14 reasons to stop stealing

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

“Well, of course you can't steal,” a reader will say when he sees the headline calling for abandoning this obvious evil … but meanwhile, almost every one of these readers is an active thief, he simply does not know about it yet, or does not attach sufficient importance to it.

I think you don’t need to explain that in modern society, people’s craving for freebies can be traced. It seems to them that they can download a hacked program, a movie from a pirate site, team up and take the whole crowd to take a training course from one account, get another service for free, and even just read a text on the Internet (even free lying!) For free. At the same time, there is such an illusion that they are saving on this:) Naive guys:) Let's consider 14 reasons that should convince you to immediately get rid of this illusion if it exists. Whether they convince is your business.

What is less obvious is that these reasons will have to convince you to stop consuming free entertainment content on the Internet altogether, but I will write another article on this topic, as they say, finishing off. For now, please read this one. Only warn: when you finish reading, your life will not be the same …

This is a trap article, and you still have a chance of not falling into it if you stop right now. Sooner or later, the information from this article will finish you off, or make you better - it's up to you. It's useless to protest … When you get to the keyword phrase of the article, there will be no way back, I warned.

We started …

1Let's say I created a useful computer program (software), invested energy in it in the expectation that it would bring profit and cover the costs that I incurred while creating it. A hacker hacked the program - and posted it for free somewhere on pirate sites. People began to download the program for free, and I stopped getting money for it, not having typed even a tenth of what was invested in it in the equivalent of time and effort, and even more so without typing what was expected of it.

The person who downloaded the pirated version thinks he saved and created a more financially profitable situation for himself than if he paid me. But he is wrong. If everyone for whom the program turned out to be useful paid for it, then I would get enough time to continue my creativity, I could improve the program, release the next version, or maybe create another useful product.

But the people who stole the program do not want this, they want to get what they have now for free, thereby killing the project. That is, they are in reality stole from themselves: they will not receive a new version of the program with fixed bugs, or other useful products of my work. Instead of continuing to work, I have to deal with eliminating the debts that arose when creating a product, and then living on something else.

Therefore, once again: users stole from themselves, because with their logic of social behavior, they simply killed the project they needed. The need is confirmed by the fact that they use this program and with its help they solve some of their problems, including those by solving which they earn money. A similar logic can be described for other similar products created by a small team of people and pirated by you.

2 Now I have to solve some of my everyday issues. For example, in the house you need to make a sewerage system, water supply, electrics, dig holes for fence posts. My neighbor - a builder by education - is ready to make a "shabashka" on fence posts for 300 rubles for each post. For him, this is a lot of money, especially when you consider that there should be 180 pillars on my site.

But I will not be able to pay him for this work, so that in the free time I will be engaged in the creation of programs useful for people, I will dig holes myself, put up the pillars myself: I will make the work worse, but for free, but in fact I will lose a lot of money in the equivalent of time, because to install one post correctly - about 2 hours, and a neighbor would have coped 2-3 times faster and more correctly, because he has more experience. Further, a neighbor could buy good textbooks or books for additional education, toys for development and other supplies for his child.

The child could become better in some area and then apply their skills to solve some important problems for society. But it won't because people stole my softwarewithout paying me to use it. A neighbor will go to look for a part-time job in another place, and there he will be paid 5 times less for similar work, he barely makes ends meet, and I am almost the only person in the district who could help him a lot by giving him fair pay for his work.

3 Now, when my neighbor's child grows up, he may, due to insufficient development in the field of management, make the wrong decision in relation to the child of the person who stole the software from me. Retribution will come … This will happen in any case, regardless of the desires and beliefs of the one who stole the software. One way or another, he will receive negative feedback from society through a mechanism called psychodynamics.

His losses will be commensurate with those suffered by me and all those people who have suffered from the actions of this thief in total. It's not just me. I was not the only one who suffered from the fact that a thief stole my software. And even my neighbor is not the only one besides me who has suffered. Also injured was an electrician, plumber, gardener and other people whom I could have paid, but whom I could not even hire.

