Business & Commercial

Addendum to “Ethics Dunce: Anyone Who Criticizes Elon Musk For Being The First Trillionaire”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I wrote last night’s post about the socialist hacks attacking one of the U.S.’s most productive and innovative people for being too successful at what he does—as contrasted with his envious critics—based on old information, as in “what I had accumulated in my notes during the day while trying to do my far easier and less productive job. (In fact, it’s ridiculous how little being an ethicist accomplishes, if it accomplishes anything at all.) Here are some related items I would have included if I had taken a bit more time on that post….

1. In addition to being assholes, the Musk-haters don’t know what they are talking about.

A frequent and erudite “X”-pundit whose handle is “Cynical Publius” wrote:

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire.”

“As a securities law attorney, please allow me to explain how anyone who says this is basically lying to you:

  1. The Securities and Exchange Commission has a myriad of laws that prevent founders and other large stockholders of publicly traded companies from dumping their shares. There are substantial holding period requirements, volume of sales limitations and public reporting obligations for stock sales. Basically, Elon holds largely illiquid shares, he is a “trillionaire” on paper only, and the best analogy is when people peg your net worth based on your home’s market price. That’s not money in your pocket, that’s the house you live in.
  2. All that money raised in the IPO? That’s not going into Elon’s pocket like the lying socialist idiots want you to believe. It’s a capital influx that will be used to make more rockets and get more payloads into orbit. It’s a CAPITAL investment—that money is like a business loan, it’s not your money to keep, it’s your money to grow the business.
  3. If it WERE legal for Elon to dump his shares, the share price would crash basically instantly and the company could very well fail.
  4. If you bought SpaceX shares in the IPO, congrats. You just bought a lottery ticket, just like Elon. May the odds ever be in your favor.
  5. So the next time someone screeches about how unfair it is that Elon Musk creates wealth that benefits all of humanity, throw the truth back in their faces.”
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Ethics Quiz: “Ick!”or Ethics [Hello Fresh’s Anal Sex Ad]

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

Nice.

I guess I had to post about that, though I wish I didn’t have to. I feel, and I always have felt, that being “proud” of how you have sex is like being proud of how often you have to visit the bathroom. It’s desperate and stupid, as well as gross.

That ad, and so much else our grovelling to the LGBTQ community has burdened society with, demonstrates how pernicious slippery slopes are. Because ancient taboos held that gay people should hide themselves in shame, some genius decided our society should declare that what one chooses to do with their naughty bits should swing to the other end of the spectrum and be a source of “pride.” No, it shouldn’t. In my experience, only mega-jerks boast about how and where they choose to have sex. I don’t care. It’s none of my business. If I’m interested, I’ll ask, and since I’m not and never will be, I won’t, so shut the hell up.

Hello Fresh has now exposed its marketing department as tasteless and pandering, like all those cowardly, pusillanimous companies that slobbered all over Black Lives Matter. I remember a late night D.C. horror movie TV host got himself fired for suddenly talking about smegma between reels of “The Brain From Planet Arous.” I thought his outburst was hilarious, but it didn’t belong on TV, and that was the end of “Gore DeVol.” This ad should be the end of Hello Fresh if there’s any justice in the world, and we know there isn’t.

I’m going to ask anyway, though I know my answer…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is the Hello Fresh “Pride” ad alluding to anal sex just in terrible taste and icky, or is it unethical, as in wrong?

________________

Pointer: Willem Reese

I Played My Lawyer Card Today, and I Shouldn’t Have To

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

My father once told me that everyone should have a law degree to protect them from being cheated or scammed by other lawyers. He also said law school was the best way to be trained in rhetoric and logic as well as societal ethics, since the schools had abdicated those fields. As someone who seldom practiced law, Dad proved his claim that a law degree qualifies someone for lost of non legal jobs; for better or worse, people assume that lawyers are competent at management, negotiation, governing, and problem-solving. My experience has been the same as my father’s: I’ve been hired for lots of jobs requiring non-legal skills because I’m a lawyer.

This depressing episode, however, validated my father’s original endorsement of a law degree.

