Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

This is basically an extremely classist, racist and uninformed version of NIMBY that says "Poor people: They are allowed to exist, but Not In My Back Yard. Go be poor someplace else!"

It's a complicated issue and I've already written a couple of long comments and I have other things I need to be doing. But telling people we will cut you a small check so you can move someplace cheaper amounts to saying poor people cannot live in desirable areas with lots of amenities and have no right whatsoever to desire to do so.

I also have zero reason to believe it actually solves the housing affordability issue. I was willing to move to almost anywhere in the western US to get off the street and back into housing. I left California and moved to a small town in Washington. But it was extremely challenging trying to find a place to make my life work with affordable rent and no car.

I no longer drive. Even if I did, buying a car is typically the second highest household expense for most American households.

We just don't have a lot of options for a full and vibrant life without a car in the US. Living without a car requires a certain level of urban fabric so you can do your shopping etc on foot and via public transit. The lack of walkable places in the US is a primary part of the affordability issue.

It will not get solved by injecting funds into the system for poor people to use to cover rent. In fact, doing so likely makes the issue more intractable.

Real change is always hard. People inherently do not like change. UBI is a "status quo is god" answer when the current status quo has terrible problems that will not be fixed by simply giving poor people a few more bucks to live on.

Two factors are at play here, although “wrong with people” may be overly harsh and is certainly unhelpful. First, a lot of people, myself included, think that prohibition of prostitution is a bad idea. Now I’d argue that in this case that’s a bit of a red herring, because we’re talking about sexual slavery, not sexual work.

The second factor is a little nasty, but let’s face it... a site full of “toolmakers” takes a strong stance against people who make tools being held accountable for the uses of those tools. What a shock. Now it’s not just that simple, because some people are legitimately concerned about the proverbial blacksmith being held liable for making hammers. Others point out that if the blacksmith specially made “head cracking hammers” for Big Bob The Headsmasher, then the blacksmith crossed a line. Others are ideologically or practically opposed to almost any regulation.

It’s a mess of people talking past each other, angrily. Personally I believe that BackPage was a bad actor, and as for SF I’ll wait and see what pretrial discovery turns up. Most people seem to be more interested in rushing to conclusions though, and fighting over hypotheticals, hence the high noise:signal ratio here.

As for sex work, there's absolutely no good reason why it shouldn't be completely destigmatized, decriminalized, and treated like any other kind of work. There are some inherent risks, but if it's decriminalized they can be managed and brought down to acceptable levels. There are certainly jobs with higher inherent risks, like working in lumber, or oil rigs, or construction. For women who aren't savvy enough to make it on their own, brothels are a good solution. With decriminalization, the bosses in brothels can be kept accountable.

Tangential, but I feel there is always an effort to cater to part of these "dark" markets with as harmless as possible ersatz (underage fictional porn, dolls/robotics, etc), but there will still be a strong negative reaction from some part of the society trying to ban the ersatz as a slippery slope.

I get that for any action there will always be a reaction, it's just depressing that most of the public opinion will agree more to principled but inefficient moral stands than to efforts to move the ball in the right direction.