Late starter to Uni @ 50. Joined OBU and thought I’d start with something simple like…. an MBA. (Probably cos I wasted 20 yrs before I got into recovery)#FBPPR
High Wycombe, England
Joined May 2012
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Thank you @Femi_Sorry for this clear take down of Brexit.
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Now Nigel Farage has finally answered questions about his close aide Nathan Gill, sentenced to 10.5 years for working for Putin's interests, what about his other close associates? Or indeed himself?bylinetimes.com/2024/06/19/t… 🧵 1/10
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Did you know? In 1975 the United Nations general assembly passed a resolution declaring "zionism is a form of racism & racial discrimination" (the resolution was revoked in 1991 because Israel made this a condition of its participation in peace talks)
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”
it was called project panama.
here's exactly what happened:
1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”
2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.
it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”
3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.
so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”
4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.
those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.
5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.
6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.
a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.
7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.
the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.
🦔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🤗
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
0.001% TAX
A junior auditor at @PwC in Luxembourg is getting ready to leave his job. Before he goes he goes looking for some training documents to take with him.
Instead he finds a folder that anyone in the company could open. No password. No warning. Just sitting there.
Inside are hundreds of secret deals between the Luxembourg government and some of the biggest companies on the planet. Deals that let them pay next to nothing in tax.
His name is Antoine Deltour. He copies 30,000 pages. That is the whole story. He copies a folder.
Let me explain what was actually in it, because this is where it gets interesting.
Between 2002 and 2010, PwC alone helped broker 548 of these secret tax agreements, known as tax rulings, for over 340 companies. Apple. Ikea. Pepsi. Disney. Deutsche Bank. AIG. Koch Industries. Skype. GlaxoSmithKline. Coach. Abbott Laboratories. Household names, every one of them.
The trick was simple. Companies moved profits through Luxembourg shell structures and Luxembourg quietly agreed in writing to look the other way on tax.
Some of these companies ended up paying an effective tax rate under 1 percent. In some cases as low as 0.001 percent. On billions of dollars.
Who was running Luxembourg for almost 20 years while this machine was built and protected? Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg until 2013.
Deltour did not leak straight to the world. In 2012 he passed the documents to French journalist Edouard Perrin, who used them for a TV documentary.
PwC noticed and filed a complaint with the Luxembourg courts. Then in November 2014, ICIJ @ICIJorg pulled together over 80 journalists across more than 30 media outlets in 26 countries and published the full scale of it as LuxLeaks.
The timing could not have been worse for Juncker, or depending how you look at it, could not have been better. He had just been elected President of the European Commission days before the story broke. The man who ran the tax haven for two decades was now running Europe.
A month later ICIJ dropped LuxLeaks 2, showing the other Big 4 accounting firms Deloitte, EY and KPMG were running the exact same playbook. This was never one bad apple. It was standard practice.
Juncker faced a no confidence vote in the European Parliament over it. He survived. Deltour was not so lucky.
December 2014, Luxembourg charges him with theft, violation of trade secrecy and fraudulent access to a computer system. He is facing up to 5 years in prison and a fine of 1,250,000 euros. For opening an unlocked folder on his way out the door.
April 2016, the criminal trial. Deltour and his colleague Raphael Halet, another former PwC employee who leaked a second batch of documents, are both convicted. Deltour gets 12 months suspended and a 1,500 euro fine. Perrin the journalist is acquitted.
Deltour appeals. Loses. Appeals again. Finally in May 2018 the Luxembourg Court of Appeal fully recognises him as a genuine whistleblower under European Court of Human Rights standards and acquits him completely.
Halet's fight took even longer. He lost his Luxembourg appeals and only won at the European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber in 2023, nearly a decade after he first spoke up.
The European Commission that Juncker went on to lead never opened a single formal investigation into a single LuxLeaks tax ruling. Not one. It did chase Starbucks, Fiat and Amazon over separate deals, but the mountain of paperwork Deltour handed over sat there untouched.
So that is the LuxLeaks story. Build a tax avoidance machine for 20 years and get promoted to run the continent. Copy the evidence of it and spend most of a decade fighting to stay out of prison.
@BBCNews · @ICIJorg · @Reuters · @lemondefr and others.
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Sky should sue Farage for this clear defamation. Firstly, they knocked on the door of one of 5 houses OWNED BY NIGEL FARAGE, not his daugher, that Farage has taken publicity shots outside. Sky approached the property once, without a camera operator, identified themselves as Sky News, and the adult occupant, not his daughter, chose not to engage.
Sky did not see, interact with, or speak to Farage's daughter yet Farage stated that his daughter was harassed by Sky.
A clear analysis of what will happen should Reform gain power. Yet missed the impacts on workers rights, and minimum wage. Or the removal of the NHS… theguardian.com/commentisfre…
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
You'll want to be sitting down for this bit.
Water companies are currently £82.7 billion in debt, have paid themselves £85 billion in dividends, leak over a trillion of litres of water per year, dump sewage for almost 4 million hours per year, have been convicted of over 1,200 criminal acts since 1989 and an average of 35% of your bill goes on nothing but paying more interest and yet more dividends.
