waste

Ethics Quiz: Life Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Favour Ogechi Ani, a young Nigerian woman, has shattered the 18-year-old staggering stupid Guinness Book of Records mark for….wait for iiiiiiiiiiiit…the highest number ever counted out loud.

Starting in October 2025, Favour spent 70 days confined to her home, counting out loud to 1,070,000. The old record was “only” one million, but she was determined to break the record as when in October 18, 1968, American long-jumper Bob Beamon broke the long-jump record at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City by two feet in a sport where records are usually set by centimeters.

“Honestly, it was tough, but my passion for counting kept me going,” Favour said. “I had a lovely team supporting and cheering me up, and it was fun despite the challenges. My determination to achieve this project was a burn-the-boats mission. I never thought of giving up for any reason.”

Wow.

What an idiot.

Ani started live-streaming her daily counting on YouTube, which helped validate her record-setting attempt. Guinness started eliminating dangerous records decades ago, but the pointless, seldom-read (by people with a life) record book continues to tempt desperate people who view celebrity, even the most degrading kind, as worth pursuing at any cost, to do dumb things in the hopes of establishing their places in history. To establish their places in the history of wasting life.

Did you know about this epic achievement? If not, I am cheered: an American news media that is debating Gwyneth Paltrow’s obscene dress at the Oscars is still not so worthless as to publicize the breaking of the “counting out loud” world record.

EA has derided self-centered, objectively useless and wasteful activities in other posts, including running marathons, climbing Mt. Everest, swimming from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage, or breaking the record for “most tattoos of the same musician (Maddona) on the body.” Still, this is special. I’m singing “September Song” these days, imagining what I could have accomplished with a better use of my time and talents. I see someone wasting 70 days of precious life counting just to get her name in tiny print in a record book, and it ticks me off.

This isn’t like complaining that a wealthy mogul has chosen to spend his or her millions on a luxury yacht when they could have been saving the snail darter. Favour Ogechi Ani is young and healthy: there are literally 1,070,000 things she could have done with her time that could have helped others, inspired others, made the world a teeny bit better, hell, something. Make herself more knowledgeable. Learn a skill. In 70 days, you can learn to do slight of hand card tricks to amuse sick kids in a hospital.

Or am I completely wrong to find unethical a woman spending every waking hour doing something objectively useless for 70 days…not just wrong, but hypocritical? Heck, how much time have I spent watching or listening to baseball games, like I will watch the World Baseball Classic finals tonight between the USA and Venezuela while I have billable work to do for paying (theoretically, anyway) clients?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this, which I dread asking…

Is it ethical for someone to spend 70 days doing something that is neither enjoyable, productive, or useful just to set a record nobody in their right mind cares about?

And Just Think: Abe Lincoln Wrote The Gettysburg Address All By Himself On The Back Of An Envelope…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Hey, it’s only money!

The New York Times today reveals that New York’s governor Kathy Hochul spent about 2 million dollars to outside consultants for help in preparing her 2022 and 2023 “State of the State” speeches. Apparently no previous governor had done that, or anything close: they relied on their staffs for speech ghostwriting.

The extravagant expenditure cannot be justified, though even as the Times exposes it, the paper tries to rationalize Hochul’s waste of taxpayer funds, emphasizing repeatedly that “the speech is among the most significant a governor delivers each year, laying the groundwork for months of negotiations and browbeating over the executive budget and other priorities.” Sure. It’s a speech. It’s not a contract, and what a governor says in it doesn’t commit her to anything, nor is anyone likely to remember what she said within a week of its delivery (especially the way Hochul talks). To be fair to the Times, Hochul is a Democrat, and the Times sees its job as protecting the party, even as the paper reports on inconvenient facts. When it chooses to….

Paying 2 million bucks for help on two speeches not only indicates unseemly insecurity in an elected official, it demonstrates no respect for budgets, priorities, or the public’s hard-earned tax payments. The consultants who got the job also were recipients of non-bid contracts. (Heck, I would have written one of those speeches for some Red Sox -Yankee tickets!)

The arrogance of our current class of elected leaders is a disfiguring blotch on the face of democracy, one that will only get uglier until voters hold them accountable for displays like Hochul’s.