Slate, the online magazine, has a new web site. Actually, “new web site” might not be an accurate description. I might prefer “attack on the public” or “insult to the intelligence” or “rain dance of hatred upon the consumer.”
It’s a Rohrschach of a web site. You don’t have any idea what it’s supposed to mean and after a time, you no longer believe anyone else knows either. Someone just threw colors and titles on the page like an electronic Jackson Pollack. The web site re-lists the same articles repeatedly apparently with the idea that maybe if you the title in a different font with a different background, you’ll like it better. If you want to find anything, you’re on the scavenger hunt from hell. I just want to read Doonsebury and I’m never sure where it is in there.
Some days, it’s just not worth hacking through the electronic jungle of obstruction and there are easier sights beckoning.
I know where they got the designer – same guys did the ACA site except better.
Internet Explorer, one of the most widely used web browsers “Browser Market Share”. Net Applications . . Retrieved 29 July 2011 . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Internet Explorer Assassin!
Before I name the culprit, let me explain the crime. Every morning barring the most unusual circumstances, I read through business, business ethics, economics, and justice related web sites. It takes about an hour. It happens every day. Usually, I set a few aside for later use as blog posts.
A few weeks ago, Internet Explorer would crash while I was reading. I thought nothing about it. Browsers do crash on occasion. I have six different browsers on my computer just in case.
But after a while, a pattern emerged and Internet Explorer began dying every morning about the same time.
It was Salon killing my browser, actually it just locks it up so it’s frozen and useless.
The internet site, Salon.com has been crashing Internet Explorer. It usually does it after I have put up several tabs of articles to read. It seems to coincide with one of their new advertisement pop-ups.
I haven’t solved the problem but I use a separate browser to view Salon, so when the browser crashes, I don’t lose much but it is inconvenient.
I guess the business ethics problem here is having a product which doesn’t work all the time. And before I learned to use a separate browser, it regularly ate my research for blogging.
So, maybe in the future, they might temper the clutter so that access to their site would be better. I’d like that and I’m sure there are others who would appreciate it.
Well, today was the last straw. I unsubscribed from the Salon main
page. It is totally impossible to read anything on Salon, or to even
try and contact them! Every time I go there, my browser crashes and I
have to restart my computer. Don’t they understand about advertising,
and how it slows down things? What idiots constructed this website?
Well they lost one reader, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The other day Sean Hannity featured some Real Americans telling tales of how they have been hurt by Obamacare. So Eric Stern, who used to work for Brian Schweitzer, had a bright idea: he actually called Hannity’s guests, to get the details.
Sure enough, the businessman who claimed that Obamacare was driving up his costs, forcing him to lay off workers, only has four employees — meaning that Obamacare has no effect whatsoever on his business. The two families complaining about soaring premiums haven’t actually checked out what’s on offer, and Stern estimates that they would in fact see major savings.
You have to wonder about the mindset of people who go on national TV to complain about how they’re suffering from a program based on nothing but what they think they heard somewhere. You might also wonder about what kind of alleged news show features such people without any check on their bona fides. But then again, consider the network.
I’m kinda’ in the same boat here with Paul Krugman. A major television network does three interviews with couples explaining that Obamacare costs more than what they had before without any actual knowledge of what their costs would be. An analysis of what they said and later interviews convincingly suggests that all of them would save money under the program. Someone is falling down on the job here.
Doesn’t the concept of a “news” imply knowledge? .. at least a little knowledge?
As a matter of business ethics, it’s very similar to skipping interviewing actual participants in an event because you don’t want to drive that far. Why do your job when it’s hard? Why work up intelligent news coverage when half-done and half-baked with do?
In short, this is a spectacular ethics failure. Interviewing people who don’t know anything about an important subject and acting as if what they are saying is factual is unethical unless your intent is to purely mislead.
A recent Obamacare special on Fox News’ Hannity illuminated the
network’s political bias, pattern of misinformation, and questionable
use of anecdotal evidence, brought to light when a former adviser to
Montana’s governor fact-checked the special and found that not one of
the show’s guests–who lamented the horrors of the Affordable Care Act
(ACA) on air–had directly suffered from the law or even visited the
insurance exchange. Hannity’s reliance on guests who condemned Obamacare
due to existing political bias demonstrates Fox News’ habit of
misinforming on the ACA and raises serious questions about the
credibility of other guests that have recounted the “consequences” of
the law.
