Boy, the laws and ethics intersection has been almost constantly in the news lately, led by the Fani Willis controversy in Georgia, which apparently will turn on whether the judge believes the justly beleaguered Fulton County DA really paid half of her paramour and co-Trump prosecutor’s expenses on various platonic < cough> trips and cruises in cash, though there’s no record of such payments. Willis’s father even took the stand to explain that keeping huge amounts of cash on hand is “a black thing.” I did not know that!
As Alice would say, “Curiouser and curiouser!” Then we have much ferment in the legal world over whether the New York County Supreme Court’s order for Donald Trump to pay an unprecedented $355 million for inflating asset values in statements of his financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers was just, cruel and unusual punishment, a bill of attainder, or self-evident partisan lawfare. Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t help matters by trying to justify the award by saying that Trump is special (wink,wink) and we all know what that means when coming from a Democrat. I confess, I don’t know the New York law involved well enough to weigh in on this one, but the verdict certainly adds to the weight of evidence that there is a full-on press to use the courts to crush Trump before he can crush Joe Biden.
There were two non-Trump law and ethics stories recently worth pondering.
In the first, comedian and author Sarah Silverman along several other authors saw most of their lawsuit against OpenAI, the tech company behind ChatGPT, tossed. Their class-action complaint claimed that when an AI program “reads” a manuscript or other copyrighted content and uses that information to generate its own content, that is copyright infringement. Basically the suit claims that copyrighted works “were copied by OpenAI without consent, without credit, and without compensation. Reason equates that to arguing that a human being reading a book “in order to learn about a subject for a presentation is infringing on the work, or that search engines are infringing when they scan webpages to index them” are “copying” them. Elizabeth Brown asks, “Is it a crime to learn something by reading a copyrighted book? What if you later summarize that book to a friend or write a description of it online? Of course, these things are perfectly legal when a person does them. But does that change when it’s an artificial intelligence system doing the reading, learning, and summarizing?” In the first round of this latest human vs. SkyNet court battle, the judge ruled that most of Silverman et al.’s theory was hooey. And so it seems.
In the other case, the Supreme Court, as it often does, turned down the opportunity to review a challenge to an admissions policy at a prestigious DEI-obsessed high school in Virginia that seems like an obvious attempt to get around affirmative action prohibitions. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a Northern Virginia high on the U.S. News & World Reports list of the best high schools in the country, does not take race directly into account, but now cleverly uses socioeconomic factors to make sure enough of the school’s 550 slots go to students who aren’t Asian American. (EA covered another related story about the school here.) The policy was challenged by a group of parents and alumni who argued that this acted to reduce the number of Asian American students, (who had previously received nearly three out of four offers of admission), and thus constituted racial discrimination.
Nobody know why SCOTUS turns down a case when it is passed over without comment, but the decision to let the 4th Circuit’s ruling that upheld the new policy go unreviewed attracted a blistering, 10-page dissent from Justice Alito (Justice Thomas also objected to the decision). Alito wrote in part,
The holding below effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.
That is indefensible….Consider the following hypothetical case. Suppose that white parents in a school district where 85 percent of the students are white and 15 percent are black complain because 10 of the 12 players (83 percent) on the public high school basketball team are black. Suppose that the principal emails the coach and says: “You have too many black players. You need to replace some of them with white players.” And suppose the coach emails back: “Ok. That will hurt the team, but if you insist, I’ll do it.” The coach then takes five of his black players aside and kicks them off the team for some contrived—but facially neutral—reason. For instance, as cover, he might institute a policy that reserves a set number of spots on the roster for each of the middle schools who feed to the high school. According to the reasoning of the Fourth Circuit majority, this action would not violate equal protection because the percentage of black players left on the team (approximately 42 percent) would exceed the percentage of black students in the school. I cannot imagine this Court’s sustaining such discrimination,but in principle there is no difference between that imaginary case and one now before us….The Court’s willingness to swallow the aberrant decision below is hard to understand. We should wipe the decision off the books…
Ethics Alarms 
“Willis’s father even took the stand to explain that keeping huge amounts of cash on hand is “a black thing.” I did not know that!”
