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Richard Meyer-Eppler

@r-meyereppler.bsky.social
134 followers 499 following 42 posts

Data Analyst looking at student statistics. Oracle SQL and IBM Cognos Analytics at work, #rstats for dataviz, parameterized reporting and everything else. Iaido instructor at www.iaido-dortmund.de. Likes orderly things.

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Reposted by Richard Meyer-Eppler
Jared Knowles @jaredknowles.com · 12/09/2026
Follow the Money: Opening 56 Years of the Fiscal Record of Our Democracy The U.S. Census Bureau has recorded what every state, county, city and township raises and spends since 1967, and it has been effectively out of reach. Today we are re-releasing it as a free API, an interactive explorer... 🔗
civilytics.com
Follow the Money: Opening 56 Years of the Fiscal Record of Our Democracy
The U.S. Census Bureau has recorded what every state, county, city and township raises and spends since 1967, and it has been effectively out of reach. Today we are re-releasing it as a free API, an interactive explorer and a bulk download, aligned across 56 years so a query returns a continuous series. It is a record you can contribute to.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
They didn't like Aaron Swartz's goals (making scientific knowledge more accessible to the public) and they do like the LLM companies' goals (permanently crushing the labor market for knowledge workers)
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Maximilian Pichl @maxpichl.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
In unserem Praxis-Forschungsprojekt "Rechtskämpfe um Informationsfreiheit" untersuchen wir das #IFG. Die Beschlüsse des Koalitionsausschusses könnten auf eine de facto Abschaffung der Informationsfreiheit hinauslaufen. Darüber schreiben wir @verfassungsblog.de 👇 verfassungsblog.de/vom-jederman...
verfassungsblog.de
Vom „Jedermannsrecht“ zum Privileg für Wenige
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Annika Brockschmidt @ardenthistorian.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Bitte unterschreiben, wenn ihr ein paar Sekunden Zeit habt - es ist wichtig!
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abgeordnetenwatch @abgeordnetenwatch.de · 08/07/2026
NEU: Angriff auf das #IFG: Diese Recherchen wären künftig so nicht mehr möglich (u.a. zu Spahns Maskenliste, Amthors Lobbybrief, Merkels Impfpatent-Wende, Lindners Porschegate-SMS, Schröders Lobbyaktivitäten) www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/recherchen/i....
abgeordnetenwatch.de
Diese Recherchen wären künftig nicht mehr möglich | abgeordnetenwatch
Briefe, E-Mails, Aktenvermerke: Das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz bringt immer wieder brisante Unterlagen ans Licht. Union und SPD wollen das Auskunftsrecht nun massiv einschränken. Acht Recherchen, die...
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Arne Semsrott @arnesemsrott.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
NEU: Die Bundesregierung plant den schwersten Angriff auf staatliche Transparenz in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Das IFG soll abgeschafft werden. Das ist nicht nur ein Bruch des Koalitionsvertrags, sondern beschädigt Presse- und Informationsfreiheit massiv. fragdenstaat.de/artikel/poli...
fragdenstaat.de
Beschluss des Koalitionsausschusses: SPD und Union planen Abschaffung des IFG
Es ist der schwerste Angriff auf staatliche Transparenz in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik: Der Koalitionsauschuss von SPD, CDU und CSU hat beschlossen, das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz de facto abzu...
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Benjamin Braun @handle.invalid · 24/06/2026
Die Koalition will einen Rentenfonds nach 🇸🇪 Vorbild, in den 2% des Lohns fließen. Wie schon bei Lindners Aktienrente (remember him?) greift die progressive Kritik an diesem Element der #rentenreform viel zu kurz. Internationale Evidenz zeigt: Kapitaldeckung = Finanzialisierungsmaschine. 🧵
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Nick Gerakines @ngerakines.me · 27/05/2026
WMF spent 20 years telling donors it wasn't like other tech companies. Then in ten days it fired MediaWiki's longtime lead, dissolved the Community Tech team, and most of those let go were union organizers. Now sitting on $296M in reserves and working hard to undo years of good will and built trust.
medium.com
Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire…
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
This is why there is a 'world war' aspect: The US-led order is at war with the confrontation states - Russia, China, Iran. It has a limited capacity of Interceptors, munitions, THAAD air defense, drones etc. Hence: Theater prioritization "Iran war may leave Ukraine without critical air defenses"
politico.com
Iran war may leave Ukraine without critical air defenses
Kyiv is already feeling the shockwaves of the U.S.-Israel military option.
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Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel. “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”
therage.co
Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web
Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology
She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.
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Richard Meyer-Eppler @r-meyereppler.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Question on #rayshader #rstats: I want to combine several images created with rayshader::render_highquality. I have complex images that will end up in print. This will only look good if I can get rid of each image's background. How to do that despite Monte Carlo noise?
Two images created with rayshader::render_highquality side by side. One has no shadows and a uniform background, the other has shadows and Monte Carlo noise.
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Helena Steinhaus @helenasteinhaus.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
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...
deutschlandfunk.de
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.
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FragDenStaat @fragdenstaat.de · 20/10/2025
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...
fragdenstaat.de
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...
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FragDenStaat @fragdenstaat.de · 03/07/2025
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-...
fragdenstaat.de
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.
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Keith Fitzgerald @keithfitzgerald.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
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.
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Richard Meyer-Eppler @r-meyereppler.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
💯! 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.
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Helena Steinhaus @helenasteinhaus.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
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!
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Frank Elavsky (he/him) ⌁ @frank.computer · 18/06/2025
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.
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Michael Albert @michlalbrt.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
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.
spiegel.de
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«, ...
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rand0mgen.bsky.social @rand0mgen.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
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.
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Benjamin Braun @handle.invalid · 09/04/2025
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/...
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 backstoppingboth 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).
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Rasmus Corlin Christensen @phdskat.org · 29/03/2025
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 🧵:
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Benjamin Braun @handle.invalid · 28/03/2025
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.
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Javier Corrales @javiercorrales.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
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.
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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 09/02/2025
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.
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Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
"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...
netzpolitik.org
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...
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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
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.
liberalcurrents.com
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.
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 29/01/2025
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.
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Ken MacLeod @amendlocke.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
Ted Chiang is one of the few sf writers who is wise. lareviewofbooks.org/article/life...
lareviewofbooks.org
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.
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Cosima @cosima.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
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 🙌
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Martijn Konings @mkonings.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Very pleased to announce that The Bailout State is now available everywhere. Get a copy and find out why governments rescue banks, not people!
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Prof. Emily Nordmann @emilynordmann.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
I'm reading Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft and it's full of gems, even for nonfiction #AcademicSky writing. "A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art."
A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

