Entry: 2024-01-31 18:55:51.281332+01 medical dead zones by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT John Cutting @jcutting@vivaldi.net
A passenger airline client is developing the complicated scheduling tools to ensure that pregnant employees can minimize working in states with actively dangerous restrictions on reproductive healthcare. Pilots also need to rethink where to divert if a passenger has a prenatal medical emergency.
The nearest airports are not necessarily places where care can be provided. This is a major safety, moral, and reputational risk, and it's damned shameful that we have medical "dead zones" in America
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Aviation Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2024-01-07 01:05:02.373546+01 I am very concerned about police by Dan Lyke comments 0
I am very concerned about police brutality. I am not a fan of car alarms. But it turns out that when some asshole in a motor vehicle accelerates loudly enough up my street to set off car alarms, my ethical structure becomes amazingly flexible.
[ related topics: Ethics Law Enforcement Automobiles ]
Entry: 2023-12-19 23:25:36.734109+01 Tesla links of the moment by Dan Lyke comments 0
Tesla Has The Highest Accident Rate Of Any Auto Brand
Tesla drivers are the most accident-prone, according to a LendingTree analysis of 30 car brands. It found that Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand. Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers for every brand.
Tesla crushed in Consumer Reports reliability rankings despite improvement
Consumer Reports‘ annual reliability rankings have been released, and with data from 24 brands and over 300,000 vehicles, Tesla fell near the bottom (19/24) along with Mercedes-Benz, Jeep, Volkswagen, GMC, and Chevrolet. Electric vehicles overall also placed poorly, being the second least reliable category of vehicles. Hybrids/plugin hybrids, especially those from Toyota, were found to be the most reliable.
Washington Post: Recalling almost every Tesla in America won’t fix safety issues, experts say
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment Friday. In a statement this week responding to The Post’s report on Autopilot crashes, Tesla said it has a “moral obligation” to continue improving its safety systems and also said that it is “morally indefensible” to not make these features available to a wider set of consumers.
Elon Musk: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Edit 2023-12-20: Reuters: Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective
Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.
[ related topics: Ethics Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Automobiles ]
Entry: 2023-11-16 18:22:15.089574+01 Free range software by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org
Putting software in containers is cruel and unnatural.
Programs should be allowed to roam and graze freely on computer systems. Forcibly isolating and constraining them will lead only undue suffering.
Use of technologies such as Docker in systems administration must be ended immediately, there is no ethical justification for inflicting trauma like this in an enlightened society.
In this "free range software manifesto" I will -
[ related topics: Ethics Software Engineering ]
Entry: 2023-10-24 21:30:02.034009+02 Whoah California suspends GM Cruises by Dan Lyke comments 0
Whoah: California suspends GM Cruise’s autonomous driverless vehicle permits.
"The agency also determined that the company “misrepresented” information related to safety of the autonomous technology."
Use with a safety driver, and presumably their ACC technology using a customer as a moral crumple zone, is still allowed.
#GiftArticle #GiftLink https://wapo.st/3Sgf5PJ
[ related topics: Ethics California Culture ]
Entry: 2023-10-06 17:45:01.332565+02 WaPo deconstructs a Tesla crash by Dan Lyke comments 0
So there's a lot of missing data in trying to understand the actual impacts of Tesla's "autopilot" on automobile collisions. It seems like a lot of the analyses are finding that right now it's less safe than a human driver (2019: +59%, 2023: +11%).
This is an interesting deconstruction of a crash, that's got me thinking a lot more about the notion of "moral crumple zones", especially when a technology is marketed as "autopilot" and, despite having good map data, allows drivers to set parameters outside of legal limits. Washington Post: The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash
[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area Law Automobiles Maps and Mapping Archival ]
Entry: 2023-08-10 18:26:59.884638+02 Browser Extensions by Dan Lyke comments 0
Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer
Over the years, I have received many proposals to monetize this extension so I think I'll just start posting them here for fun (but not for profit). The main reason I continue to maintain this extension is because I can hardly trust others to not fall for one of these offers. I'm fortunate to have a job that pays well enough to allow me to keep my moral compass and ignore all of these propositions. I realize that not everyone has the same financial security so hopefully this thread would shed some light on what kind of pressure is put on extension developers.