I believe you can write a column and strongly recommend that women be careful about drinking too much while still holding men accountable for their behavior. Ms. Yoffe wrote a column discouraging women from over indulging but did not hold men accountable. That’s not acceptable. She said she did hold them accountable but I did not get that from her writing, if you did please comment.
Is this a business ethics problem. Yes.
Giving people advice is a serious business. Implying that female drinking puts too much temptation out there is different than saying taking precautions is wise. The difference is where you place the responsibility. The responsibility is always on the perpetrator not the victim.
James Pilant
Emily Yoffe, advice columnist, blames college women for Rape Culture
Okay, Emily Yoffe–obviously alcohol makes you randy and more aggressive, no matter your gender. And obviously college-aged women invariably act like Lindsey Lohan when they consume too much of it, and, worse yet, can be unwittingly drinking a mixed drink full of date rape drugs. However, to somehow suggest that their consumption of alcohol creates a more rape permissive environment and only seeks to embolden potential rapists is, well, like saying women should be raped for wearing provocative clothing. Furthermore, a woman can be discussing her menstrual cycle while drinking O Doul’s in a beekeepers uniform, and college dudes will still try to rape her. As we all know, rape is purely about dominance. The introduction of alcohol, although certainly offering rapists a golden ticket, is by no means the fault of the woman or somehow the only invitation to rape. And this is coming from a guy, Emily Yoffe.
Yoffe is wrong, as her Slate colleague Amanda Hess, tells us, because you don’t solve a structural problem with a personal self-help solution. We didn’t deal with drunk driving in this country by telling people, “hey, you can’t control drunk drivers, so minimize driving when the bars are closing!” We dealt with it by a combination of a massive public awareness campaign, and imposing real accountability- not just jail sentences, but more prosaically, license suspensions. Drunk driving costs the drunk drivers something now, and it didn’t three decades ago. We didn’t end drunk driving deaths, but we knocked them down a lot.
Yoffe is wrong because rapists are not weather systems. I mentioned this earlier today, and I’ve written about it before. The implicit model of rapists in her piece is one of an unthinking phenomena, one that does not respond to stimulus, that therefore we can’t do anything about but get out of the way. There’s a pernicious undercurrent to this thinking in many areas, from forest fires to global climate change – but for a moment, let’s just accept that there are some things we can’t prevent or deter. All we can do it look out for them, avoid encountering them, and minimize the damage when they occur. Yoffe, and many others, treat rape like this. That’s wrong. Often, they start from the proposition that rapists are bad people who don’t misunderstand, but rather rape because they want to. That’s true. But they take the wrong lesson from the research that shows us that. They infer that the rapists are irrational and can’t be influenced, when the Predator Theory research indicates just the opposite: that they do, in fact, respond to stimulus, by choosing the tactics that are least likely to get them caught. I’ve seen it in small, tightly-knit communities, too. When they have enough victims report and can no longer convince people of narratives about crazy victims, misunderstandings or one-time poor judgment, they move on to new communities where they can get a fresh shot at bullshitting their way through their victims’ reports. Since we know that they use the tactics that work and respond rationally to stimulus, we know that they are not like weather systems and we should discard that model.
Penn State College of Engineering (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s Called Justice!
This is what happens when a university covers up crime. It’s what’s supposed to happen. It’s not an anomaly except in the sense that so often it does not.
Should they have had to pay this money and fire those people?
Yes.
How do you get justice without penalty? How do you get people to not aid and abet in the crimes of others if there are not penalties? How do you get people from sweeping criminal conduct under the rug if it threatens the institutions reputation if the penalties for not sweeping don’t do as much damage?
What’s scary is how seldom justice happens. This time, people got fired. This time, there were criminal prosecutions and monetary penalties.
Compare this to our standard international or investment bank narrative. 1. Bank does something terrible and utterly illegal. 2. Against all odds bank gets caught. 3. Bank says, “What wrongdoing?” against a background of overwhelming evidence. 4. Bank pleads guilty only after prosecution has been taken off the table. 5. Bank pays roughly 10% of what it made by outright criminality. 6. Roughly two years pass, and the bank once again gets caught doing the same old thing or something brand new. 7. The cycle goes on.
It’s a pity that child abuse brings out societal anger but not house stealing or international money laundering.
We can bet Penn State will be keeping a careful eye on its policies in the future.
