Tag Archives: business

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 Hard Domination of Everyday Life

Posted on by under Health Care Series, libertarianism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism

In a bunch of recent posts (here, here, and here), I’ve been piling on employment-at-will, mostly from the perspective of the aggrieved employee. Employment-at-will, I’ve argued, has problematic consequences for employees who are terminated at will, without cause. Terminations-without-cause incentivize arbitrary, unaccountable exercises of power in the labor market of the sort aptly described as “dominations” by Philip Pettit in his account of republican freedom.

Continue reading →

The Soft Domination of Everyday Life

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, moralism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, slices of life

Consider this post an unplanned addendum to my earlier series on domination and at-will employment.

A friend of mine just got “fired”–you’ll see in a minute why the word is in scare quotes–and we’re disagreeing about what it all means. Naturally, I thought I’d share tidbits of our discussion here. My friend blames himself; I blame his employer. Which of us is right? I’ll give you an impeccably impartial account below; you decide. Then feel free to chime in either way.

Let’s call my friend “Claude.” Claude was caught vaping on the job. There’s no explicit rule in his company’s handbook against vaping on the job. It’s simply understood that “one does not vape on the job.” It’s not clear why this is so. “It is what it is.” Argument is not invited, and evidence is not required. We all know evil when we see it. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (5/6)

Posted on by under book review, Health Care Series, libertarianism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, political philosophy

4200 words, 25 minutes’ reading time

For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here.

5. Pettit on employment-at-will
I said above that I agree in a broad way with Pettit’s critique of employment-at will. Let me put it this way: I agree that employment-at-will, at least as currently practiced in the American labor market, is a highly problematic institution, one that frequently exemplifies domination for just the reasons Pettit gives. But while this may sound like substantial-enough agreement, I think it conceals some subtle but significant disagreement. In this post, I want to work through some of the agreement and the disagreement.

Though Pettit doesn’t put things quite this way, I think we can probably agree that two things make employment-at-will problematic. One is its asymmetric character. The other are the stakes involved when it’s invoked and exercised. Continue reading →