[ related topics: Ethics Heinlein ]
Entry: 2023-08-07 14:29:50.414886+02 bribing a justice by Dan Lyke comments 0
Margaret McMullan talks about Justice Sotomayor talking at her event. How I ‘bribed’ a justice to take a no-expenses-paid trip to Mississippi
The standard royalty rate for authors is less than 10 percent of the sales price. I don’t know anything about Sotomayor’s deal with her publishers, but 10 percent would make her cut of the 1,500 books our foundation purchased approximately $2,250 — for which she had to fly to Mississippi and give two presentations. During the hottest month of the year.
Was that a bribe? You be the judge.
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3DL60pH
[ related topics: Books Ethics Law Law Enforcement Travel ]
Entry: 2023-08-01 01:50:05.066568+02 Some years ago I started to look into by Dan Lyke comments 0
Some years ago, I started to look into creating my own data set for training a Haar Cascade for facial recognition on my own images. I quickly discovered that my own image library was insufficient, and very white. And as I started looking at other data sets out there, I quickly ran into concerns about the sources and license terms of the data.
Be interesting to see some notion of ethical sharing of training sets come out of this new discussion of actually open "AI".
[ related topics: Language Books Ethics Invention and Design Community Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2023-08-01 00:17:53.591433+02 Flight Safety by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT John Cutting @jcutting@vivaldi.net
A passenger airline client is developing the complicated scheduling tools to ensure that pregnant employees can minimize working in states with actively dangerous restrictions on reproductive healthcare. Pilots also need to rethink where to divert if a passenger has a prenatal medical emergency.
The nearest airports are not necessarily places where care can be provided. This is a major safety, moral, and reputational risk, and it's damned shameful that we have medical "dead zones" in America
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Aviation Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2023-02-10 19:57:43.70735+01 Supreme Court Shenanigans by Dan Lyke comments 0
John Roberts’ wife’s client list raises concern about “conflicts of interest and influence peddling"
The complaint, which was first obtained by The New York Times, accuses the chief justice of failing to acknowledge the full extent of his wife's work in his ethical disclosures.
Jane Roberts, who quit her job as a law partner when her husband was confirmed as chief justice in 2005, made millions of dollars in commissions helping recruit for firms – some of which had business before the Supreme Court, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.
The problem with the justices’ use of emails persisted in part because some justices were slow to adopt to the technology and some court employees were nervous about confronting them to urge them to take precautions, one person said. Such behavior meant that justices weren’t setting an example to take security seriously.
[ related topics: Politics Ethics Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Heinlein New York Marriage ]
Entry: 2022-12-04 02:40:03.033024+01 evening's household discussion involves by Dan Lyke comments 0
This evening's household discussion involves a look at Moral Foundations theory, and as I get into this I wonder how the fuck Haidt wasn't laughed out of his professorship.
At least when he says "we are clueless and hypocritical about ourselves", he's demonstrating some ability for introspection.
[ related topics: Ethics Community ]
Entry: 2022-08-19 19:14:45.506535+02 Beyond Bed Bath & Beyond by Dan Lyke comments 1
So the headline reads Student, 20, makes $110 million trading meme stock Bed Bath & Beyond, somewhere else I read that he raised $25M from friends and family to start his company, but... Obviously, as the stock has crashed back down, there wasn't value created there, which means the money he "made" is essentially extracted from Redditors playing meme games.
Which kinda feels a lot like cryptocurrencies: on the one hand it's hard to feel bad for people burned by a moral hazard, on the other hand....
