Workplace

Watch Out, John Malkovich…You Can’t Trust Siri!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

NO, JOHN! SIRI’S A SPY!!!!!

Wired reports that IBM has banned Siri, iPhone’s voice-activated digital assistant, its headquarters network. Employees trying to use John Malkovich’s new friend will be foiled. Why? IBM CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT’s Technology Review that the company worries that conversations with Siri might be stored somewhere. And indeed they are. Siri relays everything she hears to an Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina. What happens to it then is anybody’s guess. Continue reading →

Anything Goes: Campaign by Rumor and Slander in the Wisconsin Recall

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Wait…who’s “Dan”?

Combining  confirmation bias, whereby any uncomplimentary rumor about one’s enemy is assumed to be true, with “ends justify the means” political warfare philosophy, can banish all fairness and honesty from political campaigns. Spreading slanderous falsehoods about candidates for office is as old as the United States, but the internet and social networking sites, along with the increasingly irresponsible news media, allow the unethical tactic to be more effective, and sinister, than ever.

Now, fearing that the vengeance of the public unions, as orchestrated by the Democratic Party, is going to fall short in tomorrow’s recall election in Wisconsin, the foes of Governor Scott Walker grabbed a manufactured smear about Walker fathering a love child 24 years ago, and have made every effort to make it viral. An anti-Walker website called the Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op [“a group of citizen journalists who began covering the Wisconsin Uprising in February, 2011. We came from different walks of life, different professional backgrounds and different parts of the state to document the dismantling of democratic process and tradition taking place in our state under the right wing onslaught of the Scott Walker regime”] recounted a second-hand story by an anti-Walker  classmate of the governor, who purported to have inside knowledge about his efforts to cover-up his impregnation of her roommate while he was running for class president (yes, this is another school days smear, like the Romney prep school episode. If you can’t beat ’em as adults, beat ’em as kids. That seems to be the current philosophy in both political camps. Phew!). Continue reading →

“Pass the Trash” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

School superintendents included.

Nancy Sebring was hired to be the new Omaha, Nebraska school superintendent and was scheduled to move into her position on July 1, having been hired in April.  Meanwhile, she was finishing up as outgoing Superintendent of Schools in Des Moines, Iowa. When Sebring suddenly resigned her Iowa post, which she had held for six years, on May 10, she and Des Moines school board president Teree Caldwell-Johnson explained that Sebring had stepped down early so she could attend to pressing family affairs before moving to Nebraska.

The real reason, however, was that Sebring had resigned as an alternative to being fired. The school board had discovered that she had used the school’s computer system to send more than forty e-mails to a man with whom she was having an adulterous affair, many of them sexually explicit. The e-mail trail began shortly before she announced her new job, and continued until she was forced to resign. Now Omaha knows about the e-mails too, thanks to a newspaper report. Sebring’s new job has ended before it started, and Omaha is desperately behind in finding a school superintendent. Continue reading →

The Fojol Bros., Innocent of Racism, Political Correctness Victims

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In its advanced stages, 21st century political correctness becomes a kind of delusional illness, causing sufferers to interpret  benign, harmless and even socially healthy conduct as offensive and sinister. An outbreak of this variety of political correctness is in full flower in Washington, D.C., where more than the usual number of officious defenders of that which needs no defending are trying to gin up public outrage against a creative, fun, and successful small business enterprise, Fojol Bros.

The company sends food trucks around downtown D.C. and serves strangely named hybrid ethnic dishes inspired by Indian, Ethiopian and Thai cuisines. The Fojol employees who hand out the delicious fare wear turbans, robes and fake mustaches,  claim to hail from  “Merlindia” and “Benethiopia,” and go by names like “Kipoto.” This was once called “theater” and “fantasy,” no more offensive than Disney employees in Frontierland dressing in cowboy and saloon girl garb and calling themselves “Tex” and “Lilly.” Now some are calling it “offensive,” because too many people have forgotten what offensive is. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Safeway…Ethics Hero: Ryan Young. Justice? Waiting…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“You’re suspended, Kent.”

I’ve asked many times on Ethics Alarms why so many Americans stand by, inert and passive, when a fellow citizen is in peril.  Maybe the stunning ethics blindness exhibited by Safeway in a recent incident is part of the answer.

Ryan Young, who works in the meat department of a Safeway grocery store in Del Rey Oaks, California, was on the job when he witnessed a man beating a pregnant woman, apparently his girlfriend. Young told the man to stop, but he continued with his assault, shoving and kicking the her.  Young jumped over his counter, pushed him away, and ended the attack.

His reward was to be suspended without pay. Safeway has a policy that directs employees to summon security personnel and not to personally intervene when they see a crime or fight in progress. Even though police confirm that Young may have saved the woman and her unborn child from serious injury, the company is insisting that Young’s conduct warranted discipline, not praise. Continue reading →

The Matthew Owens Attack: For Obama, Impossible Choices and Deserved Accountability

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Actually, Matthew Owens DOES look a little like my son...Of course, it's hard to tell...

From the Huffington Post:

“Alabama police are trying to track down a mob that beat a man into critical condition — leaving their battered victim with the words, ‘Now that’s justice for Trayvon.’ Cops told WKRG that Matthew Owens got in an argument with some kids playing basketball at a court in the city of Mobile on Saturday night. The kids left and a group of some 20 adults arrived at Owens’ front doorstep, armed with chairs, brass knuckles, pipes and paint cans. The group, all African American, allegedly beat him into a bloody pulp before someone uttered the words that connected the crime to the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teen who was shot and killed in Florida by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.”

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UPDATE (4/25): New reports question some of the details above. The dispute may have started over thefts in the neighborhood witnessed by  Owens’ niece; a neighbor says that Owens had been in disputes frequently; police now say that the beating was administered by only members of the group, with the rest standing by and watching. There has been at least one arrest. Also of note: Owens’ sister’s claim that one of the attackers said “Now that’s justice for Trayvon” may have been corroborated by other neighbors.

