5 ms·

It's a good read, but I don't know what it is teaching. Ethics anyone?

Apocryphon 11y ago
I think of it as a cute, slightly self-promoting story in an inspirational vein: underprivileged kid gains valuable business skills by hustling family-friendly wares to fellow students, grows up to use those skills to realize his childhood dream. Also he knew Kendrick Lamar before he was famous. It's light, but I like it.
pnathan 11y ago
The value of hard work and seeing the angle.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gjreda 11y ago
I see it as teaching fairly basic business and personal finance concepts. In a league where 60% of players go bankrupt within five years after leaving the sport [1], this is likely pretty enlightening for some readers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professional_American_athletes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professio...
noonespecial 11y ago
The park where I’d go to play basketball as a kid was a big Blood hangout. And obviously, my CD empire wouldn’t exactly hold up 100 percent to copyright laws but compared to the alternatives of what I could’ve been doing for money, I think it was pretty solid. I'm not a big moral relativist, but "ethics" when viewed by a resident of Compton in the early 2000's might appear in a slightly different light than many other places I can think of.
- webwanderings 11y ago
  Two wrongs do not make one right. Principles are only relevant when they are difficult to follow.
  - noonespecial 11y ago
    I'd argue its that degree of difficulty that is at issue here. $15.99 paid to a big corp is very different to an out-grouped minority living in poverty with almost no investment in "the system" than it is to a Princeton student living on his trust fund. Ethics are for rich people. Morality is for everyone. What this kid did may have violated some of the ethical rules a bunch of privileged people set up to perpetuate and sanitize their own in-grouped society, but Aaron had basically zero participation in that group so its rules must have seemed impossibly distant to him. His actions, however seem to have been both a benefit to him and to his community, vs the other choices he could have made that would benefit him at the expense of his own group. I'd call these actions moral, even if not "ethical". How different really is this than when Uber or AirBNB thumbs their collective noses at the rules "the man" has set up that seem wrong to them? Aaron's a hacker, and a hustler, just like us. One of our kind.
    - webwanderings 11y ago
      Sadly, you are incorrect, and probably in the majority. Rules of ethics are not setup by privileged few; they are the cause of civilized humanity. Without them, we wouldn't have come this far. What he did to hustle the donuts, was fair and ethical. He earned his fair share. But what he did with churning out CDs, was not. We all can possibly see that. But of course, the trade born out of Napster must have been hard to resist. The part about resisting, is where ethics reside.
      - mindslight 11y ago
        One can have a consistent set of ethics in which imaginary property does not exist. For example, my personal opinion is that it is unethical to directly support companies working to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, especially for mere convenience.
EvanKelly 11y ago
"Honestly, I think that philosophy is why I was able to make it to UCLA and have a long NBA career. A lot of dudes have a good jump shot. A lot of dudes can play ball. But how many guys are willing to put in the extra work that it takes? At this level, you have to be almost addicted to the work." I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.
orthoganol 11y ago
Bluntly, that's a very white person response. Do you know about Compton? Anything that's not selling drugs or gang related to get out is fine. What's right or wrong has a lot to do with the circumstances you're in.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  I am a white person who worked at McDonalds to get money as a teenager. Presumably something like that would have been ok? Or is that too "white?" (Keep in mind I had friends in gangs, not Compton but they got in shootouts nonetheless.)
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    0'd again for innocuous comments. I know, don't "complain" about downvoting.....
  - rdancer 11y ago
    What valuable business skills are you gonna learn working at that fast-food establishment?
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Racism isn't really a useful tool, even when you really believe in the racist principle you espouse. All people believe their racism is justified, all are wrong.
- ZoF 11y ago
  > that's a very white person response. ...
georgemcbay 11y ago
I pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the development software I used to learn C, assembly language, etc. This is back on the C64/Amiga 500, before free software was a thing for at home use (the gnu project existed, but I was doing this well before Linux existed). The software was often being sold for multiples of the cost of the (scrounged-together) hardware I'd be running it on. It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster. I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.
- webwanderings 11y ago
  What about Bill Gates' role in popularizing desktop computers for the whole world, and mostly for free or bootlegged copies of Windows? Apple/Jobs didn't want to do that. Nobody wanted Linux in comparison.