[ related topics: Games Ethics Sociology Marketing Currency Economics Furniture ]
Entry: 2022-05-09 17:53:26.854932+02 Good girl by Dan Lyke comments 0
Don't ask me to call you a "good girl" in bed. I am not in a position to make moral judgments about you, it's only through self interrogation of your own actions and the motivation of those actions that one can determine if they've been "naughty" or not
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Furniture ]
Entry: 2022-01-30 01:17:51.267588+01 Crisis Text Line sharing data by Dan Lyke comments 0
Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions>
The Crisis Text Line’s AI-driven chat service has gathered troves of data from its conversations with people suffering life’s toughest situations.
[ related topics: Privacy Ethics Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2021-12-03 23:42:03.754951+01 Pay To Participate Retraction by Dan Lyke comments 0
‘Pay-to-participate’ autism stem-cells paper retracted
“It’s not really a meaningful contribution to scientific knowledge,” said Turner, who co-authored a critical letter about the study earlier this year with Jeremy Snyder, professor of public health ethics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. “It’s more what’s sometimes described as a scientific token of legitimacy to help burnish the marketing credentials of that business.”
From reading this write-up, it also sounds like though the only possible outcome of the study was looking at safety, there were some claims about effect, even though there was no control group, and 20% of the participants dropped out. So, yeah, with the small sample size, any claims are gonna be marred by selection bias.
[ related topics: Health Ethics Current Events Consumerism and advertising Marketing Education ]
Entry: 2021-07-31 07:04:17.03795+02 Symbolic Crusades by Dan Lyke comments 0
I have two books on my nightstand right now: Joseph R. Gusfield's "Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement", and Byung-Chul Han's "The disappearance of rituals".
The former is a fascinating look at how group identity drove the Temperance movement. How lay-led organizations took moral leadership and group identity from churches, and in so doing made morality more binary. It's also fascinating for language, it was written in 1963 and revised in 1986, and I have a couple of times had to look for footnotes for a little more context so that I could understand better what the author meant by "Indian", for instance.
The latter is a more recent lament about how social media is fragmenting culture, and how spontaneous culture is destroying rituals. I'm reading it slowly, the way it (and the translation) use language is sometimes hard to suss out.
But I suspect they're actually writing about the same thing, and Han is too caught up in his privilege to understand that.
[ related topics: Politics Books Ethics Sociology Writing Journalism and Media California Culture ]
Entry: 2021-07-17 16:18:30.119947+02 Ivermectin & COVID-19 by Dan Lyke comments 0
So I became aware of the Ivermectin and COVID-19 thing a few weeks ago, looked into it, thought "huh, the people behind this seem kinda skeevy, but the results they're reporting might be useful". Looks like it was one giant troll after all: Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
and
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
Also, what is the world comin to when The Guardian is referencing Grftr.news? Why Was a Major Study on Ivermectin for COVID-19 Just Retracted?
When opening what the authors claim is their original data the first thing that any reader notices is that it’s remarkably complete. In many columns data for all patients are fully listed. The second thing the reader will likely notice is that the original data do not match the author’s public results. In three of the four study arms measuring patient death as an outcome, the numbers between the paper and original data differ.
[ related topics: Ethics Current Events ]
Entry: 2021-01-12 02:24:16.24089+01 Coup Snark OTD by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Monica Maalouf, MD @MaaloufMD
Censorship is when the government bans implicit bias trainings and the teaching of critical race theory.
Banning fascists from twitter is just the free market being the free market.
Crying because they can't get organic food in prison? Licking the boots of a dude who called your wife ugly? Refusing to stand up to a bully who rewarded 4 years of ass-kissing by encouraging a crowd to kill you? This is the same party that calls us simps, cucks, and snowflakes?
It actually takes two impeachments to vaccinate against Trump
look. no matter what we do, conservatives are gonna say this is like 1984. at this point we should go all in. make ted cruz wear the rat helmet
Fellas, I'm starting to think it wasn't really about ethics in game journalism.
