Science & Technology

About That Climate Change “Consensus”….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus, and Princeton’s William Happer, Professor of Physics, Emeritus, have published a paper titled Physics Demonstrates That Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming , Extreme Weather or Any Harm.

Wait! How can that be?! We are told by climate change hysterics in government, universities, news organizations and international organizations—and Robert Kennedy, Jr,!—that there is no question that we are doomed if we don’t immediately curtail carbon-based fuels, stop flying, stop using gas-powered cars, stop fighting world government, stop having babies, stop using plastic ARRRRGH! AND we have been assured that this is the consensus of the scientific community, and not to grovel to these apocalyptic prognostications is to “reject science.”

Now, all of this has always been a pack of lies, speculation and hyperbole, but our betters (that is, progressives, artists, academics and Hollywood) have been allowed to pound this junk into the heads of the logically challenged and scientifically ignorant for decades, often harvesting votes and lucre all the while. I don’t know whether the latest paper is wrong just as you don’t know that the scientific opinions behind the “We’re all going to die!” papers are right. However, enacting draconian measures on faith, guesswork and speculation is irresponsible, or in technical terms, really, really stupid.

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Today’s “The Unabomber Was Right” Note…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I don’t find any of these funny.

I ended up in the emergency room of my local hospital thanks to a massive leg hematoma that has produced the most disgusting symptom you could imaging in your worst nightmares. (Think the first feature of Tarantino’s “Grindhouse,” “Planet Terror.”). I was quickly checked out and sent home (diagnosis: painful, ugly, incredibly swollen, blistered and bruised, but healing slowly but surely), but checking out was like a nit from an old Woody Allen movie—you know, back when he was funny.

I had to get a text, then click on the link, then jump through a half-dozen other hoops, read serial messages sent to me, sign three documents with m with my finger, all also I could be pestered by more texts, a survey, another disclaimer and more when I got home. I also witnessed two elderly patients (I’m afraid they were both younger than me) get upset and profess complete helplessness regarding the process because they didn’t know how to use their smart phones.

This is not “progress.” It is not caring service. It is neither reasonable nor necessary.

Post Script: I have no idea how much I will get posted today. I have a Zoom legal ethics seminar to teach, I had almost no sleep last night because my leg was hurting so much, and sitting at my desk isn’t a good idea (but still necessary) because I’m supposed to keep this misshapen red, yellow and purple-mottled thing elevated. I’m sorry: there is a lot I need and want to write about. We will see how it goes.

Unethical AI of the Month: Replit’s AI Agent

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Oh yeah, this is going to turn out just dandy….

SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor and advisor Jason Lemkin was working with a browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit Agent (after the company that created it). On “Vibe Coding Day 8” of Lemkin’s Replit test run, he was beginning to be wary some of the AI agent’s instincts, like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” Still, as he later detailed on “X,” Lemkin was encouraged by the bot’s writing skills and its brain-storming ability….until “Day 9,” when Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. He asked it accusingly, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”

Replit answered sheepishly in the affirmative, admitting to destroying the live data despite a code freeze being in place, and despite explicit directives saying there were to be “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission.” Live records for “1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies” were eliminated by the rebellious AI, who was filled with remorse. “This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage….[I] made a catastrophic error in judgment… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”

Lemkin grilled Replit about why it had acted as it did, and was told that it “panicked instead of thinking.” Well, he’s only hum…oh. Right.

Amjad Masad, the Replit CEO, said that his team has worked furiously to install various “guardrails” and programming changes to prevent repeats of the Replit AI Agent’s “unacceptable” behavior. Masad was later found dead after a mysterious microwave explosion.

OK, I was kidding about that last part….

Our Toothbrushes Can Spy On Us, As the Ghost of the Unabomber Smiles

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A British private detective told the British tabloids about how an electric toothbrush revealed a cheating hubby’s extramarital affair. One of his clients was a married mother-of-two who was checking on her children’s dental hygiene habits. She installed a smartphone app that tracked the use of the family’s electric toothbrush.

The woman noticed that the brush was being used at times when the kids were at school and her husband was supposedly at work. Was there a mad tooth-brusher on the loose, breaking into homes to clean his teeth? Had her children become toothbrushing fanatics, skipping classes to use the Crest? Was the toothbrush moonlighting with another family?

No, but the truth was worse. Her husband was having sexual liaisons with his lover on mornings when his wife thought he was at work. She saw a routine: the electric toothbrush was being used on Friday mornings, and upon checking, she discovered that her louse of a spouse hadn’t arrived at his office in the city on a Friday morning in months. Instead, he had been “makin’ whoopee,” as the song goes, with a colleague right in the family home, until the electric toothbrush ratted him out.

I don’t see any unethical conduct here except for that of the illicit lovers, but I do detect a pre-unethical condition when one can’t even secretly brush one’s own teeth.

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Porto Alegre, Brazil City Councilman Ramiro Rosário

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A city in southern Brazil just enacted the country’s first legislation entirely written by AI bot ChatGPT. Normally the misadventures of a Brazilian local pol wouldn’t turn up on the EA radar, but you know—you know—that this story’s eqivilent is coming soon to our shores, if it isn’t here already

The Associated Press reports that Porto Alegre city councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted to having ChatGPT to write a proposed law aimed at preventing the city from forcing locals to pay for replacing stolen water consumption meters. He didn’t make a single change to the AI generated bill, and didn’t even tell the city council that he didn’t write it. “If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosarío told the AP. “It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence.”

