23 ms·

Is it stealing to read by the light of your neighbour’s lamp?

• martin-adams 5y ago
  This reminds me of the 'power over wifi' research[1]. If a wifi signal goes through your building and you harness the power from it, at the expense of the next building from benefiting from the signal, is that stealing? 1. https://news.mit.edu/2019/converting-wi-fi-signals-electricity-0128 https://news.mit.edu/2019/converting-wi-fi-signals-electrici...
• prvc 5y ago
  Reading "by the light of your neighbour’s lamp", accessing the internet through somebody else's wi-fi without their agreement, and working from home are all substantively different things, only (possibly, given the right argument, not provided in TFA) vaguely related. As for the last case, the relative costs and benefits for the worker must be weighed, and they usually tend to work out to be to the worker's advantage.
• kevmo314 5y ago
  Is it so hard to acknowledge that stealing and externalities are not so black and white?
• andreareina 5y ago
  Nope. Requiring your neighbor to read and therefore light their lamp is a different story though.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    The comparison to Wi-Fi is a bit strained, though. Lamp light escaping out of the window does not hurt the neighbor at all. He isn't any better or worse off if the escaped rays of light serve someone else for reading or just inconvenience the local cats in heat. If I hook to someone else's Wi-Fi, I am degrading his bandwidth. Depending on what I download/upload, possibly significantly so. And if I am unscrupulous enough to spread illegal content (such as child porn) over his Wi-Fi, I am setting him up for an unexpected rendezvous with SWAT. That said, the article probably wants to conclude that employers should pay for utilities such as Internet connection when their employees work from home. I wholeheartedly agree, though a certain ceiling on the total cost should be in order (there is no need why a random accountant would need a 1 Gbps connection paid wholly by their employer).
    • andreareina 5y ago
      The relationship of the opening story to the whole rest of the article is strained, tbh.
    • kelseyfrog 5y ago
      If my neighbor had a QoS config which meant my use did not degrade their bandwidth, then it would be ok?
• version_five 5y ago
  Has anyone seriously made the argument that it's ok for employers to require but not pay for home internet because you'd use it anyway? It's a cheap move by employers, but being cheap is different from being dishonest about why the policy is as it is. I haven't seen the latter. Personally I think who pays for internet is not high on the list of most pressing questions for how to adapt to wfh. Edit: my tech job did not pay for my internet when we went to wfh and it didn't bother me. I think the real place companies are mistreating employees is for things like low paid customer service jobs where they are expecting them to have their own connection, because the cost then is more likely to be material relative to their comp.
  • hammock 5y ago
    Our office is "open" but no one goes in and no one is required to. I suppose that means they can say we already pay for internet, it's at the office?
  • robbmorganf 5y ago
    Legally, I think there's not a problem with even the strictest interpretation of "you need this, but we aren't paying for it". In many small business manufacturing settings, the typical arrangement is that operators buy their own toolboxes without reimbursement (i.e. wrenches, screwdrivers, even endmills). Strikes me as a dumb way to scare away potential workers, but alas I don't make the rules.
    • goodside 5y ago
      This also applies to wardrobe in nearly every job — professional clothing can be arbitrarily expensive. Even retail workers usually have buy their own plain clothes in the one allowable color.
    • pengaru 5y ago
      I've worked as a mechanic in the distant past, at a muffler and brake chain. The shop-provided tools were the most neglected and carelessly handled, often unable to even be found (the torque limiting sticks for safely reinstalling lug nuts w/impact in particular were always MIA). It's probably desirable to have the employees put some skin in the game for a variety of reasons. Not only will they care for their tools more, but they'll use them more appropriately, not destructively in the wrong applications. What's good for the tools is likely good for the quality of work/outcomes.
• plebianRube 5y ago
  Triggers a reminder of another similar thought experiment story I read when I was very young. A very poor individual was accused of stealing for eating plain rice while smelling the delicious smells of a nearby restaurant. In this particular instance the restaurant owner was in the position that it was stealing. The judge ruled that payment to him would be in the sound of money passing from one hand to the other.
  • metalliqaz 5y ago
    That's a delightful proverb. If I was the judge, I'd find "in favor" of the restaurateur, and the punishment for the pauper would be that they must consume one meal per week (provided by the restaurant at no cost) to be reminded of what they are missing.
• Flozzin 5y ago
  Article feels like a bait and switch. They pose the question, ask if WIFI is any different. Never tries to answer the question and instead dives in WFH and compensation. Strangely they pose questions, but never answer any.
  • slx26 5y ago
    While the article's logic is a bit lousy, the site is called "my misanthropic musings". Therefore, your expectation of questions being followed by answers seems misplaced. I have experienced the same myself quite a few times. You just share some thoughts or how you felt about something on the internet, and people start replying "can you sumarize what are the questions here?". It's ok for people to write on the internet without writing answers to their questions, or even without writing questions at all, just sharing thoughts.