They cannot work in their specialty and are forced to clean toilets, and not do their own work, because someone stole my software. Of course, the reader has long understood that when I say "I", then this is a collective image of all those people from whom a respected reader has stolen something. But these are not all people who have suffered. The thief himself also suffered, and …

4 I brought benefit to people with my program, people were happy, some people paid money for it, but this was not enough. These people, to whom the program gave joy, now cannot get the second version or my other product. Why? Because I don't have time to do it, I need to make fence posts, electrics in the house, sewage, water supply, and generally build the whole house myself.

Along the way, I need to earn a living for myself and my family, I get a job in some company as a programmer, where they pay me "to get away" so that it would be wrong to leave, and would not get mad with fat. Well, I'm not mad, software for people is abandoned, I work 8 hours a day, the rest of the time I build a house. Those who paid for my program are waiting for the continuation, but won't wait … Thieves set them up.

5 Accordingly, due to total employment less attention to family: children are raised by one wife, I have no strength to do something for them, respectively, my wife also has no strength, because she is exhausted by the children. And it is also important for me that the house is ready for winter, that is, there is no time to rest, and there is no money for insulation either, I have to borrow from friends. And then give it back. How to give? The program I invested in was stolen.

So, the first five points, which I tried to reveal more or less picturesquely, show the material side of the process, this, in general, is quite understandable and obvious harm, that is, thieves who use a paid product for free, know in advancethat they are doing a very heinous act and are harming many people.

They do this evil deliberately, with a clear goal: to destroy a good undertaking of a person who has brought them benefit and to bring indirect harm to many other people. These people have no other goals. They are not driven by savings, because they know in advance that they are not saving, but simply create a deferred payment, and then pay much more. So there remains one goal: to harm society … Do you see other goals? You cannot see them, they are not.

Well, let's say, even if someone says: “That's not true, Microsoft has a lot of money! They will not lose anything! Yes, when we talk about giants, they have a certain monopoly, and therefore can afford a lot, including state protection from thieves; petty thieves simply cannot harm them and kill the corporation by stealing software from it.

On the contrary, in some ways, thieves are even useful to Microsoft, because they can set the popularity of a product, make it more widespread and hook others on it. Such corporations may to build losses from expected theft into the price of the product for those who cannot steal (these are other corporations and firms). Or do you think Microsoft can't count such losses? I beg you:) For this there is the next point of my reasoning.

6 See how you pay anyway for hacked Windows by force: a certain company bought Windows at a price that is several thousand rubles higher than it really would have cost if it were not for you - "economists from God." The product that this company creates will be a certain amount more expensive than it would actually cost if the Windows on which it was created was cheaper.

The grocery company that calculated the logistics for its transport department used this program, and its cost will be included in those fruits and vegetables that YOU will buy on your table. And I suspect that the real costs that you will incur will be much higher than if everyone honestly bought Windows.

Because the psychodynamics of humanity is such that if most people are thieves, then this is their logic of social behavior will laid down in all other spheres of life, including it will be inherent in the desire of intermediaries to cash in on the margin that they have the right to put in the product, only the margin will be slightly more than it should be in fairness.

There is a penny - there is a penny … a billion transactions - and here's ten million rubles in profit for some, and the same amount of incomprehensible losses for others. Who's guilty? It is clear who are thieves, including those who stole my software. By their behavior, they support the parasitic logic of the social behavior of all mankind.

Note, however, that the costs will also be borne by those people who have installed Linux for themselves, or who honestly pay for Microsoft products. Right? That is you deliberately you shift your financial losses onto other people, as if trying to smear them on other people who are not (directly) to blame for the consequences of your economic (without) literacy, because they will all buy food at an inflated price.

This is deliberate sabotage, and your goal is simple and clear to everyone: to make other people pay for your pleasure from the seeming savings on theft. You - resourceful and incredibly smart, stole the software and became richer in the amount of "saved" money, and all of them said: "Wow! It's ingenious to steal software and to attempt distribute the arisen debt to the rest of the people, while overpaying for everything else for many years. I saved a lot!"

Perhaps you will continue to object: "But almost everyone steals software, films, training courses, if I stop alone, it will not change anything, other people will just steal further, and I, like a sucker, will be all so honest, just spend money."

Yes, my dear, you will. Not because you are a sucker, but because you understand the more subtle rules of the structure of our world, which I will now remind you of … however, they are written in black and white, if you just look out the window and look at the world for a couple of your lives. But let's try to remember at least about karma … No, first, let's talk about simpler things, but also intangible.