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This was completely predictable, and indeed it is only the worst, not the first, incident in which an attack on a white victim was linked to “justice” for Trayvon Martin. Now, the reasons I laid out a month ago that made President Obama’s reckless comments about the Sanford, Florida killing divisive and dangerous ought to be obvious to all, but if not, here are some questions to consider: Continue reading →

Ethics Chess Lesson: The Tale of the Kidney and the Ungrateful Boss

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

Ethics chess is complicated, but ignore it at your peril!

Ethics chess is the process by which one considers the likely chain of events that follow from an act, and tries to predict the ethical dilemmas that may result before they occur. Debbie Stevens and Jackie Brucia didn’t play ethics chess. This is what happened to them.

When  Stevens was exploring the possibility of returning to the Atlantic Automotive Group, where she had worked previously, she met with Brucia, her former and potential boss, and somehow got on the topic of Brucia’s health problems. She needed a kidney transplant, and had found a donor, though it was not yet certain that the kidney would be hers. Stevens said that she might be willing to contribute her own kidney if that donor didn’t work out.

Later, Stevens was hired by Brucia,and two months later, in January of 2011,  Brucia called Stevens into her office and told her that she had lost her organ donor. “Were you serious when you said you would be willing to give me one of yours?’ Brucia asked.  “Sure, yeah,” Stevens says now. “She was my boss, I respected her. It’s just who I am. I didn’t want her to die.’’ It wasn’t exactly a direct donation, but Stevens donated her kidney to a stranger who matched up well with it so Brucia could be advanced on the list and get a better matched kidney from another source. Nonetheless, Brucia got a healthy kidney because Steven’s gave up one of her own. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “A Last Word on the Kevin Coffay Sentence”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Brain chemistry?

Michael, who is the reigning Comment of the Day champion, comes up with another here regarding the Kevin Coffay sentence and the mitigating factor in juvenile crimes, supported by brain chemistry research, that adolescents are not as capable of rational decision-making as adults, and therefor should not be punished as severely for their reckless acts. This is his post regarding “A Last Word on the Kevin Coffay Sentence.”

“Don’t go overboard with the studies that show adolescents are incapable of being responsible, thinking rationally, or evaluating risks. If you look at such studies, they are done in a vacuum and merely state that older people are BETTER at evaluating risks (duh). The main point is that our brains continue to develop until 25 or so. Much like Titanic research, however, this research is interpreted wildly and without considering evidence to the contrary. Continue reading →

Unethical Ethics: How Business and Government Encourage Unethical Thinking In Their Ethics Training

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Show us the way, O Wise and Ethical One!

Jack Abramoff, the corrupt lobbyist turned federal prisoner, then author and now ethics expert, will be giving a lecture on government and personal ethics at The University of Texas at Austin’s business school on May 2. This is not as unusual as it seems. My biggest competitors are felons and disbarred lawyers—they literally step right out of professional disgrace, and sometimes jail, into the lecture circuit. They are draws, and in a field like ethics, which is often prescribed as substitute for barbiturates, this is irresistible to professional development programmers and conference organizers. It also attracts the participants that most need real ethics training, but who seek what these fake ethics presenter usually have to offer:  real life-based advice on what you can’t get away with. This lesson has about as much to do with ethics as it does with Parcheesi, but unfortunately, that’s what is generally regarded as practical ethics.

Characters like Abramoff don’t have ethics alarms; they have survival alarms.  Business schools, politicians and the media still believe that aiming reforms at those alarms, in the form of tougher rules and enforcement, will make business and government more ethical. Think about it: the cultures will still be unethical; the people in them will be just as unethical, but because proven scofflaws and ethics corrupters like  Jack Abramoff will explain where they went wrong, all these people with dead ethics alarms, further deadened by absorbing  the wisdom of the most corrupt of a corrupt breed, will stop behaving unethically.

Good plan. Continue reading →

Mirlande Wilson Is My Favorite Ethics Dunce of All Time!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

When we last left Mirlande Wilson, she was claiming, improbably, that although she had bought Mega Millions lottery tickets for her workplace pool at McDonald’s, the ticket she bought giving her over $250 million in jackpot winnings was hers alone.

This made her an Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce. Now she says she has lost the ticket. This opens so many possibilities, all with their own ethical implications:

  • She is lying, and never had the ticket, meaning that she is willing to make her co-workers think she cheated them to try to pull off an audacious scam. Dishonest and shameless.
  • She did lose the ticket, but it was the pool ticket, and she is lying about that part of it. In this case, she was spectacularly irresponsible to lose a ticket worth millions to the persons who collectively bought it. And a liar. Dishonest, careless, greedy, irresponsible and untrustworthy.
  • She did buy the ticket with her own money, and did lose it, and is just telling the truth, hoping to get a little sympathy. In that case, she deserves some. But buying a ticket for a mega-jackpot and losing it is still prima facie evidence that you shouldn’t live alone, or be left in the presence of pointy objects. Honest, careless and pathetic.
  • She bought the ticket with the pool’s money, and knows that she won’t find it and can’t get the cash. She’s saying that the lost ticket was hers alone, hoping that her fellow workers won’t feel as terrible as she does, since it would be pretty terrible to gor back to a fast food job when you know you should be joining country clubs. She’s trying to spare them. Yes, that must be it. Noble, kind, and self-sacrificing.
  • She bought the ticket with the pool’s money, and knows that she won’t find it and can’t get the cash. She’s saying that the lost ticket was hers alone, hoping that her fellow workers won’t try to kill her. Irresponsible, careless, dishonest, but understandable.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.