I read an article about this. I can believe it is a black thing to keep money on hand in the event of an emergency. I can certainly believe it’s not just a black thing, but a wise thing to keep money on hand.
But is he really saying that such a practice is applicable here? That it’s a black thing to cover your wrongdoing backside with cash so there’s no paper trail? Seems kind of racist to me.
The court was televised. Watch it instead of a distillation or spin from any news outlet. This is one of the benefits of the social media leviathan.
.”The Court’s willingness to swallow the aberrant decision below is hard to understand. “
It isn’t if you realize that our elites really, really like discrimination, especially racial discrimination.
I worry about the Michael Mann verdict. Science is almost a contact sport at times. Near-violent disagreement happens at many meetings and things are said there and at meetings similar to what was found in these blogs. There are two things that really worry me about this verdict.
(1) It found that ‘online blogs’ have a lower threshold for defamation than ‘the media’. This means there are 2 standards for the law depending on how the government classifies you. Most researchers would fall under the former category unless the government elevated them through anointing.
(2) Actual researchers don’t make a lot of money. They aren’t like a politician who can have their sponsors get them on a board of a defense contractor for $500,000/year or something. These people often make less than $100,000/year. The mere threat that they could be slapped with a $1 million verdict for contesting the government narrative of some scientific area will seriously deter them from doing so. There already is the punishment in grants and jobs that come with rocking the boat now, but government science decided that court sanctions need to be added because that wasn’t enough to silence the contrary voices.
Robert Hooke proposed that gas pressure was caused by collisions of gas particles on the sides of the container. Isaac Newton promoted the idea that gas particles repel each other and that causes gas pressure. Newton destroyed most of Hooke’s work and even the only known portrait of Hooke. Well, then Benoulli came up with the idea that gas pressure was caused by collisions of gas particles with the sides of the container and he was mocked. J.J Waterston submitted a paper demonstrating evidence that gas pressure is caused by the collisions of gas particles with the sides of the container. The paper was rejected as ‘Utter nonsense!’. Finally, Maxwell and Boltzmann were able to overcome Newton’s ghost and get people to accept that gas pressure is caused by the collisions of gas particles on the sides of the container.
Alternative ideas are not allowed today. Michelson’s disproof of the aether would not have been published. He actually set out to MEASURE the aether, only to find there was nothing there. Today, his paper would have been rejected because his results didn’t show the correct conclusion. Albert Einstein was a patent clerk when he published articles showing that atoms existed and that light was made of particles. He really changed the official narrative on those. Today, he wouldn’t have been allowed to publish because he was ‘just’ a patent clerk and his papers ‘denied’ the ‘settled science’. Climate ‘science’ is one of the worst practitioner of this today. Data is routinely ‘adjusted’ to fit the latest models instead of the reverse happening. Only the anointed are allowed to publish or get grants and only if their research is targeted towards the accepted goals. It is just as hard to dissent in ‘climate science’ today as in the field of fingerprinting.
Michelson’s and Einstein’s work debunked decades of work and the careers of numerous scientists. Today, it only takes a little stretch to see that they could be sued for defamation and financially ruined by someone like Wilhelm Ostwald.
Gov. Hocul said “By and large, they are honest people and they’re not trying to hide their assets and they’re following the rules,”
Let’s just look at J.P. Morgan. The same could be said for many of the investment banks and I didn’t want to have a pages long post on J.P. Morgan. Let’s take a look at the ‘honest people’ who are ‘following the rules’. in New York and compare them to Trump’s behavior that got him fined hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/hush-money-jp-morgan-pays-18-million-fine-violating-whistleblower-protection-rules
https://www.ethicssage.com/2011/07/is-jp-morgan-a-criminal-enterprise.htmlhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/jpmorgan-920-million-fine-manipulating-bond-metal-markets/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jpmorgan-920-million-fine-manipulating-bond-metal-markets/
There’s precedent in computing law, in the seventies loading a computer program into a machine meant copying it into working memory.
Well, it still does today, just doesn’t involve a physically separate stack of punched cards.
Sometime in the eighties, a lawsuit was argued under copyright because someone not licenced to start a program had “copied” it into memory. This case lost and the earlier bad precedent was forever overturned.