Richard Meyer-Eppler

Missbrauch von Sozialleistungen - Bas kündigt bessere Vernetzung von Behörden und Strafrechts-Änderung an Um Missbrauch von Sozialleistungen wirksamer bekämpfen zu können strebt Bundesarbeitsministerin Bas eine bessere Vernetzung von Behörden an.

Kann einfach nicht deren Ernst sein, dass weiter ein Staatsakt aus diesem Randphänomen gemacht wird, während durch Steuerhinterziehung 200 MILLIARDEN € im Jahr futsch gehen und der Ex-Kanzler damit durchkommt, sich in Zusammenhang mit Cum-Ex an nix zu erinnern.
www.deutschlandfunk.de/bas-kuendigt...

Teure Symbolpolitik: Charter-Abschiebeflüge Deutschland mietet ganze Flugzeuge, um Menschen abzuschieben. Das soll Härte in der Asylpolitik demonstrieren – und bringt enorme Ausgaben mit sich. Weil der Staat Details geheim hält, verklagen wir i...

Die Bundesregierung streicht das Bürgergeld, treibt den Sozialabbau voran – und steckt gleichzeitig Millionen in Abschiebeflüge. Doch der Staat hält die Details geheim: Weil die Bundespolizei uns genaue Zahlen verweigert, klagen wir.
fragdenstaat.de/artikel/exkl...

Maybe check this article "R Packages for Data Quality Assessments and Data Monitoring": www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12...

Bundesinnenminister Dobrindt: Sag es! Relativiert der Bundesinnenminister die Gefahr durch Rechtsextremismus? Ein neues Dokument legt nahe: Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) tut sich schwer, das Offensichtliche in Worte zu fassen.

In der PK zum Verfassungsschutzbericht 2024 am 10. Juni hat Innenminister Dobrindt Rechtsextremismus ausgespart – und mit verzogenen Grafiken Linksextremismus aufgebauscht. Ein interner Sprechzettel zeigt: Das war kein Versehen, sondern eine bewusste Entscheidung.

fragdenstaat.de/artikel/die-...

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

A good overview of some of the relevant literature is in Lindner, Fabian: Does Saving Increase the Supply of Credit? A Critique of Loanable Funds Theory. In: World Economic Review 4, 4. (2015), S. 1-26. Particularly love to see him quote Wolfgang Stützel, who really should be more widely read.

💯! To me, this is one of the main points of confusion in macro, and it comes up again, and again, and again. It is really strange to see all the praise for Wolf-Pettis. I think these are fundamental conceptual errors and not reasonable disagreements in assumptions.

Wenn eine Bundesministerin faktenfrei von mafiösem Bürgergeldbetrug fabuliert, dann ist das kein Kampf gegen Missbrauch, sondern dann ist es ein Frontalangriff auf die Würde von armutsbetroffenen Menschen und Populismus mit sozialdemokratischem Etikett. Das Armenbashing muss ein Ende haben!

Lisa's work has probably been my most-shared resources (not including accessibility stuff) over the years. Lisa repeatedly has put out some of the best and most-helpful guides out there for designing data visualizations.

I know Bluesky is not a place for nuance, but I am always surprised to see Triffin brought up in such a mechanical, law-like manner. Personally, I think the work of the BIS has compellingly added a lot of qualifications to the dogmatic Triffin view, e.g. this piece www.bis.org/publ/work684....

Thumbs up to your old self for "never again, transparency!!" 😂. We've all been there! ☺️

Bärbel Bas spricht von »mafiösen Strukturen« bei Bürgergeld-Empfängern Arbeitsministerin Bärbel Bas will mit einem besseren Datenaustausch den Missbrauch von Sozialleistungen bekämpfen. »Es gibt Menschen, die werden in einem Van abgeholt und als Tagelöhner ausgebeutet«, ...

Der geschätzte Schaden durch Sozialbetrug beim Bürgergeld beträgt rund 270 Millionen Euro pro Jahr, durch Steuerbetrug 100 Milliarden.

Man fragt sich langsam, ob diese Regierung willens oder in der Lage ist, reale Probleme zu lösen, statt nur Scheinproblemen nachzujagen.

I have been reading your work since 2010 or so. Really looking forward to this attempt to synthesize your thinking! I am not as widely read in political economy as I used to be (having left academia), but I always thought your perspective was rather unique. I hope this work will find its audience!

Fully agree, it would be a shame if they went under, or full on corporate. They launched Plot in 2021 (still feels newish to me), Framework after, and now Canvas. I personally struggle to see how such a small team can push all this simultaneously, but maybe they can! I sure wish them well!

Everything is still BI What to expect when you’re not expecting to build a BI tool.

Tongue in cheek, I'd say the Observable team should read more Benn Stancil, waaaay more Benn Stancil. For instance, this piece of his: benn.substack.com/p/everything...

That's the idea, I agree. In my career, though, I never had a situation where Canvas would have fit in. Discussions with analysts and discussions of data proceed in a way where Canvas makes little sense. Hypothetically, do you have good use cases? 🤔 Love the team, doubt their current focus!

