anthonymayer.bsky.social
@anthonymayer.bsky.social
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This (from: www.ft.com/content/75ce...) is something you can *feel* if you are in the UK, especially if you've experienced living abroad. But infuriatingly successive governments and our entire media are somehow absolutely committed to suggesting anyone who wants to change this is the devil...
November 21, 2025 at 7:38 AM
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In memoriam...
October 3, 2025 at 11:38 AM
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hot war take: the roundheads were, in relative terms, the good guys in the English Civil War and the cavalier romanticism is reactionary bullshit.
September 25, 2025 at 5:11 AM
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How easily we take for granted what has got better, how much our political discourse calls regulation a cost when there were reasons behind all of it, and how we rarely hear the stories of success.
March 23, 2025 at 7:51 AM
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The willful negligence in economic understanding of what a lemons market imply is the key defining feature of so many anti-regulatory types.
March 13, 2025 at 6:04 PM
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Brazil!
March 11, 2025 at 3:07 PM
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Cool! I think Flann O'Brien, a life-long civil servant is a real master of capturing a farcical bureaucratic atmosphere. The various station procedures in The Third Policeman delight me on this front.
March 11, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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Just a few of the very many classic Ladybird books written or illustrated by women

#InternationalWomensDay
March 8, 2025 at 8:12 AM
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Only one choice for Shrove Tuesday
‘The Big Pancake’, 1972

Artist: Robert Lumley
March 4, 2025 at 8:19 AM
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unleashing social media on the world at large was like inflicting smallpox on immunologically naive peoples. Only psyches scarred over by endless stupid flamewars on usenet or IRC were truly ready for it
February 24, 2025 at 5:35 AM
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The tragedy of our universities in deep recession is that, for all the caveats, they produce exactly that connectivity, that sense of place, that attachment and even love that everyone is saying they want. You'll miss it all once it's gone.
Save the School of Music protest. It's a very bittersweet feeling watching these incredible musicians play. This is the talent we will be losing if Cardiff University go ahead with their shortsighted plans.
February 23, 2025 at 9:57 AM
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🎶Don't you remember?
We built this city
We built this city
We built this city on PHP
February 21, 2025 at 8:56 AM
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Want to go visit the national parks this year?
Sorry.
The reservation system is shut down, EMT personnel are gone, so don't get hurt or lost. No one can clean the bathrooms or cabins, so they'll be closed. Rangers are fired.

www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...
Yosemite halts camping reservations, with no timetable for their return
Yosemite halts camping reservations, with no timetable for their return at a time when federal employees are being laid off
www.sfchronicle.com
February 18, 2025 at 2:05 AM
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roses are red
so are carnations
what does that mean for
financial regulation?
February 14, 2025 at 12:03 PM
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Bullshit Jobs is really just the DOGE ethos leftishly ("if I can't understand what your job means, then its useless")
it absolutely is just libertarianism in disguise, because most of the jobs that the book targets have to do with social coordination or glue functions
February 11, 2025 at 4:46 PM
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An alternative possibility is that it is simply compositional.

Imagine an economy of 2 people
1 earns £750
1 earns £1500

GDP per worker is £1125

Next year everyone’s income rises 10% and another low income worker joins
2 earn £825
1 earns £1650

GDP per worker is £1100 but everyone better off
February 9, 2025 at 8:45 AM
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as always, an unbiased but slightly incompetent system with an unbiased but slightly difficult appeals procedure creates a system which is hugely biased in favor of the kind of people who can get decisions overruled.
‘when I decided to write about my experience for this column, I emailed Google’s press office with the details to see if I could discuss the issue. By the end of the day, my access to my email account had been restored.’ @sarahoconnorft.ft.com
on.ft.com/410gtdg
When computer says no: fairness in an automated world
Simply adding a human review process to an algorithmic decision doesn’t make tricky trade-offs disappear
on.ft.com
February 4, 2025 at 9:48 AM
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The Welsh told the Saxons this hill was called "pen" (meaning "hill"). The Saxons added their word for hill, "tor," and called it Torpen (hill hill).

Later the Norse added their world for hill. So it became Torpen Haugr (Hill Hill Hill).

Now the English call it Torpenhow Hill (Hill Hill Hill Hill)
January 24, 2025 at 8:58 PM
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reading books that keep getting upset about modernity breaking up communities. but 'community' being presented as an unalloyed good is always a red flag to me. many communities are bad! community can mean family, love, friendship but it can also mean insularity, clannishness, spite, shaming.
January 21, 2025 at 7:07 PM
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the whole point of Oxbridge tutorials is to teach you this skill, ideally you should go into an hour-long two or three person conversation about the book having read no more than the introduction and the back cover.
Reading a summary of a book is cheating. A decent bluffer should be able to pretend to have read a book on the basis of reading the blurb, hearing about it at a dinner party, or just guessing from the title - most of us were doing that for years before this newfangled nonsense came along
I don’t even understand what someone gets out of pretending to have read a book. Like don’t read it if you don’t want too, getting an LLM to make a probably bogus summary is so besides the point.
January 18, 2025 at 7:03 PM