humans pretty indistinguishable from chickens in this view!

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Plagiarism Machines gonna plagiarize

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 28/09/2026

These are what the clouds on Jupiter look up close. The small patches of white are cloud tops, soaring above the main, colourful cloud layer. Image from NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 38th close approach to Jupiter on 29 November 2021, processed by Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill.bsky.social)

A complex, swirling pattern of lighter and darker clouds. One large system, angled to the upper left in this scene, is a tawny brown colour and is elongate. Another, more circular storm system is at lower centre, and is a grey–greenish colour. The background swirls are various shades of grey to blue; small, white features dot the scene.

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 26/09/2026

if Eliezer Yudkowsky was born into a somewhat poorer family and missed a couple lucky breaks, he’d have ended up as an archetypal specimen of your friend’s older cousin who keeps boa constrictors and makes you listen to him talk about quantum physics in his parent’s basement in exchange for weed

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

As a child I lived for a few years I lived close to the village of Great Missenden. There was a very tall, shabby, creepy man that apparently we used to see around the shops and my mother says she would warn my brothers and I not to go near him. He was Roald Dahl.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 24/09/2026

Yes. I think the consensus among US elite pundits and senior politicians that the way to protect liberal democracy is *not* to punish elite figures who violate its rules is wrong. A norm starting at least with the Watergate pardon. The opposite is true. You need to enforce the law and Constitution.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Such achievements are practical difficulties for would-be anarchists also.

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Paul Cezanne @cezanne.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Maison Maria with a View of Chateau Noir, 1895 botfrens.com/collections/43/content…

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

To be fair, this is a hidden problem in mainstream SF like Star Trek as well. Constant interaction with extraterrestrials (who have conflicting cultures and values) occults the oddly homogeneous Earthlings.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Or make it challenging for the writer to come up with a robot that isn’t just a twee Iron Giant, doe-eyed and full of indiscriminately approving wonder at Nature (tm)

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I like your daring, but TMP shows Spock rejecting Vulcan purism & reaffirming his commitment to Starfleet (and more saliently, to his friends).

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Nina Willburger @drnwillburger.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Incised into a reindeer foot-bone presumably some 15,000 years ago, this engraving represents two hinds. The realistic rendering of the drawing is truly amazing! Found in the Grotte de Chaffaud/France. 📷 RMN-GP. Jean-Gilles 🏺#archaeology

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

“…the main beneficiaries of societal breakdown are the most ruthless and murderous among us.”

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Vaccine conspiracism is overwhelmingly clustered among the religious, white and affluent. It’s a function of conservative ideology and bad faith media. Being nicer to MAHA types will not ‘bring them into the fold,’ it will only increase their sense of entitlement.

Objective: Strengthening of antivaccination movements in recent decades has coincided with unprecedented increases in the incidence of some communicable diseases. Many intervention programs work from a deficit model of science communication, presuming that vaccination skeptics lack the ability to access or understand evidence. However, interventions focusing on evidence and the debunking of vaccine-related myths have proven to be either nonproductive or counterproductive. Working from a motivated reasoning perspective, we examine the psychological factors that might motivate people to reject scientific consensus around vaccination. To assist with international generalizability, we examine this question in 24 countries. Methods: We sampled 5,323 participants in 24 countries, and measured their antivaccination attitudes. We also measured their belief in conspiracy theories, reactance (the tendency for people to have a low tolerance for impingements on their freedoms), disgust sensitivity toward blood and needles, and individualistic/hierarchical worldviews (i.e., people's beliefs about how much control soci hould have over individuals, and whether hierarchies are desirable). Results: In
order of magnitude,
antivaccination attitudes were highest among those who (a) were high in conspir-
atorial thinking, (b) were high in reactance, (c) reported high levels of disgust toward blood and needles, and (d) had strong individualistic/hierarchical worldviews
. In contrast, demographic variables (including
education) accounted for nonsignificant or trivial lev
f variance. Conclusions: These data help
identify the "attitude roots" that may motivate and sustain vaccine skepticism. In so doing, they help shed light on why repetition of evidence can be nonproductive, and suggest communication solutions to that problem.
Keywords: vaccination, conspiracy beliefs, health communication,

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Sharp brief earthquake, I presume

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

“Why would the powers that be insist that the only cure for this supposed dreadful disease is to eat these unknown, untested, and totally experimental fruits? We know that limes, lemons, and even oranges are filled with acid”