  • shusaku 5y ago
    Normally I’d be complaining about how nobody read the article and all the comments are only about the title, but the connection between the first and second part of the article is so tenuous I really have no idea at this point…
• retrac 5y ago
  Slightly tangential from the main point but I'm in a free rider position now I actually feel slightly bad about. I've moved into a row house and I'm in the middle apartment. My neighbours seem to like to live in an indoor sauna. It's now well into winter and I haven't had to turn the heat on. I've actually got the windows open to keep it around to around the 20 - 21 degrees I prefer. Not great but I don't know how I'd contribute without boiling alive.
  • robbmorganf 5y ago
    Why do you feel bad about it? Sounds like you're reducing overall CO2 emissions. I understand that you are the "reader" in this article, but if you did start heating your own apartment then demonstrably everyone would be worse off (except your neighbors, who might need marginally less heating)
  • glitchc 5y ago
    A bit different from wifi. Here you are drawing from excess heat that the neighbors are generating. This heat would be wasted if you didn’t do something with it, so it’s perfectly okay.
• daniel-s 5y ago
  This is a positive externality something long discussed and understood by economists. https://mises.org/library/what-externality https://mises.org/library/what-externality The author compares the lamp's light to using your neighbour's WiFi. It's not the same thing. When you use your neighbour's WiFi you're consuming a proportion of the limited bandwidth available on that connection. The neighbour is negatively impacted. You are also interacting with his hardware. It's different to collecting a type of energy that your neighbour is voluntarily releasing out into the world and abandoning.
  • megablast 5y ago
    So if they have unlimited data, and you only read websites not affecting their use, you say it’s ok??
  • littlestymaar 5y ago
    > When you use your neighbour's WiFi you're consuming a proportion of the limited bandwidth available on that connection. The neighbour is negatively impacted. Only if your do so when your neighbour is also using the said bandwidth. So by this argument, it would be fine to use your neighbour's WiFi at night or when they aren't home, right? And by the way, if you are on a DSL link in a somewhat rural area, chances are high that using your internet connection is going to negatively impact your neighbourhood, so it can't really be an argument.
    • drivingmenuts 5y ago
      You’re still stealing, as the neighbor is paying for the availability of bandwidth, whether they are using it or not.
      • megablast 5y ago
        They are paying for the light too.
        • drivingmenuts 5y ago
• radicalbyte 5y ago
  If it is, then the neighbour is guilty of light pollution, and should be forced to take measures to mitigate their polluting activities.
• AndrewOMartin 5y ago
  If I remember one of my undergraduate lectures correctly, stealing, at least in the UK requires depriving the owner of the use. So in an extreme example if you take your neighbors car to drive your pregnant wife to the hospital, but return it before they notice, it's not stealing. It might be other things, (I'm thinking mainly of consumables and wear) but it's not stealing. At the time of the lecture the law didn't have an opinion on "stealing WiFi", (this was at a time when unsecured WiFi was reasonably common) but likely required the owner to be deprived of service.
  • Jare 5y ago
    > depriving the owner of the use I suspect it is more along the lines of "depriving the owner of the ability to use", so as long as the car was away, it was a stolen car, because the owner couldn't choose to use it themselves, or to lend it to someone, or show it to someone, or just brag to someone about how cool it looks in their driveway. Returning it may impact what happens afterwards, but can't change the fact that the car was stolen for a period of time.
• mabbo 5y ago
  I think the difference between the allegoric neighbour/reader and employee/employer is that the employer is paying the employee. As a remote worker, I signed my contract knowing that I would need to have a functioning home office (provide light) to do my job. I saw how much I was being paid and decided it was a good deal. The neighbour and reader are both knowing and willing participants in the situation. That changes things. Now, for work contracts that began as in-office and were forced into remote, one could say the situation is different. I don't agree though. I think that every day one has to look at the employment contract they are in and ask themselves if this is a fair deal. If the changes don't make it a fair deal, ask for a new deal- or turn off the light.
• Borrible 5y ago
  I know it dodges the dilemma, but the neighbour didn't pay for the light. He paid for the oil. So it's questionable what was stolen and where. The light seems to have left the property of the neighbour. You may even call it light pollution, because of its environmental impact, which may be of greater importance in the long run. https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/wildlife/ https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/wildlife/ Imagine the reader has a bee hive, that is disturbed by the light and reduces its honey production. But since the reader approved and even used the situation to its own advantage, he also could be considered responsible. So in the best of all possible worlds both should be charged with minor misdemeanor. And punished accordingly with a semester of Kantian moral philosophy, held in a Platonic cave without lighting.
  • Borrible 5y ago
    Rethinking the matter again, the punishment seems a bit harsh. One should also think about the rehabilitation of the delinquents. The punishment should teach them something and make them better citizens. So some light, maybe a little fire behind their backs may be allowed. So they learn a bit about themselves being just a shamefull shadow on the wall... So be it! Salomon has spoken.
• daniel-s 5y ago
  On the point of passing on the cost of maintaining a workplace to the employee. I don't see why that would be such a bad thing. In the immediate term it may not change much, but over time it will lead to increased income for people that work from home. With less overhead to hire an employee, companies will have more resources available to compete against each other for employees on the labour market.
