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1. UK university fees going up (but not by enough to make the system work) For those of you not in the UK, the British system of university funding is a weird mash-mash of different stuff, cobbled together from the mistakes made by successive governments. When I was young, the government effectively paid all tuition […]
7 months ago

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More from Ian Betteridge

Weeknote, Monday 23rd December

A week off work, yay! Obviously that has not stopped me checking and replying to a few emails. My team were also attempting to get me to help them cheat at the work Christmas quiz using WhatsApp. Shamefully, they didn’t even win. I had my first face to face physio session about my back. I […]

6 months ago 58 votes
When dealing with Musk, Labour needs to understand the world has changed

There are plenty of objections to preventing Elon Musk from donating to Reform. The first is it’s politically motivated. A party shouldn’t (the theory goes) use its power in government specifically to target another party. Of course, Labour could do this in a way which prevented all foreign donations to all parties, and thus side […]

6 months ago 64 votes
Ten Blue Links, “your time is up” edition

This week… But first, an announcement! TLDR: Over the holidays, I will be migrating this site from WordPress.com to Ghost. This may mean a little disruption, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. Why am I doing this? I’ve been a paying customer of WordPress.com for my site hosting for several years. I […]

6 months ago 87 votes
Weeknote, Sunday 15th December
6 months ago 54 votes
Ten Blue Links, “I am your BFDL” edition

1. Tech benevolent dictators are still… dictators in the tech community there is a concept of the “benevolent dictator for life”. This is a leadership model where one person, usually the founder, has the final say on decisions. They guide the project’s direction, relying on their expertise and vision to keep things on track, while […]

6 months ago 48 votes

More in creative

Versions of reality

A sea slug sees far more colors than you do, and you probably see more than a profoundly color-blind person. Who’s right? We each carry our own version of reality, our own story about what happened, what’s around us and how things work. Our chosen reality serves two useful purposes: First, it binds us to […]

22 hours ago 1 votes
Iconic Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

While our country looks like it might be coming apart at the seams, it’s good to revisit, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nostalgic about a lost time, but so that we can remind ourselves how, given the right conditions, things could work […]

23 hours ago 1 votes
Daydream fatigue

Spend enough time inventing possible futures in your head and you won’t have any time to build the future we will all share. Time to get to work.

2 days ago 3 votes
A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and […]

2 days ago 2 votes
A billion choices

Game theory has a lousy name. When most people think of games, they think of commercial stuff for kids, like Chutes and Ladders or possibly Monopoly. But a game is simply a system where humans, facing scarcity, make choices. Scarcity leads to choices and to competition. It turns out that our culture, our commerce and […]

3 days ago 3 votes