Can we say the same for our investment banks?
James Pilant
Sandusky fallout costs Penn State more than $50 million | News | CentreDaily.com
The money Penn State has spent in legal and consulting fees for the Jerry Sandusky scandal has topped $50 million. Penn State’s latest update shows the university has spent $50,459,828 through July 31 for work done by more than three-dozen firms. That’s up $1,025,962 from what the university spent through June 30, according to monthly updates provided by Penn State. The potential total cost of the scandal skyrockets to more than $158 million when factoring in the dollar value of the total settlement offers with Sandusky claimants and the full NCAA fine, which the university is paying in yearly installments.
Arguably the single greatest controversy ever to mar the reputation
of a nationally recognized university, and certainly the incidence of
greatest infamy ever to involve a university’s athletic
department, the Pennsylvania State sex scandal was one which, at its
height, captivated the nation, prompting a variety of emotional
responses amongst members of the general public, the most profound of
which occurred amongst those with personal connections to the Penn State
football program. While the event is one which may have faded from the
forefront of public attention, the emotional trauma inflicted by the
scandal upon those personally involved is likely to be of a far more
enduring nature.
At the onset of the scandal, allegations of sexual
misconduct against assistant coach Jerry Sandusky prompted widespread
outrage, which became exponentially more vitriolic when it was
discovered that many of Sandusky’s alleged misdeeds were said to
have involved minors. The subsequent controversy which developed in the
wake of these allegations would be of a severity so great as to nearly
completely divert public attention from other major events affecting the
campus in subsequent months, most notably the removal of longtime head
coach Joe Paterno from his position within the program, just months
before his death due to a long-gestating lung cancer. Even in light of
these developments, those convinced of Sandusky’s guilt would continue
to demand that justice be served, and would see their desires
fulfilled on Tuesday, October 9, when Sandusky would plead guilty to ten
separate instances of sexual abuse involving minors, which were
conducted over a fifteen-year period.
Can’t claim credit for this cooking, my friend Paul was responsible. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Self Regulation and Chicken!
Here Milton Friedman explains that business will self regulate without government regulation.
How do you feel about that? Ever had food poisoning? Fun?
I don’t get the impression that businesses aren’t willing to lose a few customers (and I mean permanent losses) if it means more profits.
Maybe I’m cynical or maybe I just read the news?
Or how about this?
How many people have to be killed or injured by supposedly self regulating businesses before you realize that Milton Friedman was a much better television celebrity than an economist?
James Pilant
Is our chicken safe to eat? | Business Watch | McClatchy DC
After 317 people in 20 states got sick from eating contaminated chicken, consumer groups today urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to do a better job of inspecting poultry.
Shouldn’t this case cast a little doubt on so many American Universities’ desire to build branches in China? Won’t they insist on running schools in their country they way they run the current ones?
After all, they are communists who run a dictatorship.
Yes, that is not a nice thing to say, and the fact that literally thousands of American corporations are aiding and abetting this regime is regrettable but under free market fundamentalism perfectly understandable.
I mean, does it really matter if the nation is an enemy of democracy when there is money to be made?
The business ethics implications are fascinating but largely undiscussed. For all you students out there, this is primo paper territory. If you want to write something controversial, this is where to go. Think of it, business ethics and American Investment in the Chinese economy. If I were you, I would start the story by going back to China just a few years after the Great Cultural Revolution as its economy lurched from one disaster to another. Start the story there and then begin the American involvement, investment and then sharing patents and partnerships. Compare job losses in the U.S. to job gains in China. Discuss the willingness of the Chinese government to simply not bother with environmental and worker safety problems. Put in some material on a couple of the bigger coal mine disasters. Faculty love stories. Then, when you reach the end, wonder out loud if the regime could have survived with American corporate money. I bet it’s a solid A. (If you would like to see it published once it is written, send me an e-mail – we can work something out!)
James Pilant
SHANGHAI: China’s Peking University fires professor who criticized government | Asia | McClatchy DC
One of China’s top universities has notified an economics professor known for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government that his colleagues have voted to expel him from the institution.The move against Xia Yeliang, who teaches at Peking University in Beijing, appears to reflect a crackdown on liberal academics that’s become more severe since President Xi Jinping came to power in March.Several well-known universities – including the London School of Economics and Yale and Cornell in the United States – have partnerships with Peking, though few have taken up Xia’s cause. Other institutions, including New York University and Duke University, have opened campuses in China recently or are about to amid worries that they’ll sacrifice academic freedom for the sometimes lucrative opportunity to partner with Chinese institutions.