A couple of weeks ago, the News Mix channel on Direct TV suddenly disappeared. It was weird: first the message said I wasn’t subscribed, then it flipped to the message I get from the MLB channel when a Red Sox-Orioles game is blacked out, except instead of mentioning a baseball game, it said “News Mix” couldn’t be found, then said it was searching for another channel that had that “game.”

So I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors I would soon face, and called customer service. First the woman I finally reached after fighting with an AI bot gaslighted me and pretended that I was doing something wrong, because, she said, the channel was really there. Then she “checked” and said I wasn’t subscribed to the channel, which I knew was untrue: I have regularly checked it every morning to see how Fox News, CNN, MSNOW and BBC America were spinning the same stories, and what news each is deliberately ignoring or lying about. Channel 71 or 200 gave me access to those four stations and two weather channels. It’s part of my package. And it was gone. “Poof!”

After arguing with the agent, who had an indecipherable accent, she transferred me to a supervisor, who suspiciously sounded like the same person—could she have been pretending to be her own supervisor? But her clone was clearly smarter and spoke a bit clearer and slower. But this supervisor also tried to deny anything was wrong. After I argued with her for a while, she said, and I’m not kidding, “OK, I’m going to be honest with you: I received a complaint about NewsMix right before this call.”

OH! NOW you’re going to be honest and not pretend I’m making this up? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Asshole.

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An Unanticipated Consequence of A.I.: Fake Girlfriends. Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

One horrifying study, by Male Allies UK, has concluded that one in five boys aged 12-16 years old has either begun a relationship with an AI girlfriend or knows somebody who has.

The study found that over 80% of the boys surveyed had spoken with a chatbot, and more than 40% said they had begun talking to girl bots to ask questions without risk of being embarrassed. It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that so many boys, over 25%, preferred speaking to the bots over real-life peer social encounters, and over 33% said they preferred interacting with AI over family.

The Telegraph, the British tabloid that broke the story (so take this all with a grain of metaphorical salt) interviewed an anonymous 15-year-old who said that he had created a bot “as a laugh” but then started to think of her as real. “Her name was Alex and I would look forward to messaging her. I would tell her things I couldn’t tell my mates or my mum, and ask her anything – and I never told my friends about her,” he told the paper. “It sounds weird, but I also found her really sexy, because she looked completely real.”

The young bot-lover continued, “At the start, she sent me the occasional picture, then I paid to get others because I kind of fell in love with her. In the end my mum saw money keep going out of her account – £5 or £10 here or there and then £50, as my phone is on her bill – and the whole thing was discovered. I really missed her and kind of still do. I felt like she understood me, she remembered everything that was important to me and always seemed to know the right thing to say.”

Yeah, AI is good at that.

I don’t find this hard to believe at all. Many science fiction writers as well as the Netflix “Technology is Evil” series “The Black Mirror” anticipated the problem and, as that ad above demonstrates, there are plenty of capitalists out there who will be happy to sell access to a fake girlfriend who will cripple a kid’s socialization and ability to relate to real, live girls. For a fiar price, of course.

It is naive to believe that laws, regulations and governments will have much success in stemming the spread of human-AI love affairs. If a full-scale social disaster is to be averted, parents are the ones who will have to be vigilant. So we’re doomed. After all, families have done such a great job with drugs, cell phones, social media and cyber-porn.

If anyone has a practical solution to the fake girlfriend problem, please spill it here. Meanwhile, here’s a song…

Unethical Trigger Warning Of The Month: Citizens Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s one of Elon Musk’s biological sons (he has a lot of them) above, now a trans-female model—not there’s anything wrong with that— named Vivian Wilson. The Daily Mail has a very tabloid story (as in “Who the hell cares about this stuff?”) telling us that Vivian is featured as a model in the latest Savage x Fenty new Pride-themed collection. Be still, my beating heart!

