Your employer probably gains nothing from you attending the conference. Whether you go or not, likely makes no difference to how much work they get per dollar of your paycheck.
Note my wishy-washy words "probably" and "likely." If you can provide an argument that a particular conference is an exception, then you have an argument to offer your employer, for how they will come out ahead by paying this money.
If it's a gray area (you have a valid argument, but it's somewhat weak) then splitting the cost with you (which seems to be what they proposed), seems sensible.
Didn't South Park point out that 1 in 4 Americans are idiots?
Yeah, and that's the problem; it's still not nearly enough. Even if they weren't idiots, the secede opinion would then just be 2/4, and you can't secede with that much lack of consensus, without a lot of societal strife and unhappiness.
(I'm not even sure why you'd want to use any web browser at all for this kind of thing. They should just make XBMC, MythTV, etc plugins. No, scratch that: they should publish APIs, and then let those teams write the plugins themselves. But anyway...)
If a vendor can't use standards well enough to be compatible with what you use, then just pirate. They'll either supply the files that you can use, or someone else will.
I don't see the problem, unless it's that you feel compelled to fight someone who tells you they don't want your money. If that's the case, then get over it. You can't make someone be greedy, and it'd be a pretty shitty world if you could.
I think it's impossible for a government to do anything without at least some real threat of violence behind it. How do you enforce a nonviolent sentence?
Government: "Pay me a $1000 fine."
Offender: "No."
Government: "You're a poo-head."
Offender: [sobs pathetically] "Ok, ok, I'll pay! Just please, please don't hurt my feelings again."
The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries
That's easy to believe. I feel the same way.
Yet sometimes I hear people bitching about immigrants in other contexts. If they're agricultural workers instead of tech workers, somehow they're undesirable. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It makes so little sense to me, that I think it's just plain stupid.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man. We don't open the borders. Every election we nearly unanimously scream that we want highly restricted immigration consisting of very few people, and the thought of making any moves toward meritocracy makes us so incredibly angry and resentful, that we go out of our minds with blind rage.
So, tech workers and tech industry customers (i.e. most of America), if this is how you really feel, then you need to live with the consequences. You can't say justice, fairness, and efficiency are important, yet also things you totally don't care about. Make up your fucking mind. If you speak about programmers from India in a fundamentally different way than farmers from Chihuahua, maybe you are the problem, psycho.
there is no point in abusing the power to brick someone's phone
How does someone get as far in life as being able to write sentences, yet still has not encountered their first senselessly-destructive anonymous unaccountable vandal?
I normally don't recommend vandalism, but I actually think you would learn a lot, if someone were to go break one of your car windows or take a baseball bat to your mailbox. I don't really wish you ill, but just letting you experience your first sudden stupid loss at the hands of some asshole who doesn't give a fuck about other people (or who enjoys seeing others suffer) would probably help to correct this amazing misconception of yours.
The only question is how cheaply the lesson can be learned. We can do this without totally abandoning compassion. I suggest this AC's teachers start small, and then just gradually move up. Long before we have a Nazi prison guard callously and flippantly shoot his wife, we need to try merely throwing his $200 phone into the toilet, or maybe even just splashing some grape juice on his $5 T-shirt. Geez, someone, just throw a piece of chewing gum on the sidewalk near this guy's office. Let's not go "full asshole" right at the start. I think this person's naivety can be overcome with a gentle touch of douchebaggery.
Just enough, so that he learns of the existence of currently-unsuspected asshats. That's as far as we need to go, before he shifts his position to "of course I see the point in abusing the power to brick someone's phone, and it doesn't require any paranoia at all."
Also, for it to be a DCMA, doesn't the requested takedown have to have something to do with DRM?
No. DMCA is a "big" law with several parts. Part of it is to outlaw DRM compatibility and another part is about takedown notices. There's even a part specific to boat hull designs, though I don't know if it's as controversial as the crazier stuff.