7 Freebie corrupts. A person who receives a course for free believes that they have nothing to lose if they stop in the middle or do the course tasks carelessly. He will simply devour the information - and will give some kind of assessment for himself. Usually this assessment will be exactly like this: “I just consumed the course, pushed its information into myself, and it did not help me! Bad course! The author is a goof! There may be exceptions, of course, but they are few. For instance (I repent), once upon a time, 17 years before the writing of this text, I stole a paid program for teaching touch typing.

Don't worry, I repaid my debt later with a larger amount. I went through the program three times and was very pleased with the result, because by that time I already knew how to manage motivation and could solve, in general, any tasks for self-development. But without exception, all the people who took this program from me could not pass it in the years I am talking about.

They performed tasks incorrectly, did not follow the position of their hands and fingers, did everything carelessly, and by the time a more complex exercise appeared, they realized that the program was not helping them. Who paid for the program - almost all passed. Because they did the tasks carefully. Only one person passed for free later, but under severe pressure from me. Understand freebie corrupts, the person does not appreciate what he received.

I see the same thing when people go through training courses stolen from their author by the first stream of students who photographed the material and put it in the public domain. The same can be observed when a spoiled boy gets a cool car from an oligarch dad. It will be broken very quickly or otherwise become unusable.

8 Freebie spawns a whole army of so-called consumers of information … These are people who have changed the degradation-parasitic and entertaining way of life for the degradation-cognitive one. They consume cognitive content in order to enjoy the realization that they are involved in development, in something important and useful to society.

At the same time, neither the first nor the second do anything useful for society. I asked people a question: "If the content you are reading cost at least 10 rubles per post, you would pay, because it is" kind of "useful to you?" Most often they said no, or they kept silent and somehow avoided answering, it is clear why. Then I ask, why then do you read for free if you do not find the content useful for yourself?

The answer is the same: "because it is interesting." Classic consumption. Only a few people subscribe to paid subscriptions to their bloggers, or simply make a regular payment for their work, say, through "auto payment". But then they try to squeeze out the benefit from the knowledge gained.

All such people who are interested in their own development in fact, and not for the show, have long unsubscribed from a whole bunch of "useful" and "informative" blogs, because they value their time more, they understand that instead of a dubious but interesting post or an entertaining DIY video, it's better to spend your time reading a really useful book or a useful training course.

In general, it is strange: it is a pity for a person to pay 10 rubles for an interesting post (even after of how he read it), but it's not a pity to spend 10-20 minutes on it. And with current salaries, this can be much more than 10 rubles, at times. Freebie corrupts, people just eat information and consider themselves advanced, as if they are somehow different from those who just eat beer.

Again: there is NO difference for the development of society between these two types of people … There is no difference between easy science pop and naughty videos. Both are the same content if you just eat it. If a person treated the content with respect, applied the information received in it for the real development of oneself or society (in one form or another), then it is from this moment that the difference begins.

The difference between a person and a consumer of information. And as a rule, investing money in the received content is one of the right steps towards the development of society, because when you have paid, you will not just let go of what you bought with your money. You will take it to the maximum benefit for yourself. However, I promised to disclose the topic of information consumption in more detail separately, in another article.

9 If a person has not returned to the world the benefits he received from another person, then he has locked “energy” on himself. In fact, it's no better than stealing. Payment for the product of another person's labor is the saturation of the product with energy, with the help of which the product will benefit society. Do not be confused by the esoteric terminology, you can explain all this in materialistic language, and this was done in paragraphs 1-5. It actually says the same thing.

But here, in the 9th paragraph, I want to draw your attention to the fact that not sharing with others is the same as stealing (unless we are talking about knowledge of a special nature, representing a secret, including dangerous for those who receive it, or about personal secrets). Man received knowledge, but locked it up on himself, did not give it to others. He is solely responsible for the fact that other people, without receiving this useful knowledge for them, will not be able to become better.

