Sophie E. Hill

Crypto Investor Donates £9 Million to Reform UK After Nigel Farage Plugs His Company and Tells Industry 'I Am Your Champion' The Reform leader recently used media interviews to back Christopher Harborne's company while promising to cut taxes and regulations on crypto firms

A Thailand-based crypto investor has handed a record-breaking £9 million to Reform UK, shortly before Nigel Farage used media interviews to plug his crypto firm and promise lower taxes and deregulation on the industry
bylinetimes.com/2025/12/04/c...

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Has anyone found a way to overcome Google Gemini's hard-wired desire to spam you with Youtube links?

I put "never include a video" in my saved instructions a bunch of different ways to absolutely zero effect.

Screenshot of PubPeer comment by Sholto David highlighting a duplicated image

Niche product idea: a "matching pairs" memory game where the tiles are real duplicated images from scientific papers (like this one found by @sholtodavid.bsky.social)

reminder: you can have a Little Crony, as a treat

As a Sunday treat, I’m reposting @sophieehill.bsky.social’s My Little Crony for you to remind yourselves that if just grubby money-making is so intertwined, what must targeted destabilising by a foreign power look like?

www.sophie-e-hill.com/slides/my-li...

China STILL playing out from the back 7-0 down

Other top teams do better at integrating young players.

Yesterday, for example:

🇸🇪 18yo Schröder, 19yo Holmberg started vs 🇫🇷

🇩🇪 19yo Alara Sehitler came on as a sub vs 🇪🇸

🇳🇴 20yo Signe Gaupset started and scored a brace vs 🇧🇷

(and the first two were Nation's League finals, not friendlies!)

England's starting 11 is incredibly experienced. The youngest player is 23-year-old Maya Le Tissier, who is a club captain with 100+ games for United already.

update: it's 5-0

(38 mins played)

Wiegman chooses a full-strength starting line up (given Hampton + Williamson injured).

Debut for Moorhouse in goal. Hopefully more to come (possibly Grace Fisk, plus youngsters Freya Godfrey and Anouk Denton)

The Lionesses used to play lots of "easy" games, even beating Latvia 20-0 in 2021.

Then UEFA made qualifiers more competitive (a positive change, despite some fixture repetition).

But you can play friendlies against whoever. And England are currently 4-0 up vs China after 23 minutes 😳

Sayre's Law strikes again!

("Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.")

My hand holding a shortbread cookie in the shape of an airplane. There are red sprinkles in the pattern of the survivorship bias plane.

A plate of the same cookies.

Does anyone want a survivorship bias shortbread

cheers!

oh sorry you think the Margate Shell Grotto is just a Georgian folly?? you think the owners are refusing to use carbon dating in a cynical attempt to keep the Bronze Age theory alive and maintain the mystery for financial reasons? should we invite bella hadid??

This sounds great! though link not working for me? (404)

Hello @springernature.com - you’ve just published another bit of nonsense in Scientific Reports 🙁

congratulations, you've been Grotto-pilled 🐚

It was a big craze for the Victorians, who projected all kinds of weird Orientalist fantasies onto it.

But yes, it's surprising how none of the various possibilities seem to exist in the modern imagination. Even the rather lurid ones (Knights Templar orgy chamber etc. etc. 😂)

@ Margate Crab Museum: Need crabs for undersea archaeological excavation. DM for collab.

i LOVE the crab museum so much i went to the birthday party

Image: footballer Vivianne Miedema at a post-match interview Text [amended from original] Do you want to talk about [the Margate Shell Grotto] [yes]

Two images of the grotto with text from a book. Images show womb and phallus motifs. which can be interpreted as representing the tree of life, a common symbol for all ancient cultures, as well as one with a date palm sacred to Astarte, the principal Phoenician goddess, probably the origin of the Carthaginian Tanit. Womb and umbilical cord (?) in the eastern passage of the rotunda One of the phallic images in the western passage of the rotunda

you think the Georgians were cool like this???????

oh sorry you think the Margate Shell Grotto is just a Georgian folly?? you think the owners are refusing to use carbon dating in a cynical attempt to keep the Bronze Age theory alive and maintain the mystery for financial reasons? should we invite bella hadid??