The reason it's so confusing is that when someone makes something that works with DRM, whoever's interests are negatively impacted by people buying the DRMed item (e.g. Disney fears that if you have a way to play "The Little Mermaid" DVD then you might buy one instead of just downloading the mp4), they'll have their lawyer write a nastygram. People sometimes confuse this nastygram with a DMCA takedown notice, but it's a different thing. Same named laws being referenced, possibly even the same lawyer, but a totally different part of the law.
DMCA is about balance. The anti-circumvention part was written with a pro-piracy agenda and the notice part was written with anti-piracy agenda. The idea is that unless you just completely abstain, they'll have you breaking some law, so most people should be extortable.
Oops, didn't realize we were talking about something like that.
That plugin is a kind of neat idea (I approve) but it's very poorly named and doesn't seem to have anything in common with a real "web of trust." I'd probably be madder about the atrocious name if I didn't happen to like the plugin.
That gives me an idea: I should make a program for X11 users, where the five hundredth and ninth time someone opens a new window, it generates a PDF containing an extravagant statement of the accomplishment. Then I could call the program "X.509 Certificate Authority" just to fuck with everyone.
I also have an idea for an internet communications protocol which provides the social verification (the "proof" I think he called it) of Metcalf's Internet Teranodes Metric, but I'm trying to think of a concise way to explain that to people.
What's interesting about my MITM-proof thing is that it was computer-generated. I just had to provide the right seed (the "key" according to the software's docs) to the Pseudorandom Generated Proof engine. If you don't want me to explain how the MITM-proof works, I can just give you the PGP key and you can study the output yourself, in your own Virtual Information Monitor window, or Enhanced Markup Automatic Correlation Searcher if you prefer that approach.
If you think that might work, then keep learning. The botnets' "vote" only gets counted if someone decides to trust all of them. And if you can arrange that, then you don't need a botnet, you just need one node.
All that matters is how your fake node (or web of fake nodes) is connected to the victim.
The Constitution and the Laws of the United States say it isn't money.
Wrong tool for the job. If you want to know what money is, look for dictionaries, not laws.
I suggest when you evaluate your "what is money?" answerering-tool, that you at least test it with some easy cases. Try running "Are Euros money?" through it, for example. Try giving it some story problems and see what happens:
A US citizen in El Paso Texas has as US five dollar bill and a Canadian five dollar bill in his possession, and he briefly presses them both against consecrated ground at a protestant church there, and then puts them in his wallet. He drives to Mexico City, where he meets a Japanese citizen and hands her both fivers in exchange for sexual services which are described in more detail in a different story problem. The Japanese citizen touches the Canadian five (but not the US one) to consecrated ground at a Catholic church in Mexico City, then flies to Montreal Quebec, where she pulls out the Canadian bill and offers it as a bribe to a Mounty where it is seen by this government representative but politely refused and never touched by this government worker. (Actually it only appears to be a polite refusal from her PoV. The mounty refused the bribe because she spoke in English but he was pretending to only understand French. He was attempting a rude refusal and from his PoV he succeeded.) She takes a bus through the State of New York for a while and then ends up at the Lincoln Memorial in DC. She folds the US five dollar bill into an airplane and throws it, and it glides for 2.3 seconds before landing on the ground, making contact with the earth for the first time since it left El Paso. The Canadian bill remains in her wallet, still having last touched ground in Mexico City. At any point during this course of events, did either bill's state of 'moneyness' change?
At least shake the trivial bugs out and see if your system gets confused by irrelevancies.
But it also wouldn't be balanced anymore, would it? Because, as you may or may not know, the federal budget is not balanced.
You don't know it wouldn't be balanced. If it's important to you to balance your budget (as is the case if you're a state legislator but not the case if you're a US congresscritter) then you'll get it done. You'd have to confront the difficulties that are currently denied and instead turned into costs elsewhere.
But of course a state government also has overhead; better dissolve it as well.
I am not advocating dissolving anything, not even the feds. (Though yes, some of their powers should be re-dispersed.) I'm merely saying that it's not like the states are getting some kind of magic windfall that makes their balanced budgets unrealistically achievable. All that "free money" ultimate came from themselves. It's not pixie dust.