April 9th, 2012, as usual, after raising the national flag and singing the anthem, the students in Huilong middle school stayed in square, listening to the weekly speech under the national flag by a selected outstanding student. They all knew it was a routine that every Monday, school had this assembly, so did most of the schools in other parts of China. And the speech, always presented by disciplined peers with excellent academic performance, was basically the same each week that about hard-working, obedient, respecting schools, teachers and parents etc. Thus, no one would pay attention to the speech but hoping the ceremony could end earlier. However, students, also teachers, soon realized today’s speech was different when they heard “we are not machine, even if we are, school should not treat us as tools to improve the enrollment rate of universities”. The senior two honorary student, Chenbo Jiang, was emotionally criticizing the school system and Chinese education. He continued: “what we are fighting for, under this education system, and what kind of people we will become?” He blamed the education deprived their dreams and turned them into indifferent people who only cared about the scores; he blamed parents blindly forced them to study all the time while neglected their true feeling and failed to give enough care and love; he blamed the teachers for pushing them so hard in doing endless homework in order to increase the enrollment rate of universities that few students actually loved and respected their teachers. Everyone stunned for a while and then students started to applaud. Some teachers were laughing and some were in shock. The school principal was so surprised because the draft of the speech had to be examined by the teachers every time before the students went up to the stage. This should not happen.
The news quickly spread out through internet with the titles like “high school student changes the speech under the national flag” or “high school student criticizes education system” and caused heated discussion among Chinese netizens in Sina microblog as well as in other social networking sites. Many people thought Chenbo Jiang was courageous to speak out the “truth” and they agreed that Chinese education was problematic. On April 20th, 2012, Nanfang People’s magazine, an influential weekly magazine of Southern China Press, published a commentary on this event. The report compares Chenbo Jiang to the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who points out the truth that no one wants to acknowledge.
Incredible Footage of Reusable Rocket, The Future of Space Exploration
Writing about business ethics from day to day is an excruciating experience. You are constantly bombarded by some of the worst of human behavior and lots of villains. It is similar in some sense to the cop on the beat who only sees the worst of human behavior. It pushes one toward cynicism and doubt about the human condition.
Fortunately, there are counter currents of humans at their best, humans struggling to do the right thing. Here is one of them.
Enjoy!
James Pilant
Ares I Rocket First Stage (June 2008) (Photo credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center)
From around the web.
From the web site, The Rocketry Blog. (And if you want to see more footage of this incredible vehicle – this web site has them. jp)
“SpaceX’s Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet) today, hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safely using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control. Grasshopper touched down with its most accurate precision thus far on the centermost part of the launch pad. At touchdown, the thrust to weight ratio of the vehicle was greater than one, proving a key landing algorithm for Falcon 9. Today’s test was completed at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.” – SpaceX
This thing is huge so pulling this off is quite incredible and SpaceX continues to push this technology in its test. I looking forward to one day seeing the Falcon 9 return this way.
A protest in Utah against Wal-Mart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Buying American Un-American?
No, it’s not. Buying American is patriotic, puts jobs here and honors the strong work ethic that Americans have always practiced. But Jonathan Hoenig says that buying American is Un-American. Read below for the exact quote. This is what passes for intelligent analysis on a news show?
Up is down. Black is white. What is this? If you say it long enough and often enough, does stupidity and simple nonsense become persuasive?
Oh, I get the message. What Hoenig is saying is that free market fundamentalism is the actual real American belief system and all this patriotic stuff is on a lower intellectual and thought level. I get it.
Buy American is a business ethics idea, the idea that by rewarding your fellow countrymen for their efforts you build a better nation. Free market fundamentalism is a quasi-religious movement that says we will all be happy and prosperous once we stop trying to do the right thing and chase the money.
Well, I’m not ready to give up doing the right thing. So, I’ll buy American.
James Pilant
Why does Fox “news” hate Americans? During their Saturday “business block,” Cashin’ In guest host Eric Bolling and most of his panel did their best to do an infomercial for Walmart — and to trash the protesters who have been out there demanding higher wages for their workers. And if that wasn’t bad enough, their regular, libertarian wingnut Jonathan Hoenig called the very notion of companies like Walmart buying made in America products “un-American.”