@ Rachel Reeves is there room in the budget for this?

crazy how there are 156 billionaires in britain and not ONE of them is whimsical enough to fund a decades-long undersea excavation around the Thanet coastline to find archaeological evidence of Phoenician trading posts and thus corroborate the Bronze Age origins of the Margate Shell Grotto??

omg i didn't even clock that 😅

nmental Science| TYPE Original Research PUBliSHED 24 July 2023 DoI 10.3389/fenvs.2023.1074713 Green finance and foreign direct investment-environmental sustainability nexuses in emerging countries: new insights from the environmental Kuznets curve Syed Usman Qadri 12*, Xiangyi Shi', Saif ur Rahman*, Alvena Anees4, Muhammad Sibt E. AliS, Laura Brancu 6* and Ahmad Nabi Nayel'

The primary objective of the present study is to identify the asymmetric relationship between green finance, trade openness, and foreign direct investment with environmental sustainability. The existing research utilizes the asymmetric approach to evaluate annual data from 1980 to 2021. The findings of this study show heterogeneous results. Therefore, the outcomes of the study confirm the nonlinear (NARDL) association between the variables in Pakistan. Moreover, the study describes the positive shock of foreign direct investment (FDI) as a significant and positive relationship with environmental degradation, while the negative shock of FDI shows a negative and significant relationship with the environment. Furthermore, the study scrutinizes the positive shock of green finance as a significant and negative relationship with environmental degradation; the negative shocks also show a negative relationship with environmental degradation in Pakistan. In addition, the consequences of the study suggest that the government should implement taxes on foreign investment and that investors should use renewable energy to produce goods. Furthermore, the results suggest that the government should utilize fiscal policy and fiscal funds to enhance carbon-free projects. Moreover, green securities should be used for green technologies. However, Pakistan can control its carbon emissions and achieve the target of a sustainable environment. Therefore, Pakistan's government should stabilize its financial markets and introduce carbon-free projects. Furthermore, the main quantitative achievement according to the outcomes suggests that policymakers make policies in which they suggest to the government to control foreign investment that causes carbon emissions because of trade openness and also invest the funds in renewable energy, which helps to control the carbon emissions. KEYWORDS approach environmental degradation, trade openness, green finance, economic growth, NARDL

I'm not exaggerating when I say the MAIN FOCUS of the paper is GREEN FINANCE.

It's in the title. There are paragraphs of policy recommendations about green bonds.

And the whole time they're just using a totally different variable and calling it Green Finance!

www.frontiersin.org/journals/env...

TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics. Variable Symbol Proxies/measurement of variables Data source Environmental sustainability ES (kt of CO, equivalent) World development indicator Foreign direct investment FDI (net inflow, % GDP) World development indicator Green finance GF (renewable energy consumptions, %) World development indicator Trade openness TOP (exports of goods and services, % GDP) World development indicator (imports of goods and services, % GDP) Economic growth EG (annual GDP growth, %) World development indicator

And here's the explanation in the text: "We measured green financing in terms of the percentage of renewable energy consumption because Landenberg (2014) explained green investment in terms of renewable energy consumption in a broad sense." This isn't really an explanation. And "Landenberg (2014)" does not appear in the references. file Renewable energy consumption is not a justifiable proxy for green finance. It is absurd to frame the whole paper around green finance, including extensive policy recommendations in that area, when this variable is not even included in the analysis.

Those errors are bad. But there's one earlier in the paper that's actually MUCH worse...

In Table 1 the authors they define GREEN FINANCE (a key explanatory var) as...

Renewable Energy Consumption??

#wtf