That's true for hosting content, but not the DNS issue. There's nothing in DMCA about registrars being required to fuck with domain names in response to someone complaining that the domain references a host that might be hosting alleged infringing material. Registrar coercion isn't in the league of legality (whoa, that's acatchy phrase) as host coercion.
The problem with that is, is if was sent to your email address, you are the intended recipient.
This is incorrect, and yet, the error does not matter.
Intent is known only by the sender. From the recipient's point of view, it does make sense to assume that an email addressed to you, is intended for you. That asumption is sometimes wrong, but it's a rare occurance. And whenever you're wrong, you won't know until you've already read some of the email. This really is the best any recipient can be reasonably expected to do.
The sender has all the power here (they get to decide whether or not to encrypt, for example, and which key to use (typically looked up by intended-recipient's name!!)) so I think they should have all the responsibility.
The irony is that if the people at Goldman did things right, then a filtering tool wouldn't be able to work (because it doesn't have the recipient's key).
Every state gets money from the federal government for things like roads and law enforcement grants. No state has to maintain a military. If states run balanced budgets only because the federal government is handing them money and giving them services for free, is balancing the state budget really that much of an accomplishment?
All that "free" money was collected from the taxpayers, and they all live (or exist on paper) in some state. They could have just as easily paid their taxes to their state capitols instead of Washington DC.
Sure, if your state stopped getting highway money from the feds, the resulting consequences would look bad on the state's books. ("All these roads and no money to repair them! All these assets and we can't afford a military to guard them!") But if your state stopped receiving that money and its residents stopped paying the federal taxes for those uses, and instead those taxes were paid directly to the state, then it doesn't really look all that bad on the books, does it? ("All these roads and look at all this state income tax to pay for them! All these assets and look at all the money this state's residents have paid to hire guards!")
(On average. I realize that on a state-by-state basis there is variance, but add up all 50 and the fed's contribution is less than zero, or exactly zero if they just happen to magically have no overhead at all.)
I agree with the stringent requirements London has for taxi drivers. I think this should be a requirement. You should be able to tell me at least three ways to get to any one place -- without a map, without GPS, without tech aids. Can't? Then you have no experience as a driver and I should, by default, not trust you. Uber drivers don't know the cities like taxi drivers do. Some shortcuts will get you killed.
Would you favor a more general raising-of-the-bar for drivers licenses for all drivers? The stuff you're talking about sounds pretty important and I can't think of any reasons that only people who do it for pay would be affected by it. And plenty of them do have passengers (or other cars' drivers and passengers!) in their hands. I doubt anyone would be able to make a connection between money and the safety issues that you bring up.
BTW, I loved your bit about how anyone who wants to save a few bucks on cabs, is now an "Ayn Rand capitalist." I know a whole bunch of drunks who are going to be very amused to learn that about themselves. Half of them probably mistakenly think they're on the left end of the political spectrum.
A good way for the government to circumvent the law, would be to change the wording at the top of the list from "these people are banned" to "we have concerns about these people."
If an undesirable (hippie, NRA member, unflattering editorialist, Planned Parenthood employee, Planned Parenthood protester, Defcon presenter) wishes to board a plane, the government could ask or recommend the airline to refuse service, without saying why. The airline, since they would be easily subject to various forms of unprovable harassment, would "voluntarily" comply.
Then nobody is banned; the government is merely making suggestions.
Being near drivers using phones is bad enough, do you really want to be near drivers who are confused about why it just cut off and are now trying to redial!?
You don't seem to understand tantrums. It's not about maximizing your score. It's about lowering someone else's, and some personal sacrifice can be justified if that leads to further suffering for the adversary.
It's perfectly fine to take the possible safety hit of your adversary getting confused and colliding with you, because even though it poses a risk to you, it poses an even greater risk to them (it's not certain they're going to swerve in your direction, is it?). And on top of that, their call got dropped, hopefully inconveniencing them. Mitigating all this, is that you know exactly when it's going to happen and are ready for it (but this aspect isn't terribly important; remember this is about the consequences to them, not you).
Childish behavior is a basic skill that anyone can learn. You can train this skill, by whenever you need to make a decision, ignoring any negative consequences to you. Look solely at other peoples losses, and your gains. Never other peoples gains or your losses. And don't ever cooperate.