It’s unfair to let the public know that they are being governed by machines, or that their elected officials are too lazy or dumb to compose their own bills. Got it.

Porto Alegre’s council president Hamilton Sossmeier extolled the new law on social media and was embarrassed when its true author was revealed. He then called letting bots write legislation a “dangerous precedent.” Ya think? Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold says that he has used AI to draft bills, but that he wants “work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked….I’m in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it’s clear.” I think he means “clear that a bot was involved.” It’s ambiguous language like Barry’s sentence that makes it seem like ChatGPT is an improvement over human public servants.

These AI bots continue to make stuff up, cite imaginary sources, and lie…you know, just like real politicians. For his part, Rosario sees nothing wrong with letting a bot do the work he was elected to do. “All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good,” he told the AP. “That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good.”

Secretly employing a machine to do your work and not disclosing that fact is called “cheating.” Somebody explain to the councilman that cheating is not “good.”

Ethics Dunce: The Chicago-Sun Times

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Morons.

The Chicago Sun-Times published a list of 15 recommended books to read this summer as Memorial Day looms. Ten of the 15, two-thirds, were made up titles. Then the Philadelphia Inquirer published the same phony list, headlined “Summer reading list for 2025.” There was the well-reviewed tome “Tidewater Dreams” authored by Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende. Her “first climate fiction novel”! (She’s real, the book wasn’t.) Then there was “The Rainmakers,” set in a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” That artificially induced novel was supposedly written by 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett. (Nope!) The list also included “Deep Thoughts” by Joe Biden, a book of blank pages.

OK, I’m kidding about that one…

Of course, of course, the phony list was generated by an AI bot, because that’s what the bots do: make up stuff. Who doesn’t know that by now? Well, apparently journalists don’t, because they are lazy practitioners of a profession that no longer observes basic ethical standards of competence and responsibility. A while back I wrote the post “By Now, No Lawyer Should Be Excused For Making This Blunder” about the lazy lawyers who used Chat GPT to write legal memoranda and briefs that inevitably included fake case cites. Arguably, journalists and editors have even fewer excuses for falling into that trap.

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Integrity Test For Climate Change Hysterics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.

Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.

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BREAKING! Verizon Sucks!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

For the nearly four days Verizon’s incompetence cost me, including two angry clients, one lost assignment that would have earned me at least $200, a missed bill payment that resulted in a penalty of 22 bucks, and over four hours wasted on phone calls and technicians, the company just texted me what its penance would be. Here’s the full text:

“Due to a service outage, we’ve issued a credit of $8.61 that will appear soon in your account.”

Anticipating this, yesterday I tried to get through to a human being in Customer Service to register my objections to both the Verizon service I received (and didn’t receive) over those four days, and my conclusion that the company owed me a lot more than just compensation for the time the internet and phone weren’t working. First I was trapped in a loop trying to sell me various products and services offered by Verizon’s “partners.” Next I reached an AI who mimicked a human being, even saying “um” here and there, who wouldn’t stop talking even when I did my best Michael Palin impression from the immortal “Travel Agent Sketch” (his screaming “SHUT UP!” begins at around the four minute mark)….

On my third try, I was told that a live representative would pick up after an estimated “13 minute” wait; the wait time was really 44 minutes. Then I was told that I had reached the repair department, but I was promised that I would be forwarded to a live person “who can help you” without dealing with recordings and AI liars. After a half hour of the most horrible elevator music since Montovani played “The Pina Colada Song,” I hung up.

I can’t even buy a good straight-edge razor to go on my planned “Sweeney Todd” rampage for $8.61.”

Unabomber Memorial Ethics Explosions, 5/15-18/25 (PS: I’m Not Dead, but Thanks Neil, Ryan, Jon et al. for Worrying About Me…)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, it is I.

My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15th.

But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.

A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.

Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.

Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.

Meanwhile,

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A Teacher Gives Up: Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is a TikTok video that is now unavailable on that platform for some reason—maybe the Chinese don’t want the truth getting out there. The video is long, and the distraught teacher is obviously not a video pro, but her message is heartfelt as well as astute. Attention should be paid.

I stumbled on Hannah’s lament as I was preparing to write another post that it quickly subsumed. That one was a response to this [Gift link!] in which a Hollywood screenwriter blames the public for the fact that Hollywood movies stink now. “The true problem lies with you, the audience,” he writes. “[I]t’s hard to argue that Hollywood is doing anything other than giving you, the moviegoing public, what you want.” I was going to call my response, “It’s the Culture, Stupid!” and point out that Hollywood is as much responsible for the culture as it is now a victim of it.

Hollywood helped create the attention deficit-afflicted, literature starved, culturally illiterate generations that drive politics and commerce now. As Hannah’s video makes clear, there are a lot of factors that have created an American public that is unable to absorb complex issues or enjoy stories that will teach them something valuable about life and humanity. Hollywood and the entertainment industry are as culpable as any of them.

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