Is it stealing to read by the light of your neighbour’s lamp? | Hacker News Reader

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

mymisanthropicmusings.org.uk

197 pointsAmorymeltzer315 comments

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 ... :(

That story sounds exactly like Ooka Tadasuke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Coka_Tadasuke#Famous_case...

That’s Ooka for sure. I did a PowerPoint on it for my criminal law class.

Interestingly, wiki links back to a Paul Graham article referencing Ooka http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html

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.

The Stolen Smell: https://vimeo.com/229846100

There's an old episode of the Simpsons (can't remember which), but something is wrong and Moe's Tavern is suddenly filled with noxious fumes. Barney inhales it and starts getting loopy, and Moe says something to effect of: "Hey, hey, I'm gonna have to start charging if you guys are getting high off this stuff!"

It's from the Who Shot Mr. Burns Episode (S06E25) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F

I always objected that a smell is transported mass, whereas sound is waves. But paying for electromagnetic waves with pressure waves seems fair.

(However, legal dispute resolution is about the effect on parties, not physical "reality".)

IIRC There's a bit of suspense in the original, when the decision maker orders the poor man to take out the amount demanded, and place the coins on the table, which makes the sound.

Could it have been “Sanji and the Baker”?

That reminds me of a Jewish folktale: a poor man borrowed some silver spoons from a miser to impress his daughter's visiting suitor, and returned them with a tin teaspoon, explaining that the spoons had given birth. The miser thought this ridiculous but happily accepted the free teaspoon.

The same thing happened the next week and the miser again accepted the free teaspoon.

The week after the poor man asked to borrow the miser's gold candlesticks, because this was the last week the suitor was in town and he really wanted to impress. The next day he informed the miser that the candlesticks had sadly died.

The miser, furious, dragged the poor man in front of the rabbi to demand justice. But the rabbi, listening to their story, concurred that since the miser was happy to accept the baby spoons, he must likewise accept the death of his gold candlesticks.

Right so from these two folktales we seem to all agree that the author doesn’t have a valid argument. Personally I was disappointed when the essay morphed into grasping at straws trying to argue that companies should just pay all your living expenses because they’re benefiting from you being alive…

I was expecting the author to take a copyleft direction and comment on all the absurd things we allow oppressive licensors to get away with in the modern digital era.. Oh well, another discussion for another time, I guess.

I came to write this same Arabic story, but my version was about a man that put a piece of bread above the meat grill hopping the smoke/taste will stick to it. The restaurant owner was a stingy person who saw a chance to take advantage of a poor man, for me it seems that the "free rider" is the restaurant owner who wanted to price the free smoke and if the judge was corrupted or stupid this man would become the inventor of capitalism before it was invented.

I've read it as a part of the Nasreddin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin) stories compilation. "Nasreddin and the smell of soup" https://continuingstudies.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330/reading/...

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.

Definitely always aim to rent the apartment on the ground floor, in the middle of the building.

Why ground floor? Heat flows to the top, it's better to have someone behind who's heating their own apartment.

On the ground your floor is either a basement or well, the ground. Whereas on higher floors your floor is another apartment and your roof (might) be the actual buildings roof.

Heat leaves far more easily if there is air on the other side of the wall and(!) you have the benefit of ground isolating you on the bottom floor

I was clearly implying that there has to be another apartment on top of yours (so, a 3 floors building). If you compare ground floor vs top floor, then ground floor wins hands on, I agree.

The unit above acts as an insulator, so you have a heated/cooled unit above you versus outside temperature. The ground itself is a fairly good insulator, too.

All of those reasons _plus_ there are no stairs!

Hot air rises; heat doesn't. Heat moves from warm to cold. You would way rather have a heated space above your ceiling than a non-heated space.

In many buildings, the mechanical systems are in the basement and whatever is carrying the heat runs up through the lower units. My old apartment in Cambridge was first floor and the 2nd and 3rd floor ducts were inside my living space and closets. On mild days, I could leave my heat entirely off and just the radiation and small leakage from their ducts was enough to keep my place comfortable. (The furnaces were all atmospheric gas burners with plenty of residual heat leaking into the basement as a result, making it an inadvertently heated space beneath as well.)

Sounds great if you love to hear neighbors through the ceiling and walls.

I do occasionally hear my neighbors. Sometimes a loud movie from next door, or a party, but rarely bothersome. Plumbing noises are much more common.

Oddly, I don’t recall ever hearing a vacuum cleaner…

Depends where you live. Here the apartments outside bathroom floor heating are usually collectively heated and paid... So actually not using the heat is subsidising others...

So heavily depends on where you live, what type of heating is used and if heating is billed per use.

My ground floor apartment has thin laminate flooring over low quality planks over the freezing void below. This floor is very cold in the winter. Noise from above isn't great either. Not recommended.

Heh, ok. I guess if your apartment is built over a freezing void, then the “ground floor” might be a drawback.

I loved my 8th floor apartment I used to have. It had an amazing balcony with a view of the ocean. I would have had a view of a wall if I was on the first floor.

Meanwhile some would argue that your neighbors are contributing to the deterioration of the environment for their own comfort, thus stealing portions of your health or future, for either you or your descendants. Maybe that cancels out the stealing.

that's a pathway to madness and moral blackmail. i will never feel guilty about heating my home, and to hell with anyone who tries.

It’s as petty as thinking about “stolen” heat.

I bet you don’t feel guilty about driving everywhere too??

i don't own a motor car

The impact of every character you posted, compounded over the years will have killed 4 kittens by 2075.

What a weird thing to make up.

I think that's a stronger example than the one proposed. But the outcome is similar. The neighbors are forcibly giving you heat. It just happens that you are ok with 19C. However, if you wanted your home to be cooler than that, to be the same as outside, you'd then have to pay for an AC to do that because your neighbors are making the environment around them hotter. I think stealing is not only taking something that's not yours, but taking something that's not yours without permission. As soon as they start irradiating the heat all over the place, they are effectively giving everyone permission to use it. It's not like you can somehow easily stop or give them back the heat. If they didn't want the heat to escape, then they need to invest in better insulation.