• wzdd 5y ago
  I don't understand the riddle at all. The neighbour "cast light out onto the street and in to the windows of the neighbouring houses". In a very real and obvious sense, the neighbour's light is no longer theirs at that point. Even by the naive definition of stealing ("taking something which doesn't belong to you"), the Reader is not stealing. By contrast, Wifi bandwidth, Internet access, electricity, and so on, are limited resources which someone has to pay for. If the Reader connected their Kindle to their neighbour's power supply then they are unambigously stealing electricity. Viewed in this way, an employer requiring their employee to consume electricity, potentially deprive other users of their home Internet of wifi bandwidth, and so on, is quite clearly imposing an extra cost on their WFH employees which they are not imposing on their office workers. This doesn't seem ambiguous to me, it's just not become an issue yet because the harm is relatively small.
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    Both light and and wifi are EM waves. Stealing wifi is just you stealing their "light" and them stealing "your light."
    • 3np 5y ago
      Presumably it’s not “WiFi” being taken here but access to the internet and use of the limited bandwidth. The EM waves is just how they get there.
    • dqpb 5y ago
      This analogy only holds for packet sniffing. If the stealer is actually connecting to the wifi and making their own requests, then they have literally stolen a percentage of limited bandwidth of the channel.
  • DangitBobby 5y ago
    I'd trade the stolen electricity and internet for my stolen commute time, gas money, and vehicle wear any time.
    • 5y ago
• imgabe 5y ago
  This is very muddled. Reading from the spillover light of your neighbor's lamp doesn't deprive them of anything. Using your neighbor's wifi might deprive them of bandwidth, or use up their data limit if they have one. The ultimate point they're getting to is a good one though. Should companies pay for increased costs borne by employees working from home? Of course they should. Whether or not they will, will be determined by the labor market and if they need to pay extra to attract employees. Employees get benefits from working from home too. No commute. Easier to run errands and spend time with family. Maybe those benefits are enough to offset whatever additional costs they incur.
  • klyrs 5y ago
    Indeed, your neighbor's lamplight would be considered pollution if you're trying to stargaze. Using their wifi is more like using their hose to water your garden.
• TrackerFF 5y ago
  Is it stealing to stand outside a festival camp/concert area and listen to the music for free?
• DennisP 5y ago
  This also seems like a good analogy for some copyright issues, where copies of files are the light, and publishers are the electric company complaining about the watts they didn't get to sell.
• k__ 5y ago
  Isn't the difference in capacity? A lamp has much more excess capacity of light than a wifi, I wouldn't notice my neighbour using it with me. But a wifi has much less capacity than a lamp, and using it for work might remove noticable capacity from my wifi.
  • willvarfar 5y ago
    Using a neighbor’s WiFi deprives the neighbor of using it at the same time, as using it diminishes capacity. This is not true of light. As the article says, using a neighbor’s light is “free loading”. The article doesn’t really say whether the author thinks that is stealing or not.
  • krisoft 5y ago
    > A lamp has much more excess capacity of light than a wifi, I wouldn't notice my neighbour using it with me. Interesting. I think I would notice the lamp case sooner. Not because I would have less light mind you, but because my neighbour would be creeping for a prolonged time close to my un-curtained window. That would totally freak me out, but i wouldn’t call it stealing. :) On the other hand I have so much bandwidth that I wouldn’t notice an occasional interlooper who is not being jackass about it. If they connect and saturate my link with torrent or something so much that I start investigating then maybe, but other than that I will only find them with a network scan which I perform only very rarely.
  • aflag 5y ago
    Not sure if capacity is the thing here. Using someone else's wifi does harm to that person. They will be deprived of bandwidth and, if they have a data limit, you may be using that up too. With light, what you're getting is just their waste, it's similar to go through your neighbor's trash. With wifi, if you could use the leaking signal to heat your dinner or something like that, then it wouldn't be stealing, that's just their waste. However, if you actively connect to their router and use their bandwidth, it's a completely different story.
• kmm 5y ago
  I have the thermostat in my apartment turned to about 19°, which is a bit lower than is usual here, to save money and the environment, and I'm still perfectly comfortable at that temperature. At some point, after I had rented it for a bit, I had to be gone for a few weeks, so I turned the thermostat and all the radiators completely off. The outside temperature was about 5-10°, which I what expected to find on my return. Yet when I came back, it was still at 19.5°. I have only rarely had to turn on my radiators since, even during Winter. Of course, the place can't be that well-isolated, and I regularly open the windows to let in fresh air, so that energy must be coming from somewhere. I assume it's heat leaking in from my upstairs, downstairs, left and right neighbors. They probably have their thermostats set to a balmy 21-22°, and the heat flux through my walls must be enough to keep the place at around 19°. I often wonder whether this constitutes stealing. It's not exactly parallel to the light of my neighbor's lamp, since due to the temperature differential their thermostats are working harder than they would be if I heated my place to 22°. In effect, they're all paying for the energy to keep my place at 19°, and I'm presumably paying only a pittance for heat. But on the other hand, I have no need for a higher temperature, nor do I want to pay or incur the environmental cost for unnecessary heating. Nineteen degrees seems like a perfectly reasonable temperature to me, and it's their choice (again, I'm assuming, but where else can it come from?) to keep it a few degrees hotter.