How many people did not get better in this aspect? one hundred? 1000? Multiply the loss from one such person by the number of people who, because of you, did not receive important knowledge. Are you ready to take on such a responsibility? It can be billions of dollars in losses, although it seems to you otherwise. In other words, if you did not pay (with anything) the person who gave you useful information, then you must at least return it to the world in an equivalent amount. For example, to become better and to teach others.

Let's say I taught you sobriety, but you didn't pay me. This means that I, having an extraordinary experience of weaning from alcohol, will now have fewer opportunities to wean others. So you take on these losses for society YOU … You didn’t pay me, so the next 2-3 people I won’t wean from this poison, because instead I’ll need to do an electrician or plumbing in the house, as well as dig holes for a fence, remember?

Can you do it for me - wean these 2-3 people from alcohol? If so, great - do it! I'll be very happy. If not, then you are a thief. And you will pay for this by the fact that, perhaps, one of these 2-3 people, who may be in a drunken stupor, will cause you irreparable harm, because you yourself are to blame that he was drunk. Or maybe you will pay in a different way, but you will pay anyway, because the Universe does not tolerate injustice.

At least it doesn't take too long. This is how psychodynamics works, my friend, when everyone does what he wants, but it turns out what happens, and the consequences of this lawlessness concern ALL people. So, after stealing some resource from me, many people will not get what they could get, and you must compensate the damage voluntarily, otherwise the Universe will take from you by force. You can read about this way of working of psychodynamics in my third article on this topic.

10 Freebie corrupts! The time a person has spent on freebies is usually not comparable to the costs that the world incurs as a result of this act of procrastination. Degrading cognitive content robs you of time, even though you feel like you are saving money by getting this content for free.

Yes, you watch voraciously one video after another, you get the seeming benefit, but you don’t bring it to people further, you don’t pay for the work of a person, you just enjoy the awareness of yourself being involved in the act of development, although development itself usually does not occur, you just feel more enlightened, but that is just an illusion. As you sat on the couch, you will continue to sit. So you are wasting your time.

And if so, then you are responsible before God, who gave you this time for something else. But the freebie has corrupted you, you are no better than those who watch the raunchy video.

The benefits from you are exactly the same. Likewise, if you downloaded a movie from a pirate site and watched it: two options - (1) the movie sucks, you don’t think you would have to pay for it, but you wasted your time, which means that the company that released the movie, I have already achieved my goal, and (2) the film taught you something, so you need to thank those who contributed to the act of your enlightenment, otherwise you are a thief, with all the ensuing consequences.

Moreover, when you have not paid (see above), you will not carry this knowledge further, you will not invest in your development, you ate it and will sit on the couch … Because the freebie corrupts. You didn't imbue this knowledge from the film with enough energy to make it work for you. If you paid, you would have more motivation not to miss this benefit, but to use it for your development and then to help people. And this, by the way, would give you money back in equivalent.

11 In fact, the money that a person spent on his development get him back in an equivalent form, and may even be multiplied many times. Paid a person for his creative work - he will be able to create more, and this will only make you better, because this person will help many people, in general, increasing the amount of good in society.

This goodness can somehow return to you through other people. In the limit when all people on earth are happy, any other person who appears in such a society will be happy automatically. So I wrote for a long time how the theft would return to you. Now show your imagination and think for yourself how your good will return to you. The circuit is absolutely identical. By not doing good, you are doing evil … There is no middle ground.

12 Now about that very karma. You stole from a person, which means you planted karmic seeds that will sprout a little later. What exactly did you plant? You have taken away a person's well-being, which means that according to the law of cause and effect, well-being will be taken away from you in an equivalent form … You stole 100 rubles, or maybe it was a large amount for a person.

Maybe it’s as important for him as it’s 10 thousand for you. So you will lose these 10 thousand in any way for sure. For example, you will smash a car for this amount. There are a lot of options. But that's not all. With your logic of social behavior, you supported the cult of theft in society, that is, you became an accomplice to millions of the same crimes around the world.

You have saturated the egregor of the same thieves with your act, thanks to which it has become stronger. This means that on your karma Not only these unfortunate 100 rubles, and a much more substantial amount associated with the fact that with your support you have increased the theft in society, implicitly hooking other people on this business, who see that "hey, everyone is stealing," and will also steal.