My first apartment in Boston was like this. I was on the top floor and I’d have to leave the windows open all winter because it was so unbearably hot from the heat being cranked up in the units below me. I remember nearly sweating to death during a major snowstorm because I had closed the windows to keep the snow out but keeping the snow out meant I kept all of the hot air in!

What you need is some kind of mesh covering for the window that lets air through but not larger particles such as ice crystals or bugs.

Like window screens...?

Yes, window screens allow you to keep windows open when it’s snowing. However, if it’s very windy/stormy you’d still get a lot of water in and probably shutting a part of the window would be necessary.

Yep my wife and I moved to Connecticut from North Carolina. The summers here are very mild compared to what we are used to and as such leave the windows open to stay cool. But as you mentioned the screens do allow in rain if it’s raining and windy. Funny I never thought about seeing if there’s an alternative material for it.

You don't have (the option for) ventilation shafts in your window frames[0]? Here in the Netherlands (and north-west EU) many homes have those, they're designed to allow fresh air to circulate without the need for opening a window. Most houses have those except for really old ones (which have 'natural' ventilation, i.e. creeks) or really new ones (which have a central ventilation system).

[0] for example https://www.duco.eu/Wes/CDN/1/Products/ProductImages/2016-08...

The option exists, but double–hung windows are more popular.

One nice thing about winter heat is that it's just too dry for many insects to survive long. Obviously this depends on the insect, I've noticed that yellow jackets die within a day but lady bugs can survive much longer.

My God, I think I was crazy. It happened to me in several hotels in USA and Europe, I had to leave window open in winter because it was unbereable to be in the hotel room, even with the heating turned off. Glad I am not the only one!

I currently live in the Boston area in an apt. built in 1927. Steam heat. I keep my windows cracked open pretty much all Winter because even with the radiator turned off, I still get too much heat from all sides. Yes, I do have wire mesh screens on my windows.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pan...

It was actually designed for this, so you could have fresh air during a pandemic in the winter :)

When you're on the top floor, it's often a catch-22 to do this. Heating for the building can be controlled by a system that takes as input the temperatures from sensors in apartments on the top and bottom floors. So when you open the windows to lower the temperature in your apartment, the system will react by cranking up the heat for the building.

Few things have the same $:QoL ratio as buying insulated pipe wrap for the hot pipe running floor to ceiling through your apartment's bathroom.

> As soon as they start irradiating the heat all over the place, they are effectively giving everyone permission to use it.

Hmm I wouldn't agree with that. I think the Wikipedia definition [1] captures it more accurately: theft is taking someone's property or services without their consent and with the intention to deprive them of it. In the case of heat, you're neither taking "property" (and "services" would be quite a stretch, unless they provide heating as a service...) noor are you "depriving" them of their heat, so it cannot be theft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

There is one complexity that you left out, which is that they are unknowingly spending more money on heat because of the "freeloader" that they share a wall with.

So I wouldn't call it theft. But it seems like a clear case of freeloading.

It's like that roommate that never does the dishes because they know you will do them when it gets bad enough. Are they stealing your time? I suppose not, but they aren't doing their part.

I wouldn't say it's comparable to that. In this case, they would've faced the exact same problem (even worse, actually), if their neighbor hadn't been home and hence didn't have anything generating heat at all, which the neighbor has every right to do, and which would've provided zero grounds for them to complain. That's drastically different from the dishwashing case where the roommate would actually be using more dishes by their presence than by their absence, not equal (or less).

> I wouldn't say it's comparable to that. In this case, they would've faced the exact same problem (even worse, actually), if their neighbor hadn't been home and hence didn't have anything generating heat at all, which the neighbor has every right to do, and which would've provided zero grounds for them to complain.

At my current residence, the building bylaws require that all units be heated to 60f during the winter, to prevent this exact scenario. So whether it’s a right is very local.

Yeah I'm obviously assuming the resident hasn't already entered into a contract or a jurisdiction with specific laws mandating them to heat their homes, that'd kind of make the question moot.

The countries I used to live in Europe had typically it solved, by using some formulas; the assumption was that living in condominiums puts additional obligations on you; obligatory payments to the renovation funds, paying for shared electricity, heat, services etc.

The original problem 'stealing or not' is most likely moot. The definition of stealing is conventional, unless one believes in some scripture of divine origin detailing such things, or subscribes to philosophies like utilitarianism (which might be fine, it's just hard to argue such things from first principles)

> There is one complexity that you left out, which is that they are unknowingly spending more money on heat because of the "freeloader" that they share a wall with.

They would spend more if they were heating an outside wall with an average temperature below 19 degrees. The unheated apartment acts as additional insulation. An optimal arrangement would be for the hottest apartments to be in the core of the building with cooler apartments radiating out to the edges. But it makes sense in that scenario to price heat into a shared cost that everyone bears equally. No one would be happy with temperatures below their comfort threshold, and at the equilibrium heat flow that satisfies everyone it's worth just about the same marginal cost of keeping the temperature that way; one might offer slightly lower heating prices on the outlying apartments so that residents who had a very low comfort slope vs. temperature could pay slightly less for heat and be slightly cold, making an apartment free for a resident with a steeper comfort slope at a more affordable price.

Actually, they're not. @kmm stated that they prefer their apartment at 19 degrees. Since it is 19 degrees already as a result of heat radiating from neighboring units, even when they have their thermostat set at 19, the heat won't come on.

I don't see how you can justify calling @kmm a freeloader here. Are they obligated to keep their thermostat higher than 19, even though they prefer the temperature of their apartment at 19? If so, why would you say they're obligated to waste energy? The only way to keep the apartment at 19 with the thermostat set higher would be to open the window continuously.

