Workplace

The Results Are In: After One Year California’s Irresponsible Woke Minimum Wage Hike Has Been Just As Disastrous As I Said It Would Be.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Fredo and I were not the only ones to predict this result…

It has now been a year and a few weeks since Assembly Bill 1228, the stupid (but typical, for California) law that raised the fast food minimum wage to $20 an hour in the Golden State, went into effect after being signed into law by Gavin Newsome. Shortly after that idiocy, I wrote in part here,

“Certain laws of economics are immutable: if someone’s skills and the value of their labor are not worth the amount they demand in compensation for it, then eventually no one will be willing to hire them….The U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged me with examining just this issue in my role as head of the National Chamber Foundation, the Chamber’s public policy research arm. I hired an independent economist….and he concluded that indeed, raising the minimum wage cost the most vulnerable American workers jobs every…single…time. ..Never mind, though: 21st Century progressives seem to care about virtue-signalling and fealty to socialist cant more than actual results or, to put it another way, reality. Naturally California, one of our extreme leftist kamikaze states, arguably the most reckless one, has adopted this attitude…Governor Newsom signed into law a $20 an hour minimum wage hike on the fast food sector for the “benefit” of fast food workers… Everything we have learned about minimum wage hikes indicated that this would be a disaster, but advocates of the move in the Democratic party pooh-poohed the objections as more proof that conservatives are cruel and greedy.”

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The Trevor Bauer Story Proves That Baseball Really Is “The National Pastime” (Or At Least Tries To Be)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The last we looked in on the ugly and strange tale of ace MLB pitcher Trevor Bauer was in 2023, in two epic posts, “The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck: It Has Everything: #MeToo, Kinky Sex, Ethics Zugzwang, Predatory Women, ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent,’ “The Asshole’s Handicap,” Legal Ethics And Baseball! [Part I: The Story]”and “The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck, Part 2: Villains, Victims, Heroes And Confusion.” Here’s the short version: In 2021, Bauer was an ace pitcher with a rich contract with the Dodgers until a former sex partner of his tried to shake him down for cash by threatening to claim sexual assault and domestic abuse. Baseball is tough on domestic abusers, and it suspended Bauer while it investigated her (calculated) accusation. Bauer refused to capitulate to the woman, and insisted—still insists—that the rough sex was consensual. Law enforcement concluded that he was likely the victim here, but the Dodgers no longer wanted him as damaged goods, and no other team has hired him. Bauer hasn’t pitched in the U.S. since his suspension was lifted.

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Ethics Verdict: The President’s Executive Orders On Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is easy: irresponsible, petty and stupid.

President Trump signed a pair of executive orders directing that there be federal investigations and other sanctions against high-profile administration critics from his first term. The first is former homeland security official Miles Taylor. He’s the jerk who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 boasting about how he and others were working behind the scenes to sabotage the first Trump term. describing an internal resistance to Trump in his first term. The other is Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who worked to oppose Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “fixed” and “stolen,” and was was subsequently fired.

In the case of Taylor, the President implied in his remarks that he engaged in “treason,” which is a stretch, to put it lightly. Krebs was fired: that should have been punishment enough. In either case, Trump has bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes, and these orders do nothing to advance his agenda.

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Tariffs Have Been Needed For Decades

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Guest post by Steve Witherspoon

[It’s shaping up as “Tariffs Monday,” at least in the morning! JM]

I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer in a metal fabrication plant for thirty years (I wore many hats in this small company) and I personally saw what other countries (especially, China, Mexico, and Canada) were doing to undermine manufacturing in the United States of America. The USA should have put tariffs on at least these three countries 20+ years ago, but instead they were allowed to continue to unfairly practice “free trade” with us unabated.

China took one manufacturing and assembly job after another, then China used its financial capital to seriously undercut USA steel manufacturing causing steel mills in the USA to slow to a dead crawl and increase their cost a lot. In addition to that, the steel coming out of China was rusty and didn’t meet quality standards and distributors were having real problems providing quality steel to long term customers like our company. We had to slow production of some products as a result of supply problems and that hurt some of our customers and that trickled down to problems for some consumers.

Canada has been undermining aluminum and stainless steel manufacturing in the USA for over twenty years, as they practiced their unfair “free trade”  with us unabated. When Canada’s stainless steel production slowed we had to seriously slow the manufacturing of some products. One stainless steel product that had to be slowed we made for a local company and that product ended up on United States Navy submarines. I personally know people who worked (past tense) in aluminum mills and they watched as the plants slowed down to a crawl. People got laid off and retired early as Canada took over most of the market for some aluminums.

Then there is Mexico. That nation has been undermining USA assembly plants of all kinds for well over twenty years. Where do you think a huge portion of assembled consumer goods are coming from, including PC computers? Yup, it’s Mexico and usually just across the USA/Mexico border. These are not the only countries that have been unfair with all this “free trade” bull shit.

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The Naked Mayor Principle ( or “What an Idiot!”)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Tom Ross, the “non-partisan” mayor of Minot, North Dakota, has resigned. Guess why. He accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to City Attorney Stefanie Stalheim. For some reason, this moron waited for a city investigation to be completed before doing what he should have done the moment it happened, which was back in January. The investigation found that the mayor and Stalheim had concluded a town business related phone call about a Minot police officer who had committed suicide and the mayor sent her the “Ew!” video shortly thereafter.

