Mike Beggs

Occasionally tempted to say yes and see what happens

Jon Kudelka cartoon. Julia Gillard is turning off the Light On The Hill and saying ‘it was attracting the boats’

Remembering Job Kudelka, his greatest one line single panel

Haha kind of, I think I wrote about it for Craccum and did masters on the dotcom bubble

Children’s Singer Raffi on Creating a Society That Respects and Cherishes Kids Today is International Children’s Day. To celebrate, we spoke to beloved children’s singer Raffi about nurturing the creativity and sense of play of children, his support for Bernie Sanders, organizin...

Here’s Raffi in Jacobin in 2020! jacobin.com/2020/06/raff...

What’s wrong with MMT? As Marc Lavoie and John Quiggin have noted, there are ‘two MMTs’. Scholars such as Randy Wray, Eric Tymoigne and Scott Fulwiler have contributed to debates on monetary economics, instit…

In response to the reappearance of MMT, I have, somewhat reluctantly, written up where the current crop of 'pop MMT' goes wrong.

The short version: yes the central bank issues money; no this doesn't change anything.

criticalfinance.org/2025/12/19/w...

It’s easy to forget the average person has probably only seen Eraserhead and his version of Dune. And Blue Velvet of course

On the need for a renewed democratic universalism - Overland literary journal If we’re to emerge from this awful spiral, in which one form of identitarian chauvinism spurs the next, we’ll only do so on the basis of a very different politics: one that takes for granted the abili...

Wrote something for @OverlandJournal about the scapegoating of the Palestine solidarity rallies

overland.org.au/2025/12/on-t...

LPE 2.0: A New Association to Meet the Times As the Trump administration attempts to suppress critical inquiry and operate outside of conventional legal boundaries, the work of LPE scholars, organizers, and practitioners has never been more…

A new era for LPE — a more democratic one, not subject to university administrators and not reliant on funder money.

LPE lfg

lpeproject.org/blog/lpe-2-0...

a man wearing a hat and buttons says hands up who likes me ALT: a man wearing a hat and buttons says hands up who likes me

Elon Musk to Grok engineers rn:

Now that’s what I call Ockham’s Razor

The Pub at the End of the University As universities implode, the world still needs us.

The world needs is even as the universities collapse.

open.substack.com/pub/hannahfo...

Yep. Also bizarre to exclude things like philanthropic revenue but not exclude any of the expenditures funded by philanthropy

Who me?

I’m just a bush accountant, but it’s embarrassing how gullible or incurious so many academics can be about this stuff. Managers have come to expect people know nothing and don’t feel confident questioning it (and are often badly informed themselves)

If your campus is full of scaffolding, pay attention to this item in the Annual Report

Another one is categorising things as ongoing or one-off expenses as is convenient for the year’s narrative. ‘Maintenance’ is a recurring expense, but there is a lot of discretion on timing. One way of hiding a surplus is a maintenance wave, which is counted as if it will keep happening every year

Plus writing down assets; plus removing research and philanthropic income, but still counting the expenditures against that income

Another is the idea that some funds are tied to specific purposes, and so asset earnings are completely irrelevant to what the institution can spend. Some cover things the uni wouldn’t otherwise pay for (e.g. prizes funded by bequests), but others cover necessities

One thing that really annoys me in uni reporting is deducting all investment income from operating revenue to calculate an ‘underlying margin’ and presenting that as the figure that matters. It mixes reasonable (the item is volatile) with the spurious (therefore we should count it at zero)

If only we could go to the supermarket with the same attitude as uni administrators. ‘Sorry, my budget is limited so I’ve decided you are going to give me more stuff for that budget’

What’s wrong babe? You haven’t even started drafting your Five Year Plans for each of the Four Pillars of Academic Excellence

The other side is, of course - of course! - the companies making LLMs are not doing so with the goal of more easily sharing the material that people have made freely available on the web. They are doing so with the goal of enclosing it - converting the products of free human activity to commodities.

The lesson we should be taking from LLMs is the immense social value there is in having all kinds of material - all kinds of products of human intellectual labor - freely available online. They should be reminding us of the early utopian promise of the web.

Great thread, couldn’t agree more.

RIP Claus Offe

Against Money A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.   Money is unavoidably fundamental to our daily lives. It lurks behind ...

Coming this spring. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Motherfucker this is the London review of books you better take your sensitive ass back to the Atlantic

Yes in my experience it’s more that the publisher is risk averse and also doesn’t want to bother with hassle/cost of asking for rights. If only you were training an LLM

I just put up a longish post on my blog, thinking about what's going on in the labor market. jwmason.org/slackwire/so...

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d’état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion…, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous.

Topical commentary from 1852

www.marxists.org/archive/marx...