And not a single company has ever lost their operating licence. 👇
Yorkshire Water and Northumbrian Water have nearly 200 criminal convictions between them.
On 6 August 2024, Ofwat fined them £47m and £17m for sewage dumping.
Fines not paid, will not be paid. Firms claim to have invested. No penalty for abusing laws
leftfootforward.org/2026/01/…
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
I need 100,000 signatures to win a parliamentary debate about the ownership of the water industry.
Do your thing internet.
petition.parliament.uk/petit…
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Find out who to vote for in May. Created a quiz matching you with a party that suits your views. Free, open-source, no data collection.
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THREAD THREE of CALLING OUT PROPAGANDA (numbers 30 to 39)
CALLING OUT PROPAGANDA No.30
“THAT’S A CONSPIRACY THEORY!” is a comment designed to ridicule, without needing to engage with an argument – and to warn others to stay away from the subject.
SOME conspiracy theories may be rightly dismissed as “nuts” and fit for sneers about “tinfoil hats”. But others should not be so easily dismissed.
People with power absolutely do conspire together in their mutual interest. It would be strange if they did not.
Adam Smith, father of economics, famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Here are just a few events previously derided as “conspiracy theories” which were or are “conspiracy facts”:- Watergate; various CIA coups; suppression of facts by the asbestos and tobacco industries about how their products are fatal; undercover police in protest groups; suppression of facts by the fossil fuel companies about the climate crisis.
Michael Parenti is funny and trenchant:
“[They mock]: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?”
For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever.
And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists.”
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Richard Tice lent his own party £1.4 million through a private Mayfair investment company. The Companies House accounts never once named him. Three years running, the auditor signed them off.
We've identified specific discrepancies between the Electoral Commission loans register and the 2023 accounts. A £40,000 loan filed under the wrong reporting period. A £613,000 debt-to-donation conversion that doesn't appear in the 2024 filing. A statutory auditor who named Tice in the going concern paragraph but not in the related party note.
We sent right of reply letters to Richard Tice, Reform UK, and their auditors CK Partnership on Wednesday morning. The deadline passed today. None of them responded.
A Freedom of Information request has been submitted to the Electoral Commission seeking the submission history of the anomalous loan entry. Ref: FOI 046-26.
Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates has described the quality of Reform UK's financial reporting as poor.
Full investigation publishes tomorrow morning.
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Some things Nigel won't tell you as he heralds this 'great victory'
The sitting councillor, who was also England's longest serving councillor died.
Normally, when a death happens within six months of an election, the election takes place with the others.
Reform used an old law to force a by-election at a cost of £20,000 to the taxpayer.
This took place before David had even been buried.
The turnout was 17% - reflecting the apathy and disgust felt by residents.
On May 7th, the people of Barton and Winton will once again be asked to vote, just like everywhere else.
This was a stunt that cost Salford council, and therefore the the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds.
Michael Felse, the councillor who 'won' last night got 676 votes compared to Labour's 643.
Reform are to be congratulated though - they seem to finally be becoming LGBTQIA+ friendly
Mr Felse was parade queen at Manchester Pride in 2011.
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Nigel Farage is a poor historian.
He can’t remember meeting Nathan Gill,
He can’t remember who paid for his Clacton House
He cannot remember bullying Jews at school
He can’t remember to declare all his income
He cant remember his many speeches about NHS privatisation
Reform UK will tell Welsh museums how to present history, manifesto says bbc.in/4mGhUqn
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Mandelson was sacked in September 25.
Lebedev was given a peerage by Johnson against HOLAC and intelligent service advice. He’s still in HoL and stills owns The Independent and Standard newspapers.
Tory hypocrisy on steroids.
#SecurityVettingStatement
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Oh.
Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, has dropped its defamation lawsuit against The Guardian.
They reported in 2023 that federal prosecutors in New York were investigating $8 million in payments to the company from entities with ties to Putin as possible money laundering.
🍿
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
So this article from the latest @PrivateEyeNews states that Teesside Freeport is going to close down.
Considering Teesside Freeport was Sunak's flagship Brexit freeport/SEZ policy, which was one small cog in the wider free zones rollout, 74 SEZs, 12 Freeports, and now 5 AI Growth Zones, (all fully backed/extended by Starmer's Labour government), what are the implications for the rest of these free zones now that Teesside has collapsed?
It should also be noted that the original amount of state aid allocated to each UK freeport was £25 million. Teesside freeport was lavished with £560 million in state aid, profits generated by this were 9 - 10 split in favour of the private sector.
If Teesside required £560 million to fail, what's the true cost across the entire programme? Labour has inherited and expanded this architecture without apparent scrutiny of Teesside's financial implosion.
How can the 9-10 private profit split be justified when public entities carry the debt?
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Farage and the NHS is trending I see 👀
It would be a shame to keep resharing this video of him talking about privatising the NHS to make money wouldn’t it? 😇
TobyBailey - will follow back retweeted
Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.
Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”
