Category Archives: ethics

Conflagration of Norms

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As President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Branch nominations languish in the Senate (300 of them), Republicans there are considering changing the rules to speed the nomination confirmation/rejection process. As The Wall Street Journal puts it in its lede,

…Democrats will call it President Trump’s latest conflagration of norms.

This would be, of course, typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ hypocrisy. Senate norms have already been burned to ashes in the conflagration of Party’s unprecedented obstruction of nearly all things President (read Trump) and nearly all things Republican. But especially all things (not just nearly all) regarding the President’s nominations and Party’s knee-jerk, universal attempts to block and its successes in slowest-walking the confirmation process. Progressive-Democrats are actively stalling even minor nominees who won bipartisan support in committee, just in petty protest of Trump policy (Party politicians claim it’s over his firing of Party-favored Executive Branch appointees, but their obstruction is much broader than that).

Changing the rules in the way Republicans are proposing—limited time to debate each nomination, allowing nominations to be considered in batches, with each batch subject to that same limited debate time—are sorely needed, and the change would benefit all Presidents, not just Trump.

The folks a President nominates and wants confirmed are intended to be members of the President’s team. Party politicians, though, are with their actions demanding confirmees be members of Party’s team, regardless of which party is in power from administration to administration.

Corporate Cybersecurity Training

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It isn’t very effective, apparently.

To measure the effectiveness of different methods of cybersecurity training, the authors [of a study] divided employees into four groups. After each attack, each group received a different training method: one received generic tips about avoiding phishing attacks, a second received an interactive Q&A on cybersecurity, a third was informed about the specific methods used in the most recent attack, and the fourth received an interactive Q&A that also included details about the most recent attack. A fifth group was also created, and the employees in that group received no training.
The authors found that on average, employees who received training of any sort had only a 1.7% lower failure rate than employees who had no training.

The authors’ solution?

The study’s takeaway for organizations, says [lead author Grant] Ho, is to rely on measures other than training, like phishing-detection software that automatically eliminates the need for employees to detect phishing attacks.

Software aids are important in this milieu, but the weak link remains the human. Software aids by themselves are insufficient.

There needs to be more to the training than just a slide presentation and some lectures, or in the present case, “interactive” Q&As. The training sessions need to be plussed up, a lot, but that can’t be the end of it. Schools and responsible companies run fire drills that run to completion with evacuation of the building and head counts and roll calls while the evacuees are gathered up at their assigned evacuation points. So it must be with cybersecurity training. Simulated cyber attacks (phishing, social engineering, etc) attacks should be run against a rotating collection of employees to test their training and their responses to the attacks. Those simulations should be run some weeks after the training and more frequently than those fire drills, and they should not use IT-ginned up attacks, either; they should use serious real-world attacks, altered only to get them targeted to the collection of employees being tested.

Beyond that, there needs to be teeth attached to the training and to employees’ failure to take the training seriously.

There are three outcomes from this. One is an empirical assessment of the quality of training, its durability, and identification of weaknesses in the training program, which then can be corrected (not given up on). A second results from those teeth: once management is satisfied with the training quality, employees still falling for the attacks should be terminated. They’re too great a risk to the company.

The third outcome is a very great increase in the cyber safety of the company and of its employees (with a follow-on: those employees will be better able to maintain security in their homes’ cyber environment). The added training and testing will incur costs to the company, but the risk of the far greater cost of a cyber breach—both direct and indirect through liability—is too great to ignore.

Willful Ignorance

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Or preferring her Newspeak Dictionary definitions over those in actual American English dictionaries.

That’s Arizona Progressive-Democrat Representative Yassamin Ansari’s view. In response to the hue and cry over her terming illegal aliens members of her constituency, she had this:

So, I didn’t realize this was such a controversy until the right-wing media started attacking me for using the word, so I Googled the word constituent. The definition of constituent is somebody who is part of a community, doesn’t matter what their legal status is,

She Googled for the definition of “constituent.” She could have consulted an actual dictionary of the American English language, but she chose not to. ‘Course, if she had, she would have seen her narrative collapse around her. This is what Merriam-Webster, for instance, has to say about the American English meaning of the term:

constituent
1 : a member of a constituency
pledged to help her elderly constituents

Following that first and thus primary definition over to constituency, we get this first and primary definition:

constituency
1 a : a body of citizens entitled to elect a representative (as to a legislative or executive position)
the governor’s liberal constituency

Citizens. Not illegal aliens. Even the second part of that first definition lends no support for Ansari’s Newspeak definition:

b : the residents in an electoral district
The senator’s constituency includes a large minority population.

Since illegal aliens are not legally resident, they are outside even the residents of an electoral district.

Inconvenient facts are, to a Party member, inconvenient.

Tipped Wages or Not?

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McDonald’s is insisting that every restaurant—especially fast food restaurants—should be required to do away with tip-based wages and pay servers at least the Federal-level minimum wage. There are a couple of major disingenuosities in the surrounding argument.

McDonald’s Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski:

Right now, there’s an uneven playing field,

because casual-dining restaurants, bars, and other establishments to pay below the typical minimum wage to tip-earning workers. If he thinks so, he should push for getting his restaurant able to similarly pay his workers rather than demanding that others kowtow to his business model.

Kempczinski went on:

If you are a restaurant that allows tips or has tips as part of your equation, you’re essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor[.]

This is an especially blatant bit of disingenuousness. The customer already is paying for the restaurant’s labor. The customer also is paying for the restaurant’s cooking, food and food preparation inputs, rent, management salaries, every cost the restaurant incurs. Those costs are included in the prices the restaurant puts on its menu. Tipping is just a customer-facing line item on the bill.

This is nothing but a regulated business manager venally and self-servingly trying to capture the regulators and impose added costs on his smaller and weaker competitors.

“They Don’t Have Our Backs”

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That’s the whine of some judges who are criticizing—carefully anonymously, mind you—the Supreme Court for the Court’s emergency rulings overturning lower court rulings as the Justices agree with the Trump administration arguments.

A group of anonymous federal judges is criticizing the Supreme Court for overturning lower court rulings and siding with President Donald Trump’s administration with little to no explanation, NBC News reported Thursday.

And

…judges argued the Supreme Court should offer more explanation when overturning such decisions, saying emergency rulings in such cases imply poor work on the part of lower court judges.

It implies no such thing, of course. This is just an example of the pseudo-logic of these judges, judges who misapply the statutes before them, choosing to rule based on what they wished the statutes said rather than what they actually say. Overturning decisions without explanation in an emergency ruling plainly means nothing more or less than that the Court chose not to explain within the time constraints of an emergency ruling. It certainly applies, or even implies, nothing regarding any motive for the ruling,nor does it even come close to siding with President Donald Trump’s administration, just that the Court agreed with the administration’s arguments. These judges also are carefully ignoring the fact that the Supreme Court’s emergency rulings are merely temporary, overruling lower court temporary restraining orders and temporary injunctions as the underlying cases make their way through the courts.

“It is inexcusable,” one judge said of the Supreme Court. “They don’t have our backs.”

This is a judge who doesn’t even understand his oath of office. It’s not the Supreme Court’s job to backstop lower court judges. It’s the Supreme Court’s job—it’s the job of all of those lower court judges, also—to apply the law as it is written. It’s the job of appellate court judges, especially of Supreme Court Justices, to correct lower court mistakes in the application of the law—statute and Constitution—at least as much as it is to uphold a lower court’s ruling when that ruling applies the law as written.

Separately, “carefully anonymous:” these judges don’t even have the courage of their convictions. They just want to yap from the safety of their respective private porches.