[ related topics: Games Ethics Free Speech Food moron Journalism and Media Shoes Economics Marriage ]
Entry: 2021-01-11 22:09:49.860345+01 Ethics in Game Journalism by Dan Lyke comments 0
Fellas, I'm starting to think it wasn't really about ethics in game journalism.
[ related topics: Games Ethics Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2020-12-05 19:10:15.951124+01 Hot Blooded by Dan Lyke comments 0
On a HAI message board, Karin Grace Wares mentioned her memoir, Hot Blooded: A Sexual Resurrection. I ordered it from Copperfield's, and quite enjoyed it.
One of the things that COVID-19 has made me aware of is how much of our sexual attitudes are a product of our times. I'm watching at how my various older gay friends are reacting to COVID-19, and it's amazing how much their experiences with having survived the AIDS epidemic has informed their behavior and attitudes now, and how there have been mentions of some sex parties that a younger generation were willing to attend, probably because they hadn't had that trauma deeply ingrained.
And as I sort through some of my own sexual traumas, I'm realizing that some of them come from the fact that my parents, and upbringing, were more Silent Generation than Baby Boomer, so I'm kind-of in a limbo that's between Boomer and Gen-X, with the additional cultural confusion that comes from extremely rural, Waldorf, and whatever set of neurological differences I carry.
When Charlene and I met, in a hot tub at a neo-tantra community event at a mansion in Tiburon, we talked about not being exclusive, but in practice that's never happened; I just don't have the spoons to have secondary relationships (which speaks to some of my own relationship traumas). However, I do listen to a number of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy podcasts, because those are the folks who are talking about personal growth and human relationships in terms that make sense to me.
But in listening to those folks, most of them are at least a decade younger than I am, if not more, and the generational differences in what sex means, and how they approach relationships, are clear. There's a huge difference in a generation that has access to "they/them" pronouns, to the one for which "ethical non-monogamy" wasn't a new concept, but was a new term.
As I read through Hot Blooded, I kept running across footnotes from books on my sex and sexuality bookshelf. This speaks a lot to my generation, echoing a lot of what I found in the writings of Susie Bright, and Carol Queen, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. Within the first few pages I found myself dropping quotes on social media, and as I got deeper into the book the observations got no less pithy, but built on previous thoughts so that they were no longer so easily excisable from context.
As she goes through her own journey, and likens that to what was happening in the culture around, I had the warm familiarity of the thoughts of my generation, contrasted with some wonderful insights and experiences probing the edges and frontiers of the time.
I think I may have to read this one again, and take stronger notes this time. Recommended.
[ related topics: Religion Quotes Interactive Drama Books Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Invention and Design Bay Area Sociology Writing Journalism and Media California Culture Sports Pop Culture Community Rocky Horror Picture Show ]
Entry: 2020-12-05 18:06:52.555943+01 Timnit Gebru by Dan Lyke comments 0
MIT Technology Review: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says
Also, just so I have a place to hang it. Metafilter post on both biases currently happening in economics, and in AI
[ related topics: Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2020-08-18 01:26:17.704929+02 Porn and sexual aggression: inversely correlated by Dan Lyke comments 0
Study: Pornography does not cause violent sex crimes
Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Can Meta-Analysis Find a Link? is based on research by Chris Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, and Richard Hartley, chair of UTSA’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The authors conducted meta-analytic research and examined more than 50 correlational, experimental and population studies that explored the association between pornography and sexual aggression during the past 40 years.
So many good pull-quotes:
“During the past few years many states have declared that pornography is a public health crisis,” said Ferguson. “Dr. Hartley and I were curious to see if evidence could support such claims—at least in regard to sexual aggression—or whether politicians were mistaking moral stances for science. Our evidence suggests that policymakers should examine other causes of sexual aggression and that beliefs about pornography may be driven more by methodological mistakes than sound science.”
and
“I hope that Dr. Hartley and I can point out some of the widespread problems in much of the research as well as the culture of this field, whereas some scholars appear to be too quick to try and find evidence for effects,” said Ferguson, who led the study. “We need more preregistered, transparent research and a field that is looking to falsify hypotheses and not entirely in confirmatory mode because it feels morally right.”