> Are they obligated

No. But the fact that there's no simple way to resolve the freeloading doesn't make them not a freeloader. It's a justification/defense for doing so.

The dictionary definition is "someone who takes advantage of others' generosity without something in return" and is also a derogatory term. In this case, the "freeloader" is not taking advantage of someone's "generosity" and neither are they doing something that deserves to be derogated. In fact, they are doing nothing because they get the heat regardless of whether they want it or not. Since they never asked for the heat, they could be suffering from it isn't having the "advantage.

> Since they never asked for the heat, they could be suffering from it isn't having the "advantage.

But we know it is an advantage to them. They said so.

And freeloading can be passive.

"You're freeloading, but there's not a good way to fix that." seems reasonable to me, in that the derogatory nature of 'freeloader' is basically suspended but it's not forgotten.

There is a way, the neighbors could install better insulation in their flats. They are not being generous with their heating, they are being wasteful. It's a good thing @kmm actually wants that heat. Otherwise it'd be a problem.

If @kmm had their heat turned on (and thermostat set to 19°, then their apartment's heating would contribute to bringing their apartment up to 19°. That would (by Newton's law of cooling) reduce the heat flux through their walls from the neighbor's apartments, causing the neighbors to spend less on heating. The neighbors are thus deprived of the difference in heating costs.

But if the room remains at 19° even when the thermostat is set lower, then the heating will provide the same energy output* regardless of whether it's set at 9° or 19°; that is, zero.

The heat flux through the walls with the neighbours will be the same in either situation, since that depends on the temperature difference, not

The previous comment [0] shows the truth of this, if you wanted the room set to 18° you would need to run cooling, which would cost you AND it would increase the neighbour's bills yet again, since now the heat flux is even greater.

Given the heating output will be zero whether 9° or 19°... this suggests that what people are reacting to is @kmm's intent...

Fair enough in the context of social norms, because with the thermostat set at 9° a non-physics normie would assume they were intending to 'steal' heat, whereas at 19° they are 'contributing fairly'... even when the actual output from their heating is exactly the same.

* This all assuming electrical / heat pump heating and an ideal scenario. In the real world there are temperature variations across the room and the idealist model may very well cease to apply.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29288237

This is largely the same problem as piracy. No, you're not depriving someone of their property that they can no longer use due to your actions, but many people who could very well afford to pay for media (of course barring the horrible issue with how you're actually given a "license") end up depriving the owner of revenue by watching it without paying.

You have deprived them of the opportunity & reasons for you to purchase it from them, which is their motive for creating it.

This is most definitely not like piracy. If you try to make that argument in a courtroom I'm pretty sure you'd get laughed out of the court.

> As soon as they start irradiating the heat all over the place, they are effectively giving everyone permission to use it.

Similarly, it's not theft to just take whatever is left on the curb the evening leading into grabage collection day.

it just sounds like you found the most hospitable climate for yourself, you don't have to feel bad for being a clever biological organism that is more efficient than your neighbors :)

we're all trying to do the same! it's arguably evolution?

Your neighbours are "stealing" from you, even if you run with that idea. They're not having to insulate your shared walls as much as their outside facing ones.

JFYI, there are largish condo's here (Italy) with central heating that were recently "converted" to new technology.

Basically on each radiator there is an electronic regulating valve (commanded by a thermostat) that logs the usage and that can be interrogated via radio frequency, a managing firm them calculates how much each apartment has to pay for heating.

Set aside the practical folly the system is from a maintenance viewpoint (not working valves, dead batteries, mis-readings and what not), after the first winter the main issues came out.

Till then people paid based on the area of each apartment, suddenly came out huge differences between - say - a central/south/southwest one and an outer/north/northeast one, in some cases the latter costed twice or nearly twice the former.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering about GP - I have some multisensors hooked up to HomeAssistant so I can see what happens over time, and as long as the sun is out the sun can warm mine up like 3-5 degrees between sunrise and noon, even in the winter. It doesn't all dissipate until the middle of the night.

Traditionally (and when/where possible) the way a house is (should be in theory) oriented is/was definite (at least here in central Italy), places where you live during the day (kitchen/dining room/sitting room) should face roughly south, bedrooms should face roughly north.

This way you have most of the light (and warmness) of the sun during the day, while bedrooms are colder (but you have blankets) in winter and fresher in summer.

Certain places use more complex methods of counting heat used, exactly because you leaving apartment unheated incured additional cost on neighbours.

Heat is transfered from their apartments, so they must pay more for your comfort.

But that doesn’t seem fair either? GP is perfectly happy at a cooler temperature.

If GP actually preferred an even colder temperature (perhaps for sleeping or exercising) and had to turn on the air conditioner, can they bill their neighbors? GP must pay more for their neighbor’s comfort.

Correct, it's potential that they are paying for GP's discomfort at times

But then the neighbours would both pay them and turn up their own heating to keep their own house at their own favourite temperature, since the airco is working against that.

The heat flux through the walls depends on the temperature of your apartment and your neighbor's apartments -- not on if your thermostat is on or off. So even if you leave your thermostat on at 19° you still benefit. And you have no obligation to turn your thermostat up.

Do you suppose that if someone’s hot apartment heats a neighbor, that likewise someone’s cold apartment cools a neighbor?

The neighbors have to spend more energy to maintain the temperature of their apartment because of this person not heating their own.

I could see an argument for theft.

The argument for theft would have to assume that there is a "right" temperature to set. Personally I would be sweating in a t-shirt if I had the heating set to 22C, which would be the only way to prevent the cooling in the example.

As others have pointed out, it's a happy coincidence that the equilibrium is at a point that GP is happy with. If it were higher they would have to actively cool their apartment which can be seen as a cost, sort of comparable to dumping trash on someone's property forcing them to pay to deal with it.

