You were socialized by your environment to be better at lying that telling the truth. You learned to "cheat" and it's easier than not at this point. Living in the US I once knew a Russian emigre who essentially was living in the US completely under the radar. He was an excellent and successful programmer and mathematician, but the way he did business with everyone was as if he needed to work-around or subvert the system, not because he was "unethical" but simply because it was what he knew best how to do.

Well, don't look to capitalism. Even Adam Smith recognized it's largely driven by the "invisible hand" of greed. Not exactly ethical, moral or responsible. Or for that matter, respectful of the individual and not particularly intelligent (pragmatic though, I suppose).

And if you doubt my assertion, read this: http://science.slashdot.org/co...

Absolutely, in the upside-down world of communist states, it may be that lying and stealing are the appropriate ways to remain ethical. So you can't use these elements to measure ethics.

Nice to get some real insight on how things work for a change, thanks for these stories. You might consider putting some of these up on a blog. These pretty much completely invalidate the so-called social "science" discussed in the OP. The problem being, the presumption that the amount of stealing going on is any measure of ethics.

Didn't you get the memo? Capitalism is the worst system of economics there is, except for all the others. That's the mantra, anyhow.

An "open market" is open to market manipulation by the bigger players. Open markets that remain level playing fields do not and have never existed except in theoretician's minds.

On the other hand, perhaps the problem is all the corporate welfare, making systems like the American one more like socialism for the rich.

Sounds about as realistic as a "free market".

They should test corporate CEOs. They have not proven to be the most ethical bunch of late, or for that matter, ever. If that's as good as capitalist ethics gets, I'd say the difference between socialism and capitalism when it comes to ethics is negligible.

Many people on welfare already have jobs, they qualify for welfare because their resultant pay is too low compared with the cost of living. "Forcing people off welfare" isn't going to fix the problem there.

Given the apparent interest in Privacy Badger it's clear in the US most people are still using desktops. I almost never browse on a desktop anymore, and the fact that Privacy Badger insists on running as a desktop browser plug-in makes it useless to me. And before you whine about how Apple won't this or Apple won't that, I am using a less heuristic web filter on iOS that I believe operates as a proxy (Weblock. Note: NOT Web Lock, though I suppose that might work too). So it seems to me it's possible to do in iOS. Plus, a proxy version rather than a browser plug-in would be preferrable anyhow, I tend to use multiple browsers on every platform, and I could set up a Raspberry PI to host it and at least my at-home browsing with the iPad and everything else would be able to use that in any case...

No doubt this is because it is taking the NSA too long to suck the data out of your computer(s).

This a perfect argument for NOT storing the data. ANYWHERE. You're too addicted to it anyway. At least anonymize it as soon as possible, or distill it down to something useless for anything but your intended usage (such as product preferences or ad targeting info). Sure, they'll try to force you to keep it but they can't always and not indefinitely, in any case. Can they really keep you from deleting data that you have once you've no longer any need for it? And without paying for the storage? How can a long-lived company remain economically viable in face of short lived competitors who don't yet have the same data storage requirements? Can they keep grandma from deleting her own old data from her personal hard drive? If not, then how can they legitimately force intermediaries to do it? The real addictive habit that needs to be broken here is the government's insatiable desire to preserve all possible surveillance information, forever. Just because Google offers a free email service shouldn't mean they can just give copies of all your messages to anyone and everyone, or save them forever and risk hackers getting ahold of them. And while you may have signed that right over to Google when you signed up, would you have if you were first told your emails would all be archived for posterity whether you like it or not? Welcome to the US, where you have freedom of speech but everything you say will be recorded and there are no private conversations. In fact, they encourage you to speak freely so that they can get it all down and save it in order to keep track of all you miscreants.

That would make one heck of a tinfoil hat...