Uncle Joe flunks ethics

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/here-are-the-answers-to-your-craigslist-questions/more-1941

This has some humorous bits. The CPA offering to pay someone else to take his ethics test for him is a classic.

Benchmarking Craigslist against the government is setting the bar pretty low, -- in reference to the self-policing nature of the site.

One of the other blog posts at the site amused me with the curiously phrased "charming anecdote about Stalin" Which then proceeded to explain that he went to visit his mother for the first time in years after having had his entire census bureau executed or deported to gulags (perhaps a minor days work in Stalinist times, considering the 20 million or so deaths, millions more imprisoned during 20 years of Stalinism). Somewhere in there a link was made to show that abusive parents are potentially socially engineering criminals, which is hardly a surprising point. But it did give us a charming story.


In other news, a privatized school had an incident in Cleveland, for all four of us living under a rock and unable to hear the cries of 'he was a such a strange kid' and 'we must ban violent video games!'. And so forth. Perhaps in Soviet Russia such a child would have gone far. Perhaps even heading the census bureau. But here, when people are 'punished', they get prissy about it and decide to shoot people. Outside of former slaves (and there are some in this country, but not of the ethnicity you're thinking of), nobody in this country knows what 'punishment' is. Even the guilty people on death row get to sit there for years awaiting an execution often with minimal physical pain or penalty exacted whilst they wait. The end result is a simple vial of lethal poison usually. It's so distressingly boring. No debt to society is repaid. No service is performed save the disposal of an otherwise worthless piece of flesh and a few swaps of disinfecting alcohol.

Instead what we get are people sent home early from school or sent to the principal's office. And for this, we get headlines 4 pages high announcing another belligerent teenager has assailed his classmates by firing guns into the crowded hallways. Seriously kids, get a grip. Life is not that complicated. And almost everyone fucks it up anyway.