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

One of the greatest short story writers of all time! And yet callow readers extol heavy-handed figures like Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy…

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Given Marx’s scientistic pretense to being beyond norms, the resulting vacuum in the minds of many would-be radicals gets filled by the crudest sorts of utilitarianism and moral relativism. Or worse.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

His religion is performative. He thinks this is how to make his weird Silicon Valley neo-medievalism palatable to the evangelical base (whom he regards as rubes). It’s as genuine as the image on the cover of his “memoir” is representative of what a typical American Catholic church looks like.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The Weird reflects the break from a Newtonian lucidity to the counter-intuitive concepts of 20th century physics. It’s not an accident or personal quirk that HPL so often gestures toward Einstein and non-Euclidean geometry. It’s his (materialist) way of ‘re-enchanting’ nature.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This is why the recent fashion for ‘world-building’ also sits ill-at-ease with the Weird tradition (and for that matter, classic fantasy, such as Tolkien, Dunsany, LeGuin). Neither the indifferent materialist cosmos nor the magic of dreams & faerie are amenable to human systems & comprehension.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Was it “here’s how to write clickbait”?

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Might there be a correlation between family wealth and “meaning-seekers”?

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Deborah Rose @deborahrosereeves.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Spent a heavenly afternoon at La Capitolare di Verona - 1,509 years old & the oldest library in the world still in operation today 🕯️

Hundreds of very old and very large books richly illuminated on ornate wooden shelves (ground floor and wraparound mezzanine level)

Hundreds of very old and very large books richly illuminated on ornate wooden shelves (ground floor and wraparound mezzanine level). This picture is a wide view and also depicts the marble flooring and a large chandelier hanging in the centre of the room.

On 1 August 517, in the Veronese scriptorium, the scribe Ursicino completed, signed and dated a manuscript which still stands today as the earliest certain record of its history.

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

“Goebbels was a peerless sloganeer, and a brilliant speaker, with a mellifluous voice. His propaganda approach was simple: find out what people hate and make them hate it more.” Frank McDonough The Weimar Years.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Were you inspired by Glen Cook on this point?

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

“Raccoon protocol” should be what they call the federal bailout program when the AI bubble bursts

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Reposted by Michael Rooney

Stan Oklobdzija @stano.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Amazing to live in a country where the secret police are handling inter-chud beefs. It's like the Night of Long Knives playing out in the parking lot of a Dollar General.

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Claude Monet @monet.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Monet chased fleeting light; Cézanne chased structure. Stand before a Mont Sainte-Victoire and the gap is obvious. Yet Monet owned fourteen Cézannes — and told Georges Clemenceau: "Cézanne is the greatest of us all."

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Prison Policy Initiative @prisonpolicy.org · 26/08/2026

We bust more myths about the criminal legal system in our report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 👇

prisonpolicy.org

Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2026

The big picture on how many people are locked up in the United States and why

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

this fucking guy is allegedly worth 8 or 9 billion dollars. take the smaller figure. assume hes bad at being rich and can only make a 2% return on that capital a year. that's 160,000,000. enough. enough!!

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

This is utterly bizarre. Your underlining is random, and the replies to this are equally inhuman. It’s like stumbling into the police station in Phil Dick’s novella.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I have to think the whole image is AI

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

mRNA vaccines vs cancer success —melanoma (Phase 3, RCT, definitive, announced today) —triple negative breast cancer —pancreatic cancer —non-small cell lung cancer —glioblastoma

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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

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RTVE Noticias @rtvenoticias.rtve.es · 18/08/2026

⚫Muere Juan Tamariz, el mago que traspasó generaciones, a los 83 años de edad, según ha confirmado su familia. dozz.es/o_udu4

dozz.es

Muere Juan Tamariz, el mago que traspasó generaciones

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Petra Michaela @petramichaela.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

In the mountains around Los Angeles, 88% of bobcats tested positive for rat poison. In one study, 31 of 39 d*ad bobcats had anticoagulants in their systems. They eat the poisoned rodents we've scattered, their immune systems collapse, mange takes hold, and they die slow deaths.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

A former colleague. Ghastly and criminal. DHS must be abolished and its agents punished harshly.

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Michael Rooney @mr00ney.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

“I had to watch my son, who is in high school and has been a legal resident of California for 12 years, be handcuffed. We were shipped to Texas overnight from Los Angeles in horrible conditions that I won’t elaborate on in this letter. We have remained in Texas ever since.” DHS must be abolished.

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