Nosce te ipsum

Paul Graham strikes again....

Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, and sell it to the big company. At the very least we want options.

Among other things, this shift has created the appearance of a rapid increase in economic inequality. But really the two cases are not as different as they look in economic statistics.

Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe jobs. An easy job from which one can't be fired is worth money; exchanging the two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an annuity. Except sinecures don't appear in economic statistics. If they did, it would be clear that in practice socialist countries have nontrivial disparities of wealth, because they usually have a class of powerful bureaucrats who are paid mostly by seniority and can never be fired.

Amen - finally a little sanity in the realm of let the punishment fit the crime.

The case against the "Kutztown 13" -- a group of Pennsylvania high school students charged wit felonies for tinkering with their school-issued laptop computers -- seems to be ending mostly with whimper

In meetings with students over the last several days, the Berks County, Pa., juvenile probation office has quietly offered the students a deal in which all charges would be dropped in exchange for 15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility and a few months of probation.

"The probation department realizes this is small potatoes," said William Bispels, an attorney representing nearly half the accused students.