Musings

Damn that Biden and his trashing the economy!

Of course that statement is not serious, our economy was doing a great job before someone appeared to take an oath of office last year in January.

Easiest just to quote the article. "Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025."

In 2024, 1.46 million jobs were added to the labor market. I can't imagine what event happened between '24 and '25. that could have caused such a change.

A decline to 12% of the previous year. Now THAT is a stellar economic policy! If you divide it up by 12 months and 50 states, that's 300 jobs per state per month. Which clearly isn't the case, but as a rough indicator it's a bit frightening. Fast food franchise employee turnover per state could probably account for that many people!

Things are perhaps looking better for '25: preliminary numbers for January show 130,000 jobs added where 55,000 were expected. But those numbers will be revised in a month or so, thus are not final. But this post and the NBC article were written before someone started World War 3 by trying to destroy Iran, so who knows what the economic backlash will happen here. We know the oil industry and market will be turbulent, we can anticipate the national debt will go up as something on the order of $11B was spent in the first week in expended munitions, and the companies that make said munitions will probably get a big boost. But overall, the stock market isn't doing that great, I know my funds and stocks are down and I'm not an aggressive investor.

A job market this stagnant can be signs heralding a recession, and we still have the growing AI bubble which has not yet popped which will gut the tech sector.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/january-jobs-revisions-trump-rcna258398

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/11/1754240/us-had-almost-no-job-growth-in-2025

Stryker is a global firm with facilities in 79 countries and over $25 billion in revenue. And a group that calls themselves Handala claims to have infiltrated them and launched a wiper attack after exfiltrating data. They used Microsoft's Intune service to execute remote wipe commands against any device that is running Outlook.

50 gigabytes of data. POOF. Now we shall see how good of a data/disaster recovery plan and whether they've practiced it.

Among Stryker's lines of business were providing supplies to hospitals, and also transmitting EKG data from field paramedics to hospitals. Supply ordering is unavailable with their systems down, and hospitals are disconnecting the non-working EKG link for fear of the wiper getting into their system.

Handala's published claim of responsibility calls Stryker a 'Zionist-rooted corporation', apparently they bought an Israel-based medtech company a few years ago.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/03/iran-backed-hackers-claim-wiper-attack-on-medtech-firm-stryker/