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Comment by bossyTeacher | Hacker News Reader

Maybe. Anyway, let us not forget that both of these actions are unethical.

Sure, theft is theft.

But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.

And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?

In this context it's not one individual stealing from another. This is a temporary reallocation of a dormant resource within the system to a more critical process that requires those resources to perform its function and ensure the system remains stable. In this framing I'd be inclined to argue not taking the RAM would be the unethical choice.

Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!

You're spending a ton of effort to try to craft implausible scenarios like the RAM only being "temporarily" taken or the work it was used for being critical. I could just as easily claim that the one who's RAM was taken had critical humanitarian work that didn't get done in time because their RAM was stolen so their coworker could play the latest game that required 16 MB. The actual facts that have been established make neither of these less likely than the other because they're both incredibly unlikely, and it's kind of bizarre that you seem to think otherwise.

Ethics aren't binary. The amount of harm caused to a company needing to allocate an extra 8 MB of RAM a single time is a lot lower than the amount of harm caused to an individual by forcing them to lose 1/4 of their workday.

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