Tag Archives: technology

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 →

Those Drones Explained

Posted on by under Palestine, War with Iran

Zeynep Tufekci has a piece in The New York Times trying to explain the “drone panic” that has (supposedly) overtaken New Jersey. I live and work in central New Jersey, and have neither seen any drones nor encountered any panic, but am only too happy to borrow the premise.

Tufekci attempts a couple of explanations for the drone panic (and the drones), but conspicuously fails to mention one of the most prominent ones out there. About a week ago, South Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew vehemently suggested that the drones had been launched by an Iranian mothership, the implication being that they were imminently about to attack us, and constituted a major national security threat. He cited no real evidence for his claims, accused the Pentagon of covering up the threat, doubled down for awhile, and then retracted the whole thing. Van Drew is a standard-issue right-wing imbecile, but the explanation for making such claims is obvious. It’s called a guilty conscience. A belatedly guilty conscience.
Continue reading →

It Tolls for Thee, You Idiot

Posted on by under Election 2024

Election Night, 2024
Princeton, New Jersey
9 pm

As we watch the US election results shamble their way onto our screens, it’s amusing to think that we’ve spent a year or more fixated on the spectacle of two pieces of moral trash engaged in a long, unsavory job interview. Ironically, the result will be a hire and possibly a termination that blurs the distinction between at-will and for-cause. Whoever wins or loses this thing, can anyone really say why? 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 →