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Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

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Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#241

Post by nine_k »

charles_f wrote: post #201

> Despite a user base of over 130 million, OnlyFans has failed to attract venture capital I don't get why that's a problem? They already built their platform, it works, they're the gold standard and they have a massive paying userbase! Why do they need VC money? Why would you want to dilute your stock rather than just build with your already existing, sizeable revenue stream?

Usually it makes sense to take investor money if you want to grow faster than your revenue stream allows. It lets you potentially capture the market before your competition.

But I don't think that there's much direct competition to OnlyFans, or that there is a market which is easy to capture by copycatting them.

Hence, they can afford to not take any investment. This is similar to how GitHub operated and grew for the first few years.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#242

Post by MichaelCollins »

pas wrote: post #207
MichaelCollins wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's late stage capitalism. It's going to get so much worse. Years from now you'll look back at the 2020s and think "I though THAT was the late stage? Boy I had no idea."

why will it get worse? what's the model that predicts this?

There seems to be no limit to the insanity people will tolerate with sufficient conditioning, so there is no reason to think there is a natural limit to how bad any economic or political system, capitalism or otherwise, can degrade.

If you can't imagine how things could get even worse, then watch some science fiction or read some history books. Tearing people's hearts out to appease the sun god, or to repossess the organ after unpaid medical bills. We're not there yet, but that could be the sort of madness we're heading into.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#243

Post by BirAdam »

pas wrote: post #207
MichaelCollins wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's late stage capitalism. It's going to get so much worse. Years from now you'll look back at the 2020s and think "I though THAT was the late stage? Boy I had no idea."

why will it get worse? what's the model that predicts this?

It will get worse because the US federal government will not be able to pay debt service indefinitely. This will either mean a lowering of interest rates and acceleration of both inflation and debt accumulation (merely delaying the collapse of the dollar system) or US federal default which will collapse the dollar system. When dollars quit flowing to the states in return for federal program enforcement there will be little incentive for state governments to continue adhering to federal rules. Warriors likewise don't usually fight for free, so there's unlikely to be a large military presence to hold it all together. From many perspectives, you could consider this to be not the end of capitalism in the USA, but the end of empire altogether. Of course, the politicians, bankers, and managerial elite of the USA have kept this going far longer than I thought possible, so it may not happen that way at all.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#244

Post by kreco »

charles_f wrote: post #201

> Despite a user base of over 130 million, OnlyFans has failed to attract venture capital I don't get why that's a problem? They already built their platform, it works, they're the gold standard and they have a massive paying userbase! Why do they need VC money? Why would you want to dilute your stock rather than just build with your already existing, sizeable revenue stream?

Especially because it also means that potential OnlyFans competitor will come across the same fate. So there is no need to worry about them (unless the owners intended to get massive cash asap).

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#245

Post by osrec »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #128

I investigated this a few years ago in Australia. Sex work is legal in Australia, kinda. It is legal to exchange sexual services for money, but supporting and assisting such a transaction is illegal. So a landlord who rents a property to a sex worker is breaking the law. A payment processor who processes the card transaction is breaking the law, and so on. There are some clauses around managing establishments that ba…

What were their tech issues?

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#246

Post by Kiro »

Kye wrote: post #118
Kiro wrote: post #66

Among Swedish feminists and the left, sex work is completely unacceptable and prostitution is pretty much equated with rape. Is this not true for other countries?

Swedish feminists probably have as wide a range of opinions on any given topic as any other kind of feminist. Also: "the left," a fraught and increasingly fluid concept.

The narrative is extremely one-sided in Sweden and there's no debate. Celebrities get unanimously cancelled for getting caught buying sex.

Here are some quotes (Google Translated) from the biggest feminist organisation (Feministiskt Initiativ):

"Prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes is a form of violence and a violation of human rights."

"Sexualization and objectification work against the principle of the human being as an independent subject and can limit women's ability to protect their bodily integrity."

"Equality cannot be achieved as long as it is possible to buy other people's bodies through prostitution, strip or sex clubs."

"Working against pornography and objectifying representations is thus an important part of violence prevention work."

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#247

Post by DiggyJohnson »

kodah wrote: post #223
marcus_holmes wrote: post #128

I investigated this a few years ago in Australia. Sex work is legal in Australia, kinda. It is legal to exchange sexual services for money, but supporting and assisting such a transaction is illegal. So a landlord who rents a property to a sex worker is breaking the law. A payment processor who processes the card transaction is breaking the law, and so on. There are some clauses around managing establishments that ba…

Ostracizing sex work has become fully normalized, so unfortunately people read this and immediately think, "Why not pretend to be someone else?", "Why not just do other illegal things (like tax evasion)?"

> has become fully normalized

I don’t think this is a new phenomenon at all. I would guess it’s the norm through much of history.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#248

Post by mschuster91 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #137
mschuster91 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is even worse, for both customers and sex workers. A wad of cash is virtually untrackable and can be protected, crypto asset flows are by definition completely public, and the government already has the tools (both legal frameworks and the technology) to associate crypto accounts with identities.

monero and tornado cash are crypto, but payment flows through them are pretty difficult to trace.

Money in, money out. The US government most definitely has the capability to do correlation tracking, not to mention you will have to exchange any kind of token into ye olde fiat currency at some point, which can and will be tracked.

As for Tornado Cash, anything that passes (or passed!) through mixers can be tracked and sanctioned as well.

In case of doubt, always assume that the US government has an ability to at least collect all traces of data, and that sooner or later it will make itself an opportunity to, as TC proved even retroactively, seize your assets or make them worthless with the stroke of a pen on a court order. And to make it worse, unlike a wad of cash that you can construct a reasonable parallel way on how you acquired it, you are automatically committing a crime by interacting with a sanctioned entity like TC.

Sex workers have already precarious lives as it is, there is no reason to entice them to even more risks.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#249

Post by DennisP »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #9

All this time, and technology hasn't solved this issue? Wasn't bitcoin supposed to be applicable here - anonymous transactions? Wasn't the internet supposed to enable humans to interact at will without censorship?

Cryptocurrency can't be a mass-market payment solution until it scales a lot better.
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