Category Archives: Big Data

Karma Comes for Mikie Sherrill

Posted on by under Big Data, character based voting, EVS Journal, Health Care Series, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

A controversy has recently broken out in the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign. Mikie Sherrill, who has long touted her experience as a helicopter pilot for the Navy, is now facing the somewhat exaggerated charge that she “cheated her way” through the Naval Academy (to quote hearsay from the Internet).

The backstory is this: Nicholas DeGregorio, a supporter of Sherrill’s opponent in the race, made a records request re Sherrill, including her Naval Academy record, to the National Personnel Center of the National Archives. Continue reading →

The Reporters that Didn’t Bark in the Night

Posted on by under Big Data, Trump 2

The New York Times is the paradigm of mainstream legacy reporting, but its business reporting is so fucking bizarre–so outlandish and downright weird in its selectivity–that you can understand why people who work in business resort to conspiracy theories to explain what its reporters are doing.

It’s widely been reported in tech news that Oracle’s Cerner data has been hacked, and that while Oracle is trying hard to downplay the hack, it is in fact a big deal. CloudSEK has called it “the biggest supply chain hack of 2025,” adding that six million records have been exfiltrated from Oracle Cloud, affecting over 140,000 clients. According to CloudSEK, the hacker was active for several weeks across January and February before being detected. Feel free to Google “Oracle hack,” and read the dozens of articles that come up. All of them have scooped legacy media by weeks. Continue reading →

The Oracle Speaks

Posted on by under Big Data, Health Care Series, Palestine, Trump 2

OK, so let’s get this straight. TikTok had to be sold because given its Chinese ownership, it was a danger to our privacy, and on top of that, a danger to national security. But no worries, because according to business guru and data analyst Donald Trump, all-American Oracle had the technical capacity to “handle” the TikTok acquisition and handle TikTok itself. Nothing that a $100 billion Trump-inspired AI initiative couldn’t solve.

Meanwhile, back in 2022, Oracle acquired Cerner, the healthcare data company. It has now managed, as of just a few weeks ago, to get precisely its Cerner data hacked. So while Oracle could, at least in Donald Trump’s mind, handle TikTok, it couldn’t, in fact, manage to handle Cerner.

Continue reading →

Stirring the POT (2)

Posted on by under activism, Big Data, cancel culture, Election 2024, General announcements, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

March 2025: Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of “Institutional Neutrality”

Last month, I started a series here called “Stirring the POT,” designed to announce forthcoming events and summarize notable recent happenings. In my last installment, I mentioned that I was giving a paper on–a critique of–“institutional neutrality” at the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) in Norfolk, Virginia. That was fun, so I figured I’d report on what happened.  Continue reading →

Hayek on Social Knowledge

Posted on by under Big Data, Hayek, political philosophy

We’re reading Hayek’s famous paper, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in our monthly reading group tomorrow. I’ve never been convinced by Hayek’s argument, and get less convinced every time I re-read the paper. I don’t have time to work out a full response to the paper, so here, for whatever it’s worth, is a quick laundry list of objections to be developed at some later date. Continue reading →

The Rime of the Denial Manager

Posted on by under Big Data, Health Care Series
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834)


About two weeks ago, I wrote a long post here on the killing of UnitedHealthCare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson. Here’s a follow up.  Continue reading →

UHC, Denials, and Death

Posted on by under Big Data, Health Care Series, Palestine

This post has been superseded by a new and improved version written a few days later (Dec. 18, 2024). 

Let me just get straight to the point: I have a real worry about how people are reacting to the UHC killing. It’s not the usual worry that we’re being mean to Brian Thompson. It’s that a lot of what people are saying shows a misunderstanding of how the health insurance denials process works. I work in health care denials management on the provider side, and have in fact dealt with UHC‘s denials reps. I have no sympathy for them or for the insurance industry generally. UHC is the apex predator in an industry of predators. But on the whole, I don’t think it makes sense to say that insurance denials kill people. I’ll grant that excess mortality and morbidity are possible through an insurance denial, but death-through-denial is not the modal case of premature death or even close to it, and it’s a mistake to suggest otherwise. Continue reading →

Anarchy, Democracy, and Privacy

Posted on by under anarchism, Big Data, book announcement, book review, General announcements, liberty and the left, Ukraine

A trio of announcements on, yes, anarchy, democracy, and privacy:   

(1) PoT’s Roderick Long has a review in Reason of Jesse Spafford’s new book, Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (Cambridge, 2023). Despite his reservations with some of Spafford’s arguments, Roderick says, 

…this is an intelligently argued book that deserves careful reading and discussion—particularly among market libertarians, since it offers ingenious and powerful arguments, from premises many libertarians will find appealing, to conclusions that most libertarians will be eager to avoid. That’s the sort of challenge that libertarians need to take seriously.

Judging from the review, I’m inclined to think that Spafford’s discussion of the Lockean Proviso is worth further discussion. I’m hoping we can have some of that here, possibly with Spafford’s input. Continue reading →

Failing the Empathy Exams Yet Again, Starring Chat GPT

Posted on by under Big Data

We’ve taken too much for granted
And all the time it had grown
From techno-seeds we first planted
Evolved a mind of its own

–Judas Priest, “Metal Gods”

I had a conversation with ChatGPT about my latest blog post, “Failing the Empathy Exams.” I began by feeding the whole post into ChatGPT, but was told it was too long, and that ChatGPT was incapable of processing something that long. So I gave it smaller chunks, and decided to have a conversation with it about those. I started by asking it to write an improved version of the opening paragraph of the post. 

This is what it said: Continue reading →

We the Living

Posted on by under Big Data, liberty and the left

Encountered this quotation on Facebook today, in a post intended to dismiss fears of job loss through technology:

It is much easier to imagine someone losing their job to a new technology than it is to imagine many people gaining jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

Yes, it’s definitely easier to imagine something that’s happened than something that hasn’t. But what does that prove? Does it prove that fears about job loss are unfounded? Or does it prove the reverse, that those who deride such fears lack common sense? Continue reading →