Tag Archives: ethics

Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

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Somebody said that a while ago; it’s still true today.

The milieu this time, though, concerns drones and the People’s Republic of China, and the headline lays out the matter:

Drone Makers Looking to Steer Clear of China Fear Beijing’s Wrath

And this, to put the gooseflesh on the skin:

For US companies, dependence on China has become untenable, particularly as Beijing shows it is willing to cut off their access to essential supplies.
In Taiwan, that spells opportunity. ….
However, recent examples of Beijing punishing companies for their ties to Taiwan have made US businesses cautious in their efforts to avoid China in the production of drones, an industry where commercial ambitions and national security intersect.

“Cautious” is it? This is just one more shameful example of the cowardice of American business managers.

The way to avoid PRC wrath and repercussions over no longer sourcing essential supplies from the PRC and sourcing them from the Republic of China is to stop sourcing from the PRC and source them from the RoC. And from anywhere else.

When the goodies no longer come from the PRC, the PRC can no longer threaten their cutoff. When all the goodies, for everything else besides drones, no longer come from the PRC, the PRC can no longer use any cutoff for leverage or retaliation, or any other purpose. Don’t overthink things. Don’t artificially complexify things. Just do it.

Even managers of American companies can understand that.

Certainly, the transition will be short-term expensive, but in the mid- and long-term things get so much cheaper, so much more stable, and so much less threatening that the time to incur that expense is today.

Lose the fear.

If They Were Serious

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Callum Borchers, a self-identified DEI maven, ended his Wall Street Journal article with this bit:

To restore confidence in hiring fairness, companies should make clear that business goals come first and diversity is part of a strategy to recruit top talent, she [Ruth Villalonga, who advises companies on diversity messaging as senior vice president at Burson] says.

If these wonders were serious about diversity improving their bottom lines, though, and not just engaged in cynically rephrasing their DEI sewage to better message it, they would take concrete steps in that direction.

Those concrete steps would begin with the Critical Item of no longer lying to their prospective hires and those passed over for promotion. Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, as paraphrased by Borchers:

When a woman is promoted and a man was in the running, HR will often wink and say, “Maybe next time, guy.” Even when the woman is promoted because she’s better-qualified, it’s a way for the manager to get out of having a difficult conversation.

Here’s a carefully anonymous executive recruiter, whose level of integrity is illustrated by his cowering behind that anonymity:

[P]roviding honest feedback to unsuccessful job candidates is awkward and sometimes adversarial, so it is tempting to fudge the reason for rejection.
He offered a scenario: “How do you tell someone they had body odor or were weird? ‘Sorry, bud, DEI strikes again!'”

The answer to Anonymous One’s scenario is as straightforward as telling that person he has body odor, or is weird by the company’s standard. The truth may well be uncomfortable and awkward, but avoiding that in favor of lying both does a gross disservice to the one being rejected, denying him his opportunity understand where to improve, and it’s plain cowardly and dishonest. Who wants to work for a liar or a coward?

Those concrete steps would continue with another Critical Item: working from the ground up to help toddlers and pre-schoolers, and their parents, have actually equal opportunities at quality education so those children could develop their skills, their talents, their interests as they grow up and progress through K-12 and then trade school/community college or college and university.

Employers’ concrete steps would further include the Critical Item of pushing colleges and universities to eliminate DEI-related positions in school management and push STEM subjects in their school curricula, withholding recruiting efforts on their campuses and ignoring resumes with those schools’ degrees on them until they do.

Diversity—true, honestly built diversity—would flow out of that.

Time to Go

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Here’s yet another Federal agency that needs to be eliminated, its budget returned to the Treasury, and its personnel—all of them—returned to the private sector rather than reallocated within the Federal Leviathan.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [emphasis added]:

  • its role in organizing the Election Integrity Partnership—the private group that worked with social media companies to censor content during the 2020 election
  • did not implement effective controls for the selected High Value Asset (HVA) system per Federal and departmental requirements
    • DHS OIG found inactive user accounts were not consistently disabled or removed, according to established rules—40% of nearly 2,800 “users”
    • 15% of sampled users missed initial or annual cybersecurity training
  • did not follow its own recommendations when conducting its own review of the system, failing to detect the access control deficiencies identified by the watchdog

When the agency personnel aren’t being overtly corrupt, they’re being patently incompetent. The organization is far beyond redeemability, and it’s new enough (created out of whole cloth in 2018) that there are much fewer entrenched interests in preserving its corruption or its incompetence.

A Foolish Question

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors note that California’s Progressive-Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has waived some permitting requirements for some folks to facilitate their rebuilding efforts in the wake of the fires burning to ashes some suburbs of Los Angeles. Then they ask

Why not ease regulations for all projects if the rules are such a barrier to development?

It’s clear enough why not. Newsom hasn’t had the epiphany the editors’ headline at the link claims; he’s pandering to the uber-rich and to the upper middle class folks in what is really a narrow slice of the whole of California. Those rich who’ve lost their homes to the fires are major donors to him and to Party. The waiver is limited to these panderees because throughout that whole of the rest of California, Green groups and unions operate, and they’re major donors, also, to Newsom and to Party.

Cynical Failure

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Say they really believe their climate-cause claims.

The theory is that climate change caused two especially wet winters in California in 2023 and 2024.

And

[C]limate change explains wet and dry seasons, which follows the progressive line that climate change is responsible for every natural disaster….

It doesn’t matter if they actually believe that. If the California Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and the climatistas really believed that climate was at the root of the wildfires that have beset the State over the last couple of years, the one collective would have taken proactive steps, and the other collective would have supported those proactive steps, to protect the State’s citizens and their property from the ravages of those wildfires—the alleged outcome of “climate.”

They—both collectives—consciously, with forethought, chose not to take those steps. The question is why. One motive is increased power for the political collective through ranting about climate and how they’re the only ones able to deal with it and more “climate”-combating funding for the climatista collective who insist they are the only ones qualified to devise the ways with which to deal with it—and people and property be damned.