  • taneq 5y ago
    My first apartment was surrounded on four of six sides like that and I never used heat in winter. It never got cold enough to need more than a light jumper. I'd be curious to know what difference it made to your power bills turning your heating off, since if it's sitting above 19° then it was probably just running the fan anyway. Thinking about it, you probably get all sorts of interesting feedback loops going on between the thermostats of neighbouring apartments.
  • db48x 5y ago
    Definitely always aim to rent the apartment on the ground floor, in the middle of the building.
    • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• g5095 5y ago
  No it's gleaning.
• boramalper 5y ago
  I don't have much to add to the discussion here, but I was expecting this to be an allegory about "piracy". In fact, as others have noted, using your neighbour's Wi-Fi consumes a portion of their bandwidth whereas file-sharing is as close as it gets to free-riding your neighbour's lamp.
• nvissari 5y ago
  What about the oil company? Your pirating light from your neighbor and stealing from the hard working people in the oil industry. If you want light, burn your own oil! /s
• 999900000999 5y ago
  >When organisations talk about remote working reducing their costs, it’s worth considering which of those costs are just being passed onto to the employee, and if that is fair. WTF. I'm saving hundreds a month not commuting,as well as about 1.5 hrs per day. Even assuming a lower rate , like 50$ an hour for my time, that's 75$ per day. I can pick a far cheaper city to live in. Why complain about a good thing. It's so nice I'm going to vastly prefer remote working going forward. Being remote is worth 50k or so a year to me. When it comes to WiFi, my main concern is someone else doing something illegal with it. If I knew it was just some homeless guy reading Wikipedia I wouldn't really care.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    I think they’re more talking about energy usage, monitors, desks, etc. At all my in office jobs, I’ve always had workstations, dual 27” monitors, nice chairs, desks, etc. all provided by the company. Now I just have a laptop and am supposed to buy everything else myself. Also, the company never paid anything regarding my commute.
    • 999900000999 5y ago
      Unless you're really weird with money you'll still come out ahead. I imagine if you lived across the street from your office, and didn't need to pay for a commute then you'd have a point. Commuting, even with public transportation is still at least 120$ a month. You then also have the stress of having to run to catch the train, of occasionally being late, etc. I guess you are correct in that you will have to bear some modest upfront cost, but what professional programmer doesn't at least have a desk and a chair for their own personal use. Let's just assume you get a job at Big box Corp. Big box is based in San Francisco, when working in the office you'd need to obviously pay San Francisco rent. Then they go remote I can't imagine any world where giving employees the option to move to Alabama or wherever and keep SF salaries wouldn't put more money in the employees pocket. Hell for my next remote job I'm looking to get a 3 monitor setup.
      • bmitc 5y ago
• mountainb 5y ago
  I know he thinks this is profound, but it's not. These kinds of questions are common law school type puzzles. It depends on the jurisdiction. In practical terms it also depends on how aggressive the government or a civil plaintiff want to be in policing this type of thing. Often, yes, it is illegal to leech your neighbor's wifi: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/stealing-wi-fi-your-neighbor-a-victimless-crime.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/stealing-wi-fi-your-... Generally also people tend to look for hard and fast philosophical answers to questions like this, when in reality the dispute is adjudicated in a more even handed and precise way. Questions like "was it available and unprotected," "was there a sign saying you could use the resource," "did the person using the resource have ill intent" all come into play, as would how much data you used and for what purpose you used it. This is pseudo profound overintellectualized gibberish. It displays a mind like a Rube Goldberg machine employing the wrong tools to try to resolve a simple dilemma. It brings in all these irrelevant analogies and premises that just convolute the statements without advancing a clear argument.
  • vnchr 5y ago
    > It displays a mind like a Rube Goldberg machine employing the wrong tools to try to resolve a simple dilemma. Thank you for this amusing and poignant metaphor.
  • FpUser 5y ago
    >"Often, yes, it is illegal to leech your neighbor's wifi" Yes. Our society has this pathological aversion of people having something for "free". I can turn this all upside down. By having all this giant infrastructure you are leeching by reducing my abilities to roam the Earth and feed myself without being someone's servant. I think the root of it has something to do with the higher ups wanting and forcing people to work so that they can profit out of it. But this is also something that allowed us to progress from semi monkeys with 20 year lifespan to what we are now.
    • kelseyfrog 5y ago
      > I think the root of it has something to do with the higher ups wanting and forcing people to work so that they can profit out of it. In the same way we think the divine right of monarchy is an absurd way to justify feudalism, someday we will think human nature is an absurd way of justifying our current system.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• u10242 5y ago
  The most common example I know of is that if in a garden grows an apple tree, where one branch reaches into the neighbor's garden, is the neighbor allowed to harvest the apples from that branch? IANAL, but IIRC German law states that 1) the neighbor is allowed to harvest the apples and 2) the neighbor can demand from the tree owner to saw that branch off.
  • Turing_Machine 5y ago
    I don't know about the fruit specifically, but I believe that in most jurisdictions in the United States you can also demand that the neighbor remove the encroaching branch, or remove it yourself, if you so choose. Usually it's better to just be friendly, though. When I used to home brew and grew hops along my back fence, my neighbor on the other side was also a home brewer. I told him he was welcome to any hops that were on his side of the fence. :-) It probably helped that the fence was old and ugly, and being covered with hop vines make it look nice.