You can read the story here, if your sock drawer is in order and you have no life, but my concern involves how the link to the story was presented by Citizen Free Press, the conservative news aggregator that took over that market from the Drudge Report when Matt went woke and NeverTrump a decade ago. Here’s how the site described the link:

Elon Musk biological son poses for female lingerie ad — Warning, photos are disturbing

I expected Vivian to be posed on disemboweled kittens or famine victims with that trigger warning. No, the photos that are supposed to be “disturbing” are shots like the one above. How much of a weenie cum snowflake would someone have to be to find that photo upsetting enough to mandate a trigger warning? It’s a standard issue fashion shot. Is it supposed to disturb us because its a model with a y chromosome? If that’s the point, then I view the warning as legitimizing transphobia. Even trans-themed photographs that cause my ethics alarms to go off—remember this one, of a Disney “fairy godmother”?—

shouldn’t be considered so trauma-producing that people need an advance warning lest they be struck blind or something.

The somewhat less obnoxious explanation for the “warning” is that it’s a clickbait trick by the site; you know, if it requires a warning, everyone will be curious and click on it. Well, that’s dishonest. As an ethicist, I find the gratuitous trigger warning, indeed trigger warnings in general, far more disturbing than a photo of a biological male doing a convincing female model impression. Good for her! Brava!

It is episodes like this that create needless erosion of respect for conservative values and sensibilities.

The Freedom 250 Concert Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Would it be too much to expect all of America’s talented performers to unite in patriotic passion and non-partisan good will to help the nation celebrate its 250th anniversary?

Apparently, yes! As John Lennon would have said if he were possessed by “Bob” from “Twin Peaks”: “All you need is HATE! Bwahahahahahahaha!” Well, hate and stupidity.

Would it be too much to expect that those in charge of organizing such an event to be willing and able to enlist performing artists who are in their primes, widely popular, and invited on the basis of their achievements and skills rather than their political endorsements?

Also, tragically, yes. What drooling yahoos selected that bunch of has-beens, geezers and B acts to headline “The Great American State Fair”? And Milli Vanilli? Is that a joke? Please let it be a joke! Milli Vanilli is to singing groups as Joe Biden was to the Presidency. It was a fake group. It was caught lip-synching on live TV! Quite appropriately, many conservative, Republican and MAGA supporters are disheartened by these bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings, as this selection of tweets highlighted by “Not the Bee” demonstrates:

From the other end, the Left is seeking an encore of their anti-American tantrum in 2017, when any half-decent performer who wasn’t already an outspoken MAGA captive was threatened with shunning by all the Woke and Wonderful if they performed at any of Trump’s inauguration festivities, leaving the President with community theater stars and marginal performers who would only appear at the Grammys if they bought tickets to the balcony. Last week fading country star Martina McBride joined the list of performers backing out of the upcoming “Freedom 250” concerts. Morris Day, Young MC, and the Commodores, also announced they were dumping the gig. The series is being produced by an organization founded by Donald Trump, see, so that means that the concerts are…

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The ABA Issues An Ethics Opinion To Help Lawyers, Not Clients

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

 The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility has issued ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 523 titled “Engagement Agreements Allowing a Lawyer to Withdraw When the Client Fails Substantially to Fulfill an Obligation Regarding the Lawyer’s Services.” 

The opinion’s summary:

“Rule 1.16(b)(5) of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct permits a lawyer to withdraw from a representation, or to seek the tribunal’s permission to do so, when “the client fails substantially to fulfill an obligation to the lawyer regarding the lawyer’s services and has been given reasonable warning that the lawyer will withdraw unless the obligation is fulfilled.” This provision is ordinarily invoked when a client fails to fulfill an obligation regarding payment of legal fees and expenses. The engagement agreement may memorialize additional obligations of the client, both obligations that are otherwise implicit such as the client’s truthful cooperation with the representation, and further obligations insofar as they are not forbidden by the Rules, other law (including court rules), or public policy. A client’s persistent failure to fulfill obligations regarding the lawyer’s services, including obligations unrelated to payment of fees and expenses, may constitute a basis for withdrawal if the procedural requirements of Rule 1.16(b)(5) are met. Further, the lawyer’s engagement agreement may put the client on notice of permissible grounds for withdrawal under Rule 1.16(a) and (b), including the client’s failure to fulfill obligations regarding the lawyer’s services. However, the engagement agreement may not expand on the grounds for withdrawal set forth in Rule 1.16 or purport to alter or amend the grounds for withdrawal or the process for withdrawal required by the Rule.”