I think of it as a cute, slightly self-promoting story in an inspirational vein: underprivileged kid gains valuable business skills by hustling family-friendly wares to fellow students, grows up to use those skills to realize his childhood dream. Also he knew Kendrick Lamar before he was famous. It's light, but I like it.

pnathan 11y ago

The value of hard work and seeing the angle.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gjreda 11y ago

I see it as teaching fairly basic business and personal finance concepts. In a league where 60% of players go bankrupt within five years after leaving the sport [1], this is likely pretty enlightening for some readers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professional_American_athletes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professio...

noonespecial 11y ago

The park where I’d go to play basketball as a kid was a big Blood hangout. And obviously, my CD empire wouldn’t exactly hold up 100 percent to copyright laws but compared to the alternatives of what I could’ve been doing for money, I think it was pretty solid. I'm not a big moral relativist, but "ethics" when viewed by a resident of Compton in the early 2000's might appear in a slightly different light than many other places I can think of.

webwanderings 11y ago
Two wrongs do not make one right. Principles are only relevant when they are difficult to follow.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  I'd argue its that degree of difficulty that is at issue here. $15.99 paid to a big corp is very different to an out-grouped minority living in poverty with almost no investment in "the system" than it is to a Princeton student living on his trust fund. Ethics are for rich people. Morality is for everyone. What this kid did may have violated some of the ethical rules a bunch of privileged people set up to perpetuate and sanitize their own in-grouped society, but Aaron had basically zero participation in that group so its rules must have seemed impossibly distant to him. His actions, however seem to have been both a benefit to him and to his community, vs the other choices he could have made that would benefit him at the expense of his own group. I'd call these actions moral, even if not "ethical". How different really is this than when Uber or AirBNB thumbs their collective noses at the rules "the man" has set up that seem wrong to them? Aaron's a hacker, and a hustler, just like us. One of our kind.
  - webwanderings 11y ago
    Sadly, you are incorrect, and probably in the majority. Rules of ethics are not setup by privileged few; they are the cause of civilized humanity. Without them, we wouldn't have come this far. What he did to hustle the donuts, was fair and ethical. He earned his fair share. But what he did with churning out CDs, was not. We all can possibly see that. But of course, the trade born out of Napster must have been hard to resist. The part about resisting, is where ethics reside.
    - mindslight 11y ago
      One can have a consistent set of ethics in which imaginary property does not exist. For example, my personal opinion is that it is unethical to directly support companies working to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, especially for mere convenience.

EvanKelly 11y ago

"Honestly, I think that philosophy is why I was able to make it to UCLA and have a long NBA career. A lot of dudes have a good jump shot. A lot of dudes can play ball. But how many guys are willing to put in the extra work that it takes? At this level, you have to be almost addicted to the work." I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.

orthoganol 11y ago

Bluntly, that's a very white person response. Do you know about Compton? Anything that's not selling drugs or gang related to get out is fine. What's right or wrong has a lot to do with the circumstances you're in.

wavefunction 11y ago
I am a white person who worked at McDonalds to get money as a teenager. Presumably something like that would have been ok? Or is that too "white?" (Keep in mind I had friends in gangs, not Compton but they got in shootouts nonetheless.)
- wavefunction 11y ago
  0'd again for innocuous comments. I know, don't "complain" about downvoting.....
- rdancer 11y ago
  What valuable business skills are you gonna learn working at that fast-food establishment?
oldmanjay 11y ago
Racism isn't really a useful tool, even when you really believe in the racist principle you espouse. All people believe their racism is justified, all are wrong.
ZoF 11y ago
> that's a very white person response. ...

georgemcbay 11y ago

I pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the development software I used to learn C, assembly language, etc. This is back on the C64/Amiga 500, before free software was a thing for at home use (the gnu project existed, but I was doing this well before Linux existed). The software was often being sold for multiples of the cost of the (scrounged-together) hardware I'd be running it on. It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster. I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.

webwanderings 11y ago
What about Bill Gates' role in popularizing desktop computers for the whole world, and mostly for free or bootlegged copies of Windows? Apple/Jobs didn't want to do that. Nobody wanted Linux in comparison.