There's luck in art. And there's the gift. You can't earn that. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.

I'm not going to discuss writing as self-expression, as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things, but first of all - and in the end, too - it is an art, a craft, a making. And that is the joy of it.

To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It's worth it.
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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
Please forgive a little earnest-posting. I’m finding the start of 2025 kind of hard and while there are obvious reasons to dread what’s coming, I think it’s more than the new administration. A lot of my ground truths have been unsettled in a way that makes it hard to know what to do next.
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Doug Mack @douglasmack.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
My family is out for a few hours and unlike all the other times, THIS time I will manage to deep-clean the whole house, catch up on every email, create a perfect household budget, write all the posts I've been meaning to write, pitch 10 stories to major publications, take time for myself, run 10k,
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Tyler Morgan-Wall @tylermw.com · 03/12/2024
🤔Problem: You like the idea of #AdventOfCode but you have tons of outstanding #GitHub issues! 🤗Solution: Install the below bookmarklet (copy code into the address field of a bookmark) and turn any GH issues page into an advent calendar! Code: gist.github.com/tylermorganw... #RStats #python #coding
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Daniel Bachler @danielbachler.de · 21/11/2024
At @ourworldindata.org, we’ve just launched new data download options and a Chart Data API to make it even easier to access and reuse the data on our site! Here’s a quick overview of what’s new: 🧵
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Neil Kaye @neilrkaye.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
This #dataviz compares the of area of land vs the area of sea across the globe. On this equal area map each box is about the area of Australia or the contiguous USA - we are a water world! For #map geeks, this may be the only sensible use of the Gall–Peters projection!
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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Hey #RStats people. How do you feel about startup messages? Would this nudge be too obnoxious if I added it to my package?
R startup message to encourage people to cite software
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Tyler Morgan-Wall @tylermw.com · 09/11/2024
Greatest #dataviz hits continued! Here's the Humanity Globe: visualizing the world population density, independent from geography. Importantly, by emphasizing humans instead of land, New Zealand finally gets its revenge: a map "without" Australia, for once!😀 Made w/ #RStats, #rayrender, & #rayshader
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Joe Cheng @jcheng5.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
It suddenly feels like we're back... are we back!? 😭 #rstats
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