If one of your neighbors left for a long vacation and turned their thermostat off, causing your apartment to cool down significantly, would you turn your thermostat back on?

IMO, the fair thing to do is to set your thermostat to a temperature that you're satisfied with and leave it there. If your neighbors want their apartments at 22 degrees that's their business and your benefit. You don't have any codified responsibility here exactly, but it's still best to follow the golden rule.

Sounds like GP still has their thermostat turned to 19 - but now they are aware that it almost never results in the heater turning on.

This kind of reminds me of the cryptocurrency climate change hack.

Mining cryptocurrency uses electricity and some electricity currently comes from fossil fuels, so that's bad.

In many places the cost of direct heating from fossil fuels (fuel oil or natural gas) is less than using electric heaters, but electric heat is typically lower carbon because grid power is a mix of fossil and non-fossil fuels instead of 100% fossil fuels, and this gets better the more of the grid goes to non-fossil fuels. So switching to electric heat can lower your carbon footprint, but might cost more.

Cryptocurrency mining equipment is effectively an electric space heater that generates revenue. So if you heat your home in the winter using cryptocurrency mining equipment, you turn a profit while lowering your carbon footprint. Or it's carbon neutral free money to anyone already using electric heat.

I think you have to factor in transmission and conversion loss from converting carbon based fuels to electricity and powerline loss.

Then on the other side you also have the lower efficiency of small home furnaces compared to large combined cycle commercial power generation. It's not guaranteed to be less -- if your power grid is 100% coal and you're heating with natural gas, it very well might not be -- but in many/most cases it is. The most obvious winning case being where your power grid is predominantly nuclear, hydro and renewables.

If you're in the US they have the breakdown by state here:

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-g...

Washington, Oregon and Vermont are predominantly hydro. Illinois, New Hampshire and South Carolina are majority nuclear. South Dakota is, surprisingly, >80% hydro and wind. Wyoming is, unsurprisingly, 80% coal.

Electricity generation efficiency from coal is only 25-50% according to [1].

Heating efficiency of modern home furnaces is typically way above 90% according to [2].

Power transmission efficiency across the power grid is around 94% according to [3].

I'm treating natural gas the same as coal since, while the direct emissions are about half the CO2 per thermal unit produced, its production is much more problematic (esp. emission of methane) [4].

I've taken these numbers and the numbers given at the link you provided and calculated that probably (lacking numbers for the mean efficiency of coal->electricity production) only 10-15 states out of 51 satisfy your claim that heating with electricity (via resistive heating) is making lower use of coal than burning coal locally (as mentioned above I'm treating natural gas as an equivalent). I've put my spreadsheet here [5].

Note that the situation would be much different when using heat pumps instead of resistive heaters. (Aside of the coin generation, cryptocurrency mining rigs are resistive heaters.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal [2] https://www.pickhvac.com/gas-furnace/most-energy-efficient/ [3] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/united-states/energy-production-... [4] https://group.met.com/fyouture/natural-gas-vs-coal/66 [5] http://christianjaeger.ch/electricity_production_in_the_US.o...

> Electricity generation efficiency from coal is only 25-50% according to [1].

25% efficient generation is from ancient garbage that has largely already been retired because it's uneconomical.

Combined cycle turbines have efficiency up to 64%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant

Power plants in active service are probably around 50% efficient.

> Heating efficiency of modern home furnaces is typically way above 90% according to [2].

That number is for the newest highest efficiency furnaces. By comparison you could say that commercial power generation with cogeneration achieves even higher efficiencies, but neither is widely deployed.

Existing furnaces are as low as 56% efficient:

https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers

The average for the existing installed base is probably around 80%.

Someone evaluating this for personal use might research the efficiency of their own furnace or compare the cost of installing a more efficient one vs. the net cost (possibly net profit) and environmental benefit of heating with electricity generated by rooftop solar.

> I'm treating natural gas the same as coal since, while the direct emissions are about half the CO2 per thermal unit produced, its production is much more problematic (esp. emission of methane) [4].

Then you have to count the same thing the other way when you're heating with natural gas. Fuel oil is even worse because it emits more CO2 per unit heat than natural gas and is extracted using the same methane-leaking process. Worse than that, many oil wells capture only the liquid fuel, have no infrastructure for capturing the natural gas and knowingly release it directly to the atmosphere!

Assuming your equivalence between coal and natural gas, that commercial power generation and transmission are 47% efficient (50% x 94%) and home furnaces are 80%, the percent non-fossil fuels needed for breakeven with natural gas heat is 41.25%. Some even lower number for oil heat. That's pretty much exactly the existing US average (and thus already ahead in places like California which are at >51%), and is only going to move in one direction as fossil fuels get phased out of the power grid.

If the question is about deciding what kind of heating to use, more likely than not the choice will be for new gear. For a new house the choice would be between one of the modern furnaces or electric heating. For someone with an old furnace, the choice would be between no change, a new furnace, and electric heater. I haven't checked the payoff and environmental cost of a new furnace versus no change, but it seems relatively likely that also in this scenario the competition to electric heating would be a new furnace.

Would electric heating mostly use electricity during times when solar or wind is abundant? If not, then, until storage is widespread and is efficient, coal might still end up being used to satisfy those customers' requirements and the mix would be worse. Electric heaters that store heat in a large mass exist, but that approach wouldn't work for mining rigs.

I don't dispute that electric heating can be better than gas/oil, depending on location. But I still don't believe it's the majority of cases. And again, this ignores that in many cases the best solution would be a heat pump. If the argument is about making cryptocurrency mining ecological, it would be disingenuous to ignore that alternative.

Electric space heaters are the least efficient way to use electricity to heat a space.

A variant of this idea suggests that humans evolved sophisticated intelligence -- and a bipedal stance -- as a way to efficiently let off waste heat in the hot tropical environment. Hard for me to believe, but the idea is out there.

Our two previous apartments had the same issue.