And, from the abstract of the paper:
... Population studies suggested that increased availability of pornography is associated with reduced sexual aggression at the population level. ...
[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Ethics History Sociology Law Enforcement California Culture Education Furniture ]
Entry: 2020-05-08 16:52:10.975582+02 Responsible Meat Packing by Dan Lyke comments 0
Cold, Crowded, Deadly: How U.S. Meat Plants Became a Virus Breeding Ground. As we watch Tyson Foods and others plead for bailouts and attempt to socialize risk, it's important that we not excuse their behavior and allow them to get away with the moral hazards:
There are exceptions in the U.S., too. Sanderson Farms Inc., America’s third-largest poultry producer, has had about 100 workers test positive for Covid-19 out of 17,000 employees in its 13 plants across the South. In late March, Sanderson became aware of a coronavirus outbreak in Dougherty County, Ga., near its 1,400-worker plant in the city of Moultrie. It sent more than 400 workers home, with pay, to quarantine for two weeks whether or not they were showing symptoms. The plant had to slow its line speed by 15%, but it averted a spike in infection, a closure, and possibly worse. None of the Dougherty County workers tested positive, and there have been no reports of deaths among Sanderson workers.
[ related topics: Movies Ethics virus Food Current Events Work, productivity and environment Gardening ]
Entry: 2020-03-17 22:17:39.804063+01 Stock Buybacks by Dan Lyke comments 0
In case you had any question at all that bailing out investors is a moral hazard, and we should be letting companies go bankrupt, or nationalizing them: U.S. Airlines Spent 96% of Free Cash Flow on Buybacks
[ related topics: Ethics Aviation Law Current Events ]
Entry: 2019-10-28 22:38:19.879416+01 Katie Hill & revenge porn by Dan Lyke comments 0
After resigning, Rep. Katie Hill vows to battle revenge porn, which critics blame for her downfall. Surprise move from Republican Florida rep Matt Gaetz:
But fewer lawmakers have outwardly addressed the problem of revenge porn, or nonconsensual pornography. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was a notable exception. Last week, Gaetz called the House ethics investigation “absurd,” questioning, “Who among us would look perfect if every ex leaked every photo/text?” He suggested that the real reason Hill was being investigated “is because she is different.” Hill is also one of the first openly bisexual members of Congress.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Real Estate ]
Entry: 2019-09-18 00:12:52.583244+02 Cokie Roberts on the Congress of 1820 by Dan Lyke comments 0
After the War of 1812, Dolley Madison had worked with the women in Washington to establish an orphans' asylum because there had been many orphans left by the British invasion and so Louisa goes to this meeting of the orphan asylum trustees and is told that they're soon going to need more space because "Congress had left many females in such difficulties as to make it probable they would beg our assistance" and Louisa says, "What are you talking about?" and the answer comes back from the trustee "The session had been very long. The fathers of the nation had left 40 cases to be provided for by the public and our institution was the most likely to be called upon to maintain this illicit progeny." There were 40 pregnant women left behind as Congress goes home to its wives and Louisa Adams is writing these letters to old John Adams, who's home in Quincy. Abigail had died by this time, and she's trying to amuse him and so she discovers this shocking fact. Then she says to him, "I recommended a petition to Congress' next session for that great and moral body to establish a foundling institution and should certainly move that the two additional dollars a day which they have given themselves as an increase in pay may be appropriated as a fund toward the support of the institution.
Susan Kitchens tweets the page number from the book.
[ related topics: Politics Books Ethics History Space & Astronomy Writing Archival Marriage ]
Entry: 2019-09-15 18:34:04.550159+02 Autism & sperm donors by Dan Lyke comments 0
The children of donor H898. Large cluster of children of autism appear to have a single sperm donor father. This not only opens up lots of questions about the ethics of the processes of fertility treatments, it's giving a lot of data for people searching for heritable sources of autism.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Ethics ]
Entry: 2019-08-13 21:11:07.128242+02 Ethics Class by Dan Lyke comments 0
law professor: you're currently failing your ethics class
me: *slides a $20 across the desk* how about now
Reply by Gary Anderson @DamagedWriter
law professor: A twenty? Now you're failing economics as well.