It’s so accepted. And each of those who steal makes this cult stronger simply by the fact that they steal. And so it is responsible for this support. What is the magnitude of this responsibility? I can't say that, but God can. You can ask Him. Perhaps He will explain to you why you have problems in life and how exactly you pay with these problems for theft.

13 People who are corrupted by freebies are a very convenient object of manipulation. It is for free that you will be lured to where you will pluck like a goose. It is for free that you are led when you save money on a product and lose it due to poor quality, and then buy it again … also cheaper. It is the freebie that creates a parallel process - the desire to cash in on others with minimal costs for oneself.

That is why you get the blogging ads that you hate, because it is simply impossible to get bloggers to pay you the correct payment for their labor in any other way. That is why there is a markup on goods, which is designed to compensate for your craving for freebies. That is why other mechanisms of “completely legal” ways of taking money away from the population appear.

Because these mechanisms are driven the same people, what class you belong to and you are the geniuses of economics. You devour yourself, and normal people suffer along the way. Think about this and how the rich differ from the poor.

14 The very culture of a rich person is that he knows the value of labor and understands that you have to pay for it. He can give awayand therefore he is rich. Money does not linger on him too much, he passes a stream through himself, and thereby makes this stream stronger and stronger, and the spray from this stream, which he takes for himself, is much more powerful.

If you close the flow on yourself, it will stop, there will be no place for a new one. If the river does not flow, it turns out to be a swamp. The rich person differs from the poor first of all in that he knows how to give, and the poor thinks that by keeping everything in himself he saves. The poor are poor precisely because of their stinginess and materialistic stupidity.

So, after reading this text, now you will no longer be able to so easily steal hacked software, films, training courses and other such materials, because if earlier you had a chance to say “well, I somehow didn’t think about it,” now you ABSOLUTELY RIGHT you know why you can't do this, and your next act of theft will already be malicious sabotage. That is, negative feedback (designed to stop this harm) will return to you in stronger circumstances than when you did not know about the content of these 14 reasons.

However, there are situations where I personally would steal. For example, I’m very hungry, I haven’t eaten for a month and I see food that is not available to me for free, but I don’t have any money at all. I'll steal it! Because I understand that there will be much more benefit from a well-fed me than from a dead one, then I will earn money and return 10 times more food to the owner for saving.

Second situation. I'm not hinting at anything, but someone will recognize her. Let's say a new medicine has been developed for a previously incurable disease, but the company that developed it, taking advantage of its monopoly, set a price, say, 10 million for a course of treatment. Do you want to live - pay, who refuses? So the company begins to enrich itself completely irrelevantly.

Of course, smart pharmacists will quickly steal the formula and will sell the same medicine cheaper in their country, the monopoly will end, everyone will get better thanks to the theft. Only in Russia this medicine still costs 10 million … However, was there any theft here? YES! But not only on the part of those who copied the formula, but also on the part of those who tried to profit from the monopoly.

Just the evil ones (who stole and sold them cheaper) destroyed the first evil ones, as it should be in a just society. Both will get the "hat", but in the end most people will be fine! Although, of course, it will be even better if people stop doing the stupid things that give rise to this disease. But this is already, as they say, a story from another opera.

Friends, thank you for reading this work. It has taken me many years to understand these simple truths, and I have done a great job to help you accelerate a similar realization. Now you have a chance to do either the right thing or the wrong one. I have shared with you useful information that can make your life better, collected, structured it for you and presented it in a convenient form. If you also find it useful, then I ask you to do at least one of the following actions. Just one thing, but if you do more, it will be just fine.

- Stop stealing in the sense indicated in the article: completely clean all the "freebies" from your computer and no longer start it there; structure your life so that there is no more theft. Always pay even the free labor of other people with donations or in some other way. Remove from your feed and other subscriptions all resources that you not pay with money or other acts aimed at helping people or improving the world.

- Share the article with your friends and, if necessary, help them understand it (if asked), but without fanaticism. Who is not ready - do not put pressure on that, the Universe has more effective mechanisms, do not interfere with It.

- Pay for my work (any amount you like) with a cash gift. Here is a link to the details (link leads to my home page).

- Perhaps you will come up with another form of equivalent gratitude, which from the standpoint of your conscience will be equivalent to the options listed above. Then exercise gratitude in this way.

Thanks!