Even when it was -30 outside, our apartment was a warm 22-24 degrees with the radiators completely off.

Our current one is really refreshing, because we can actually get the heat under 20 degrees by turning off the radiators. Took about a month to get used to the lower indoor temp, but we feel and sleep much better now.

we did that when i was a kid. we had central heating where each radiator has some kind of device with material that evaporates depending on how hot the radiator is. the heating bill was based on how much evaporated. we didn't want to save money or the environment, we just liked it a bit cooler. that was decades ago and there was no temperature control on the thermostat. the only way to get to our desired temperature was to turn the heating off.

the result was that measurement devices didn't evaporate at all, and the company had us investigated for cheating. (apparently some people tried to prevent the evaporation by wrapping them in some isolating material.)

I was going to post exactly this :-) I live in a 5 year old apartment, and there are two units above and below exactly the same layout. We don't turn on our heating until it gets well below freezing as the heat from other apartments is more than enough. This season the coldest temperature I've seen is 20.5c - when it was 0c outside and cloudy for one week.

For vertical neighbours you could say they could have insulated the ceilings (when we bought the apartment new it was unfinished, just concrete inside), so it was their choice to allow heat to escape. But we have underfloor heating, so it's not just neighbours vertically but also horizontally, as quite a lot of heat transfers via the concrete floors too (this is the only way the common areas of the building are heated) - you can't insulate that.

In the summer we have AC on, and a lot of our neighbours don't have it, so I figure we benefiting them at that time by taking away some of their heat.

On a related note, if you have underground parking I'd also suggest to choose the lowest floor if you have a choice (as long as there is no flood risk). We are on -2 and when it's 35c outside our car is parked in a cool 18c, and when it's -25c it is 8c.

In slovenia, we have very complicated formulas to determine the cost of heating in multi-apartment buildings, and the costs are calculated by the usage of your radiators (we have energy counters for heat in every apartment), and you add/subtract the some reduced values of your neighbors meter (the ones you share your walls with), and the things are averaged out a bit.

Basically, even if you turn all the radiators off in your apartment, you still pay around 50% or even more (if you share most of the walls) of the average heating bill.

So if I set my thermometer to a super warm luxury temperature, my neighbors have to pay for that?

Yeah, a bit of that... but they use less of their own heat, since you are heating their apartments too.

It kind of makes sense. If you turn yours really high, your neighbor doesn't need to turn theirs as high anymore because you will be warming up their apartment

But this assumes that more heat = good is always true. What if it isn't? If you're running a whole bunch of computers in one of the rooms then extra heat from your neighbor might actually be harmful rather than helpful.

A judge made a similar point during in a court case about whether animals have property rights (I believe it was Cetacean Community v U.S). They said "if animals have the rights of humans wouldn't they then have then responsibilities?" Wouldn't you then be able to sue a monkey for not maintaining a stream bed such that it floods you?

It just assumes that more heat needs more fuel therefore more cost. It's a finite resource. What you do with the heat is irrelevant

Yes, but the point is that you're paying for something you didn't want.

That's the reality of multiapartment buildings. People at lower levels don't want to pay for elevator repair, and also don't want to pay for roof repair... people higher up don't care about people parking directly infront of ground level windows, and that the floors at ground level are usually cold(er).

Yes and no. Yes, they pay for some of your consumption, but if the formula is accurate, they save that (or more) because the heat leaking from your appt into theirs means they can heat less.

If they want to make these more complicated, they could also factor in the usage of gpus in each apartment.

The owners-meetings are already complicated enough, especially when someone old is away from home for a month, and they get a bill that includes heat, and they complain that their radiators were off all the time :) ...then they find out that they're paying for their neigbors heat, and then they start complaining, about "that neighbor above them" who keeps their windows open, even during the winter :)

...former socialist country, so yeah, people complain, and want everything to be "fair", as long as "fair" means less money for them to pay.

I would read an article with a quick history of this particular formula (who came up with it, who enforces it), what people think of it, how accurate it is in respect to the actual movement of heat, etc. Does it account for heat rising irt mutilevel buildings?

Just a leftfield idea for any blocked Slovenian writers.

This is one of the documents that regulates one type of heating system in slovenia... You can mostly just find companies that do the calculations for you :)

https://www-pisrs-si.translate.goog/Pis.web/pregledPredpisa?...

Article 15

If the temperature is too high for you and you used an air conditioner to lower it, then wouldn't you be paying twice: for the AC and the heating?

Do your neighbors have to pay extra when they don't run their AC in Summer?

If you're running your AC, aren't you also raising your neighbor's heating bills?

If the A/C exhaust was set up to vent into your neighbors, you could actually be lowering their heating bill :)

This comment is the winner for me. Co-generation for the win!

I so wish combined-cycle gas turbines could be miniaturised enough to run one at home and still have the same efficiencies.

We use heat, when it's cold outside (i think it has to bee three days below 12°C at 9pm - not sure), so if it's too hot for you, you just open a window.

AC usage is not regulated.

I do the same thing. I practically turn my heat off in the winter and all my neighbors warm me.

Did you notice a change in bills?

I realised this when I lived in a middle flat. I had the heating set to around 20 degrees I think, but it barely ever kicked on. The downside was in the summer it got too hot and I couldn't cool it well at all. Wasn't great for sleeping.

> I often wonder whether this constitutes stealing.

No, definitely not. You're not responsible for the insulation context of the apartment you're renting (as it pertains to eg such things as shared or external walls). You're not responsible for the apartment design. You're not responsible for the materials it is constructed of, nor how thick its walls are.

You would have to do something dramatic to the construction of the apartment to alter the context you're describing, and that's likely not in your legal purview to do, as such it's not your responsibility morally or legally.

All I can think here is : so you have individual heat billing in an apartment building? IOW separate electric or gas heaters in each apartment?