    • silisili 5y ago
      IIRC, in the US, tree law is a lot more complicated (which itself is fascinating). For example, where I lived, it was my responsibility to trim my neighbors branches that were growing into and falling into my yard. Further, if I chose to cut said branches, I had to make sure it wouldn't harm or kill the tree.
• Ensorceled 5y ago
  This is a strange analogy to introduce this dilemma, the light spilling into the neighbour's reading room costs the lamp owner nothing. If I use my neighbour’s WIFI, I degrade their usage and may force them to pay additional money to upgrade to a higher bandwidth or an uncapped plan.
• bobthechef 5y ago
  The analogy is problematic. The neighbor is broadcasting his light out into the neighborhood in a "unidirectional" way and as an incidental loss. It is leaving his house as a side effect of him lighting his home. It's like body heat. When we enter any building, our body heat, meant to keep our own bodies at an optimal temperature, escapes and fills the room and reduces the cost of heating for the building owner (at least when the weather is cold). That body heat is generated because we eat, and we must pay for food. So do you want to now claim that the building owner is stealing from you? You've given your body heat and light away. Where WiFi is concerned, the usage is two-directional. It's more like having the building owner ask you to run on a treadmill when in his building or asking the neighbor to turn up the light. Stealing WiFi involves incursion into resources belonging to the subscriber. Unlike heat and light, those WiFi signals are not the thing that we benefit from per se, they're just the medium. And eventually, the increase in WiFi consumption will also result in increased costs for the subscriber.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• analog31 5y ago
  In my view, things like ownership and property are not absolutes, but are an evolved set of ad hoc rules and customs. They're maintained because they mostly work, except in some cases when imposed by a person in power. Discovery of a loophole, or development of a new technology, might render the old customs obsolete and require new ones to be developed. A lot of "ownership" and pricing systems are attempts to govern the distribution and conservation of public goods and externalities. Charging money for heat or electricity are ways to encourage conservation of things that are ultimately subsidized. Using someone's wi-fi is an interesting case. If I noticed that my neighbor had a water leak, I wouldn't water my lawn with it. I'd tell them about the leak. Likewise, unsecured wi-fi exposes them to a risk of nefarious access to their network, and I'd tell them about it.
• drivingmenuts 5y ago
  Light and WiFi aren’t equal, though. The light produced is gated by the burning of fuel, thus light is the side-effect of an action. Light may be consumed at will by the Reader because there is no cost to the Producer in the making of the side-effect. The gating for WiFi is after the WiFi itself and is bandwidth. If no bandwidth is consumed, then it’s not theft. But, if bandwidth is consumed, then the cost is borne by all parties and anyone who is not contributing is stealing from those who are.
• amelius 5y ago
  Yes it is stealing, because light providing companies might go bankrupt and this leaves your neighbor without light. (simply put)
• jaclaz 5y ago
  As a side question/note, how much does a MB (or a GB) actually cost? I mean, your ISP is giving to you for a monthly fee, an "unlimited" amount of GBs, it is the concurrent usage that is limited by the bandwidth of your connection. How many of them do you actually use? How many of them does your neighbour actually use? In - say - a 12 flats building there are likely 12 different, individual connections, serving who? At the very most 24-36 people concurrently. Yet, on your small-medium office, a single connection (with comparable cost/bandwidth) serves 10-15 people, possibly more. So, people in your condo is cumulatively paying some 10x the money that an office would. In a perfect world, there would be a centralized connection, wouldn't it?
• jfax 5y ago
  There are already laws about this: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rights-to-light https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rights-to-light
• generalizations 5y ago
  The neighbor is producing more than they require; the only light the neighbor requires from their lamp is what falls on their page. The rest is (intentionally or not) scattered abroad to the environment, where it is as much theirs as the leaves on the plant in their window which are blown down the street. It's not stealing, because it's not taking, because it is possessed by no one.
• ademarre 5y ago
  One of my neighbors has a bright light on a garage behind their house. It shines directly onto my backyard and I see it as light pollution. It is a nuisance for sky watching with my telescope.
  • denysvitali 5y ago
    So he is stealing your darkness...
• kgwxd 5y ago
  I probably shouldn't confess this publicly but, I once did not wish to incur the expense of a obtaining a book, so I read my neighbor's book over their shoulder, using their light.
• yeetaccount2 5y ago
  Title reminds me of a coworker I had that would rip up and throw away a newspaper after he was done reading it so others wouldn’t get for free what he had paid for.
  • newsbinator 5y ago
    That's a fascinating personality trait. Was it part of a larger pattern?
  • metalliqaz 5y ago
    Yikes. He must have been popular at happy hour. /s If I worked with him I'd bring in the same paper every day and leave it in the common area near his desk.
  • miles 5y ago
    Was his name Ebenezer by any chance?