Millions of people would be happy to commit murder, rape, theft, and other crimes if there were no consequences.
If there were really no consequences, we would be ok with people committing murder, rape and theft! Welcome to Valhalla, where we hack each other to death with axes and then wake up the next morning and happily feast together.
The reason that murder, rape and theft are crimes, is that there are consequences. If you could address them (though you can't), then you would have eliminated some crimes.
You apparently have never watched a movie on DVD or BluRay or tried to use a proprietary streaming service. Are you sure you're not the one from last century? From what I remember, we didn't really start having all these problems, until around 1996 (or 1999 for me; that's when I bought my first DVD). Until around then, things mostly Just Worked, so most of us didn't really have any reasons to pirate anything, therefore we didn't.
The right analogy is that your boss paid you big bucks to write TPS reports, and you did it, but you were angry at your boss so you passive-aggressively wrote all the TPS reports in Swahili, and your boss doesn't know Swahili. The boss somehow got an unpaid volunteer with a weird sexual fetish to translate the reports into English. (Somehow, this person gets off by translating Swahili to English, and is quite happy to do it for pleasure or glory or whatever the hell is going on there. People are weird!)
On the surface, the process appears to work so perfectly (the boss is actually very happy with his unobfuscated TPS reports) that he fires you, because he forgot that the new guy was really just repairing the deliberately-sabotaged TPS reports, not actually providing the reports' content. All because you insisted on being a total dick, and also all because there are some really weird people out there who are happy to clean up after you.
Long-term this looks like a bad situation. OTOH, it seems that eventually someone else comes along and writes more TPS reports (but in enciphered Swahili) for a single pay period. Then they get fired too. So you report-writers are making money, but a lot less than if you could just stop being a dick and hold a steady job. And the bosses are sort of happy because they're getting their reports, but they can't help but think that if they could find employees worth keeping who weren't dicks, the company would be more productive. Everyone is losing (except the fetishists), and things aren't working well, but somehow we're all getting by.
(Further complication and analogy-repair: There are really two bosses, in different departments, and there's a broken accounting system. Only one of the bosses' budgets are actually having to pay the paychecks for the high-turnover dick TPS report-writers, but the other boss whose budget never gets hit, also gets to read the repaired TPS reports from the volunteers. So we're not all paying evenly for this broken system. The "pirate boss" get a free ride and the "chump boss" who keep hiring dicks, is getting visciously shafted. Some people think the pirate boss or the volunteer translators are the problem here, but I think the dick report-writer is the problem, and yet, solving the problem requires that we all start talking to the chump bosses, explaining "Stop being a chump, and stop paying those dicks. Let's just put 'reports must be in English' into the hiring contract, and so the dicks don't get even a single paycheck." If we can all agree to stop being chump bosses, the dicks will get selected out of the job market and either starve to death or change their behavior, and we can start hiring employees who write unobfuscated TPS reports. That seems to be the everyone-wins scenario, though I'm not sure how the fetishist translators will occupy their time, after that.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not if your phone completely obsoletes your tablet, so that you're never carrying one around.
(But yes, I can see how not everyone wants a tablet, so they might not want a phablet either.)
Your employer probably gains nothing from you attending the conference. Whether you go or not, likely makes no difference to how much work they get per dollar of your paycheck.
Note my wishy-washy words "probably" and "likely." If you can provide an argument that a particular conference is an exception, then you have an argument to offer your employer, for how they will come out ahead by paying this money.
If it's a gray area (you have a valid argument, but it's somewhat weak) then splitting the cost with you (which seems to be what they proposed), seems sensible.
Yeah, and that's the problem; it's still not nearly enough. Even if they weren't idiots, the secede opinion would then just be 2/4, and you can't secede with that much lack of consensus, without a lot of societal strife and unhappiness.
(Before anyone replies "whoosh": whoosh yourself!)
(I'm not even sure why you'd want to use any web browser at all for this kind of thing. They should just make XBMC, MythTV, etc plugins. No, scratch that: they should publish APIs, and then let those teams write the plugins themselves. But anyway...)
