Business & Commercial

The Ethics Alarms 2023 “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Guide, With A New Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

2023 INTRODUCTION

It’s time again for the Ethics Alarms annual posting of its ethics guide to perhaps the best ethics movie ever made, Frank Capra’s now iconic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Past time, in fact: last year I concluded that the movie really belonged in the Thanksgiving movie canon, not Christmas. However, as I wrote in the 2022 preface,

 Like George, I often feel like I didn’t achieve and experience what I could have, that my choices too often didn’t pan out, that I barely missed the breaks that I needed when I most needed them…What makes our lives successful (or not), and what makes makes our existence meaningful is not how much money we accumulate, or how much power we wield, or how famous we are. What matters is how we affect the lives of those who share our lives, and whether we leave our neighborhood, communities, associations and nation better or worse than it would have been “if we had never been born.” It’s a tough lesson, and some of us, perhaps most, never learn it…I’m not sure I have learned it yet, to be honest with myself. Intellectually, perhaps, but not emotionally.

I have to admit that I still haven’t genuinely accepted the lesson of the film. Maybe it’s time to watch it again; I haven’t since last year, and recently I’ve been feeling a bit too much like George to get up the courage. I’m posting this the day after my birthday, an all-time low for the number of friends, colleagues and relatives who remembered it (five, and my wife didn’t recall until mid-morning, with my son remembering around 10 pm), cards (one) and gifts (none). I don’t care about any of those things really, but I once believed that with as much ability and talent I had been lucky enough to be born with, and the additional advantages of wonderful parents and citizenship in the United States, I would have achieved enough that, oh, I don’t know, I might have earned a Wikipedia page by now. It’s stupid; I know it is. This is a tough time for my business and my family, and a lot of the problems are the result of my own selfish choices and mistakes as well as my hard-wired proclivity to cause trouble and not back down after the consequences start becoming clear. I’m seriously considering not celebrating Christmas this year, and we have always been a big Christmas family, because several recent disasters  require the money to go elsewhere.

And yet, as I have been musing about all of this lately, I cannot deny that I, like George, have had a wonderful life, and, frankly, one that has been a lot more interesting and varied than George’s was. My various crazy projects and eventually defunct missions have been responsible for many marriages and many children, and now grandchildren. I’ve inspired some people to take risks that panned out well for them, and have advanced the careers of several artists. I’ve made a lot of people laugh. There are some plays and musical being performed more frequently now that my theater company rescued from obscurity, and, weirdest of all, a student theater organization that I started is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. And, of course, there is my son, who we adopted from a hell-hole in Russia and who is making the most of his opportunities in the land of opportunity.

It’s not a bad legacy. I’m not heading to the bridge, but I need to snap out of this mood…cue Cher!

I guess it is time for me to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” again….

1. “If It’s About Ethics, God Must Be Involved”

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Oh Look, Another Artificial Intelligence Scandal…With More Undoubtedly On The Way

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Sports Illustrated writer Drew Ortiz (shown above) doesn’t exist. An investigation showed that he had no social media presence and no publishing history. His profile photo published in the magazine is for sale on a website that sells A.I.-generated headshots; he is described as a “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

A whistleblower involved with the S.I. scam told the website Futurism that the magazine’s content is now riddled with fake authors. “At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that,” the anonymous source told the tech website. Another source involved in the Sports Illustrated content creation revealed that least some of the articles were written by bots as well. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,”  he or she said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”

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Guest Column: Shoplifting Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

by Sarah B.

[Introduction: This excellent post by Sarah B, who has a history of them, posed a dilemma. It was originally posted in this week’s Open Forum, but the comment easily could have been a Comment of the Day on two recent posts, “Irony: The Washington Post Telling CVS How To Handle Rampant Shoplifting,” and “Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout.”

In the end, I decided to publish it as a guest post, as Sarah herself told us up front what she was commenting on, writing, “This article, about a woman who wrote a piece for the newspaper anonymously about how and why she shoplifts, is worth discussing,” referring to “I’m a middle-class shoplifter – and here’s why I’m happy to confess it” in the UK’s Independent. Proving once again that valuable insights can be obtained from idiotic essays, Sarah’s post is far, far, FAR superior to the article that apparently spawned it. The explanation of “anonymous” about why she’s apparently “happy” about being a shoplifter was so devoid of either logic or ethics comprehension that it made my phantom hair hurt. Among her fatuous excuses and rationalizations were “It’s easy, so it’s the stores’ fault,” “I don’t even see it as shoplifting” (#64 on the rationalizations list, “It isn’t what it is”), “I’m owed it,” and #22, the worst rationalization of all, “It’s not the worst thing,” because she “would only do this in a supermarket chain, rather than any family-run small business.” People like the author make me want to chuck my business and profession and become a pimp or something. Why do I spend so much time on ethics when so many people think like this? Fortunately, Sarah had a different and more constructive reaction.—JM.]

