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PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

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Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#701
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing better than receiving your salary in a token with huge minute-to-minute volatility.

Would there be a way to peg valuation to clock periods? Or a certain number of transaction counts? (Ie., between the next 1000 transactions the value must be exactly 'X'.) It would also be interesting for the protocol to gain the ability for arbitrage. Or even negotiate whom the arbitrating party would be.

If you want less liquidity, more extreme volatility, and less buyin, sure. But what you just described (absent a central bank; like Tether) is much how dictators have tried to stabilize devaluing currencies.

Derivatives/forex and black markets would develop quickly in any major currency that did this.

AKA, nobody would logically accept your transaction until the time period or count ends, otherwise, there is a significant likelihood of them being wrong.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#702
post #135

Financial deplatforming is a monster, long-term trend to watch over the next decades. Deplatforming happens with sex workers. It also happens in the US marijuana industry. It happens with perfectly legal political content. The number of ways in which someone, somewhere will be offended by products or services for sale is growing, driven by a rapidly improving worldwide communication network and delivery system, and b…

I've had several friends in the adult industry have their checking accounts closed at a several major banks as well. Traditional banking should definitely not be discriminating against fully legal activities.

Seems like an interesting opportunity for a new bank — be the bank for porn, cannabis, etc.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#703
post #209
post #135

Financial deplatforming is a monster, long-term trend to watch over the next decades. Deplatforming happens with sex workers. It also happens in the US marijuana industry. It happens with perfectly legal political content. The number of ways in which someone, somewhere will be offended by products or services for sale is growing, driven by a rapidly improving worldwide communication network and delivery system, and b…

But Bitcoin won't solve deplatforming, because the existence of Bitcoin doesn't preclude a bank from deplatforming you. Until Bitcoin is ubiquitous (doubtful this will occur in my life time) we are still vulnerable to deplatforming when we go to exchange btc for fiat.

Correct. Banks in Canada are already de-platforming customers suspected of using Bitcoin: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinCA/comments/89gsdk/td_canada... https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinCA/comments/9ckikr/rbc_froze... https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bmo-blocks-cryptocurrency-purcha...

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the description I put "fun times". I recently started using Venmo to pay a few people and the things I have wrote are awful. Recent examples include: "Human organ trafficking" "Lunch and murder for hire", "sack of shrunken heads" and so on. Let them call me.

Get ready for your account to be closed suddenly without warning over the next few years.

Never forget.. It's not personal. It's just a process who wants to shed potential liability by applying pressure on individuals involved. Wouldn't be necessary if we had banking secrecy.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who could possibly threaten a bank over handling financial transactions for sex workers? The government. They do it right out in the open. > And what could they possibly threaten the bank with? Shutting down the bank.

How do they do this in the open? The bank isn't doing anything illegal.

Know Your Customer laws can directly transfer legal liability to banks, but it's not just that.

The Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to provide "suspicious activity reports" on a wide variety of transactions, which can trigger seizure of funds without convictions. And structuring rules can make do the same to suspiciously-organized Filing those reports can get all of the assets in question seized, and failing to file them or filing them too slowly can incur extremely large fines. So the bank runs the risk of 1. having the funds in question seized, so they don't even get to collect interest, and 2. being fined a large multiple of the amount of money in question any time they overlook an instance. That's not directly involving the bank in anything illegal, but it amounts to "if you handle suspicious transactions, you won't make money on them and can potentially be fined lots of money". It effectively threatens banks for working with anything that looks similar to illegal transactions, even if they know its a different industry. And since the private cash transactions for this sort of work can look like either escorting or drug-dealing...

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#706
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you don't use a shitcoin, you use Monero.

JFC, this tribalism in the cryptocurrency space is harming adoption. "Shitcoin"? Please grow up..

Before you criticize me for calling a dangerously flawed currency a shitcoin, you should criticize those who use "bitcoin" and "cryptocurrency" interchangeably. Bitcoin was fine back in the day but is terribly flawed in 2019. Are the fanboys never going to move beyond this?

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#707
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornography is a symptom of the commodification of sex, much like legal prostitution, sugar-daddies, and even the transactional swiping hookup apps that dominate dating among lower age groups. It is the tendency of a capital-dominated culture to turn everything into a commodity that is bought and sold; sex is merely one element that this system has consumed. After the wide acceptance of the birth control pill, the tr…

Sex was bought and sold long before capitalism, though. And I don't even mean prostitution, although that one is obvious. But in traditional patriarchal societies, brides are often effectively bought and sold, and sex is a part of that package. The difference is whether the benefactor is the woman herself, or somebody else. In a very cynical sense, in a traditional society, women are "capital" of a very special kind…

What do you make of dowries, where the bride's family transfers wealth to the groom's family? Are they buying the sex of the groom? This would be consistent with what you are saying. Dowries (wealth from bride's family to groom's family) are much more common today and throughout history than a dower (the reverse wealth transfer).

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#708

>"... is a private company and it is their right to refuse service to anyone" >"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" >"en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope_fallacy" Nothing is out of the order.

Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's necessarily neutral. We can still argue this development being negative, for reasons unrelated to "freedom of speech".

We can also argue how it's a positive development.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#709
post #579
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that couldn't have been the reason for account closure, I meant :)

Don’t know if it’s only in Germany but banks here don’t need to give you any reason to close your account. There are some stories of how every time they tweak N26 Risk ML there’s a wave of termination letters to customers that didn’t do anything wrong. A bunch of friends got affected by this a while a go, they didn’t do anything wrong and the bank refused to give any reason at all for the termination.

This is actually a consequence of what neural network based ML actually does.

Machine learning is actually a misnomer. A more accurate term is function interpolation.

Let's say I have a training set of 5000 samples.

When I kick off the training process, I'm basically telling the NN run until it simulates a function that yields the desired response in those 5000 cases.

The rub of course, is that programs aren't only defined by what they do (yielding the appropriate response for the the training cases) but also by what they don't do (excessive false positive/negative generation outside the training dataset). Performing correctly on the training, but messing up on more general tasks (the human equivalent being becoming an excellent test taker, but a lousy practitioner) is called overfishing. A more broad subclass of overfishing that van occur would be undesired/discriminatory/illegal optimizations, such as using combinations of protected classes as a significant data point in coming to a determination.

There is no guarantee for any particular training session that you'll arrive at the same weights, or that that set of weights will cover the same set of things that the previous network did. I.e. Your network can make mistakes (just like a person).

The irony in all of this, is you're basically training a machine to simulate a human doing a task in reliability/consistency (admittedly without the constraints of interacting with the world through a human body) with all the volatility between training that just being a human from day to day introduces.

I'm honestly beginning to wonder if the push for machine learning adoption isn't anything more than the market trying to replace people with models that they don't have to pay benefits for, and onto which they can pass blame trivially because, "Of course we didn't make it to discriminate! There's no way we could have known it would do that ahead of time!"

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#710
post #489
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the worst case, you could set up brick and mortar shops for getting dollar bills in and out.

I think you've just stumbled on the reason that folks are so determined to move us to a "cashless society" In a cashless society, once the folks in charge deplatform you, you cease to be able to engage in any transactions of any kind, and you basically cease to exist.

I agree that that is a consequence. But I don't think it's the primary motivation.

When I talk to people around me about cash vs cards everyone agrees that paying with card is so much more convenient, especially when you just have to gently tap the reader with your card.

I know many people who have the phone case with space for a few cards. They don't even carry a wallet anymore. They have nowhere to put bulky coins or even bills.

Everything else: Decreased risk of being pick-pocketed, decreased risk of money vans being robbed, increased surveillance, increased control. All those are just secondary concerns.

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