I’m not going to transcribe all of this mess, but here’s some of the worst of it, where they were blaming the protesters for Walmart deciding to expand into China, and attacking labor unions, which is their favorite sport along with attacking poor people on Faux “news” on Saturday mornings. …
(The relevant remarks below)
HOENIG: I’m actually against that Eric. I think this whole notion of buy American is actually un-American. American companies should buy the lowest quality product… excuse me, the lowest price product at the highest possible quality. If they happen to be made overseas, that’s even better. It allows Americans to save money and those resources to be more deployed, and more profitable in productive ways.
Josh Miller’s new documentary is an inspirational reminder that the words “Made in USA” still matter. While Americans from Main Street to the halls of Congress struggle to cope with our sputtering economy, Miller reminds us that the answer to reclaiming a prosperous future may lie in the long-forgotten rallying cry to “Buy American.”
As Miller demonstrates in his month-long trek across the United States, a sure-fire way to create American jobs is to stimulate demand for American-made products. While conventional wisdom once told us the jobs that left our shores would never return, as is so often the case, that conventional wisdom is now being turned on its head.
The film shows that in many industries, companies that stuck to their American-made roots are now thriving, while firms that made the decision to off-shore are realizing the advantages of sourcing from low-wage countries like China are being eaten up by rapidly increasing wages in those countries. Once you consider the other disadvantages of off-shoring, such as increased shipping costs, higher inventory costs, and extended time to get products to market, in many industries the benefits of overseas production are now being outweighed by the costs. As a consequence, America may be primed for a serious jobs recovery.
In the film, Michael Araten, CEO of the toy company K’Nex, whom Miller interviews, makes the most compelling case that the U.S. is poised for job creation in the manufacturing sector and that the Buy American Movement can help facilitate it. “What I see happening is that consumers care more and more where stuff is made; businesses react to consumers,” explains Araten. “As demand picks up for [American-made products], then [businesses] will find more ways to [fill that demand].”
And I can add, evil as well. My half of the human race, the male half, can sometimes be alarmingly stupid, ignorant and malicious. Pushing around young girls looking for some bizarre concept of purity is the ultimate bullying and we should know better. We might do better trying to live our lives as gentlemen and worrying less about women’s sexuality.
There is no way that taking money for testing a woman’s virginity to determine her purity is ethical in business or otherwise. It never will be. Doesn’t basic business ethics imply that you are doing something useful, something beneficial in a sense? What’s useful about testing for virginity?
The Virginity Hit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Where would you get that out of this?
James Pilant
The invasive, sexist practice of “testing” girls’ virginity – Salon.com
Aside from the primary fact that a virginity test is evil and invasive, it’s not even accurate – as any teenager who’s ever gone horseback riding or read the instructions in a box of tampons could tell you. As ethicist and researcher Marie-Ève Bouthillier told the Gazette, to assume so “reduces virginity to a piece of skin.” Claire Faucher, an assistant clinical professor at the Université de Montréal, says that the World Health Organization considers virginity testing sexual violence against women. And Amnesty International calls it “sexual violence… akin to rape.”In far too many places in this world, a girl’s virginity is so highly prized her community is willing to sexually abuse her to try to confirm it. And though an official statement on the ethics of the practice may help curb it in some areas, it’s clear from its persistence in places where it’s not supposed to exist that it takes a lot more than saying it’s wrong to stop it. As Bouthillier notes, testing is easy to perpetuate “because it’s a taboo practice and it’s hidden.” That’s why more education and enlightenment and protections for girls need to be a serious priority in the healthcare profession, all over the world. Healthcare providers need …
But I thought I’d mention that before Melanie Phillips became ‘Mad Mel’, she was a social affairs journalist for The Guardian and broke the ‘virginity testing’ story for the newspaper in 1979, as seen in this archival piece from The Guardian‘s
website. The ‘virginity testing’ controversy centred around the
gynaecological examination of a South Asian women at Heathrow when she
tried to enter the country on a fiancee visa, and soon led to a
widespread investigation into racially discriminatory practices within
the UK immigration control system (you can find out more about our
research into this here).
It is bizarre how the investigative journalist who broke this story
in 1979 has become the right-wing columnist that we know (and don’t
love) today. I wonder what she would write if the ‘virginity testing’
story broke now…
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