[ related topics: Ethics ]
Entry: 2019-06-08 00:04:49.519673+02 Lawyers endorsing piracy? by Dan Lyke comments 0
Piracy is Ethically Acceptable For Many Harvard Lawyers, Research Finds
Should digital files be considered a commons? Copyright infringement in the eyes of lawyers
... Although file sharing is typically illegal, our findings show that lawyers overwhelmingly perceive it as an acceptable social practice. The main criterion used by lawyers to decide on the ethical acceptability of file sharing is whether or not the infringer derives any monetary benefits from it. Further, our findings show that lawyers in the public sector (including judiciary and academia) are even more tolerant of online copyright infringement than those in the private sector. Interestingly, our data suggests that this is largely the result of self-selection: lawyers who lean more on the side of broad disclosure and social sharing tend to orient themselves toward the public sector. ...
[ related topics: Ethics Copyright/Trademark ]
Entry: 2019-04-28 02:30:25.095137+02 Beyond Consent by Dan Lyke comments 0
It requires registration, but it's really good. Via Elf Sternberg: Consent and Refusal Are Not the Only Talking Points in Sex — The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex/a>
I propose centring invitations rather than requests in our model of the language of sexual initiation. This opens up a whole set of new ethical and pragmatic questions. When are sexual invitations felicitous and appropriate, and who has authority to issue them to whom? Since invitations strike a complex balance between welcoming and leaving the recipient free, what maintains this balance and what throws it off-kilter? An invitation might be degrading by being insufficiently welcoming, for instance. Or it might be coercive by being too pressing. Notice that if I invite you, appropriately, to have sex with me, then consent and refusal are not even the right categories of speech acts when it comes to your uptake. It is not felicitous to consent to an invitation; rather, one accepts it or turns it down. So the consent model distorts our understanding of how a great deal of sex is initiated, including in particular pleasurable, ethical sex.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics tolkien Invention and Design ]
Entry: 2019-03-28 17:23:44.312993+01 Lack of moral authority by Dan Lyke comments 0
When the law and a city's police are so corrupt that they've lost all moral authority over those they're supposed to be serving: On the West Side, the street shows no fear of Chicago police
Authorities confirmed that two police officers — TAC cops, not rookies — were making a drug arrest shortly after 2 p.m. on Sunday.
A mob appeared, threatening the officers, surrounding them, threatening to reach for their own weapons to shoot them dead, and the cops let the suspect go.
[ related topics: Health Ethics Current Events Law Enforcement Guns ]
Entry: 2019-02-28 22:59:11.382158+01 Bayer delivers HIV for profit by Dan Lyke comments 0
Blood money: Bayer's inventory of HIV-contaminated blood products and third world hemophiliacs.
Abstract This article presents an overlooked case of research misconduct and violations of basic principles of medical and business ethics. When Bayer's Cutter Laboratories realized that their blood products, Factor VIII and IX or antihemophiliac factor (AHF), were contaminated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the financial investment in the product was considered too high to destroy the inventory. Cutter misrepresented the results of its own research and sold the contaminated AHF to overseas markets in Asia and Latin America without the precaution of heat treating the product recommended for eliminating the risk. As a consequence, hemophiliacs who infused the HIV-contaminated Factor VIII and IX tested positive for HIV and developed AIDS.
Account Res. 2014;21(6):389-400. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2014.882780.
[ related topics: Ethics virus Law Currency Gambling Economics ]
Entry: 2019-02-17 19:38:29.296615+01 Ring & Privacy by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Intercept: Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police. I think the article is a little overblown, but there are some issues worth thinking about.
