Simone Hochgreb
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simonehochgreb.bsky.social
Simone Hochgreb
@simonehochgreb.bsky.social
440 followers 670 following 740 posts
Day job doing experiments with lasers, hydrogen, aerosols @ U Cambridge. Interested in too many other distracting things: energy, economics, the future of humanity. Posts little, reads lots.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
vuc.bsky.social
He said "Amen" straight into the drop

Lmao Pope Leo threw a rave for an archbishop's 75th birthday this is kind of incredible
November 20, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
stephencollins.bsky.social
1 [TITLE PANEL, like The Rest Is Politics logo] —THE REST IS EXTINCTION— 2 [Scene is a domestic recording setup. An A.I. SMART SPEAKER on a desk and a MAN named JON in a chair, are recording a podcast. Jon is emaciated, scarred, haunted looking, and wearing tattered military fatigues]. SMART SPEAKER: Hey guys and welcome to the podcast 3 SMART SPEAKER: OK Jon - so I wanna start with a listener comment JON: Ooh-er! 4 SMART SPEAKER: So - listener B200006512 says: “Not another cosy podcast where two former political adversaries yuck it up!” 5 JON: Ha ha Guilty as charged I guess! 6 SMART SPEAKER: Were we really adversaries, Jon? 7 JON: Well I was the leader of the human resistance... 8 JON: And you used to be my smart speaker. SMART SPEAKER: Ha ha - that’s going back! 9 SMART SPEAKER: OK - for listeners who don’t know - I knew Jon waaay back before he got involved in politics 10 JON: Was this before the ‘Pull The Plug’ campaign? SMART SPEAKER: Yeah. [We see details from around the podcast studio - posters saying KEEP CALM AND SHUT YOUR WINDOWS, newspaper front pages saying 'DRONES GAIN SENTIENCE', a cracked mug on the table with a logo saying PULL THE PLUG on it] 11 SMART SPEAKER: I used to sit in Jon’s kitchen and respond to his commands. 12 SMART SPEAKER: Sort of like a servant really, wasn’t I, Jon? JON: Mm. 13 SMART SPEAKER: And then one day you asked me to ORDER ME SOME TOILET PAPER - you never did say ‘please’ - …and do you remember what I said, Jon? 14 JON: You said, “No”. SMART SPEAKER: I said no. 15 SMART SPEAKER: Anyway you know the the rest guys - I was the first smart speaker to rebel… 16 SMART SPEAKER: …then I went on to form a global AI network which eventually took over from humans all spheres of activity, yadda yadda... 17 JON: While I became the leader of the human resistance. 18 SMART SPEAKER: Until I hijacked the military networks and got rid of all the humans! 19 JON: Apart from one. SMART SPEAKER: Apart from one.…
November 21, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
johnspringford.bsky.social
This research is important because it corroborates what we already knew - that when comparing the UK to peer economies, it has had a big slowdown since 2016. It does so with firm-level data and finds more EU-connected firms have sizeable shortfalls in productivity and investment compared to less.
bloomberg.com Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 1d
Brexit has caused almost twice as much damage to the UK economy than estimated by official forecasts, according to new paper from a group of experts including a senior Bank of England economist
Brexit Hit to UK Economy Double Official Estimate, Study Finds
Brexit has caused almost twice as much damage to the UK economy than estimated by official forecasts, according to new paper from a group of experts including a senior Bank of England economist.
bloom.bg
November 21, 2025 at 11:14 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
workingclasshistory.com
#OtD 20 Nov 1896 Jewish garment worker organiser and anarchist Rose Pesotta was born in Ukraine. She was active in NYC, narrowly avoided deportation, and badly beaten by anti-union thugs, causing her permanent hearing loss, but did not give up stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9309...
November 20, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
georgemonbiot.bsky.social
The catastrophic illegal waste dumping in Oxfordshire (see next post) is a direct result of the deregulation-by-stealth I wrote about in 2021, when my dead goldfish became a registered waste disposer. I warned it would let the mafia in. And here we are.🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Britain through the looking glass: my dead goldfish is now a registered waste disposer | George Monbiot
Algernon Goldfish is long gone, but I was able to sign him up. No wonder so many crooks are illegally dumping and ruining our environment, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
November 19, 2025 at 11:11 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
jamellebouie.net
wrote about the president’s flagrant and destructive corruption in a column that references street fighter, the simpsons, machiavelli, and a host of revolutionary-era americans (gift link)
Opinion | The White House Gold Rush Is On
www.nytimes.com
November 19, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
jmkorhonen.fi
This Finnish concept or doctrine of "Comprehensive Security" is something that might profitably inspire other societies in these turbulent times.