  • silisili 5y ago
    Yikes. If there were truly no other reason than that, I'd see it as kinda petty. But perhaps there's something more to the story? There are a lot of little reasons that could make it more reasonable. Were people fighting over it? Was a person or people walking by his desk waiting for him to finish, or worse, asking if he was finished? Or digging in his trash can? Or worse, assuming he was finished and taking it off his desk? All of these would be rather annoying things I could see leading to that. I remember when I worked in a grocery with a deli, we used to give away or heavily heavily discount fried chicken at close time. Eventually more and more people started crowding around at closing time, clogging the area, arguing who was there first, etc. What was a logical nice choice turned into the owner saying screw it, throw it all away every night. An outsider would say it's wasteful or mean, but seeing it happen gave a good context. Anyhow, in your example, I think it's reasonable anyone depending or expecting said paper to chip in. Maybe rotate days, offer a buck here or there, buy coffee, whatever. Or ask the company to buy a few copies for everyone.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
• w0mbat 5y ago
  This reminds me of the dispute between FAANG companies and big ISPs. The ISPs were saying "You are benefiting from our networks for free! Pay us!". The companies like Netflix were saying "Without our services nobody would want broadband. Maybe you should pay us!".
  • Dylan16807 5y ago
    A lot of ISPs were saying something much stupider, which was "the data flows are unbalanced, so pay us to peer". 1) The data is all at the request of the ISP side, and 2) What so you'll peer for free if Netflix changes their software to upload 5Mbps of null bytes while open?
• emeraldd 5y ago
  This reminds me of a story I read growing up. I can't find the reference now, though I'm pretty sure I read it in an old copy of "1000 and 1 Arabian Nights". The way it went, there was a poor man who lived above a restaurant who subsisted primarily on rice. He discovered that by eating by his open window, the smells drifting up from the food cooking below would add flavor to his meager meals. When the restaurant owner discovered this, he became angry and demanded payment from the poor man who naturally refused. The restaurant owner pulled the poor man before a local magistrate demanding that the magistrate force the man to pay. After thinking for a while, the magistrate asked if the poor man had any money, which he did. The magistrate then directs the poor man to jingle the money and said that the payment for the smell of the restaurant owner's food was the sound of money. I can't retell it nearly as well as the original, which is probably online somewhere but not anywhere I know about ... :(
  • vanboxel 5y ago
    That story sounds exactly like Ooka Tadasuke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Coka_Tadasuke#Famous_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Coka_Tadasuke#Famous_case...
    • Kaibeezy 5y ago
      That’s Ooka for sure. I did a PowerPoint on it for my criminal law class.
    • shpongled 5y ago
      Interestingly, wiki links back to a Paul Graham article referencing Ooka http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html
    • _nalply 5y ago
      From that article: > In 1956, an illustrated book was created by I.G. Edmonds, an American military officer. Published by the Pacific Stars & Stripes, it was called Solomon in Kimono: Tales of Ooka, a Wise Judge of Old Yedo.[4] Edmonds' work was published in 1961 as Ooka the Wise, and then in 1966 renamed The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories and made widely available to American schoolchildren by the Scholastic publishing company. Perhaps GP read the story thanks to Edmonds.
• scotty79 5y ago
  If your light shines on your neighbor and he uses it to read and you asked him if he wants to participate in the costs of maintaining the light, but he doesn't want to, is it moral to cover the light so it doesn't shine on your neighbor if you have no other reason for doing that?
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Sure, because the point is not to deprive them of light, but to collect payment for it. Is it moral for media companies to paywall content when it could be distributed for free? The lamp is a trivial example but you can apply this to many things.
    • scotty79 5y ago
      But they will not pay for it. They don't want to pay for it. They have no intention in paying for it. Why is it moral then? When you deprive someone of something that costs you nothing and this someone will not buy it from you under no circumstances because he's not able or willing?
      • Gigachad 5y ago
        Because if you give it away for free, you devalue the service on the market. So that person may not pay, but someone else will. But if the actual buyer sees someone else getting it for free, they will not be inclined to pay for it either. So I guess it depends on your motive and the circumstance. If you are doing it purely to negatively affect the other person, it's not a very kindhearted thing to do. If you are doing it to preserve the market value of your service so that you can collect a payment, that is fine.
        • scotty79 5y ago
          Is your moral responsibility to care for the market? Is it more immoral to devalue the market for light than to inconvenience your neighbor?
• Jiro 5y ago
  Something that surprisingly, almost nobody has said: In order to use somebody's wi-fi, you have to do things that affect the source of the wi-fi. Wi-fi is inherently a two-way thing; wi-fi that only went from your neighbor's house to you but sent nothing back would be useless. It's true that wi-fi also differs from light in that you're using limited bandwidth, but that difference is only even possible because wi-fi is a two-way thing, so it's possible for your actions outside the house to cause loss of the bandwith inside the house. As for employers, overhead is something that you should be taking into consideration as part of the negotiation for wages. If the employer suddenly made you work from home and this increased your costs, this is the equivalent to the employer suddenly reducing your salary. Whether it's fair is just like whether any other reduction in salary is fair. Does the UK have laws about salary reductions?
