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.
United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., east front elevation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
International Implications of Shutdown
Did you notice how odd it was that during the shutdown and the subsequent debt ceiling game of chicken that there was precious little discussion of the international implications? I did. It worries me.
Thinking that the United States is invulnerable like Superman might make you confident but it can also make you dead.
What other nations think and do matters? How much was put at risk overseas by actions here? Did we put our allies at risk and give our enemies an advantage?
A few brains in Washington would be good, some working ones anyway.
James Pilant
BERLIN: Europeans agog at Americans’ inability to compromise, aghast at likely long-term impact | Politics | McClatchy DC
No one was amused, however. The United States, after all, is not a bit player on the international stage like Greece. It is the unquestioned global leader. And while after a decade of controversial war it’s not so unusual for Europeans to express hostility toward the United States, many were shocked to see how hostile Americans seem to be to one another – and disinterested in how their internal fight might affect the rest of the world.“This is pure domestic politics,” said Xenia Dormandy, an expert on the United States and its place in the world at the London think tank Chatham House. “Nobody cares about any of the international implications. There’s a lack of desire to even think about the repercussions.”The discord will have long-term consequences, even if the United States is able to see its way through this crisis to yet another battle over spending and the debt ceiling that will come early next year, some predict.
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.
[Howth and Ireland’s Eye. County Dublin, Ireland] (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)
Ireland Tax Haven for American Corporations
Is it ethical to have a company in the U.S. base a subsidiary in a nation like Ireland to avoid paying taxes here? The company being discussed here is Apple. Do you suppose since they used this tax haven to pay an effective two percent tax on their profits, that perhaps they are not acting responsibly in regard to their duties? Are the roads, bridges and communications systems the company uses free or do they cost tax money? Are educated workers free or do schools have to be financed to educate them? Does the fire department, the police and the military defend Apple and all of its possessions on a charity basis?
It must enhance the profits of a company immensely to sit inside a highly developed nation with elaborate communication hubs, educational systems and complex legal protections and pay virtually nothing for any of it.
Well, if they don’t then who does? I’m sure you can make a guess, my average reader is probably paying a far higher proportion of their income in taxes than the two percent Apple wound up with.
Is that fair? Is it ethical to shirk your responsibilities to your country?
I’ve heard it said that all taxation is a form of theft. That’s an interesting theory. It conveys a certain sense of righteousness in not paying taxes because, after all, you are preventing a robbery. However, I am a great reader of history and i am unable to discover any successful civilization that did not use shared burdens to develop and maintain their nation.
The scheme Noonan wishes to stop became famous this spring when a Senate investigation found that Apple had paid nearly zero taxes on around $100 billion in sales revenue. Apple’s arrangement, which even critics say is a completely legal exploitation of a poorly designed global tax system, relied upon three subsidiaries incorporated in Ireland but not “resident” there for tax purposes. Noonan said Tuesday that his budget proposal would “ensure that Irish-registered companies cannot be ‘stateless’ in terms of their place of tax residency,” adding that “we don’t want to incur any reputational damage.”
While Noonan’s move would end this particular form of tax evasion, a more common form that uses shell companies registered in Ireland will go untouched. A company can still register in Ireland but avoid paying its 12.5 percent corporate tax rate by declaring tax residence in some other country with lower corporate rates, Bloomberg reports. While Apple-style tax statelessness is relatively rare, Irish subsidiaries registering to pay taxes in Bermuda, Luxembourg, and other tax haven countries is not. Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, eBay, and Microsoft all use such schemes to avoid taxes by moving global revenues from points of sale to Ireland, and then from Ireland to another tax haven. Ireland’s proposal is therefore “a very small step” and “relevant only to Apple,” former Joint Committee on Taxation chief of staff Edward Kleinbard told Reuters.
The head of the Irish agency designed to promote foreign investment in the country strongly denied that Ireland is a tax haven. But when questioned by Ireland’s RTE News, he could not deny that Apple has paid an effective tax rate of just two percent, much as Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) said yesterday in hearings on Capitol Hill.
Which, frankly, sounds pretty tax haven-ish.
“There is global competition, and tax happens to be one of the areas [where] Ireland competes for global investment,” IDA Ireland Chief Executive Barry O’Leary told RTE this morning.
That also sounds suspiciously like a tax haven. That’s what Senator Levin believes, as well.
“You are able to shift profits to places where you, an American company, don’t pay taxes,” Levin said yesterday to Apple CEO Tim Cook. “That is not right … that a company could shift its value to a tax haven, which is what Ireland is.”
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.
If you go down the page you will see a article from the Huffington Post in which an attorney suggests, I suppose the best way to put it, is that in the current case of the Missouri teen, that she was to blame. This makes me very angry. Bizarrely enough, I think you shouldn’t take advantage of 14 year old girls.
I think that it is obvious that rape is wrong but it apparently in many people’s minds carries a lot of caveats. Apparently that caveated definition always begins with the phrase: “What did she expect…”, which I have been hearing now for a good thirty years. This is often followed, in no particular order – when she dressed like that, – when she got into the car with him, – when she drank that much, – when she flirted like that, – when she went to his apartment at two in the morning, etc. You can probably think of a few I missed.
Raping women is wrong. Let me throw a little radical thought your way. Rape is a crime. It is not punishment for women’s misbehavior. It is a crime for which the perpetrator should go to prison. It is not a crime of passion, it is an assertion of power by a male without character or breeding.
And let me add these little thoughts –
A gentleman does not have sex with an unconscious woman.
A gentleman does not get a woman drunk to avoid getting her consent.
A gentleman realizes that no matter how a lady is dressed, how late it is, how drunk she is, that his duty is to protect and honor, all the time, every time.
James Pilant
Joseph DiBenedetto: ‘I’m Not Saying She Deserved To Be Raped, But…’
“What did she expect to happen at one in the morning after sneaking out?” attorney Joseph DiBenedetto said on Shephard Smith Reports. “I’m not saying — assuming that these facts are accurate and this did happen — I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, but knowing the facts as we do here including what the prosecutor has set forth, this case is going nowhere and it\’s going nowhere quick.”
Shep Smith immediately jumped in and refuted his claims.
“What you’ve done, Joseph, is taken an alleged victim of rape and turned her into a liar and a crime committer,” he said. “That’s a far jump from a 1,000 miles away.\”
I call this an epidemic in our military because the numbers are staggering. It is estimated that 1 in 5 women in the military are sexually assaulted. (McDonough) A March 26 report by the Institute of Medicine said sexual assault and rape have “been occurring at high rates throughout U.S. armed forces, including the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.” (Maze) The DOD (Department of Defense) estimated that last year around 19,000 service members are sexually assaulted each year. Thousands of our brave soldiers are being assaulted by their fellow brothers and sisters. The psychological damage of being betrayed by someone you are supposed to trust with your life has to be incredibly scarring.
The military even has a term for those who are suffering from the effects of sexual assault; it is called MST (Military Sexual Trauma). The military has reports done every year, and they have a division SAPRO (Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office) that handles policies and training around sexual assault crimes. So why are the numbers so high? “Only a small fraction of the incidents, 3,192 in 2011, are reported, and a mere 10 percent of those cases proceed to trial — hardly enough to create meaningful deterrence to criminal behavior and establish accountability.”(NYT Editorial)
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