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by cssndrx 5421 days ago
I'm probably going to get down-voted to hell, but I'm not sure what this counter experiment is trying to prove... we all already knew it is easy to take from Jonathan's card.

When people noticed that money was disappearing off Jonathan's card $100 at a time, most people thought it was an uninformed, karma-less nobody stealing from the card. It is incredible that the transactions are due to some educated do-gooder imposing his beliefs onto the donors of Jonathan's card.

I've read many of Sam's comments before, and respect them as thoughtful and intelligent. However, just because you don't like the idea of "yuppies buying yuppies coffee", doesn't mean that you should try to destroy Jonathan's card. Some people feel good and more connected with others by adding to and taking from Jonathan's card.

By taking money out of the system, you are in effect going against donors wishes and imposing your own beliefs on them. It is almost like taking from the vault of a charity that you dislike and giving the proceeds to your charity of choice. Its less atrocious than pocketing the money and buying an iPad, but obviously still bad.

EDIT: I feel sorry for Jonathan and his good intentions.

1 comments

I agree with you except on one point. Sam is exactly the kind of person I thought was taking the money and I think most people probably suspected the same thing. I thought it was someone sitting around watching the twitter feed stealing money 150$ at a go. Someone who looked at this, possibly silly probably naive, social project and said 'This is stupid and I'm gonna show them how stupid it is.' I also knew that this person would eventually write a blog post about how smart they were for figuring out how to steal from people giving away money and how the project wasn't just foolish it was immoral.