The Donut Hustle
theplayerstribune.com
theplayerstribune.com
I had my PC setup with all the file sharing programs, hammering my cable modem 24/7, downloading movies and music. DVD's were $10 and audio CD's were $5.
My main competition was bootleg movies on regular CD's that you could buy at flea markets, gas stations and party store but they had terrible quality. Not just because they had to fit on a CD but many of them were shot in the theater with a handheld video camera, not rips from IRC channels. They were only $5, though.
It was way too much work driving around dropping discs off and I couldn't use my laptop for learning Cocoa, so I stopped doing it after a few months.
It was also (to us) INCREDIBLY expensive to buy a CD burner, so before either of us could get one, we made cassette tapes of the albums, and sold those.
The weirdest thing for me to think about looking back on it is how many of my peers still had cassette tape players in the year 2000.
This was a pretty inspirational story, I really enjoyed it. He seems like a smart guy, and I am sure he enjoys playing ball, obviously a very successful guy. He picked an avenue and followed through going pro. If he had more opportunities it would be interesting to see if he turned out as an academic or entrepreneur or if having to fight for everything he had is what made him so great.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professio...
I'm not a big moral relativist, but "ethics" when viewed by a resident of Compton in the early 2000's might appear in a slightly different light than many other places I can think of.
Ethics are for rich people. Morality is for everyone. What this kid did may have violated some of the ethical rules a bunch of privileged people set up to perpetuate and sanitize their own in-grouped society, but Aaron had basically zero participation in that group so its rules must have seemed impossibly distant to him. His actions, however seem to have been both a benefit to him and to his community, vs the other choices he could have made that would benefit him at the expense of his own group. I'd call these actions moral, even if not "ethical".
How different really is this than when Uber or AirBNB thumbs their collective noses at the rules "the man" has set up that seem wrong to them?
Aaron's a hacker, and a hustler, just like us. One of our kind.
For example, my personal opinion is that it is unethical to directly support companies working to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, especially for mere convenience.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but an NBA player's livelihood depends quite a bit on the "imaginary property" that makes it illegal to rebroadcast games and sell counterfeit jerseys.
But the author wasn't the one who brought up ethics. A "hustle everything" set of ethics seems like it would include both breaking copyright law and utilizing it, depending on how it benefits oneself. Perhaps this is approaching a "null" ethics, but if those values are shared by his peer group then it seems like they should still qualify as ethics.
It's just a bit disingenuous to appeal to ethics and morality while really referencing laws, especially when we can see (historically) that laws are often wrong.
Look at it this way: does anyone get hurt if 50 cent donut is being sought for $1? There's no Napster of donut business.
Even the worst behavior is moral, ethical, and legal given certain frameworks.
I sincerely hope that your pronouncements regarding the ethics of those less fortunate are met in vigor with your efforts to right their systematic disenfranchisement.
Allow me to use the Godwin accelerator to draw it all the way out:
"Ja, Herr Kommissar, I saw Frau ten Boom sneak half a dozen Jews into her attic on Tuesday" is the ethical answer. It is the only answer that satisfied the answer's requirements under the law of that time and place. But ethics had ceased to matter, civilization had already failed. Morality was all that was left.
There's a continuum, and being poor, black, and living in Compton in 2003 pushes the puck down the line a little towards uncivilized, into the space where morality starts to hold as much or more sway than ethics. We're just arguing about the amount.
In this case, the guy violated copyright law, one of the laws people tend to not agree with, so he is popular.
There is some optimal set of ethics which, if consistently followed, will lead to an optimal set of outcomes. We're not clever enough to figure them out, though, and so people will quite happily come up with their own, inevitably self-serving ethical systems in which "the things I want to do are right, the things you want to do are wrong".
Getting everyone to behave perfectly ethically is impossible, but telling everyone that their own self-serving ethical systems are perfectly valid is one of the worst things you can do.
I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.
(Keep in mind I had friends in gangs, not Compton but they got in shootouts nonetheless.)
All people believe their racism is justified, all are wrong.
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It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster.
I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.