Although Ring owners must opt in to the Neighbors program and appear free to deny law enforcement access to the cameras they own, the mere ability to ask introduces privacy and civil liberties quandaries that haven’t previously existed. In an interview with The Intercept, Matt Cagle, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said “the portal blurs the line between corporate and government surveillance,” making it unclear where the tech initiative ends and constitutional issues begin. ..
Personally as soon as I connected my Ring cameras to my network I assumed all of that data was public, and their field of view is deliberately limited to places I don't mind having publicly visible.
Washington Post: The doorbells have eyes: The privacy battle brewing over home security cameras
Police want to register — and even subsidize — private security cameras. That’s just the start of the ethical challenges ahead.
[ related topics: Books Photography Privacy Ethics broadband tolkien Software Engineering History moron Law Law Enforcement California Culture ]
Entry: 2019-01-07 20:38:58.077617+01 Some political musings by Dan Lyke comments 0
My path away from being a Libertarian has had many incremental steps. A strong one was reading one of the issues of Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Newsletter" in which she defended the patent system, but talked about the length as being somewhat arbitrary, and that the notion of independent discovery really made the patent system an attempt to create a real estate like limit on knowledge.
Which, of course, led to two "aha": moments: The first was that legal systems were imperfect representations of ethical structures, had knobs that let you tweak the relative return of capital vs labor. The second was that if that knob was tweaked towards capital, then as capital accumulated you'd end up with a monarchy.
Which, of course, is the observation that Picketty made a few years ago.
Another was that in discussions with other people who claimed the Libertarian label, so many were unaware of the externalities of their actions. So many dismissed, for instance, automobile pollution, or were willing to look at the economics of subsidies and policy decisions that created the lifestyle they enjoyed.
But overall, I was willing to accept that there was at least a theory of a place with limited government that didn't deteriorate into Somalia-like warlords; that reducing the ethical notions of violence and compulsory behavior that underpinned society was a laudable direction.
Until now. Until the current rage of Trump supporters who have sprung from the woodwork claiming at the same time that government is an evil that holds us back from market-based cooperation, and that killing political opponents is completely reasonable.
An example from the faux outrage over Rashida Tlaib referring to Trump as "the motherfucker", on a Facebook thread someone said:
Rashida the muslum is not even sworn in, she did not use a Holy Bible, so go get a red dot in her head, i want to scratch it and see if i won again.
Which, initially, I and a few other respondents took to be pretty much awful bigotry, conflating Islam with the Hindu practice of married women wearing a red dot, but in a discussion about why "bigotry" and not "racism" was the correct term, another commenter clarified:
Never said anything about Indians..... just said give her a red dot which refers to banging a barrel into her head leaving a red dot. That’s not racist, it would be if referring to her as an Indian but she’s not nor was the comment. Clearly said she was a Muslim.
I'm just... completely amazed that discussing the desirability of assassinating politicians has become mainstream. Right Libertarians have long said "no, we're not talking about Somalia, with warlords and such", but the public discourse enabled by Trump's popularity has exposed that, yes, the modern Right cares nothing for the rule of law and would freakin' welcome a Somalia-like warloard-ruled death- squad fueld society.
It's pretty freakin' astounding.
[ related topics: Religion Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Libertarian Sexual Culture Ethics moron Sociology Law Automobiles Community Race Economics Marriage Real Estate ]
Entry: 2018-07-13 18:01:31.309102+02 SESTA/FOSTA hampers prosecution of pimps by Dan Lyke comments 0
“We’ve been a little bit blinded lately because they shut Backpage down,” Daggy said. “I get the reasoning behind it, and the ethics behind it, however, it has blinded us. We used to look at Backpage as a trap for human traffickers and pimps.”
U.S. authorities seized Backpage, which has been accused of facilitating human trafficking and prostitution, in April. Legislation signed by President Donald Trump in April known as SESTA-FOSTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) made it illegal to knowingly assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking and removed immunity for civil liability that online services previously had. The result has been that other sites like Backpage, including Craigslist’s personals section, have gone dark.
