Comment by mountainb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mountainb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

> 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.

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.

>"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!

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