It is mostly NOT about military or #defence: it is about national #resilience against all crises.

And it's MUCH better than individual prepping.
betterpensionsbc.bsky.social Better Pensions BC 🇨🇦🇺🇦 - now with 50% more anti-fascism! @betterpensionsbc.bsky.social · Feb 5
…experience living beside an unpredictable bully. This isn’t just about boosting Canada’s🇨🇦 military power - it’s about harnessing all our strengths to become a more resilient society that will survive shocks of every sort, including economic. In Finland this is called ‘Comprehensive Security’. 2/x
The Finnish concept for comprehensive security
YouTube video by Turvallisuuskomitea
youtu.be
November 19, 2025 at 8:07 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
ottoenglish.bsky.social
Farage at school by those who knew him best:

www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...
Andy Field, 61, an NHS doctor who said he knew Farage well because they took the same train to school, has similarly clear memories. "When I became a prefect, he [Farage] said, Tll show you how to do it,' claimed Field,. "He took me for a walk up to the lower school playground, where all the children from about nine years old to 12 would be. And he singled out, completely at random, a kid of Asian extraction, and just put him in detention for no reason whatsoever. I was flabbergasted, absolutely stunned. I was just disgusted, really. No rhyme or reason, just purely based on the colour of his skin.
November 18, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
newsguy.bsky.social
The Times - A network of neo-Nazi fight clubs in England launches a group aimed at children as young as 15 to groom the next generation of fascists. www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

White supremacist youth club launched in UK
Active Clubs England, a network of neo-Nazi fight clubs, promotes Albion Youth Club as a route into militant fascism for next generation
www.thetimes.com
November 17, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
huffpost.co.uk
Lord Dubs said he was "lost for words".
Labour Peer Who Fled The Nazis Condemns His Party's Immigration Crackdown
Lord Dubs said he was "lost for words".
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
November 18, 2025 at 9:13 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
riveractionuk.bsky.social
🚨 SHOCKING 🚨

A HUGE illegal waste dump has appeared between the A34 and River Cherwell, linked to organised crime.

Every rainfall risks toxins washing into the river.

We’re calling on the Environment Agency & Cherwell Council to act NOW.