If a vendor can't use standards well enough to be compatible with what you use, then just pirate. They'll either supply the files that you can use, or someone else will.
I don't see the problem, unless it's that you feel compelled to fight someone who tells you they don't want your money. If that's the case, then get over it. You can't make someone be greedy, and it'd be a pretty shitty world if you could.
I think it's impossible for a government to do anything without at least some real threat of violence behind it. How do you enforce a nonviolent sentence?
Government: "Pay me a $1000 fine."
Offender: "No."
Government: "You're a poo-head."
Offender: [sobs pathetically] "Ok, ok, I'll pay! Just please, please don't hurt my feelings again."
That's easy to believe. I feel the same way.
Yet sometimes I hear people bitching about immigrants in other contexts. If they're agricultural workers instead of tech workers, somehow they're undesirable. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It makes so little sense to me, that I think it's just plain stupid.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man. We don't open the borders. Every election we nearly unanimously scream that we want highly restricted immigration consisting of very few people, and the thought of making any moves toward meritocracy makes us so incredibly angry and resentful, that we go out of our minds with blind rage.
So, tech workers and tech industry customers (i.e. most of America), if this is how you really feel, then you need to live with the consequences. You can't say justice, fairness, and efficiency are important, yet also things you totally don't care about. Make up your fucking mind. If you speak about programmers from India in a fundamentally different way than farmers from Chihuahua, maybe you are the problem, psycho.
How does someone get as far in life as being able to write sentences, yet still has not encountered their first senselessly-destructive anonymous unaccountable vandal?
I normally don't recommend vandalism, but I actually think you would learn a lot, if someone were to go break one of your car windows or take a baseball bat to your mailbox. I don't really wish you ill, but just letting you experience your first sudden stupid loss at the hands of some asshole who doesn't give a fuck about other people (or who enjoys seeing others suffer) would probably help to correct this amazing misconception of yours.
The only question is how cheaply the lesson can be learned. We can do this without totally abandoning compassion. I suggest this AC's teachers start small, and then just gradually move up. Long before we have a Nazi prison guard callously and flippantly shoot his wife, we need to try merely throwing his $200 phone into the toilet, or maybe even just splashing some grape juice on his $5 T-shirt. Geez, someone, just throw a piece of chewing gum on the sidewalk near this guy's office. Let's not go "full asshole" right at the start. I think this person's naivety can be overcome with a gentle touch of douchebaggery.
Just enough, so that he learns of the existence of currently-unsuspected asshats. That's as far as we need to go, before he shifts his position to "of course I see the point in abusing the power to brick someone's phone, and it doesn't require any paranoia at all."
No. DMCA is a "big" law with several parts. Part of it is to outlaw DRM compatibility and another part is about takedown notices. There's even a part specific to boat hull designs, though I don't know if it's as controversial as the crazier stuff.
The reason it's so confusing is that when someone makes something that works with DRM, whoever's interests are negatively impacted by people buying the DRMed item (e.g. Disney fears that if you have a way to play "The Little Mermaid" DVD then you might buy one instead of just downloading the mp4), they'll have their lawyer write a nastygram. People sometimes confuse this nastygram with a DMCA takedown notice, but it's a different thing. Same named laws being referenced, possibly even the same lawyer, but a totally different part of the law.
DMCA is about balance. The anti-circumvention part was written with a pro-piracy agenda and the notice part was written with anti-piracy agenda. The idea is that unless you just completely abstain, they'll have you breaking some law, so most people should be extortable.
You keep outta this! He doesn't have to shoot you now!
Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
"Can't?" Ok, I'll bite: what happens when you try? (Did you get an error message? What did it say?)
According to my records, I made that joke 114 years ago, so therefore I am quicker-witted than you.
Oops, didn't realize we were talking about something like that.
That plugin is a kind of neat idea (I approve) but it's very poorly named and doesn't seem to have anything in common with a real "web of trust." I'd probably be madder about the atrocious name if I didn't happen to like the plugin.
That gives me an idea: I should make a program for X11 users, where the five hundredth and ninth time someone opens a new window, it generates a PDF containing an extravagant statement of the accomplishment. Then I could call the program "X.509 Certificate Authority" just to fuck with everyone.