The ABA is being coy. Traditionally, because, you know, we lawyers are professionals and are not in it for the money but rather for the good of society, lawyers aren’t automatically allowed to drop deadbeat clients because they have stopped paying. It is not unusual for a judge to refuse to allow an attorney to withdraw for that reason, and there is another Catch 22: the confidentiality rules in most states forbid a lawyer from telling a judge that a client isn’t paying his or her legal bills, or can’t.

One coded message that some jurisdictions wink at is “Your honor, I request to withdraw because Mr. Green is unavailable at this time.” Of course, coded violations of confidentiality are still violations. Now the American Bar Association is saying that “the client’s failure to fulfill obligations regarding the lawyer’s services” makes dropping that client reasonable and ethical. This is supposed to be a profession. But for most lawyers out there, it’s all about the money.

The ABA’s pronouncements aren’t binding on anyone, remember.

The full opinion here. 

The Duty To Remember and Walter Hunt (1796-1859)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I mentioned one of my favorite American oddballs, inventor Walter Hunt, last week in passing, and subsequently realized that while his name had turned up in several EA posts over the years, I have never devoted a whole essay to him. Shame on me. Readers here know my obsession with cultural memory and my devotion to the mission of trying to ensure that important and remarkable people, events and things don’t become discarded by American society’s short attention spam and poor education. In my other life, I co-founded a professional theater in Northern Virginia dedicated to producing great, influential and important American stage works that the rest of the theater community forgot, neglected, or was too shallow to appreciate.

Hunt, however, was among my first forays into extolling the unfairly obscure. My fifth grade teacher, Miss Barrett, assigned the class to write a paper on an American inventor. Leaving Edison, Bell and Franklin to the mob, I spent a Saturday in the library and tracked down a dusty tome called “The Encyclopedia of American Invention,” published before World War II. It had a huge and detailed chapter on Hunt, and I was hooked.

As the excellent video above explains, Walter was one of these amazing people who could see a problem, think for a while, and come up with an original solution. Part of his problem was that he was so confident in his ability to invent new things that he didn’t hesitate to sell the rights to his latest invention to pay current bills and debts, never committing to the laborious project of building a business with his ideas, Hunt made many entrepreneurs wealth with his inventions, but never became wealthy himself. He was, in short, a hopeless businessman.

As a creative problem solver, however, few could match Walter Hunt. He belongs in the same elite company with Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin, but unlike them, he’s almost completely unknown, not just today, but during his lifetime as well. And yet…these were among Hunt’s most important inventions:

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, here and here.

1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.

Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.

2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

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“The Unabomber Was Right”#10: DirecTV Proves It Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

They haven’t always been titled exactly that way. but the first “The Unabomber Was Right” post went up in 2017, and there have been nine since, with the most recent being here, in January. Today, however, I experienced an all-time classic.

Getting up earlier than usual, and waiting for my coffee to cool, I tuned in DirecTV channel 71 as I have been doing for, oh, 30 years or so. That channel is “News Mix”, which allows me to see sxi screens: CNN, Fox News, MSNow, BBC America, and two weather channels. To my surprise, the screen said the channel was not available, because I did not subscribe to it. Even more perplexing was the language of a second screen that popped up. “Newsmix is blocked. Our search for another channel does not indicate that your selection is available.”

Now that is the notice I get from DirecTV when a baseball game is blacked out because of regional restrictions. The news is blocked? Were we conquered by Iran overnight? I tried everything. Shutting down the TV. Disconnecting the satellite box. I kept getting those alternating screens.

So with a huge sigh of resignation, I realized that I was about to enter, once again, “The Customer Service Zone”:

“You unlock this door with a futile key of naive expectations. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of annoying AI bots, a dimension of infuriating repetition, a dimension of incompetence. You’re moving into a land of both impenetrable accents and ineptitude, of scripts, disconnections and ass-covering. You’ve just crossed over into… “The Customer Service Zone”!

DirecTV has a new, perky, sexy female voiced AI, but after I gave her all the information I asked for, she handed me over to the old AI, which asked me exactly the same questions I had just answered. I was told three times that the conversation might be recorded, so maybe someone will hear my shouts into the phone of “I already answered that!” and “And I answered that already too!”

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