I paid for my first PowerBook G4 this way. I didn't buy the built-in SuperDrive because I knew I'd burn it out in a few months, so I got a Sony FireWire DVD writer.
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.
My friend and I also hustled bootleg rap albums in the early 2000s, but in our case, we were two white kids selling the explicit versions of the albums you couldn't buy at the nearest music store, which was a Wal-Mart. Lots of our customers already had the album, they just wanted the version with the curses left in.
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.
We also had two $5 CD hustlers in my high school in the Napster days. I can attest - The demand was insane. Retail price was really high and $5 seemed to be the sweet spot of affordability.
I remember someone back in the pre-napster days when CD writers were thousands of dollars. They were selling "The Best of Bill" on CD for $15 a pop: it had Windows 95, Visual Basic, Word etc, Visual C++...
I was one of those hustlers from 2000-2002. I was in a junior high with only 90 students, and I was the first with a CD burner. It was best when a clique of girls would come up and ask for the exact same songs, $5/ea...easiest $15 ever. I don't remember who eventually took over supplying the masses, but I was honestly sick of doing it by the time they did.
If you’re a man of your word and people can count on you, it cuts across all lines.
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.
By the time i hit highschool, it was easy to find music and movies online, but modding the hardware to play it, PSP, DS flashcards, chipping xbox, PS1, was ripe.
esp. because no-one else knew how to use a soldering iron, and the whole bricking your device warning turned people off.
The park where I’d go to play basketball as a kid was a big Blood hangout. And obviously, my CD empire wouldn’t exactly hold up 100 percent to copyright laws but compared to the alternatives of what I could’ve been doing for money, I think it was pretty solid.
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.
I'd argue its that degree of difficulty that is at issue here. $15.99 paid to a big corp is very different to an out-grouped minority living in poverty with almost no investment in "the system" than it is to a Princeton student living on his trust fund.
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.
Sadly, you are incorrect, and probably in the majority. Rules of ethics are not setup by privileged few; they are the cause of civilized humanity. Without them, we wouldn't have come this far. What he did to hustle the donuts, was fair and ethical. He earned his fair share. But what he did with churning out CDs, was not. We all can possibly see that. But of course, the trade born out of Napster must have been hard to resist. The part about resisting, is where ethics reside.
I'm not saying that his actions were ethical. They were not. I am saying that ethics are not absolute and that there is a point where they simply become irrelevant and can and do depart from "civilized humanity". Ethics and morals can in extreme cases become opposites. The civilization happens when we get them to align and keep them that way.
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.
Generalizations regarding the theoretical role of ethics in society are easy to offer. What is far more difficult is forging one's way in a world that systematically shifts the definition of ethics in a manner that privileges a few at one's own expense.
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.
One can have a consistent set of ethics in which imaginary property does not exist.
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.
One can have a consistent set of ethics in which imaginary property does not exist.
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.
Perhaps the issue is that when saying anything is moral, ethical, or legal, we seem to be acting as if there is some universal system of morals, ethics, or laws that we are applying to.
Even the worst behavior is moral, ethical, and legal given certain frameworks.
One of us as long as the ethics and laws he breaks are what we find personally agreeable. Skirt rental laws and you become popular because so few people understand the reason for those laws. Skirt child labor laws and you don't, because people do see the major wrong, even if what you are providing for those children is a better alternative than any of their other choices.
In this case, the guy violated copyright law, one of the laws people tend to not agree with, so he is popular.
Ethics are subjective. In the culture he described this seems like it was no only ethical, but praiseworthy. Ethics are not universal and neither are principles. I think he turned out alright, but that is my opinion.
Fundamental ethics are not subjective. Is murder subjective? A live human disappears from existence by force, how is that subjective? Now, murder something of that live person, say, make him handicapped by force. Is that subjective? You will now claim that it is subjective, because the person is at least alive. No. It is still not subjective. Now, take it further down the food chain. Steal something from a person. Bully him. Curse him. Make his life miserable. All subjective? Nothing is subjective here. The fundamental ethics filters down to the common ethics. If one is subjective, they are all subjective. But you will be hard pressed to prove a murder to be subjective. So, none of the ethics are subjective.
Ethics are not subjective. People merely disagree on what the right ones are.
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 of it as a cute, slightly self-promoting story in an inspirational vein: underprivileged kid gains valuable business skills by hustling family-friendly wares to fellow students, grows up to use those skills to realize his childhood dream. Also he knew Kendrick Lamar before he was famous. It's light, but I like it.
"Honestly, I think that philosophy is why I was able to make it to UCLA and have a long NBA career. A lot of dudes have a good jump shot. A lot of dudes can play ball. But how many guys are willing to put in the extra work that it takes? At this level, you have to be almost addicted to the work."
I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.
I see it as teaching fairly basic business and personal finance concepts. In a league where 60% of players go bankrupt within five years after leaving the sport [1], this is likely pretty enlightening for some readers.
Bluntly, that's a very white person response. Do you know about Compton? Anything that's not selling drugs or gang related to get out is fine. What's right or wrong has a lot to do with the circumstances you're in.
I pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the development software I used to learn C, assembly language, etc. This is back on the C64/Amiga 500, before free software was a thing for at home use (the gnu project existed, but I was doing this well before Linux existed). The software was often being sold for multiples of the cost of the (scrounged-together) hardware I'd be running it on.
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.
What about Bill Gates' role in popularizing desktop computers for the whole world, and mostly for free or bootlegged copies of Windows? Apple/Jobs didn't want to do that. Nobody wanted Linux in comparison.
https://youtu.be/BPAxrGT2emw