[perl4ever]

The wealth that was being destroyed from the perspective of society, or the starving, is the losses of WeWork day by day and year by year.

I think it's important not to confuse that with the wealth that was merely transferred from one book entry to another.

The spectacular destruction of the abstract entity ensures that the slow bleeding doesn't go on.

Like, if I have $1B, which is really just a note in a computer and you steal it from me by hacking that computer, or playing a confidence game, that's not the same as if a billion dollar factory burns down.

[JohnFen]

> you steal it from me by hacking that computer, or playing a confidence game, that's not the same as if a billion dollar factory burns down.

I honestly don't follow this logic. What is the essential difference?

[perl4ever]

The difference between kicking a stuffed toy and a live pet?

[JohnFen]

I don't see how that's an apt analogy at all. Both of the circumstances you cite appear to be the same fundamental thing to me -- they're both live pets, just of different breeds.

[perl4ever]

Money in an account is just a note that someone is entitled to actual resources at some indefinite time in the future. You don't see a difference between erasing that note and destroying the resources it quantifies? I mean, I'm not saying that what people write down can't affect the real world, but it's a fundamentally different thing from the physical world. Erasing a number could have any positive or negative consequence, maybe soon, maybe far in the future. It's very tenuous. Destroying the stuff has a specific cost, for certain, that applies to society and not just the owner. Destroying or wasting stuff in large amounts is obviously "stealing" from the needy, while numbers changing because of people having their hopes and dreams deflated is not.

When hopes and dreams die, the cost or benefit depends entirely on how it motivates humans, which is very complex and often unpredictable, but can as easily be good as bad, even if it's painful.

Perhaps I am talking to a being from another dimension, or a ghost who exists only on the internet, in which case I'm probably wasting electrons.

How about this:

Suppose you have a lottery ticket, and you think you've won $1M. But then you notice that you read a number wrong, and it's actually worthless. You may feel like you've lost $1M, but actually you just gained something extremely valuable - if you continued thinking you'd won, you might have done something destructive like quit your job before you found out you didn't. And that action in the real world, would have had negative consequences for you, your employer, your loved ones, and so on. Society in other words. For some reason, even (or maybe particularly) people who think money is evil fall into the trap of thinking it's real as...(google says "a donut").