I also have an idea for an internet communications protocol which provides the social verification (the "proof" I think he called it) of Metcalf's Internet Teranodes Metric, but I'm trying to think of a concise way to explain that to people.
What's interesting about my MITM-proof thing is that it was computer-generated. I just had to provide the right seed (the "key" according to the software's docs) to the Pseudorandom Generated Proof engine. If you don't want me to explain how the MITM-proof works, I can just give you the PGP key and you can study the output yourself, in your own Virtual Information Monitor window, or Enhanced Markup Automatic Correlation Searcher if you prefer that approach.
If you think that might work, then keep learning. The botnets' "vote" only gets counted if someone decides to trust all of them. And if you can arrange that, then you don't need a botnet, you just need one node.
All that matters is how your fake node (or web of fake nodes) is connected to the victim.
Wrong tool for the job. If you want to know what money is, look for dictionaries, not laws.
I suggest when you evaluate your "what is money?" answerering-tool, that you at least test it with some easy cases. Try running "Are Euros money?" through it, for example. Try giving it some story problems and see what happens:
At least shake the trivial bugs out and see if your system gets confused by irrelevancies.
You don't know it wouldn't be balanced. If it's important to you to balance your budget (as is the case if you're a state legislator but not the case if you're a US congresscritter) then you'll get it done. You'd have to confront the difficulties that are currently denied and instead turned into costs elsewhere.
I am not advocating dissolving anything, not even the feds. (Though yes, some of their powers should be re-dispersed.) I'm merely saying that it's not like the states are getting some kind of magic windfall that makes their balanced budgets unrealistically achievable. All that "free money" ultimate came from themselves. It's not pixie dust.
That's true for hosting content, but not the DNS issue. There's nothing in DMCA about registrars being required to fuck with domain names in response to someone complaining that the domain references a host that might be hosting alleged infringing material. Registrar coercion isn't in the league of legality (whoa, that's acatchy phrase) as host coercion.
This is incorrect, and yet, the error does not matter.
Intent is known only by the sender. From the recipient's point of view, it does make sense to assume that an email addressed to you, is intended for you. That asumption is sometimes wrong, but it's a rare occurance. And whenever you're wrong, you won't know until you've already read some of the email. This really is the best any recipient can be reasonably expected to do.
The sender has all the power here (they get to decide whether or not to encrypt, for example, and which key to use (typically looked up by intended-recipient's name!!)) so I think they should have all the responsibility.
The irony is that if the people at Goldman did things right, then a filtering tool wouldn't be able to work (because it doesn't have the recipient's key).
All that "free" money was collected from the taxpayers, and they all live (or exist on paper) in some state. They could have just as easily paid their taxes to their state capitols instead of Washington DC.
Sure, if your state stopped getting highway money from the feds, the resulting consequences would look bad on the state's books. ("All these roads and no money to repair them! All these assets and we can't afford a military to guard them!") But if your state stopped receiving that money and its residents stopped paying the federal taxes for those uses, and instead those taxes were paid directly to the state, then it doesn't really look all that bad on the books, does it? ("All these roads and look at all this state income tax to pay for them! All these assets and look at all the money this state's residents have paid to hire guards!")
(On average. I realize that on a state-by-state basis there is variance, but add up all 50 and the fed's contribution is less than zero, or exactly zero if they just happen to magically have no overhead at all.)
Would you favor a more general raising-of-the-bar for drivers licenses for all drivers? The stuff you're talking about sounds pretty important and I can't think of any reasons that only people who do it for pay would be affected by it. And plenty of them do have passengers (or other cars' drivers and passengers!) in their hands. I doubt anyone would be able to make a connection between money and the safety issues that you bring up.
BTW, I loved your bit about how anyone who wants to save a few bucks on cabs, is now an "Ayn Rand capitalist." I know a whole bunch of drunks who are going to be very amused to learn that about themselves. Half of them probably mistakenly think they're on the left end of the political spectrum.
A good way for the government to circumvent the law, would be to change the wording at the top of the list from "these people are banned" to "we have concerns about these people."