• hackathonguy 5y ago
  In Jewish law there is a paradigm called "this one is benefitting and this one is not losing". Essentially, the idea is that if you're enjoying something belonging to someone else, that doesn't constitute stealing as long as they don't stand to lose anything owing to your usage. This applies to lamplight, and interestingly, can be applied to piracy as well: if you can honestly say you wouldn't have purchased the movie/software/music anyway, downloading it is not stealing. As others have mentioned in the comments, this idea doesn't work for wifi: performance is inversely correlated with connected devices, making using your neighbor's wifi a case of "this one is benefitting and this one is losing".
  • onethought 5y ago
    But intellectual property isn’t a thing then.
    • akomtu 5y ago
      Using one metaphor, IP is not a thing, it's a fire: by its nature, when it creates more fire, the original fire does not diminish.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      I'm fine with that outcome.
      • onethought 5y ago
        Me too, but completely unwinds the software economic model. Licenses are meaningless, as would more broadly copyright.
        • Dylan16807 5y ago
          A lot less than 'completely'. A big chunk of software is commissioned, and another big chunk of software is open source.
          • 5y ago
• hbarka 5y ago
  When I was very young, parents would tell me to turn off the bedside lamp for bedtime. Engrossed in a book, I would lean by the window to read by the light of the street lamp. I blame this now for my nearsightedness.
• driggs 5y ago
  Ignoring the false equivalence of wasted candle light to stolen WiFi bandwidth, as has already been pointed out... It’s an unspoken(?) assumption that one can’t apply for a remote job unless one has access to internet. Doesn’t matter whether it’s yours, stolen from a neighbor, or sipped from a coffee shop, so long as it’s reliable and of sufficient bandwidth. That’s the remote work deal. Having the privilege to work remotely for a non-remote job requires the same deal, an your employer seems even less responsible for providing bandwidth in the latter case.
• baskethead 5y ago
  Once it leaves the confines of your property, you no longer own it. So you’re not stealing light that shine outside. If you care so much about the light you should close your shades. If you’re concerned about your neighbors freeloading off your heat, then you should compensate them when their heat causes them problems, as well.
• hermes8329 5y ago
  Honestly it seems like if you don't pay a monthly subscription everything is stealing
• colordrops 5y ago
  Even though you aren't stealing anything, the light from your neighbor's lamp is still limited. An even broader example is the flame of a candle. Fire is an unlimited resource - if you light your candle from another, you have not only stolen nothing, but added more light to the world. This analogy applies to software - if you copy a piece of software, you are not depriving the owner of the software from their copy, just like the flame. Now software companies may complain that you are depriving them of revenue for their copyrighted bits. The same argument could be used with the original story - by using your neighbor's light, you are depriving lamp oil companies of their revenue. Clearly an absurd take, and I tend to think software copyrights are also absurd. I will organize the atoms and electrons in my computer's memory and storage how I damn well please.
• kordlessagain 5y ago
  Light has become exponentially cheaper over time. San Francisco now limits prosecution for stealing up to a certain amount. It’s not stealing to use extra light!
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• golemiprague 5y ago
  The Jewish Talmud discuss a more extreme situation where someone squats in someone else's yard and then leaving it intact. If the owner just found about it after the fact, does the squatter have to pay? Regarding loaning light or even fire it was pretty obvious that it is allowed.
• coldtea 5y ago
  No, but it IS stealing from community, humanity, charity, etc. to entertain such ideas - that "reading by the light of your neighbour's lamp" could be stealing...
• juxtapose 5y ago
  Funny that there is an old Chinese idiom 凿壁偷光 (záo bì tōu guāng) referring to this exact act. The idiom literally means "to pierce the wall to steal a light" and the original story goes exactly like how a man wanted to read books but was too poor to afford lights, and he just pierced the wall to steal lights from his neighbor. So yeah, to Chinese, it is stealing. But the funny thing is that Chinese also think the man in the story is keen on studying, and this idiom is actually used as a praise to people who never stop studying even during the hardships.
  • convolutionart 5y ago
    The end justifies the means?
• supernova87a 5y ago
  Here's a more pressing and actual problem for many US states and cities. In multi-unit condo buildings, the pipes and systems were designed at a time when water was so cheap and abundant that it's not individually metered. You pay through your HOA/condo fees as a group. You just live with the fact that a family of 4 likely uses much more than a single person because it's "pennies" difference if you billed it properly. (Admittedly there is both the cost of the water, and the natural gas to heat it, but same principle) But in the more recent climate of water scarcity/energy waste awareness (and costs of energy rising), it would be a kind of holy grail to find a way to install meters for individual units at a cost-effective price of the hardware and labor needed to do such a thing. It would lead to much conservation I think. But there are so many problems in trying to do this. Even starting with the design of buildings being unsuited to do this -- for example tall apartment buildings, your pipes tend to be run as "stacks" so that the bathroom located in the same position on each floor can have piping run vertically. It's not like each apartment is self contained and has a single inlet/outlet for water to place a meter. Sometimes I think about whether you could, if clever enough, derive the usage of a single unit by measuring at the row/column of each floor/stack like addressing pixels... It's a problem, when things were designed for a time when it was much cheaper.
  • bequanna 5y ago
    I don’t know about HOAs, but it is extremely common now for apartment owners when they initially acquire a property to sub meter units and bill back those utilities that were included in rent back to the tenants. Rent is typically kept at the same amount, so this is effectively a raise in rent. Like you mention, I assume this lowers usage substantially as people are aware of the cost of their individual usage.