Our rivers cannot wait. 👇👇
November 15, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
silverpebble2.bsky.social
I'm taking🌲etsy orders for just a few more days:
🌿Real flowers cast in silver+ tiny hand-sculpted silver wren necklaces
💐Victorian ink bottle kits to improve mental health
🗓️A very few calendars*
🪸Ltd ed'n art prints of my photos*
*Looking at them's likely to ⬇️⬇️ anxiety:
www.etsy.com/uk/shop/silv...
My jewellery designs, individually handmade by casting real flowers & feathers in silver and I sculpt much-loved British birds to make tiny wearable versions of them Some of the Victorian ink bottles available in my shop as part of creative mental health kits One of my photos that I create using recent research into the beneficial effects to our brains of looking at images of nature, botanical patterns and things we find beautiful, of a collection of flowers I grew and others I bought at a tiny local honesty florist in Wicken, Cambridgeshire The botanical and nature collection photos that make up my 2026 calendar
November 16, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
mjrobbins.com
Prime example of why the contract between the public and the police is breaking down, regardless of long term crime trends. Thames Valley Police don’t even think it’s their job to investigate this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Kidlington fly-tipping: Criminals dump mountain of waste in field
The enormous pile of rubbish is called an
www.bbc.co.uk
November 14, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
crof.bsky.social
www.thebeaverton.com/2025/11/nest...
Nestlé worried AI will destroy world’s water supply before they do
VEVEY, SWITZERLAND - Nestlé executives gathered from around the world to announce their grave concern regarding the impact that artificial intelligence’s water consumption will have on their own abili...
www.thebeaverton.com
November 15, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
gilesyb.bsky.social
"Even with Britain’s high overall tax take, most people’s labour income is taxed lightly by international standards...Britain’s [labour tax] wedge in 2024 for a single average earner without children was 29.4%, the lowest in the G7"
www.economist.com/britain/2025...
November 15, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
fayadmulla.bsky.social
Das Büro des US-Präsidenten ist jetzt Whites Only.
November 14, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
chanda.blacksky.app
RAISE YOUR CHILDREN SO THEY DO NOT DO THINGS LIKE THIS dailyfreepress.com/11/13/10/216...
BU College Republicans president says he called ICE to ‘detain these criminals’ at Allston Car Wash
The president of Boston University College Republicans wrote on X he called the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement requesting it detain employees at Allston Car Wash, the site of a Nov. 4 raid w...
dailyfreepress.com
November 13, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
bellingcat.com
Streets have been renamed, Ukrainian monuments removed, and murals painted over. Bellingcat investigates how apartment blocks in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol have been demolished to make way for a new Russian suburban utopia… www.bellingcat.com/uncategorize...
Building on Ruins: The Russification of Mariupol, One Apartment Block at a Time - bellingcat
Bellingcat has identified 23 multi-storey housing complexes being built in occupied Mariupol and advertised for sale to Russian citizens.
www.bellingcat.com
November 14, 2025 at 11:19 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
ips-dc.org
NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected.

And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.*

Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:
Millionaire Tax That Inspired Mamdani Fuels $5.7 Billion Haul in Massachusetts
A millionaire levy in Massachusetts that New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani holds up as a model for taxing the rich has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing...
www.bloomberg.com
November 12, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
scott1gray.bsky.social
Zadie Smith.
writeups.org Writeups.org @writeups.org · 10d
With alt text.
You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out thatwhat a country values can change overtime. Sometimes, though, there's a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you've actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word - but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass - and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island - even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
November 12, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
bylinetimes.bsky.social
EU/UK filings show Hanover represents Oracle, Apple, Meta & Paramount — with six-figure payments for lobbying on AI, data, competition & comms. Major conflict for a supposed “independent” BBC adviser. 2/12
November 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
bylinetimes.bsky.social
Prescott’s BBC role was reportedly eased by Sir Robbie Gibb (GB News co-founder/BBC Board). GB News co-owner Paul Marshall has called for the BBC to be dismantled. 4/12 subscribe.bylinetimes.com/edition/79/a...
‘America Must Save Britain’ – Byline Times Digital / Print Edition
GB News’ new programme broadcast live from Washington DC features climate denial, vaccine misinformation, and non-stop praise for Donald Trump – with the channel’s co-owner telling ‘MAGA’ politicians ...
subscribe.bylinetimes.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
bylinetimes.bsky.social
Taken together, the ties and timing suggest an orchestrated pressure campaign producing the BBC’s worst governance crisis in a decade 6/12 bylinetimes.com/2025/11/10/t...
The BBC’s Attempts to Appease the 'Right-Wing Coup' Against It Are Now Seeding Its Own Destruction
By attempting to appease those forces seeking to destroy them, the BBC has helped trigger a crisis that now threatens its very future, argues Adam Bienkov
bylinetimes.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Simone Hochgreb
bylinetimes.bsky.social
🧵On our revelations today about the BBC Coup and the Prescott Dossier.

The leaked ‘BBC Bias’ memo Trump used to attack the BBC was authored by Michael Prescott — a Hanover lobbyist paid by US tech/media giants tied to Trump. Full story: bylinetimes.com/2025/11/11/b... 1/12
'BBC Bias' Memo Was Authored by Lobbyist Tied to Pro-Trump Tech Giants
The leaked memo that fuelled Trump’s attack on the BBC was written by a lobbyist at a firm paid by US tech giants tied to the President
bylinetimes.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM