Thursday, January 23, 2025

Repairing a broken America - where the Trump oligarchy is vulnerable

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I expect it will be transiently reversed, but the Jan 21, 2025 federal informer program was a historic marker. Nobody will be able to say t...

The Jan 21 2025 Federal OPM informer program is a historic milestone

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The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) informer program launched within government on Jan 21 2025. This is a historic milestone.  [1] “… I...
Thursday, January 02, 2025

On DOGE and government efficiency: bad software, bad regulations, underfunded commitments and more

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I spent six years as a mid-level (regional) federal bureaucrat in VHA. I'm also a tech and economics geek with 20 years experience at a ...
Monday, December 02, 2024

Link resolution in the broken web - embed a fallback search string in the URL

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Geeks know the web has been dying for over a decade. Google was one on the killers, which is ironic since now the near-dead web is a problem...
Wednesday, November 27, 2024

On performative block culture in social media

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I am told Oligarch Musk did something that made blocking less effective on X.  I don't care about what he did, but I think our would-be ...
Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Ed Lotterman - American's best economics pundit - and a sample column excerpt (immigration)

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What? You've never heard of Ed Lotterman, the Minnesota economist  whose web site was last current around 2020 ? At one time he was an a...
Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Mass disability measured: in 2016 40% of OECD workers could not manage basic technology tasks

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It's hard to imagine how very simple much of our technology environment was in the 1980s. Much of what we interacted with was still unde...
Wednesday, November 06, 2024

Chaos times: American oligarchy

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1. I was right about polling being worthless 2. At least Biden was spared humiliation  3. Americans chose oligarchy willingly.  4. Our feebl...
1 comment:
Thursday, October 31, 2024

Autonomous vehicles: A prediction

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I'm putting this down as a marker for me to look back to in a few years. When autonomous vehicles are able to operate in Minnesota winte...
Sunday, October 13, 2024

Muskism, Vance, AI and the American choice between oligarchy and an imperfect democracy

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In advance of Nov 5 2024, some thoughts on  Muskism. Because I can't resist this kind of thing. Musk and his fellow tech oligarchs more ...
Friday, September 20, 2024

Perplexity is saving my linguistics classmates

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I have a dark past. I asked questions. In class. Lots of questions. Too many questions. I hear things, I get ideas, I notice gaps, I ask que...
Friday, September 13, 2024

The End Times have come for the Pinboard.in bookmarking service

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In the years following the Great Recession, from 2010 to 2013, many web services went offline . In retrospect that was the end of the Berner...
4 comments:
Wednesday, August 28, 2024

In which I declare my expert judgment on AI 2024

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These days my social media experience is largely Mastodon. There's something to be said about a social network that's so irreparably...
Friday, August 16, 2024

Fantasies of a tyrant: The Deshittification Corps

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This morning on my Mastodon : It’s possible that we have built an economical and technical environment that is too complex and treacherous f...
Monday, July 22, 2024

Naturalized and adopted citizens and Medicare/Social Security - the SSN class trap and a likely SSA software process failure

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TLDR; If you are a US citizen by naturalization or adoption you should check (call SSA and wait on phone for 1-2 hours) that your SSN is cla...