it’s never the same thing when it’s happening to us.

your shoes, please.

Ever crossed a bridge over the River Thames in London? Ever eaten a banana split, or a beef Wellington? Names don’t always have to follow the rules, you know.

Sorry for the double post, but my agents have informed me that I have misquoted them and I’ve missed the edit window.

Where did the thirteen million come from? Not the supposed NINE million in Valve’s account. It came from guys like you. This is not an allegory about Valve being a guy like you, it’s a literal fact about the case if you actually read it, genius.

Also, allow me to point out something: Corporations only continue to exist as long as their employees are paid. If you steal from a corporation, you effectively steal from it’s employees. Less cash = more layoffs. This whole “fuck Valve for daring to make a game and actually charge money for it” is the argument of a mental midget. Go take an economics class and then tell me anarchy is a better idea.

It’s important to bear in mind that your attempts to justify MaddoxX stealing from Valve are off-base for a very important reason. One that I’ll inform you of at the end of this post. But for now, I’ll respond to your appeal to sentiment in kind before making you sit in a corner.

HEEEAAAAALP!

I’m pretty scared that you think stealing “13 billion” is nothing to scoff at. Hell, plenty of people are willing to kill for only a few thousand. And Euros are twice as strong as the dollar (as far as I know) so this is some serious stuff.

You somehow want to try to justify it by saying you, well, don’t like Valve’s games. This is also pretty iffy, because an opinion is not a fact, not a strong basis to justify such a serious felony, and your opinion isn’t even a very common one–most of us PC gamers happen to love Valve’s games, and Steam.

But seriously, how is a multi-million dollar theft “petty” in any way? Have you looked up the definition of the word? Petty theft is robbing $300 from a cash register. Stealing 13 million Euros is freaking insane.

You ask people not to confuse your opinions with generic anti-corporation claptrap, but that’s all they are. You’re not giving us definite, supportable, morally stable reasons for your position. You’re attempting to sway people with shaky appeals to sentiment that, fortunately, nobody’s buying because nobody shares your sentiment. Because we don’t approach this issue from an anti-corporate, anti-Valve stance. Some of us see a duck and call it a duck.

…

And now for the elephant in the room:

Are You Ready? Let’s Go!

Those 13 million Euros aren’t even from Valve. They’re stolen credit cards from people using Valve’s third-party cyber cafe program. You know, the people he claimed he was “sticking up for.” “Fraud on a corporation” my ass. The guy didn’t steal from Valve, he went straight after their customers. The people he tried to say were Valve’s victims. If you honestly believed that these people were being hurt by Valve in some way, how could you justify victimizing them again?

The man’s a greedy identity thief and a damned hypocrite, not Robin Hood. Now go sit in a corner and think about what you’ve done.

don’t forget a corporation is not a person. depending on how you look at it, it’s either all the owners, or all the employees. This is why people who say “x large oil company has y billion profits, they’re greedy” are misleading; that profit is shared amongst a lot of people.

saying “valve” can afford to lose the money is also misleading. If I had the amount of money in the bank valve does I’d just retire and live off the interest, but “valve” can’t do that because there is no person called Mr Valve*, and the money has to go into a lot more people’s pockets than you’d think.

The difference is, if someone steals from a person you can point at the victim. If someone steals from a corporation, the victims (owners/shareholders, and employees, or even people who might have been employed had the company not developed a 13 million euro hole in their finances) are diffuse and harder to interview bravely holding back tears on the news.

I fail to understand why stealing 13 million from one person is more heinous than stealing 100 from 130,000 people. Which is, in fact, closer to what he did.

If you wanna argue Valve “deserves” punishing, find their crime, collect evidence, and get a case brought against them.

“It’s not the worst that could happen” Well, no. Planetary genocide is. I don’t see how that means anything less than that gets a free pass.

*There probably is someone called Mr Valve, but it’s not the same person. honest

To reiterate; I’m not saying we should walk around stealing money off each other. Okay? It seems like thats what you all think.

You see, in a world as flawed as this one, some kid comitting fraud is not the worst thing that can happen, but that won’t stop the law pulling out all the stops and making an example of someone. Is this guy risking jail time? if so, then that’s sad. For crimes like murder, yes, I can understand (even though prison does nothing to reform an individual) but fraud on a corperation? Give me a break. He’s not Myra Hindley. His crime is mere petty theft. Stories like this get all the attention because it has the magic word “money” in it, which is really quite depressing.

besides, the master said this world is a burning house, so any attachment zenarcade would have to the shoes would be detrimental. in one sense i’d be helping him.