How can you steal something intangible like culture

[Darkharta666]

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

(1) Find a secluded culture with a natural mistrust of outsiders
(2) Realize that they won't tell you, show you, or explain anything to you
(3) Find out about culture through underhanded means, evesdropping, spying, hidden cameras
(4) Spill information which you shouldn't have to thirteen year olds that want to be unique

Yeah but it's not like they don't have it any more because a 13 year old found out about it, and if they're shut off from the outside world how would they even notice?

You can steal electricity from someone, they would still have electricity and they would notice something is wrong when they get their electric bill.

Lots of people have the internet nowadays.

I don't see how that connects, electricity is measurable and thus tangible?

The comparison was made because you felt that it wasn't stealing because they still had their culture. In my comparison, the thief steals the electricity, and the victim still has electricity because it's a commodity that is continuously supplied to them as opposed to a finite resource that has to be budgeted. Whether or not the item being stolen could be measured has nothing to do with the comparison, or why the comparison was made.

Electricity is finite since we need coal or another energy source to generate and supply it so it does need to be budgeted. I mean if you can't deprive it from another person, how are you actually stealing it?

[Lucky~9~Lives]

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

(1) Find a secluded culture with a natural mistrust of outsiders
(2) Realize that they won't tell you, show you, or explain anything to you
(3) Find out about culture through underhanded means, evesdropping, spying, hidden cameras
(4) Spill information which you shouldn't have to thirteen year olds that want to be unique

Yeah but it's not like they don't have it any more because a 13 year old found out about it, and if they're shut off from the outside world how would they even notice?

You can steal electricity from someone, they would still have electricity and they would notice something is wrong when they get their electric bill.

Lots of people have the internet nowadays.

I don't see how that connects, electricity is measurable and thus tangible?

The comparison was made because you felt that it wasn't stealing because they still had their culture. In my comparison, the thief steals the electricity, and the victim still has electricity because it's a commodity that is continuously supplied to them as opposed to a finite resource that has to be budgeted. Whether or not the item being stolen could be measured has nothing to do with the comparison, or why the comparison was made.

They no longer have that portion of electricity that was stolen; if the electricity wasn't a finite resource that had to be budgeted, they wouldn't be getting the electric bill.

[Darkharta666]

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Lucky~9~Lives

Darkharta666

How can you steal something intangible like culture

steal
verb (transitive)
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.

I'm looking at the 1st definition

Ideas can be considered as property. See -> Patents.

This is kind of a silly argument since those ideas are intended to be products, how can you patent and sell a social construct?

[Silent Mule Man]

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

(1) Find a secluded culture with a natural mistrust of outsiders
(2) Realize that they won't tell you, show you, or explain anything to you
(3) Find out about culture through underhanded means, evesdropping, spying, hidden cameras
(4) Spill information which you shouldn't have to thirteen year olds that want to be unique

Yeah but it's not like they don't have it any more because a 13 year old found out about it, and if they're shut off from the outside world how would they even notice?

You can steal electricity from someone, they would still have electricity and they would notice something is wrong when they get their electric bill.

Lots of people have the internet nowadays.

I don't see how that connects, electricity is measurable and thus tangible?

The comparison was made because you felt that it wasn't stealing because they still had their culture. In my comparison, the thief steals the electricity, and the victim still has electricity because it's a commodity that is continuously supplied to them as opposed to a finite resource that has to be budgeted. Whether or not the item being stolen could be measured has nothing to do with the comparison, or why the comparison was made.

They no longer have that portion of electricity that was stolen; if the electricity wasn't a finite resource that had to be budgeted, they wouldn't be getting the electric bill.

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource. And to be honest, electricity itself isn't something mined out of a cave somewhere, but rather created through artificial means from both renewable and nonrenewable resources, and so long as the means to create it and the resources to create it exist it can and should be considered an infinite resource.

[Lucky~9~Lives]

Silent Mule Man

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource.

The customer is precisely limited in their consumption by how much they can pay.

[Darkharta666]

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Silent Mule Man

You can steal electricity from someone, they would still have electricity and they would notice something is wrong when they get their electric bill.

Lots of people have the internet nowadays.

I don't see how that connects, electricity is measurable and thus tangible?

The comparison was made because you felt that it wasn't stealing because they still had their culture. In my comparison, the thief steals the electricity, and the victim still has electricity because it's a commodity that is continuously supplied to them as opposed to a finite resource that has to be budgeted. Whether or not the item being stolen could be measured has nothing to do with the comparison, or why the comparison was made.

They no longer have that portion of electricity that was stolen; if the electricity wasn't a finite resource that had to be budgeted, they wouldn't be getting the electric bill.

and so long as the means to create it and the resources to create it exist it can and should be considered an infinite resource.

This doesn't make any sense : /

[Silent Mule Man]

Darkharta666

Electricity is finite since we need coal or another energy source to generate and supply it so it does need to be budgeted.

