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The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

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Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#201

Post by everforward »

mcmcmc wrote: post #118
jmkd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay sounds like we agree that sugar and junk food should be on the wrong side of the line, but turns out those industries have very little stigma. Who is standing outside the school gates protesting against big cola? My point is it's complicated, ambiguous, sometimes hypocritical, differs by jurisdiction and so on. None of it is clear.

Ah yes, the great evil of sugar… which our bodies require for energy. Seriously, your brain needs glucose. Ask a diabetic if sugar is evil

This is not the first time I’ve seen this, and it’s misleading. Your brain needs glucose, as does the rest of your body. You do not need to eat glucose, your body can synthesize it from non-glucose sources. You can absolutely survive on a diet with 0 glucose.

I don’t have an issue with people eating sugar, but it is not a necessary nutrient.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#202

Post by BreakingProd »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #184
thaumasiotes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license. That isn't true; crimes can have aggravating factors and selling drugs to a minor could aggravate the crime of selling drugs. I don't think the laws were written that way, but they could have been.

There is an incentive to commit a crime when the benefit of committing the crime exceeds the penalty times the chance of getting caught plus the cost of measures taken to avoid getting caught. This is why increasing penalties have extremely fast diminishing returns. As the penalty goes up, the relative cost of measures to avoid detection goes down, and the penalty needed to counter them becomes exponentially larger.…

That seems like the only sensible path forward, if you assume that the only lever a society can pull to make punishment harsher is “longer prison sentences”.

What if the penalty for selling drugs to kids was death?

It seems like that would change the risk/reward calculation pretty substantially.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#203

Post by scelerat »

ball_of_lint wrote: post #152

Author makes a point badly, but there is an important point here. It's really strange that we de-facto allow the few large credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard) to effectively impose their own particular views and values on what sorts of businesses can process payments. The stigma+roadblocks against these "high-risk categories" generally doesn't come from the processors (like Stripe, Adyen), but are actually driven…

It's not that credit card companies have some kind of moral bone to pick, it is that the legal, logistical and political morass of dealing with the variety of state and national laws, definitions of porn, protections of children and non-consenting performers, etc. are such that it is not worth it for them to pursue.

Similar issues exist for, e.g., companies and sites selling legal THC and THC products.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#204

Post by LorenPechtel »

gosub100 wrote: post #198
cj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> line between good and evil Talking about good and evil in tech is a slippery slope. What's worse, working at Meta building products causing addiction in kids, or building an adult content site? I think there's an argument that Meta is morally worse, yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. I find that interesting.

Let me challenge your POV for a moment.. What about proportionally of abuse? How many married people met on fb? Estranged family members reunited, long lost friends who found each other again? Etc. It's impossible to know the number for those, but I vividly remember how difficult it was to find people before fb. And they made it trivial because of critical mass. I'll acknowledge that this has also led to a lot of unw…

Facebook, as a community is fine.

The evil lies in the feed. All the standard addiction techniques are present. All the engineering to promote "engagement" is actually basically addiction. And the attempts to show you want you want have a strong tendency to show you more extreme versions of anything you previously watched. It's very, very easy for it to lead you down a rabbit hole into extremist territory. It's inherent in any such prediction algorithm unless somehow the selector understands to bias away from extremism.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#205

Post by what »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #167
PaulHoule wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nuanced. When I was a kid I really enjoyed Scarne's books about gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scarne which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and…

> but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me Do you literally mean you are seeing people die around you? From doing drugs? What is your general location / occupation / lifestyle? I'm a 20+ year coder in the valley, and the closest I've come is hearing about some friends of my spouse (who is a teacher) who indulge in cannabis, and one couple who do adderall recreationally.

You must not leave the house. Emergency services responding to ODs is commonplace in SF. It happened at least once per week outside my office. Walgreens (while they were still open) ran audio ads in the store encouraging you to buy narcan.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#206

Post by bdangubic »

scelerat wrote: post #203
ball_of_lint wrote: post #152

Author makes a point badly, but there is an important point here. It's really strange that we de-facto allow the few large credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard) to effectively impose their own particular views and values on what sorts of businesses can process payments. The stigma+roadblocks against these "high-risk categories" generally doesn't come from the processors (like Stripe, Adyen), but are actually driven…

It's not that credit card companies have some kind of moral bone to pick, it is that the legal, logistical and political morass of dealing with the variety of state and national laws, definitions of porn, protections of children and non-consenting performers, etc. are such that it is not worth it for them to pursue. Similar issues exist for, e.g., companies and sites selling legal THC and THC products.

exactly, they would not give two shits about what your business does if they got immunity from any prosecution

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#207

Post by ChoGGi »

nekusar wrote: post #19
strken wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the clients I've worked with was a female-led sex toy manufacturer. It was a nuisance trying to dodge some of the roadblocks. Stigma and regulatory pressure don't always mean the company is evil.

Just call the brand "Pickle Bread". Cause it's made with dill dough :D (gotta at least have a joke for a friday. its rough for a lot of us.) (edit: seriously, tough crowd. hovering between -2 and -4. Like, this is a light-hearted joke. Not even insulting anyone, either.)

No jokes allowed here.

I chuckled.

If you add something to the conversation and sneak the joke in, it'll usually pass by the fun police.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#208

Post by LorenPechtel »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #181
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of those things is not like the other

Uhh, yeah, they're both different from each other, but are you implying that one of them is worse than the other? Which one?

Porn is repeatedly demonized but the supposed evils are pretty much nonexistent. No, porn isn't destroying marriages; rather, people in failing marriages often turn to porn. For porn to be more attractive than reality there must be something wrong with the reality.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#209

Post by deaux »

Maxatar wrote: post #106
deaux wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The converse is also true It isn't true, at least not as a hard and fast rule. Post-legalization changes in demand differ greatly per country. It completely depends on contemporary cultural factors of the country in question.

Your claim is far too open ended to interpret clearly. A change in demand post-legalization can absolutely be highly variable across different countries/cultures, but unless you can demonstrate a country that legalized cannabis and saw a decline in demand, then your as of yet unsubstantiated claim does not refute mine.

No, all I need to demonstrate is a country that saw no significant increase, not necessarily a decline.

From everything I know, the US states as well as the Netherlands that all decriminalized it in the 70s didn't see local use increase in significant numbers.

Neither did it in Belgium who did the same in 2003.

And before you go "decriminalization is not the same as legalization", in the "Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it." is clearly about drugs that have not been decriminalized at all.

Re: The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

#210

Post by Animats »

antonymoose wrote: post #7
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #5

You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Good . You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.

Not to mention the entitlement of startups to just flaunt laws and regulations. Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near…

"Flout", not "flaunt".
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