I’m used to central heating, basically a water-circulating radiator setup, where the overall water temperature is set by the condo management and thermostats regulate the temperatures in each apartment, within the limits of the total heat provided. No way to monitor what people have their thermostats set to.

And, of course, district heating is a big thing. What I’m trying to say here is, it sounds like there are bigger problems with the heating in your apartment building than whether or not you’re stealing heat from your neighbours.

> IOW separate electric or gas heaters in each apartment?

No, it does not mean that. As other comments already mentioned, local energy counters on the radiators are a thing.

Here’s another one.

I know someone who’s upstairs neighbours radiator pipes ran through their apartment. The pipes are scalding hot when the neighbour’s heating is on.

What is the legality of slapping a big honking heat sink on the pipes?

He never did it but we discussed it, from both technical and ethical points of view.

It would likely be considered either trespass to chattel or to land.

Maybe they have their thermostats set at 20 and are working more to keep those 20 whilst heating your apartment too. Even if they set their thermostats at 25 they would be working extra to compensate.

Is there a mandatory maximum temperature in your country?

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.

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.

I'd trade the stolen electricity and internet for my stolen commute time, gas money, and vehicle wear any time.

By this logic, your employer should have subjected you to something much worse originally, so you'd be happy to pay the vehicle wear and tear, gas, and commute time.

Correct. This isn't revealing. Norm conditions were worse originally (in factories and other industries) and had settled in a less worse condition recently. Now it's less worse again and people are happier. Unsurprising.

Exactly what I came to say. They pay for a limited resource. The download and upload rates. Which is indeed limited in availability. With the light its not much different than driving around and enjoying looking at others Christmas lights. You didn't buy their lights, they bought them, but you derive value / joy from them which was their purpose.

> the harm is relatively small

Try working from a Third World country, you connecting to your company's bandwidth-hungry VPN means anyone sharing the wifi won't be able to do anything.

VPNs don't usually consume any significant bandwidth overhead at all which makes me curious as to what service your employer is using?

I’ve heard many WFH setups that record your screen and monitor your camera to make sure you’re actually working. There could be monitoring stuff bundled with the VPN that does consume many resources (or IT dept is screen recording remotely).

It's not the VPN itself but the software that makes the traffic

Maybe more simply put, they’re using the “wasted” light ?

Exactly. If neighbor doesn't want their light "stolen", then they can use a curtain and stop throwing the light onto the street. If they don't want rats to "steal" their peanuts, they can grab them from the bag without dropping and leaving a handful on the road.

Candle-light is more expensive than bandwidth is today. Also, bandwidth is the use over a specified allotment.

Aside from the obvious analog that your neighbors wifi is literally a light you cannot see, if they aren't maxing out their bandwidth, then it makes similarly no difference that you use it.

It's not 10 years ago, the neighborhood using your router for Facebook doesn't dent the bandwidth.

So how is it not comparable to stray light?

> if they aren't maxing out their bandwidth, then it makes similarly no difference that you use it

That is a big assumption right there. The neighborhood streaming 4k cat videos from youtube could make a massive dent, and I can easily use all the bandwidth I have for my own needs.

That's before we consider the potential consequences of them "borrowing" my IP address and all. Of course it's on me to keep my network secure so I don't let that happen, but in theory they could find the next vulnerability that lets them in.

>if they aren't maxing out their bandwidth

The analogy is only in the contextually relevant case of a limited resource and the consumption.

The juxtaposition of individual vs collectivism, and the inevitable tragedy of the commons, was the relevance.

Of course, any technical analogy on HN gets pedantically deconstructed into atomic trivialness.

Anywho - if you don't broadcast your SSID, or, even less dismissively, don't Faraday cage your house, then anyone interacting with the electromagnetic field that you haphazardly allow to escape the privacy of your residence is within their rights to do so.

> Anywho - if you don't broadcast your SSID, or, even less dismissively, don't Faraday cage your house, then anyone interacting with the electromagnetic field that you haphazardly allow to escape the privacy of your residence is within their rights to do so.

Are you seriously arguing that anyone is allowed to tamper with your mobile phone signal as long as you're at home and they're outside the walls?

Yes, and it is legal, and commonly done.

You are allowed to broadcast a cell phone tower signal and MiTM the connection.

You are not forcing others to connect to your signal.

The spirit of this freedom is even emblazoned on every compliant device, look for the FCC warning.

As for jamming, that is entirely unrelated, not comparable, and illegal. It would be akin to blaring loud music and lights.

> anyone interacting with the electromagnetic field that you haphazardly allow to escape the privacy of your residence is within their rights to do so

You seem to have an insufficient understanding of how wireless communication protocols work, in particular the 'communication' aspect. Simply detecting the signal would not allow you to use the WiFi network. You would have to establish a connection with the access point and actively and continuously exchange information with it, thereby directly using its resources.

This is not the same as coming across a fallen coin in the street, or reading by ambient light emitted by someone else's candle

Reading by the ambient light emitted is constantly exchanging photons, which is information communication. Picking up a fallen coin is displacing localized complexity.

If it wasn't, you wouldn't be given any extra photons to bounce off the book and into your eyes, and wouldn't know of the candle across the street, since the photons were "insufficient" to make themselves known to you.

Again, pedantically deconstructing a technical analogy to dismiss it on its merits is going to be hard when faced with a more pedantic pissant.

The point of the entire exercise is to acknowledge the collective vs individual contributions to the emergent tragedy of the commons.

> Reading by the ambient light emitted is constantly exchanging photons, which is information communication.

Wrong. You don't emit photons

> Picking up a fallen coin is displacing localized complexity.

That's a meaningless statement

> Again, pedantically deconstructing a technical analogy to dismiss it on its merits is going to be hard when faced with a more pedantic pissant.

It's an analogy that doesn't work, picking apart the differences is revealing

> The point of the entire exercise is to acknowledge the collective vs individual contributions to the emergent tragedy of the commons.

