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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?

#431

Post by mrguyorama »

dymk wrote: post #376
mrguyorama wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not consider cash anonymous in a grocery store anymore. They're tracking you through other means, including using the bluetooth in your phone, hiring facial recognition companies, and other bits of data to try and have some form of identifier for you that they can put all your purchases on.

That’s true, I mean more for transactions on e.g. Craigslist or a farmers market.

Craigslist has logs of your conversations, which they will definitely share with police when asked (which likely happens all the time) and then the police can buy your phone location data from whoever and track what happened.

Nothing is anonymous without extreme and CONSTANT effort. Any second you don't have perfect opsec, you should assume you are perfectly tracked. This is independent of any laws congress makes, because the policing apparatus does this itself.

The only way to change this is make it illegal to track transactions for anyone, including police, but the second we do that we will see significant sanction busting, money laundering, spam, scams, online casinos, fraudulent businesses etc.

All crime involves money at some point, and if you want to allow the police to fight that you have to allow money to be tracked. You don't get both options.

I think making money untraced is not useful, and instead, we should be fighting for a government that is free enough to allow your entirely tracked transactions to do what you want. Buying some drugs or sex? Whatever, just pay your sales tax. The government knows what you do, that's the modern reality, so build a government that allows you to do things that don't harm others.

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

#432

Post by mrguyorama »

bambax wrote: post #419
mrguyorama wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically half the US thinks this way and votes this way. If you are a conservative and upset at my comment, understand the people you vote for SIGNIFICANTLY support the religious nuts.

I'm not from the US, don't live there (and don't vote there).

Billions of people still live under the framing that their religion is the only truth in the universe and think that prostitution is defined as some sort of bad thing according to their holy books. Even just limiting to Christians and Muslims, that's billions of diverse people who are limited to very against prostitution and sex out of wedlock. Why are you surprised that some of them can find this community?

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

#433

Post by rendang »

bambax wrote: post #416
rendang wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would social conservatives and Christians, who make up a large share of US population, not be expected to be present among HN commenters?

Because they weren't in the past. And because HN is an international forum for tech geeks; I think social conservatives and Christians are underrepresented in tech; and I am quite certain the kind of social conservatism and "Christianity" that exist in the US doesn't exist in the same proportion, or with the same beliefs, elsewhere. In Europe for instance, so-called "pro-lifers", while they exist, make up a small min…

Fair, but if the underrepresentation is 50% say, half of a large number is not tiny. Tech nowadays is a major career path akin to law or medicine, less of the niche idiosyncratic subculture it was 20 years ago.

Anecdotally, my socially conservative church is full of FAANG developers & one of our lay pastors is a highly-cited ML researcher

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

#434

Post by powerslacker »

feet wrote: post #380
powerslacker wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant amount of people aren't looking at this as an issue of metrics, convenience, economics, or anything of the sort. That's a utilitarian approach. The vast majority of people opposed to legal & regulated prostitution are approaching it from a religious and moral perspective. The Christians that the article rags on believe that the Bible is truth that has been revealed to man by God and that it encourages t…

Yet the US has freedom of religion, it seems there is a large conflict there

As @a-user-you-like has pointed out, your interpretation is a common misconception about what 'freedom of religion' means. The framers certainly did not mean that the laws passed by the state and federal governments were to be completely free from moral judgement based on religion or more particularly Christianity. There is no conflict, because neither the states or the federal government are instituting a state church. Instead, you have individual citizens insisting that the laws of their land should be derived from God's law and not judged by some arbitrary and immeasurable standard such as the happiness of prostitutes and their clientele.

