Ethic Soup

Verizon Succumbs to Consumer Anger : Scraps $2 'Convenience Fee'

 

Yesterday, Verizon announced its customers would have to pay $2 fees for making payments via phone or online with a credit card.  Today, Verizon shouted a mea culpa and scrapped the controversial fee. About the quick, one-day, about-face:

VERIZON SAYS IT REALLY LISTENS

 "At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers," Verizon CEO Dan Mead said in a statement.

Uh huh. But, they sure do have short memories.

You would have thought that the big bananas at Verizon had observed what happened with Bank of America recently. Well, of course, they did!

CORPORATE ARROGANCE

But, corporate arrogance made them think they could get away with it -- charging a fee for every payment that subscribers make on their Verizon phones or online with their credit cards. But that's what they said was going to happen come January 15th.

Go Betty! Go Naughty Betty! Tonite It's Saturday Night Live: With Betty White!

I CAN'T WAIT for Betty White to host SNL. And it's tonight! She's wonderful, hilarious with a perfect sense of comic timing.

Betty knows how to be naughty and uses blue language -- not a lot, just a little and enough to make you want more. It's always a shock to hear one of her saucy lines, coming out of what looks like a sweet grandma.

For example, everyone knows that Betty loves animals. She once said:

"All creatures must learn to coexist. That's why the brown bear and the field mouse can share their lives in harmony. Of course, they can't mate or the mice would explode."

Or has Hank Stuever of the Washington Post wrote today "America loves a slightly dirty-minded meemaw..." 

Internet Addicted Teens More Likely To Hurt Themselves

SOMETHING IS FRIGHTENINGLY WRONG. Teenagers who are addicted to the internet are much more likely to purposefully hurt themselves than non-addicted teens.

What? The way the world now communicates correlates with self-injury, at least for adolescents. Adults who are addicted to the internet have yet to be tested for self-injurious behaviors.

What in the world is going on here? We're not talking about psychological or socially injurious behaviors because kids are spending too much time alone, on the internet. The hurt is physical -- hitting themselves, pulling their own hair out, burning and cutting themselves.

A COLLABORATIVE STUDY

Researchers from Australia and China collaborated on the study which surveyed 1,618 adolescents between 13 and 18 years old from the Guangdong Province in Southeast China, asking about their self-injurious behaviors and giving the teens a test designed to gauge internet addiction.

Reporting in the journal Injury Prevention, Dr. Lawrence T. Lam and colleagues from the University of Notre Dame in Australia, found that although only 10 percent of the students were moderately addicted to the internet, with less than 1 percent severely addicted, those students were more than twice (2.4 times) as likely to have self-injured one to five times in the past 6 months than students with normal internet habits.

Halloween, Lawyers and a Haunted House

  IT'S ONLY 24 DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN! 

HALLOWEEN AND LAWYERS in the same sentence is fodder for a lot of potential humor. But for me, I immediately think of Atticus Finch, the small town southern lawyer in "To Kill a Mockingbird," played by Gregory Peck in the movie.

What a wonderful character Harper Lee created in her only book, which since it's publication in 1960 has never been out of print. He was a great Daddy to Scout and Jem and he defended the innocent black man Jim Robinson, accused of raping a white woman. A lawyer hero he was!

Come Halloween night, Scout was in her school pageant, dressed in a papier mache ham costume. As Jem walked his sister home in the dark, with the wind howling and the tree branches and shadows swaying, they were attacked by the knife-wielding Bob Ewell, father of the woman who was supposedly raped by Jim Robinson. In reality, she was pregnant with her incestuous father's progeny. Boo Radley saved the children. 

That was what I was thinking when I ran across 'legal help needed' ad on Craigslist. It's posted on the website Jerks In Your Area, where they "scour Craigslist to find posts written by or written about the strangest, stupidest, and funniest people out there:

NEED HALLOWEEN LEGAL HELP (GREENPORT)

Every year I put on a Halloween haunted house for my neighborhood. In the past few years, I've really stepped up my game with fake blood, assorted limbs and bones (shins, arms, skulls) and lots of pop up zombies, mock executions, etc. Last year I had a bit of a legal snafu when a kid on my block had a seizure and another had to go to therapy after a bullet squib popped too close to his head. Their parents threatened to sue me and the whole ordeal was a hassle. Anyway, I was thinking that this year there are so many out of work lawyers out there that I could probably get one pretty cheap to come and hang out around the house and keep an eye on things. If another parent gets pissed off or whatever, it would be good to have someone who knows the law. I might also need you to write up a release because this year the guillotine will be real.