If an undesirable (hippie, NRA member, unflattering editorialist, Planned Parenthood employee, Planned Parenthood protester, Defcon presenter) wishes to board a plane, the government could ask or recommend the airline to refuse service, without saying why. The airline, since they would be easily subject to various forms of unprovable harassment, would "voluntarily" comply.
Then nobody is banned; the government is merely making suggestions.
You don't seem to understand tantrums. It's not about maximizing your score. It's about lowering someone else's, and some personal sacrifice can be justified if that leads to further suffering for the adversary.
It's perfectly fine to take the possible safety hit of your adversary getting confused and colliding with you, because even though it poses a risk to you, it poses an even greater risk to them (it's not certain they're going to swerve in your direction, is it?). And on top of that, their call got dropped, hopefully inconveniencing them. Mitigating all this, is that you know exactly when it's going to happen and are ready for it (but this aspect isn't terribly important; remember this is about the consequences to them, not you).
Childish behavior is a basic skill that anyone can learn. You can train this skill, by whenever you need to make a decision, ignoring any negative consequences to you. Look solely at other peoples losses, and your gains. Never other peoples gains or your losses. And don't ever cooperate.
If there were really no consequences, we would be ok with people committing murder, rape and theft! Welcome to Valhalla, where we hack each other to death with axes and then wake up the next morning and happily feast together.
The reason that murder, rape and theft are crimes, is that there are consequences. If you could address them (though you can't), then you would have eliminated some crimes.
You apparently have never watched a movie on DVD or BluRay or tried to use a proprietary streaming service. Are you sure you're not the one from last century? From what I remember, we didn't really start having all these problems, until around 1996 (or 1999 for me; that's when I bought my first DVD). Until around then, things mostly Just Worked, so most of us didn't really have any reasons to pirate anything, therefore we didn't.
The right analogy is that your boss paid you big bucks to write TPS reports, and you did it, but you were angry at your boss so you passive-aggressively wrote all the TPS reports in Swahili, and your boss doesn't know Swahili. The boss somehow got an unpaid volunteer with a weird sexual fetish to translate the reports into English. (Somehow, this person gets off by translating Swahili to English, and is quite happy to do it for pleasure or glory or whatever the hell is going on there. People are weird!)
On the surface, the process appears to work so perfectly (the boss is actually very happy with his unobfuscated TPS reports) that he fires you, because he forgot that the new guy was really just repairing the deliberately-sabotaged TPS reports, not actually providing the reports' content. All because you insisted on being a total dick, and also all because there are some really weird people out there who are happy to clean up after you.
Long-term this looks like a bad situation. OTOH, it seems that eventually someone else comes along and writes more TPS reports (but in enciphered Swahili) for a single pay period. Then they get fired too. So you report-writers are making money, but a lot less than if you could just stop being a dick and hold a steady job. And the bosses are sort of happy because they're getting their reports, but they can't help but think that if they could find employees worth keeping who weren't dicks, the company would be more productive. Everyone is losing (except the fetishists), and things aren't working well, but somehow we're all getting by.
(Further complication and analogy-repair: There are really two bosses, in different departments, and there's a broken accounting system. Only one of the bosses' budgets are actually having to pay the paychecks for the high-turnover dick TPS report-writers, but the other boss whose budget never gets hit, also gets to read the repaired TPS reports from the volunteers. So we're not all paying evenly for this broken system. The "pirate boss" get a free ride and the "chump boss" who keep hiring dicks, is getting visciously shafted. Some people think the pirate boss or the volunteer translators are the problem here, but I think the dick report-writer is the problem, and yet, solving the problem requires that we all start talking to the chump bosses, explaining "Stop being a chump, and stop paying those dicks. Let's just put 'reports must be in English' into the hiring contract, and so the dicks don't get even a single paycheck." If we can all agree to stop being chump bosses, the dicks will get selected out of the job market and either starve to death or change their behavior, and we can start hiring employees who write unobfuscated TPS reports. That seems to be the everyone-wins scenario, though I'm not sure how the fetishist translators will occupy their time, after that.)