🤹 tidyexplain – Garrick Aden-Buie Animations of tidyverse verbs using R, the tidyverse, and gganimate.

This is excellent but focused on dplyr joins. Porting it to ANSI SQL wouldn't be difficult, though. www.garrickadenbuie.com/project/tidy...

Opinion | To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First (Gift Article) These estimates, drawn from the location data of three billion Facebook users, provide a view of human migration in extraordinary detail.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Consider the turmoil, in late 2019, in the US repo market, wherefinancial firms borrow and lend cash against securities, pledged as col-lateral. A major cause of this turmoil was liquidity demand from hedgeand private equity funds. These funds are typically levered — in ordermaximize their returns, they borrow large sums in the shadow bankingsystem, often pledging the assets they acquire as collateral. In order tostabilize the repo market, the Federal Reserve increased its balance sheetby 10 percent, or USD 400 billion, between September 2019 and Janu-ary 2020. The question “What is the social value of levered hedge fundsand private equity buyouts?” was not asked.The same pattern recurred — on a much larger scale — in the wakeof the COVID outbreak in early 2020. In order to prevent the economicshock caused by the pandemic from leading to another systemic financialcrisis, central banks across the world chose to backstop not only banksbut also the broader shadow banking system. The most audacious meas-ures — in both size and scope — have been implemented by the Fed-eral Reserve. By purchasing so-called “junk bonds” — bonds issued bycorporate debtors with lower credit ratings — the Federal Reserve againbackstopped private equity funds, which routinely transfer debt to theirbuyout targets, forcing the latter to issue junk bonds. By backstopping

both the money market and the (high-risk) capital market, the FederalReserve effectively protects both the liability side and the asset side oflevered investors’ balance sheets.In other words, the Federal Reserve ensures that the arsenal of themost predatory actors in the financial system is fully stocked and readyto be deployed — for further financializing currently distressed sectorsof the economy, such as elderly care. Shareholders understand — thestock price of firms such as Blackstone and Apollo bounced back spec-tacularly after the Federal Reserve announced its measures. Unless gov-ernments take swift and decisive action to curb the ability of hedge andprivate equity funds to gobble up assets, COVID will become a majormilestone in the long history of central bank-facilitated financialization.The upshot is that while central bank planning already exists, it iscurrently geared toward propping up a system in which the planning ofinvestment is in private hands. This system is both unfair and inefficient.Central banks have become the lenders of last resort for a manifestly un-sustainable status quo (Fontan, Claveau, and Dietsch 2016; Jacobs andKing 2016; Streeck 2014).

Time really is a circle. Leveraged hedge funds make billions; bets blow up; dash for cash; the Fed steps in; repeat. Here's what I wrote four years ago about central banks as guarantors of this unjust and inefficient (some might say: stupid) system.
benjaminbraun.org/assets/pubs/...

This is a great list. As someone who has also been teaching the political economy of the green transition this term, a few additional resources I've found useful 🧵:

Teaching the political economy of the green transition this term, I used, and learned from, some amazing 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬. A 🧵 on some of the best. Further suggestions are very welcome, I'll add them below.

All my life I have studied democratization and autocratization. My 1st field trip was to newly democratic Argentina. I then added autocracies to my portfolio: Cuba, Ven, etc. I think I can recognize the stages of transition to authoritarianism. Here are the boxes Trump has already checked off.

Musk has no technical skills whatsoever, but he wants to appear smart. So he takes bits of information like this, told to him by junior engineers, and regurgitates it to appear smart.

Musk did this with the Twitter stack and Twitter's senior architects called him out publicly, then he fired them.

Awesome idea! 👏

10-Punkte-Plan: Hardliner Habeck im Law-and-Order-Strudel Demokratische Parteien befeuern mit ihrem Überbietungswettbewerb bei Migration und Sicherheit die rechte Diskurshegemonie. Auch die Grünen machen mit. Doch die Brandmauer verläuft nicht nur zwischen A...

"Die grundrechtliche Brandmauer verläuft nicht nur in Abgrenzung zur AfD, sondern auch in Abgrenzung zu 1 grundrechtsfeindlichen Politik. Denn was nützt eigentl. die Brandmauer, wenn die Parteien hinter dieser quasi die Forderungen der AfD von vor 3 Jahren umsetzen?"

netzpolitik.org/2025/10-punk...

Personal Discretion Over the Treasury's Payments System Means the End of Democracy If the Court and federal workers fail to stop Elon Musk, we are heading for authoritarianism.

The NYT asked me to write an op-ed on Musk and the Treasury and then took a pass. I hope it will still get read.

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see

1. The data it was trained & evaluated on

2. The code

3. Model architecture

4. Model weights.

DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books Julien Crockett speaks with Ted Chiang about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology.

Ted Chiang is one of the few sf writers who is wise.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/life...

To all the #pyladies and #rladies out there - if you have a blog or a YouTube channel and want to be added, feel free to reach out! Your content will then be featured by the @pyladies-bot.bsky.social or @rladies-bot.bsky.social 🙌

Very pleased to announce that The Bailout State is now available everywhere. Get a copy and find out why governments rescue banks, not people!