***

First, there is no doubt that her actions are unethical, and while we could just analyze this as a “name the rationalizations”, I also think that a deep dive into the article can show many things about our society and make for a good discussion. There are options for discussing how she doesn’t shoplift because she has to, but does it to decrease the prices of expensive alternatives instead of paying for what she wants. However, I want to look at how I think we could combat her “how-to guide”.

This seems to me to be a great case study in “locks keep an honest man honest.” The author admits that much of her stealing is predicated on the app-shopping and self-checkout philosophy of big stores. My main proposal, after looking at this, is to somehow return to the “good old days” of customer service.

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The Cognitive Dissonance Scale And Jobs Lost After Hamas-Israel War Outbursts On Social Media

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The scenario has been a theme this week. Someone shoots off his or her metaphorical mouth showing ignorance and probable anti-Semitic bias in a social media post designed for public consumption, and loses a job when the employer decides that it doesn’t want to lose business from those who might wonder, “Why do they hire people like that?”

It is not a First Amendment issue. It is a an irresponsible employee issue. Hollywood has been especially busy. Spyglass, the company that owns the “Scream” film franchise, fired actress Melissa Barrera from the upcoming “Scream VII” (There are going to be seven of these?) after she posted standard issue “genocide/innocent Gazans/ cruel Israel messages. “THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING,” she concluded.

1) No, it isn’t, and 2) You really don’t understand the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, do you?

It’s really quite simple, Melissa…

For the vast majority of Americans who pay attention and aren’t intersectional fanatics, supporting the Palestinian-Hamas “From the river to the sea” mission is at the bottom of the scale. People who want to see movies must regard the films and its stars above zero, ideally quite a bit above. If that film or its stars associate themselves with a deeply negative point of view or conduct, that connection (think of being tied to an anchor) drags the positive attitudes down, meaning fewer tickets sold, and in turn fewer profits.

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Irony: The Washington Post Telling CVS How To Handle Rampant Shoplifting

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

…when it is the extreme anti-police, anti-law enforcement ideologues the Washington Post supports and slants the news to assist that are the reason shoplifting is out of control in D.C. and other cities.

The photo above that accompanies the laughable Post editorial shows the infamous CVS Pharmacy at 14th and Irving streets NW. There, in recent months, roving mobs of thieves have staged “smash and grab” mass raids resulting in the store having empty shelves and the local neighborhood having little access to needed supplies. “Shoplifters ransacked this CVS over two days early last month, and it hasn’t been restocked since,” the concerned editorial board wrote. “Weeks later, there’s still hardly anything to buy — or steal. The CVS at 14th and Irving symbolizes extreme retail theft and the harms it can engender. Distressing and inconvenient to ordinary people, threatening to businesses and livelihoods, and repellent to tourists, unchecked shoplifting can corrode a community’s spirit.”

The Post, which has never uttered a metaphorical “boo” regarding its woke, black Democratic mayor directing a huge, block letter “Black Lives Matter” message to be painted on a downtown street two years ago, is engaging in outrageous hypocrisy. “Black Lives Matter,” of course, means “Police Beware” and “Enforce the Law At Your Own Risk.” In related news, the Supreme Court today turned down Derek Chauvin’s last ditch appeal to get his unfair trial declared what it was; I’m assuming they don’t need the grief. They have to work in D.C. after all.

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The OpenAI Saga: Wow, It’s Scary How Incompetent And Irresponsible Big Companies Can Be…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

More ironic still, the OpenAI debacle that has unfolded the past few days is over the management of artificial intelligence, and the human kind is displaying its inadequacies. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI and widely recognized as the prime mover in the AI revolution, was ousted as CEO of his own company in a boardroom coup last week. Greg Brockman, another co-founder of OpenAI, quit as the start-up’s president after Altman was fired. Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Amazon’s streaming service Twitch, will become OpenAI’s interim CEO, replacing Mira Murati, who was named interim CEO when Altman was fired. The financial markets hate instability. They really hate clown shows. Seldom does a company shoot itself in the foot, shoulder and head so enthusiastically

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Baseball Tacitly Admits That Its Pulling The All-Star Game From Atlanta In 2021 Was Despicable Groveling To Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oh no, ya don’t…Major League Baseball shouldn’t get off this easy, and neither should the major villains in this debacle that Ethics Alarms flagged from the very start (along with others): Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, good election denier Stacy Abrams (when Democrats reject election results, it’s OK), and the President.

