If the ONS is systematically overestimating inflation, that isn't just a data problem: it causes actual price rises to go higher because lots of bills are linked to the official figures observer.co.uk/news/busines...

I can’t pay rent with a chart, Matts. I can’t eat a median. All I can FEEL in m my day-to-day lived experience is the difference between actual real gdp per capita (excluding transfers) and a linear trend-line over the 2000-2019 window.

This makes me reflect on my own interest in economic science, which is not my field but nonetheless has had a surprisingly large impact on me, especially as it pertains to the debunking of misinformation. 🧵

John Rentoul's parents are fighting ☹️

Congrats to Julie K. Brown! She was awarded a #Pulitzer Prize special citation today for her groundbreaking reporting in 2017 & 2018 for the Miami Herald exposing Jeffrey Epstein's systematic abuse of young women and the justice system & powerful network of associates that protected him for years.

A bogus story is posted to tiktok. It circulates around the other social media sites. Reddit says that it's bullshit and bluesky falls for it. How the fuck are you dumber than reddit? Before I joined bsky I wouldn't have thought it was possible to be dumber than reddit, aside from YouTube comments.

It's @besttrousers.bsky.social on Neon Liberalism. This is not a drill.

"I have to hedge anything vaguely positive I say lest I be punished" is a fucking abuse dynamic. We've all been roped into a toxic relationship with a sentient tar pit that thinks it's the Good Guys.

This post seems like it was intended to flatter women 🧐

Name your top 15 TV shows ever, gut instincts only— The Thick of It Peep Show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Breaking Bad Better Call Saul Trailer Park Boys Blackadder The Simpsons Yes Minister The Office (UK) Battlestar Galactica 24 Nathan For You Arrested Development South Park

It has been more than 48 hours since we first approached the Green Party for comment about Tina Ion. And well over 24 hours since we went to them for further comment on *this* story. We have heard nothing. From their press office, from anyone senior, or from Zack Polanski himself. Nothing.

“AI is only as useful as your ability to evaluate what it gives you. And that ability—the capacity to interrogate an output, to know whether the premise is sound, to sense when something is missing—doesn’t come from a prompt engineering course. It comes from…” (1/2)

"Luddism does not deserve to be rehabilitated. It was a medieval throwback, reactionary and primitive, a pre-Marxist labor convulsion closer in spirit to the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies of agrarian restoration than to the universalist solidarity of Eugene Debs." open.substack.com/pub/verysane...

The thing about nitwits is they have bad ideas and it's fairly important to say "these ideas are bad".

slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time

@moderation.bsky.app @safety.bsky.app you guys gotta go on a purge of antisemites here. This shit is spreading like wildfire among the seedier corners of this app. If they want to post shit like this, they should go back to X/Twitter.

Ex: Delia Ramirez (who’s Methodist) and Daniel Biss (who’s Jewish) both took money from J-Street employees and neither took money from AIPAC. Guess which one gets the red background with flames and a black & white photo, and which gets the green background with normal colors.

Hasan is an antisemite but importantly, he also is an idiot who has nothing to add. You're not even compromising on morals so that you can listen to a math genius or a grandmaster architect or even a star athlete something, he's just some dweeb

Radical extremist cleric issues angry new fatwa -->

Old enough to have to go through school without LLMs but young enough to use them for postgraduate research is the optimal condition for brain power imo

People who have this kind of attitude to information could totally ruin Bluesky 😡😡

people will talk about how AI makes you dumb and then go on tiktok

We need another $20,000 to hit our next crucial milestone of making it one-third of the way to our goal. We are not The Atlantic or the NYT. We will not ever promote open race "science" guys like Richard Hanania, or abandon trans people. Please help us compete those who would gofund.me/bb5e8eaed

There was a counterstrike player called Coldzera and when I started playing I was already bald

🔴NEW🔴 Thread 🧵 @bylinetimes.bsky.social can now reveal that, during the crucial period when convicted Reform leader Nathan Gill was most active, working directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most senior ally in Ukraine, he was also one of Nigel Farage’s closest confidantes 1/12

Contra this, saw someone (correctly) describe our situation as the administration wanting to skip to the steps at the end of an authoritarian consolidation when they haven’t even managed the first ones

Are they showing him the popularity graphs upside down?

one of the most baffling things about all this is that I really can't understand why nobody in government seems to be saying "guys the strategy isn't working"

Since security guarantees are back in discussion, for those interested in the requirements, tasks, and what a European deterrence force might look like - check out this piece from back in March with Jack Watling. warontherocks.com/2025/03/will...

Tomorrow's Mail: "Huge water damage caused by Labour as they put out fire."

What happens when an unstoppable Masterful Gambit meets an immovable Art of the Deal.

That guy is the epitome of the student politics wonker class, politics politics and more politics, never had a proper job in his life, ungrateful beneficiary of the residual pin-a-red-rosette-on-a-monkey voting tendencies that persist in parts of Scotland.

Iconic image. SBU Chief Malyuk during the “Spiderweb” special operation.

AI doesn't live up to the hype, but I have to wonder how it's being prompted to be this bad at a trivial programming task. I've used it to program things of similar or higher complexity, and it works fine so long as you describe the task correctly. Many videos on YouTube confirm this

There isn't a bullying problem on Bluesky *immediately bullies a mentally ill person off the site for bringing up trans rights in a cringe way*

🚨Murder in Helmand🚨 In this episode, I spoke to @warmatters.bsky.social about BBC Panorama allegations regarding war crimes committed by UK forces in Afghanistan. We spoke about the wider issues it raises in the field of counterinsurgency and military policy. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...

rare photograph of chief of staff Morgan McSweeney

I recently co-authored & circulated (with @alasianuti.bsky.social ) an open letter against Starmer’s anti-immigrant rules & rhetoric. Over 100 of my UK-based political academics & writers signed it. Read the whole thing here: www.politicalphilosophypodcast.com/starmer

Whenever someone talks about AI water usage I immediately discount their opinion. Water? Like from the toilet?

American exceptionalism takes many forms - sometimes it's Trump forgetting that Denmark contributed to GWOT, and sometimes it's self-styled defence analysts on Bluesky forgetting that anyone did.

All happy lives are alike; every ruined life is ruined in its own way. But losing your job because you threatened to kill a former Democratic primary candidate for Minnesota State House on BlueSky for saying Star Wars wasn’t politically sophisticated is fascinating even by ruined life standards.

Incredibly depressing day. I've spent my entire life being told by British governments how dreadful immigration is. New Labour did it. The Coalition. The Brexiters. Now Starmer. All of them accusing the ones who came before them of failing to clamp down. The same old vacant mean-spirited bollocks.

Neon Liberalism #25: Samantha and guest Will Stancil talk the vexed question of whether politics is driven by merely material conditions and ask why tyrants are obsessed with their own popularity. www.liberalcurrents.com/neonliberali...

/Freakonomics/ really has been one of the most corrosive pop culture phenomena of my lifetime. "You're actually wrong and your viewpoint is simplistic. The simplified *opposite* of that is the actual immutable truth!" gets us here so many times with very bad results

the thing about waiting for the perfect victim is that fascists simply lie all the time. they will smear anyone. it's what they do.