I've never really hired a lawyer before so I'm not really sure what they charge but I'm guessing it won't be more than like $18 an hour. If you have one of those insane clown masks that would be really helpful too. 

Location: Greenport Village, Long Island, N.Y.

TO READ OTHER "HALLOWEEN POSTS" CLICK HERE.

TO READ "WHAT ETHICS? KINGS ISLAND PARK PULLS HALLOWEEN DISPLAY OF DEAD CELEB SKELETONS" CLICK HERE.

by Sharon McEachern

 

Free Rice to Feed the Hungry: Just Play Free Internet Games

 

  Would you like to help end world hunger? You can and it won't cost you anything. In fact, all you have to do is play a game at FreeRice.com. This ingenious website is "in the best spirit of the Internet, it offers education, entertainment and a way to change the world -- all for free," says the Los Angeles Times.

"FreeRice.com is an international, viral sensation," says CBS Evening News. "Folks from Thailand to Germany and India are just as enthusiastic ...improving thousands of lives, all with a simple, collective, click of a mouse."

TO END WORLD HUNGER & EDUCATE

FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program and its partner the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Its two goals are to help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free and provide education to everyone for free.

IT Execs' Top Wishes: Workers With Ethics and Morals

  The top workplace skills that IT execs are seeking among both entry-level and mid-level IT workers are ethics and morals.Those are the qualities at the top of their wish lists, according to the Society of Information Management (SIM).

The results of an online survey with 231 respondents overwhelmingly cited ethics and morals as the traits the executives most desire when hiring IT staff. These virtuous traits easily beat out alternatives like communication skills and business acumen, according to the group which released the results of its annual membership survey at its SIMposium 2008 conferenceat Lake Buena Vista, FLA., yesterday.

Numerous IT executives reported their concerns about staffers doing "unethical things" such as circumventing security systems. This concern has made the issue of ethics and morals paramount to the IT executives, reports Computerworld.

Everyone Is Cheating: College Students and Their Professors

  Ethics? They are students at one of the world's most prestigious universities, pride themselves on their superior intellect and almost half of them admit they are cheaters. No, their behavior doesn't seem to bother them.  Most feel guilt-free, they say. They rationalize their behavior by saying "everyone cheats."  Sadly, it's getting harder and harder to deny that statement.

The most recent study to receive attention is out of the University of Cambridge (U.K.) where the student newspaper Varsity conducted an anonymous on-line poll of more than 1,000 students. They found that 49 per cent of undergraduates admitted to cheating, with only 5 per cent ever getting caught. Law students were at the top of the cheaters' list, with 62 per cent self-admitted cheaters.

"So what's up with law students?" asked Carolyn Elefant of Legal Blog Watch."Is it the training to rely on precedent -- which encourages us to cut and paste quotes and holdings from other cases -- what makes law students more prone to plagiarism? Are law students under more stress, and therefore, more tempted to cut corners and cheat? Or does our profession just encourage dishonest actors?"

TURNING A BLIND EYE TO PLAGIARISM 

Academics in universities and colleges everywhere are being accused of turning a blind eye to the practice of plagiarism and other forms of cheating "to ensure their institutions climb national and international rankings," according to The Times (U.K.) which has called the cheating scandal "School Gate."

Ten Blogging Commandments: 'God Bloggers' Tempted by Blogosphere

  England's religious bloggers just had a "Godblogs" conference in Kennington, south-east London, where they faced some ethical admonitions, leaving with a new set of Ten Blogging Commandments.

The country's leading Christian umbrella group, the Evangelical Alliance (a most moral and ethical bunch of Christians), represents thousands of churches of all denominations in the U.K. And, they are alarmed by how much religious bloggers are descending into vitriol.

So many blogs have joined the great blogosphere, with  its"instant access," that people posting comments are influenced by the heat of the moment and creating problems of intemperance and foul language as they attack blog authors and other commentators, or both. Some of these "trolls," post defamatory and hostile comments and even target blogs to destroy. Believing this  practice is unethical ,immoral and divisive, church leaders were also concerned about the inflammatory content of some blogs.  Based on the commandments delivered to Moses by God on Mount Sinai, the ten blogging commandments were drawn up at the Godblogs conference with admonitions from senior evangelical clergy to bloggers to obey.

There was some talk about how "right-wing bloggers in America are among the most extreme in their postings," said Ruth Gledhill, religion correspondent for the Times Online. who "never knowingly updated on the Sabbath."

"Christian blogs, for some reason, can generate the most hate-filled comments," she wrote.