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

#435

Post by wnoise »

lkslkdjfsl wrote: post #393
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is your own conlcusion. Historically armies were "staffed" by nobles If you as a man weren't willing to fight, be it the army or your home, good luck attracting a mate for most of history. Similar dynamics exist today. >why is sex work different? Already answered. History and cultural virtues. >Who is we? The far majority of your male and female ancestors, for one. The majority of cultures globally, for two. >I…

> If you as a man weren't willing to fight, be it the army or your home, good luck attracting a mate for most of history Most men, for significant parts of history, weew explicitly excluded from joining the army (e.g. Roman armies were only "staffed" by citizens). Where are you getting the idea that most men had to fight at home? Do you have any relevant sources for this? > The vast majority of men aren't attracted t…

> Roman armies were only "staffed" by citizens

Er, no. It was a path to citizenship. The Tartship Strippers quote "service guarantees citizenship" had real antecedents, and is even now a benefit of military service in the US.

See, e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-stu... for the first, and https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita... for the second.

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

#436

Post by wnoise »

fiat_fandango wrote: post #370

I don't personally, but society (even liberal society) still has structural reasons to disincentivize this kind of behavior. Even as someone who doesn't think the government should tell you how to live, you can't pretend to be blind to the fact of why the government doesn't want to promulgate this kind of promiscuity / lack of family structure. It's ironic, given they think it's completely okay to explicitly target f…

> Even as someone who doesn't think the government should tell you how to live, you can't pretend to be blind to the fact of why the government doesn't want to promulgate this kind of promiscuity

I can. Make the argument, rather than saying "it's obvious -- you know. Come on, you know. It's obvious." Until the argument is actually made, it can't be engaged with. This just terminates discussion.

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

#437

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #429
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people out there ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/09/sex-work-... ) advocating for prostitution as a reasonable career path which should be discussed openly with women who feel undervalued or unfulfilled in their current career. I don't think people are gonna start plowing each other in public, but I think there's a very real possibility that in a decade or two it could be considered strang…

What if they did? In what way does this harm you? At one time they said the same thing about exposing any skin at all even at the beach. Every human, yes including children gasp has a body with body parts, so mere exposure to the sight of them and knowledge of their existance is not harmful. Sight of the act of sex is merely more of the same. Kids on farms see it every day from birth. At worst it's perhaps distastefu…

I don't think there can be a rigid distinction between "I don't want to see that" and "actual harm". We can presumably agree that it would be wrong if Google put up posters of naked women all over the office, and that the EEOC is right to prohibit such things as a hostile work environment. But what "actual harm" could you point to beyond the fact that the posters are offensive and people don't want to see them? I understand the appeal of being able to take a "live and let live" attitude without considering these kind of tricky values judgments, but I just don't see how you can avoid it.

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

#438

Post by x86x87 »

x86x87 wrote: post #326
ethotool wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has been such a proven failure yet people still say these things on the regular.

Here is one thing you can do with crypto that you cannot do with a credit card: use your money how you would like. There is no payment processor to decide that you are not allowed to send or receive money.

Everyone believes that's an edge case/oddity until they or a business they care about gets banned by the payment processor gods.

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

#439

Post by confidantlake »

slillibri wrote: post #253
confidantlake wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is friends/family/social pressure is for. We don't forbid it, but people will look at you sideways if you drink beer at 9 am on a weekday.

> but people will look at you sideways if you drink beer at 9 am on a weekday. This is interesting because it assumes everyone's day to day is exactly the same. When I worked 3rd shift, drinking beer at 9 am wasn't an issue to me because my 9 am wasn't the same as your 9 am. At that point, drinking beer at 9 pm would be odd because that was my morning. Also, my workweek was shifted so my weekend was Monday/Tuesday, s…

Ty for pointing that out, my example was bad. I think this is a good illustration of why being judgemental is not helpful. I completely missed why this is a perfectly normal choice for a lot of people who don't operate like I do.

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

#440

Post by confidantlake »

slfnflctd wrote: post #204
confidantlake wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is friends/family/social pressure is for. We don't forbid it, but people will look at you sideways if you drink beer at 9 am on a weekday.

There are countless situations where that sort of pressure simply doesn't exist, and likely won't in the future. I also don't think the example you provided is a very good one. Perhaps a better example might be extreme cosmetic surgery (&/or body modification) addicts. Or maybe I should say 'enthusiasts'.

Yup good point, it wasn't a very good example.
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