"Another energy source" can include such constants as sunlight, wind, the kinetic energy of flowing water, or even human labor. You don't get charged for electricity because it's going to run out sometime.

Darkharta666

I mean if you can't deprive it from another person, how are you actually stealing it?

Because it wasn't yours. A human body naturally creates blood; so long as a human is alive and properly nourished they will continue to create red blood cells. You would still be stealing from them if you strapped them down and forcibly removed their blood.

Darkharta666

This is kind of a silly argument since those ideas are intended to be products, how can you patent and sell a social construct?

I dunno, ask a scientologist.

[Silent Mule Man]

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource.

The customer is precisely limited in their consumption by how much they can pay.

Not, however, by the amount of electricity available.

[Lucky~9~Lives]

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource.

The customer is precisely limited in their consumption by how much they can pay.

Not, however, by the amount of electricity available.

True - but the pertinent quantity is the amount of electricity available to the customer, not available per se.

[Darkharta666]

Silent Mule Man

Darkharta666

Electricity is finite since we need coal or another energy source to generate and supply it so it does need to be budgeted.

"Another energy source" can include such constants as sunlight, wind, the kinetic energy of flowing water, or even human labor. You don't get charged for electricity because it's going to run out sometime.

Darkharta666

I mean if you can't deprive it from another person, how are you actually stealing it?

Because it wasn't yours. A human body naturally creates blood; so long as a human is alive and properly nourished they will continue to create red blood cells. You would still be stealing from them if you strapped them down and forcibly removed their blood.

Darkharta666

This is kind of a silly argument since those ideas are intended to be products, how can you patent and sell a social construct?

I dunno, ask a scientologist.

Yeah it might be renewable but the constructs that harness sunlight and wind are still made of finite materials. Either way all these allegories are referring to tangible things so I still don't see how it meshes with the original premise. You have a point with the Scientology thing but it seems like a stretch to compare those e-reader things to talking like a sassy black woman as a white gay guy or so,etching along those lines

[Riviera de la Mancha]

Darkharta666

Don't get it dude.

Simple - you can steal things which are not tangible. I can, for example, steal someone's patents, copyrights, or trademarks which need not be tangible. I can also steal product ideas as well. I can also, under certain circumstances, be held liable for theft which I have subsequently fixed, like being a trustee and unlawfully stealing money from the trust only to quickly replace it.

A much more interesting question to ask is that if we all agree that it is possible to steal intangible things, including a culture, how do we determine who owns what, when it has been stolen, and what, if anything, we as a society can or should do about it.

[Silent Mule Man]

Darkharta666

Yeah it might be renewable but the constructs that harness sunlight and wind are still made of finite materials. Either way all these allegories are referring to tangible things so I still don't see how it meshes with the original premise. You have a point with the Scientology thing but it seems like a stretch to compare those e-reader things to talking like a sassy black woman as a white gay guy or so,etching along those lines

Many finite resources can be, for lack of a better word, recycled. For example, there are only so many cows in the world; however, cows reproduce, so any cows that might be slaughtered for food could theoretically be replaced. Since many materials have this particular quality (living beings being replaced with young, old metal being melted down, purified and reformed), these materials could, under certain circumstances, be treated as infinite due to our ability to replenish these resources.

The comparison addressed specifically your concern that their culture couldn't truly be taken from them in the specific manner I described earlier. You argued that it couldn't really be considered stolen because those who originally possessed the culture would possess it all the same, so I brought up the idea of stealing electricity, something which the victim would still have even after electricity has been stolen.
As for how this relates specifically to the intangibility of culture, I would argue based on my previous comparison that tangibility and intangibility are inconsequential, and that you're concentrating on something that really doesn't matter.

[Silent Mule Man]

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource.

The customer is precisely limited in their consumption by how much they can pay.

Not, however, by the amount of electricity available.

True - but the pertinent quantity is the amount of electricity available to the customer, not available per se.

Electricity isn't so expensive that your average person would go without electricity for extended periods of time under normal circumstances.

[Lucky~9~Lives]

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource.

The customer is precisely limited in their consumption by how much they can pay.

Not, however, by the amount of electricity available.

True - but the pertinent quantity is the amount of electricity available to the customer, not available per se.

Electricity isn't so expensive that your average person would go without electricity for extended periods of time under normal circumstances.

They would go without something, though.

[Silent Mule Man]

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

Lucky~9~Lives

Silent Mule Man

To the customer paying for the electricity, the electricity is for all intents and purposes an infinite resource.

The customer is precisely limited in their consumption by how much they can pay.

Not, however, by the amount of electricity available.

True - but the pertinent quantity is the amount of electricity available to the customer, not available per se.

Electricity isn't so expensive that your average person would go without electricity for extended periods of time under normal circumstances.

They would go without something, though.

Please elaborate. Without some other resource? Without specific electrical appliances?