Ross insisted he sent the video to the wrong address and had intended to send it to his girlfriend. So what? The Naked Mayor Principle, though never explicitly stated here because no previous mayor has been this stupid (or stupid in this particular way), is a natural corollary to the Naked Teacher Principle, which states that a secondary school teacher or administrator who allows pictures of himself or herself showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses to be seem online cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result. A high elected official who sends such a photo or video to an employee is in an ethically similar position. Bye!

The frisky mayor handed over his resignation letter prior to a Minot City Council special meeting called to deal with the scandal. The city investigator found that due “to Ross’s position as one of increased visibility, responsibility, and trust, and due to his decision to use a personal cell phone to conduct city business, that the fact that he would use that device to record and send videos of this nature is in and of itself reckless enough that he knew the risk he was taking by engaging in such behavior.” Yah think? The investigator also concluded that the incident met the city’s standard for workplace harassment, whether or not it was accidental. I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t matter. The town’s mayor takes naked photos of himself and sends it to people. Ick. Pooie. Elected officials shouldn’t be behaving like teenagers, even competently. He’s an idiot. Idiots shouldn’t be mayors.

Case closed.

An Unethical Cascade…Thanks, Metropolis!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The photo above carries the caption: “Metropolis parking utilizing AI to create drive in drive out parking without the need for a ticket and validation. This lot is at 236 S. Los Angeles in Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles.” Here’s my caption: “Metropolis parking can bite me.”

And did, come to think of it.

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Addendum to “An Ethics Can of Worms: The Mental Health of Airline Pilots”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This has been happening to me a lot lately: I finish a post under the pressure of my large and enthusiastic dog making it painfully obvious that he wants a walk and won’t leave me in peace before he gets one, rush to get it up while he’s pawing at my arm, and then, on the walk, think of something I should have included in the post.

In this case, I should have mentioned the comparison with the military. We don’t want those suffering from mental and emotional illnesses holding guns and defending the country any more than we want them flying planes, but the standards are much, much lower. A “Section 8” draft deferment required far more serious symptoms than chronic depression.

Four famous movies had the issue of mentally ill soldiers at their centers: “Dr. Strangelove…,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “M*A*S*H,” and “Catch 22.” (I never could figure out what was the problem with Trini Lopez in “The Dirty Dozen” except for his obsession with songs about vegetation.) My father was somewhat bitter about the low standards WWII draftees were subject to, I assume because his foot was almost blown off because of a member of Dad’s platoon who had an IQ in the sixties.

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Observations on a Jobs Graph

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That provocative graph above is brought to you by Apollo Global Management.

It purports to reveal what proportion of new jobs added each year since 2016 were in the private and public sectors. I have no way of telling whether the numbers are accurate, whether the manner of presenting them is fair, and whether Apollo has an agenda in presenting them this way. I guess that’s the first ethics observation. It is now impossible to trust news accounts, statistics, analysis, surveys, studies and data, no matter where it comes from. We can add this to the fact that photographs, films, recordings and videos are also untrustworthy.

But here are some more observations on the off chance that the numbers are correct and can be trusted:

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Marketing Ethics: “That’s Some Bad Hat, MLB!”*

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

We shall see if the ethical value of accountability is completely dead in our culture by how many people are fired by Major League Baseball in the aftermath of the Great Baseball Cap Disaster of 2025. It should be a lot.

Baseball finally figured out that the clubs could make a lot of money by constantly adding new uniforms and baseball cap options to each team. (I blame former Commissioner of Baseball Peter Ueberroth, whose entire function during his tenure was to modernize the sport’s merchandising and public relations.) I thought this hustle had reached its apotheosis with the dreadful “City Connect” uniforms that were inflicted on the teams a few years ago, creating inexplicable eyesores like this for the RED Sox…

but the sport’s greed and lack of taste knows no bounds. Fans and collectors actually bought those jerseys and caps (to be fair, some of the redesigned uniforms aren’t quite that bad), along with the “vintage” uniforms and caps, the Mother’s Day uniforms and caps, the stupid “nickname” jerseys, the boring All-Star team jerseys and caps, “turn-back-the clock” uniforms….As P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So someone got the bright idea to foist these ugly team caps off on the public, since obviously baseball fans will buy anything:

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About the “Appearance of Impropriety,” the Limits of “Deny, Deny, Deny,” and the Foolishness of Defying the Lessons of Michael Clayton

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Yes, ProPublica is generally a one-way-only ethics watchdog, but that way is still worth watching.

It is reporting that Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), had a romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for the Navy. According to two sources with knowledge of an inspector general’s nvestigation, this was not the GOP combat veteran’s only inappropriate relationship with military personnel. Earlier this year, the Air Force revealed that Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty, who oversaw its lobbying before Congress, had inappropriate romantic relationships with five women, including three who worked on Capitol Hill. One of those, though the names in the report were redacted, was allegedly Ernst. Because the Senator is an influential voice in Congress regarding the Pentagon and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee which has a crucial role in setting its annual budget, these are troubling accounts.

ProPublica says that neither Ernst nor the two military officers were married at the time. Current Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates, although why I don’t know. Nonetheless, government employees and officials, like judges, are supposed to avoid appearances of impropriety.” “Ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest,” ProPublica tells us. “A former legislative affairs official for the military” tells ProPublica that “From an ethics standpoint, [these relationships] are severely problematic.”

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