Another meaningless statement

The author is mixing a lot of largely unrelated topics. Emitting light from your residence is just an externality that can be positive or negative depending on the situation.

The question “who should pay for lighting?” is a classic question that comes up when discussing street lights in the context of theoretical user-pays economics models. As in “what services can potentially be implemented in a user-pays model? for instance you can’t practically charge somebody for benefitting from a street light”.

Using somebody else’s wifi is related to neither of those topics, because that’s about consuming somebody else’s limited resources without their permission. The legality and morality of that question relates to whether the wifi broadcaster should expect that to occur when using unsecured wifi, and whether they should have any obligation to take reasonable steps to prevent it if they don’t want it happening.

Both light and and wifi are EM waves. Stealing wifi is just you stealing their "light" and them stealing "your light."

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.

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.

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-...

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.

>"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.

> 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.

uhm, it's not an allergy to free things that is why it's illegal to leech your neighbor's wifi. It's illegal to leech your neighbor's wifi because you could do something illegal which then gets pinned on your neighbor.

You can live in the forest if you don't want to live in society. Nobody is stopping you and there is more space than you can roam in your entire lifetime. Good luck!

It's an interesting thought experiment IMO and you can't really resolve moral questions by looking at what the law says. After all, the law tends to be based on some moral principles, and laws can fail or be ineffective/corrupt.

It is quite conceivable that when it comes to working-from-home (and having the employer contribute to the costs that you make at home), the laws simply aren't in place yet, because we have never seen WFH on the scale that we see during the pandemic. So it is ultimately silly to try to determine what is reasonable based on the currently existing law here.

The laws exist already, and even where they don’t directly address WiFi, they address broad enough situations to be applicable to WiFi issues. It’s also not really something that requires unique and specific laws to address. For it to be a useful practical thought experiment it ought to address the law as it exists. It’s a cut and dry issue as it relates to the law. The interesting points might be around what level it ought to shift from a civil issue to a criminal one and vice versa. The analogy in the original post between a broadcasted network signal and excess light is also a bad analogy even though technically it’s just two types of light emitted at different frequencies. It’s not analogous because of how it’s used in the two separate instances.

It’s not really that interesting of a philosophical issue either; I find the notion that it’s a novel issue to be baffling. Out of all the many novel issues arising from mass WFH this isn’t one of them.

This feels like a subtle anti-remote work puff piece to test the waters with scare phrases like:

"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."

I don't know a many people who lament WFH, excepting educators and middle-managers.

I’m not sure I would read that passage as lamenting WFH. It could equally be read as comment on whether is fair to pay people less if they’re WFH. Or equally it could be read as comment that companies should be passing some of their WFH savings on to employees rather than shareholders.

> Or equally it could be read as comment that companies should be passing some of their WFH savings on to employees rather than shareholders.

There's nothing about savings mentioned, just costs. Now you could really stretch the meaning of cost to possibly include inversion of value, but that's incongruous with the vernacular used in the article and is not even hinted at. Based on these things, I wouldn't agree with the interpretation of "costs".

Corporate welfare (savings go to value/bonuses/shareholders, costs go to customers) is a the norm in the US. This article goes one step farther to suggest there are costs that are being passed to the employees. It makes no sense when faced with reality, playing as FUD.

> It's an interesting thought experiment

What is the experiment? Honestly? What's the point? That two people enjoy different advantages and that's unfair and needs to be addressed?

Here's a take on that "issue" by Vonnegut that actually is well thought out and interesting:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

In the days before computer access laws I know of someone who was charged with "Unlawful extraction of electricity" for using a computer in violation of his allowable access.

> 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.

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.

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.

This is a positive externality something long discussed and understood by economists.

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.

> 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.

You are also consuming electric power from the neighbor by keeping their wifi non-idle, which means more heat and thus load for their climatization when he comes back. Also the lifetime of the electrical components involved is therefore reduced.

Well, if you want to consider such a small amount of energy,then each time a light you own illuminate you're neighbour's property, you're heating it too…

You’re still stealing, as the neighbor is paying for the availability of bandwidth, whether they are using it or not.

They are paying for the light too.

But using the overspill light doesn’t reduce the availability of light.

Nor does using unused bandwidth though.

But the point is that someone is paying for that bandwidth to be available, regardless of it being used or not, at the moment. Light is not consumed, it is produced. Someone else put it that spillover light is gleaned. Bandwidth cannot be gleaned in the same way. You don’t have excess bandwidth like you would have light.

You're assuming no data caps; lots of people are on uplinks that bill by the byte or after some limit

So no data caps and it’s ok?

I never said data caps were the only problem, just pointing out that they are one practical problem.

So if they have unlimited data, and you only read websites not affecting their use, you say it’s ok??

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.

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.

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?

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/

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.

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.

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".

But intellectual property isn’t a thing then.

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.

I'm fine with that outcome.

Me too, but completely unwinds the software economic model. Licenses are meaningless, as would more broadly copyright.

A lot less than 'completely'. A big chunk of software is commissioned, and another big chunk of software is open source.

… a tiny chunk (by value).

Commissioned software Is a fraction of product/services protected by IP law.

Open source doesn’t really have an effective business model (and it doesn’t need one!)

So much software is in-house, and that's only part of commissioned software, are you sure it's a tiny chunk?

In house Software still rely on ip law. Try stealing Facebook’s source code and see what happens.

Not giving back when you can is greed, not theft. But these days we encourage greed, so copyright owners had to frame greed as thef to make it punishable.

That's not the definition of greed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

>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.

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.

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.

It’s not being weird with money. Commuting costs have no bearing on the point that I am now paying for things that companies pay for if I’m going in to an office. The overhead for an employee is typically 100-250% of their salary, and this is because it includes costs like monitors, desks, equipment, and energy usage. With employees working from home, that overhead cost has reduced and eliminated in some cases but is not returned to the employee. Some places do subsidize work-related costs at home.

