Samuel Miles
@spmiles98.bsky.social
9 followers 28 following 17 posts
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Reposted by Samuel Miles
Switching 2p from National Insurance to Income Tax would bring the rate of tax paid by pensioners closer to that paid by working-age people.

Even so, pensioners with incomes below £40,000 would still be better off next year than this year, due to upcoming increases to the state pension age ⤵️
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Nish Kumar, "What is the Green Party's vision for how we redraw the economy of this country?"

Zack Polanski, "The first thing is to have a big conversation about public ownership"

"Nothing we need, and need to use, should be in private hands. All of our utilities should be nationalised"
Reposted by Samuel Miles
To a large degree, the collapse of American power is driven by the stupidity of its leaders.
🚨 Speaker Mike Johnson says the problem with gun violence is the human heart, but global evidence shows easy access to guns and inequality — not the heart — drive violence. From Dunblane in the UK to Port Arthur in Australia, stronger laws saved lives.
open.substack.com/pub/theintel...
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Imagine your country being at war for its survival and you're having to devote even a scintilla of thought to what you might wear to visit a supposed ally.
This has Vance's dirty fkn fingerprints all over it.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Bet nobody screamed at Churchill when he wore his army fatigues to the White House.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
The extent one might think it valuable to hear from an adversary, platforming Putin's proxies is still worthless because they are joyfully, unapologetically, almost gleefully dishonest.

Last thing UK broacasting needs is more talking heads with zero fidelity to the truth and no hint of shame.
I genuinely do NOT understand the idiocy of having Putin proxies on TV News, like Sergei Markov just now screaming Russian propaganda on Sky News for ten minutes.

We are at war with Russia. When before has UK media ever platformed enemy states who attack our allies and poison people in our streets?
Reposted by Samuel Miles
For all the reply guys saying "But Alex, we are not at war with Russia":

July 2025 UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR) calls Russia an ‘immediate and pressing threat’ to British national security.

Our media should not be platforming our enemy.
Russia: an immediate and pressing threat. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine makes unequivocally clear its willingness to use force to achieve its goals, as well as its intent to re-establish spheres of influence in its near-abroad and disrupt the international order to the UK and its allies’ disadvantage
Reposted by Samuel Miles
The government is turning a blind eye to what Elon Musk has done to Twitter - it hasn't reviewed its use of the platform since before it became X. No review after the riots, no review after Grok launching... there's a pattern here:
Josiah Mortimer (@josiah.writes.news)
Oh, this is good: Lib Dem peer @markpackuk.bsky.social asked the Government "whether they have considered creating a Gov.uk account on Bluesky, and if so, when that consideration took place, and what…
buff.ly
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Just to be clear: Trump was warned his name is in files that don’t exist and were invented by Democrats as a hoax to destroy him and which are both too boring to release and part of a treasonous plot against America but there’s no reason for you to see them so let’s forget all about it. Got that?
Reposted by Samuel Miles
This is precisely what happened. The same effort, over and over again, with Democrats and Republicans. But America was finally weak enough to simply ignore and its president idiotic enough to go along with it.
Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him. Unbelievable.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him. Unbelievable.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Padilla: "If this is how Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they are doing to farm workers, cooks, day-labourers out in the Los Angeles community, throughout California, and throughout the country."
Powerful statement by Sen. Alex Padilla.

Please notice that anytime senators or representatives try to conduct oversight, they’re blocked.

In this case, a sitting US senator was tackled to the ground and handcuffed—for asking a question.

Where the hell has Chuck Schumer been on this?
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Powerful statement by Sen. Alex Padilla.

Please notice that anytime senators or representatives try to conduct oversight, they’re blocked.

In this case, a sitting US senator was tackled to the ground and handcuffed—for asking a question.

Where the hell has Chuck Schumer been on this?
Reposted by Samuel Miles
So then Elon goes "Kill the Bill!" and Trump goes "Elon has TDS!" so Elon goes "I'm the reason Trump won!" so Trump goes "we waste billions on Elon!" so Elon goes "Epstein!" and a corpulent flunkie goes "Deport Elon!" and Elon goes "Impeach!"

And THAT'S why women are too emotional to be President.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Uh oh whoops said the quiet part out loud quick put it back in the tube quickly quiclkly
Lmao they added “perceived“

The worms they be wriggling
Reposted by Samuel Miles
I just want to say that now all this Unbound shit is out in the open, this was one of the major factors in my being made redundant.

I was constantly budgeting around promised money that never materialised. Everything was always a couple of weeks away.
Time to clarify something. When authors say “Unbound haven’t paid me” that makes it sound like Unbound had some money, which they used to buy authors’ writing.

Unbound had no money. The authors did: we had raised that money. They were holding it in trust.

Unbound stole our money.
The date of the election was their choice. If they could've done all of this with just a little more time, why didn't they hold off a few more weeks?
This feels like such a simple retort that I don't see why people aren't responding with it to shut down this BS!
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Time to clarify something. When authors say “Unbound haven’t paid me” that makes it sound like Unbound had some money, which they used to buy authors’ writing.

Unbound had no money. The authors did: we had raised that money. They were holding it in trust.

Unbound stole our money.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
This is so fucked. I've supported Dan since ~2013. I helped back his first book, "Fuck Yeah, Video Games!" (you can even find my name in the thank yous). I purchased both a hardcover and e-book copy of "The Paradox Paradox" to support Daniel, the author, not a shady publisher with shady people.
So, it's not just my immediate finances they've obliterated, it's future earnings too. My debut novel, despite selling more than enough to be a bestseller, now wasn't. Anything I write in the future will struggle to find a publisher because by all the metrics that count, The Paradox Paradox failed.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Micah @rincewind.run · May 31
something that stands out about this is just how cheap it is for us to have world-leading scientific capacity

we spent ~6.75 trillion last year, and the combined budgets for NIH, NSF and NASA are barely more than 1% of that

what an incredible waste to lose it all for a drop in the bucket
There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.
Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
Gonna burn some bridges and talk about Unbound, since it's unlikely that they'll sue me at this point. They seem to have spent money that was supposed to go towards royalty payments, expecting money to come in, which then didn't bsky.app/profile/laur...

(thread)

#unboundless
The TLDR as I understand - the company expected an incoming investment for a magazine project, took money out the author royalties account to pre spend the investment, the investment fell through, author money can't be repaid by investment.

That's my good faith understanding of those events.
Reposted by Samuel Miles
I discovered yesterday, in a mass email sent at 3am, that I will not be receiving the roughly £40,000 that my publisher Unbound/Boundless owes me for pre-order sales of The Paradox Paradox. The payment for five years of work, gone.

#unboundless
Authors published by the crowdfunding publisher Unbound will not receive historic royalty payments for sales of their books, unless Boundless, the new publisher founded following Unbound going into administration, "survives and thrives" 👇 #BookSky
Unbound authors will not receive unpaid royalty payments until new publisher Boundless 'is cash stable'
www.thebookseller.com