Major League Baseball announced that it has awarded the 2025 All-Star Game to Atlanta, or as one conservative wag put it, “finally decreed that Georgia is no longer racist.” You will recall that the sport had removed the 2021 game from the city after Abrams lobbied the sport to do so on the grounds that Georgia’s newly passed voter integrity law disenfranchised black voters. This was done without anyone in the Commissioner’s office bothering to read the supposedly racist law, which we know because Manfred moved the game to Denver, and Colorado has a law essentially identical to Atlanta’s. Joe Biden encouraged the MLB boycott too— he hadn’t bothered to read the law, either, or he wouldn’t have said it was “Jim Crow on steroids.”

The best part, however, was when Abrams, having pushed for the move, calling Manfred to insist on it, learned that most of the small businesses and Atlanta residents who would suffer because of the boycott (Atlanta lost an estimated $100 million in All-Star Game-related business revenue), claimed that she opposed MLB taking the game away (Biden’s puppeteers also denied that he had said what he said), double-talking this deceitful word salad:

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Ethics Pop Quiz: Why Does Amazon Sell “From The River To Te Sea” Merchandise But Not Anything Featuring A Confederate Flag??

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I find this perplexing, and perhaps attention should be paid. Amazon sells several versions of that attractive shirt above, but stopped making anything with a Confederate flag available in 2015. The impetus for this move was, as you might recall, Dylann Roof, a lone, racist wacko, shooting and killing nine African-Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church. Yet more than a month after approximately 1,200 Jewish civilians were murdered by Hamas in a carefully organized surprise terror attack, merchandise with the Palestinian slogan calling for Israel’s eradication, in accordance with the Hamas charter, is still selling briskly on Amazon to U.S. customers. The U.S. Congress just censured its racist, anti-Semitic “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib for endorsing the very same slogan. The American Jewish Committee regards the phrase as antisemitic.  The White House finally condemned the use of the “inspirational phrase,” as Tlaib called it. Amazon claims to have a policy prohibiting “the sale of products that promote, incite, or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance” and”prohibits or promote organizations with such views, as well as listings that graphically portray violence or victims of violence.”

How do you reconcile the contradictory treatment of the Confederate flag, which is a far more ambiguous symbol with important significance in American history, and an infamous anti-Israel rallying cry?

Some possible answers are offered below:

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Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I am happy to say that I foresaw this mess the first time I encountered these things, in a local Home Depot, if I recall correctly. even if they worked reliably and were user friendly—and they don’t and aren’t—it was obvious from the very dawn of the era that they would allow retailers to reduce staff while making the shopping experience less pleasant for consumers. And so it has. But it wasn’t sold that way, and, as usual, much of the public was ovine in its acceptance. Sure, long checkout lines would be a thing of the past! Now you wouldn’t have to deal with the underlings who man the registers. Store employees would be free and able to answer inquiries! Wunderbar!

Right. You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks are persnickety if you, for example, fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning items doesn’t always work, and its easy to scanned an item more than once. Problems and glitches arise so frequently that counter staff are constantly called on to deal with them, meaning that customers who wisely eschewed the delightful self-checkout adventure are stranded in line. Heaven forfend that you try to self-checkout a product with some kind of purchase restriction. Meanwhile, a lot of self-checkout machines break down, and because it’s expensive to fix them, often sit useless for a while, causing more back-ups.

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Ha! Disney Gets The Message!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Discussing the last Ethics Alarms post about the totally botched live -remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” one of the most influential and ground-breaking (and popular, and profitable) films in Hollywood history, I told my wife, “If I were in charge of Disney, I’d just re-release the original in a restored version.”

And that’s exactly what the company is doing.

The best part about the move is that it implicitly rebukes Rachael Zeigler, the current Snow Of Color who foolishly trashed her own vehicle by calling the original dated and “weird.” It also commits the company to the ultimate version of the live-action rip-off emerging as an homage to its predecessor, not a rejection of it: all those kids who see Walt’s movie and love it are not going to like a live-version that defames Snow and her friends. Even Disney’s not that stupid. (Are they?)

Anyway, there is hope: the profit motive and the instinct to survive may have overwhelmed toxic wokism. Disney may have rediscovered the ethical virtues of competence, responsibility, and respect.