[anigbrowl]

Agreed. Indifference to politics (by someone intelligent enough to have meaningful choices, obviously) is the ultimate privilege, resting as it does on the assurance that one is unlikely to suffer any kind of personal inconvenience.

My wife has an electrical engineering degree and she had to take ethics courses and pass an exam in them as part of her credentialing process, which in turn shaped her career decisions significantly. I find it troubling that ethics are not considered a very important topic in software development or indeed many spheres of business activity.

It's not that I expect people to necessarily share my opinions; what distresses me is that many arguments I encounter from contrary positions are so utterly shallow that you can tell the person hasn't really thought about such issues very much. Positivism has a great deal to answer for.