mechoman444

Yeah… well, maybe if you didn’t spend $60k on a truck and another $10k on a lift kit, you could afford a normal-sized house.

The hell do you need a lifted F-250 for?! You’re not hauling anything, you’re not towing anything, and that lift kit just ruined whatever practical use the truck had in the first place.

So you’ve got a 6,000-pound grocery-getting overcompensation machine that’s somehow less useful than the truck was before you modified it.

Congratulations. You spent $70k to make a work truck worse at doing work.

And all of those books are printed with the permission of the author or their estate.

The books are being preserved with the rights holder’s permission, not preserved in spite of them. And yes, plenty of books have gone out of print over the centuries and been lost to time or obscurity. That is unfortunate, but it doesn’t give consumers the authority to decide that someone else’s intellectual property is now theirs to distribute.

Games are no different. Once the rights holder decides they no longer want to sell a game, that’s their decision. You don’t have to like it, but you don’t get to override it simply because you believe the work should remain available.

There is a reason copyright and intellectual-property law works this way. Authors, painters, musicians, developers, and publishers legally own the rights to their creations. Those rights include the ability to decide how, when, and whether their work is reproduced or distributed. The alternative would be giving the public the authority to make those decisions on the creator’s behalf, and that is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of owning intellectual property in the first place.

And believe me, I have very little sympathy for large corporations and their endless pursuit of profit. But even I have to acknowledge that giving a rights holder control over their own property is the more consistent and ethical position. We don’t get to discard someone’s ownership rights simply because we think the public would benefit from having access to their work.

You can absolutely argue that copyright terms are too long, that abandoned works should have a legal preservation exception, or that the law should provide some mechanism for orphaned or commercially unavailable works to remain accessible. Those are legitimate arguments for changing the law.

But that’s fundamentally different from simply deciding that because a company stopped selling something, consumers now have the right to copy and distribute it.

I most certainly do not.

It’s not. There is no inherent necessity to keep the game around especially if the people who own it no longer want to sell it.

The people that will continue to provide the game are breaking the law by doing so.

So my analogy holds up.

No one “needs” to rob a back. No one “needs” to pirate a game.

Needs? Games never “needed” to be pirated.

It’s kinda like saying “I needed to rob a bank”

Do these people just want everyone to not play their games and to pirate everything!

I mean… They’re not. And that’s the problem.

I remember the AIG debacle and how Obama went ape shit to get the money back even though the payouts were contractual obligations to AIGs employees.

Why would Donnie ever intervene in trying to get the people their money back… He’s been screwing us over for over a year now. Ain’t going to stop now.

Huh. He did exactly that…

I think I downloaded open office like 20 years ago. It hasn’t changed much and only just now started getting updates again.

I should probably switch to libreoffice but I’m too old and set in my ways. That and I don’t really use it for much more than the most basic of word processing and spreadsheet.

How to get rid of the new style context menu.

Just did this to my PC. So much better!

What he really meant to say is that we’re not board of director executives. And we have absolutely no idea how to milk every possible cent out of a game.

No.

You’re stating a position that I never took. I never said I supported AI data centers. My point was about how users on Lemmy are quick to encourage criminal behavior when it targets something they dislike, while condemning the same behavior when it is directed at something they support. That’s called being two-faced.

For the record, I do not support AI data centers. They could all burn down for all I care. If every LLM shut down tomorrow, nothing in my life would change. I consider AI data centers a blight on the environment, and many communities do not want them built in their areas.

I pray to the God I don’t believe in that they don’t build one anywhere near me.

For the record, I have no issue with people supporting socialism or transgender rights. I only use those examples because they’re emotionally charged topics in this community, and they illustrate how quickly people’s standards change depending on who the victim is.

I knew there would be at least one of you.

There’s a lot that can be debated about the validity, usefulness, and impact of AI data centers or data centers in general. However, I’m not going to get into that discussion with you because it would be a waste of time when you clearly didn’t read or understand what I actually wrote.

You saw the words “transgender” and “socialism” and immediately assumed I was attacking those groups, which was not the argument I was making. I don’t hate either of them. Those were examples of emotionally charged topics, not the subject of my criticism.

This particular tack definitely seems to be the main flavor of responses to my comment at this point.

It is a really strange logical conclusion that many of you have arrived at.

What it sounds like you’re saying is that if the theft is morally correct, then it is somehow no longer theft and is perfectly justified. That is a very strange argument to make in the first place.

That is not how morality works. That is not how anything works.

If a starving person steals bread, they may have a morally compelling justification for their actions. We can debate whether that theft was ethically permissible under those circumstances. But they still committed theft. The act itself does not magically stop being theft because we understand or sympathize with the reason behind it.

The distinction between whether an action is understandable, justified, or morally excusable has been debated since the time of the Greeks.

The current defense strategy for Luigi is emotional distress. They are fully admitting that he shot the man.

The question at trial will be. Is he culpable for the crimes.

We’re not talking about people stealing bread because they’re hungry. We’re talking about people stealing millions of dollars worth of construction materials for personal gain.

Do you really think the thieves stealing those materials from AI data centers are morally justified by their actions?

I’ll even go one step further and fully admit that I don’t have a simple defense for someone stealing food because they’re starving. That situation is morally complicated and can absolutely be debated from a philosophical perspective. But justice is blind for a reason. We can acknowledge the circumstances behind a crime, show compassion toward the person committing it, and still recognize that the act itself is theft.

I’m not sure we can apply that same reasoning to organized theft of millions of dollars in construction materials.

Also, you’re the third person to tell me I’m being “black and white” about this. That criticism doesn’t really apply. I have consistently said that justice exists on a gradient and that different crimes carry different levels of severity. Recognizing that all theft is wrong does not mean I believe all theft deserves identical punishment.

Please don’t argue against a position I haven’t taken.

All right. I’ll concede that point. If there wasn’t such a massive wealth Gap. People wouldn’t have to steal like this. In this particular case you are right and they stand corrected.

I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about at this point sorry.

You’re the first person to actually provide a constructive response to my comment. Thank you.

But we can definitely examine the comparative morality here. Let’s take a moment to consider who the victims actually are when large amounts of materials are stolen, regardless of where that theft occurs.

The first affected party is obviously the entity that owns the property, in this case the corporation building the data center. We can acknowledge that many people have little sympathy for a massive corporation losing money, and I understand that perspective. However, I still maintain that theft is theft regardless of who the victim is.

But what about everyone else affected by that theft? What about the construction workers who cannot work because projects are delayed? What about the construction companies that are contracted to complete the work and now have additional costs because of someone else’s actions? Why should those people bear the consequences of someone else’s crime?

And what about the thieves themselves? Are we automatically assuming they are morally justified individuals who are taking from the wealthy and redistributing it to those in need? That is not what is happening. These materials are being stolen and sold for personal profit through illegal channels. The people committing the theft are not acting out of some noble principle. They are benefiting themselves at someone else’s expense.

So who exactly are we supporting, and who are we condemning? I do not see any meaningful moral high ground in celebrating theft simply because the victim is a corporation. The entire chain of events, from the theft itself to the people harmed by the consequences, is far more complicated than “rich company loses money, therefore it is good.”

The most frustrating part is that this larger picture is often ignored. People focus only on the corporation taking a financial hit while overlooking everyone else affected by the crime. That is a very short-sighted and incomplete way to evaluate the situation.

Sure, you absolutely can. That’s not in contention. I am simply admonishing how two faced Lemmy is.