• mbfg 5y ago
  You could also say that the lamp owner who's lamp is on is polluting his neighbor with light, by that argument.
  • drivers99 5y ago
    True. A town I used to live in (Alamogordo, NM) had light ordinances to avoid light pollution due to a number of nearby observatories, for example: > Offstreet lighting shall be shielded and/or directed in such manner that it only illuminates the user's premises and does not spill over into neighboring residential areas so as to interfere with the peaceful enjoyment of residential properties. http://www.astronomersgroup.org/Lighting.html http://www.astronomersgroup.org/Lighting.html
• toss1 5y ago
  The author's first example is good, but trying the apply the same thing to WiFi is incorrect. The neighboring reader is using surplus light that spills out the neighbor's window. The neighbor might have instead kept and used more of his light by pulling down a light-colored shade, reflecting it back into his room. The light out the window was truly abandoned, as if it were left in the street, and will not cause any additional costs to the neighbor. However, with WiFi, the signal is not abandoned, and is in fact limited in many circumstances. One is not simply picking up abandoned broadcast packets like receiving an over-the-air TV or Radio broadcast, which would be like the light spilling out the window. Instead you are establishing a session on the router and sending, requesting, and receiving packets specifically for your own browsing. This consumes router capacity, and potentially limited bandwidth of the owner, potentially even incurring the neighbor with the WiFi higher costs. So, I'd say the reader is not stealing, but the WiFi user is, unless of course the WiFi neighbor is specifically making it available for free use. (Whether this stealing is of any consequence depends on the circumstance - at the extremes, are they just using it for a few seconds to check an essential text email, or downloading torrents that'll bog down the router and get the neighbor overcharged and cutoff?)
• stevenalowe 5y ago
  No. And the WiFi analogy doesn't work either. Both fail as an introduction to the question of employer benefit from remote workers. A more interesting question: is the excess light of your neighbour's lamp actionable as unwanted environmental pollution?
• still_grokking 5y ago
  One should consider the idea of "intellectual property" under the premise of this lamplight metaphor. "Stealing" ideas doesn't make anybody poorer after all, as you can't "steal" an idea in the same sense as you can't "steal" lamplight. Whereas being able to base own ideas on the prior ideas of others benefits usually the whole society sooner or later. That's one of the reasons why inventing writing enabled such a huge step in human development: It made passing forward ideas to others much more efficient. On the contrary just imagine a world in which someone would have claimed "intellectual property" on the idea of writing, and would have tried to prosecute "illegal" usages of written texts, and that claim would have been enforced by authorities. In such a world human progression would be obviously crippled substantially. Information in general doesn't get "used up" by being processed. As lamplight doesn't get less when shared. Ideas aren't a capitalistic asset as they get more valuable when shared by more people! It's long overdue to draw consequences from that fact. For the benefit of our whole species.
• Thorentis 5y ago
  I'm disappointed this article didn't talk about copyright. It is the obvious parallel to the neighbour's lamp parable. Let's make some similar analogies. If my neighbour is watching Netflix and I can see it through their/my window, is it stealing for me to watch it too? If my neighbour is reading a book at their window, and I can read it using binoculars, is it stealing to read it too? And so on.
  • still_grokking 5y ago
    "Intellectual property" was also my first association. Unexpectedly not much people here are talking this point. But there're a lot of comments so some interesting got buried and aren't discussed I guess.
• sporkland 5y ago
  IANAL, but the rule that you can't internalize (by charging money) the positive externalities you create seems to apply here? ;P
• nsonha 5y ago
  wow what a shallow article, you would think someone asking this question to go into why stealing is bad, and therefore, in some cases, it's not such a bad thing if we reason from first principles. It could be about not harming people, instead of blindly following some commandments.
• loa_in_ 5y ago
  > [About personal internet service at home] So, if your employee is going to have that facility anyway, then is it fair for you as an employer to derive the benefit without paying for it? I know it's a technicality, but for me it's super clear that employee's machine is client to the employer's network, so it's straighforward: it's employee using his own service.
• kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > Stealing is, according to one reasonably uncontroversial definition, taking something that doesn’t belong to you. Not in English law as far as I remember. There has to be intent to permanently deprive the owner of the goods.
• t0suj4 5y ago
  If using neighbor's light escaping to the street is a theft, so is inhaling smoke from nearby coal power plant. If the neighbor has a problem with that he can install blinds. This story is completely missing interaction with the other side.
• shukantpal 5y ago
  When you using someone else's light, the light would've left the neighbors house at the same rate as if you didn't exist. When you use someone's WiFi, the WiFi router now starts sending you more energy / packets and therefore is stealing. If you were just packet sniffing, that would be not be theft.
• zelon88 5y ago
  I remember hearing my micro-economics professor tell the class how he snuck onto a ferry in South Korea and when caught managed to convince the captain to let him and his friend ride the ferry at-cost, which he estimated to be some insanely low figure like $1. He reasoned that this giant boat was going to make the trip across the river whether or not he was on board, so by letting him ride for any contribution was still more profitable than to kick him off now.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    It would be more profitable to extort money out of that professor.