Not commuting may reduce the cost for the employee but it isn’t relevant to the specific argument because those costs were never seen by the company.

>Those costs were seen by the employees.

Most of that overhead is stuff like healthcare, payroll tax, etc. It's going nowhere.

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/overhead-include-payroll-607...

You serious don't have a chair and a desk at home already?

You can buy a small desk for 100$ and a chair for another 100$. A monitor can be had for another 200$.

In addition to this you can now live a drastically cheaper life. Moving to a city where rent is 1/3rd as much, you don't need a car, etc.

Let's say you get a job for a company that's located in Los Angeles. In la a one-bedroom is about $2,500, and you need a car which on the low end is going to cost you between a $500 to $700.

If they make you come into the office your core monthly living expenses, even before nice things like food and electricity are about $3200.

However, if they allow you to work remote you can live in say Philadelphia, find a nice apartment for around $1,400 and live car free. A metro pass is like 100$ That's 1700$ a month back in your pocket.

How can you ask for more, of course you might still prefer to live in LA for personal reasons, but then you're choosing to live like that.

I know I'm going to enjoy saving an extra $1,700 a month, not to mention getting up and hopping on the train even if you're in some magical Utopian city where public transit is free, is much harder than just logging in.

WFH saves you money and it saves the company money.

This would be true even if you had to pay your company to work from home, but that would pretty clearly be an unfair situation!

I think it's reasonable to say that if a company gets to stop providing certain utilities at the office, it would be fair to contribute to those utilities for WFH employees. Why don't you think that's reasonable?

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.

The end justifies the means?

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.

So he is stealing your darkness...

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.

Nope. Requiring your neighbor to read and therefore light their lamp is a different story though.

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).

The relationship of the opening story to the whole rest of the article is strained, tbh.

If my neighbor had a QoS config which meant my use did not degrade their bandwidth, then it would be ok?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I do understand having skin in the game, but at the same time it pushes away candidates, particularly during this labor shortage[1]. And it has disparate racial impact, because oppressed minorities are less likely to have the finances to invest in their own tools.

My thought is that any good company should be able to create emotional skin in the game (i.e. caring) without needing financial skin in the game. If a company isn't there, it needs to sell its mission better and link the availability of tools to that mission.

[1] if you subscribe to the view that there is no shortage but only an unwillingness to pay fair wages (which is totally valid if there are no upfront costs to getting a job), consider that after months of losing savings to a pandemic, candidates may literally not have the cash to buy tools needed for a new job, so in this case it is truly a shortage of candidates with the ability to get the tools

What jobs are you imagining have such difficult/steep tool requirements?

My experience was auto-mechanic, and that strikes me as exceptionally high in the required tools department. They were willing to put up with my being tool-less for like two years before replacing me when an old-timer showed up looking for work, with a freezer sized toolbox in the bed of his truck, and I was clearly not committed to the career having still not invested in even a toolbox.

Construction workers and framing carpenters can start out with very little. A lot of the work is just labor. Back when my dad owned a concrete construction company he would bring most of the durable larger tools in quantity.. stuff like sledge hammers, pickaxes, shovels, those were shared. But the individuals were expected to bring a hammer for nailing/disassembling the framing, and steel-toe boots for OSHA compliance b.s. If you started out without even a hammer you'd just be a grunt then buy a hammer a week later, though someone would probably loan you one if you were that destitute. I think there were more barriers in the area of the union and trade school requirements, but not for a laborer AFAIK.

The flip side of workers taking better care of their own tools is that their tools also actually get used.

When I worked construction (many years ago) you could always spot an inexperienced bullshitter who showed up looking for work on the crew by the fact that his tools would be all shiny and new.

I guess the pro tip there is that if you don't have much experience and want to work construction, take your brand-new tools and beat up on them a little bit before going to look for work. :-)

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!".

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?

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?

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?)

Is it stealing to stand outside a festival camp/concert area and listen to the music for free?

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.

If it is, then the neighbour is guilty of light pollution, and should be forced to take measures to mitigate their polluting activities.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

It would be more profitable to extort money out of that professor.

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...

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

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.

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-electrici...

> [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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Is your moral responsibility to care for the market?

Is it more immoral to devalue the market for light than to inconvenience your neighbor?

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.

Is it so hard to acknowledge that stealing and externalities are not so black and white?

There are already laws about this: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rights-to-light

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

IANAL, but the rule that you can't internalize (by charging money) the positive externalities you create seems to apply here? ;P

You could also say that the lamp owner who's lamp is on is polluting his neighbor with light, by that argument.

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

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.

Honestly it seems like if you don't pay a monthly subscription everything is stealing

Yes it is stealing, because light providing companies might go bankrupt and this leaves your neighbor without light.

(simply put)

No it's gleaning.

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.

That's a fascinating personality trait. Was it part of a larger pattern?

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.

Was his name Ebenezer by any chance?

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.

> An outsider would say it's wasteful or mean, but seeing it happen gave a good context.

A context with a dumb solution. How about reducing the discount?

I'm not sure that's fair, but perhaps I painted the wrong picture. This is a small grocery deli - there'd be anywhere from a zero to maybe 10 or 15 pieces max. I only likened it because of the newspaper example - it's just not much. Spending any amount of time above zero on studying and solving the problem just isn't worth it.

Expecting everyone to chip in on the newspaper is reasonable in the same way many antisocial behaviors are reasonable.

Not sure I understand, but think it's the same point I was trying to make.

But honestly, an office spending 10 or 20 bucks on multiple daily newspapers is the correct answer, as it's miles cheaper than having the tension that OP described existing.

That's just silly. If I've used something as much as I'm going to, it has no sentimental value to me, and I'm not planning to resell it, why would I not give it away?

Yeah, if anything I prefer that someone else read it after me, because then it feels like my purchase had more value.

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.

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