Indianapolis vice cop says SESTA/FOSTA closure of Backpage has ‘blinded’ investigators
[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Sports Handicaps & Disabilities ]
Entry: 2018-06-24 18:15:38.53847+02 Red Hen by Dan Lyke comments 4
The owner of the Red Hen explains why she asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave.
The Sarah Sanders tweet that launched a thousand replies:
Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so
And, of course, a reminder that food establishments turning down customers based on political views has a history, from 2012: Radford bakery that turned Biden away sells out of 'freedom cookies'.
(Although many people have compared this to wedding cakes and said things like "liar is not a protected class")
RT Chalis Montgomery @ChalisforGA:
To clarify:
You were separated from your MEAL and you are upset?
The director of the United States Office of Government Ethics from January 9, 2013 to July 19, 2017 weighs in: RT Walter Shaub @waltshaub
Sarah, I know you don’t care even a tiny little bit about the ethics rules, but using your official account for this is a clear violation of 5 CFR 2635.702(a). It’s the same as if an ATF agent pulled out his badge when a restaurant tried to throw him/her out.
Bonus, 'cause I don't have a better place to put it: RT Michael Cavadias 🌹 @michaelcavadias
very interesting from the 2002 vote that created ICE..
Barbara Lee - NO
Bernie Sanders - NO
Nancy Pelosi - NO
Russ Feingold - NO
Nydia Velazquez - NOHillary Clinton - YES
Carolyn Maloney - YES
Joe Crowley - YES
Chuck Schumer - YES
Diane Feinstein - YES
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Privacy Ethics Food moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Birds Marriage Government ]
Entry: 2018-06-09 20:52:02.136012+02 Canoedling by Dan Lyke comments 0
Love Boats: The Delightfully Sinful History of Canoes
As further proof that canoeing had become a hotbed for teenage delinquents, in 1913 the Minneapolis Parks Board refused to issue permits for canoes with unpalatable names. Local newspapers published some of the offensive phrases that slipped past the board the previous summer, including “Thehelusa,” “Kumonin Kid,” “Kismekwik,” “Damfino,” “Ilgetu,” “Aw-kom-in,” “G-I-Lov-U,” “Skwizmtyt,” “Ildaryoo,” “Win-kat-us,” “O-U-Q-T,” “What the?,” “Joy-tub,” “Cupid’s Nest,” and “I Would Like to Try It.” The commissioners unanimously agreed to outlaw phrases lacking obvious moral and grammatical standards, though a few of these clever pre-text-message abbreviations clearly had them scratching their heads.
[ related topics: Ethics History Political Correctness Boats Machinery ]
Entry: 2018-04-02 18:45:17.883389+02 Leaving Fox News by Dan Lyke comments 0
Included more so I can find it again than any real content: Ralph Peters: Why I Left Fox News:
Four decades ago, as a U.S. Army second lieutenant, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” In moral and ethical terms, that oath never expires. As Fox’s assault on our constitutional order intensified, spearheaded by its after-dinner demagogues, I had no choice but to leave.
My error was waiting so long to walk away. The chance to speak to millions of Americans is seductive, and, with the infinite human capacity for self-delusion, I rationalized that I could make a difference by remaining at Fox and speaking honestly.
[ related topics: Microsoft Ethics Law Current Events Civil Liberties ]
Entry: 2018-03-17 21:10:53.252574+01 Making Decisions by Dan Lyke comments 0
While it’s not unusual for judges to ask attorneys to submit proposed decisions for their consideration, those requests are made in the open, and the attorneys’ work is labeled a "proposed decision" and made part of the public court file, separate from the judge's ruling.
But Jacobson, who retired from the bench in October at age 69, admitted in a deposition last fall that he sometimes privately requested that attorneys for the winning side write up the decision and then email it to him rather than file it with the clerk of courts as a "proposed decision."
[ related topics: Ethics Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]
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