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Three Stories

justinkan.com

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Re: Three Stories

#41

Post by girvo »

throwaway3487ds wrote: post #36
hyperion2010 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but everyone wins. The user looking for porn is directed to an appropriate venue and everyone in the community that doesn't want to deal with a horny male at the other end of internet never even notices he is gone! Score -1 for continued prudishness.

Not everyone wins. Philosophers and specifically feminists have to spend valuable cycles deciding and debating whether sex work is morally wrong or whether there should be a sex-positive part of the free market. This time could be much better spent on questions such as war, income inequality, discrimination other than as regards sex work, or a thousand other things. But it needs to be done, it's not like there is gen…

I don't think I understand your argument?

Re: Three Stories

#43

Post by 55555 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't do it. Without getting into an icky and tedious discussion of pornography in general, my general default setting is that major porn sites are exploitative, and that the ones that pay the most affiliate dollars are likely to be the worst of the bunch. Which is just to say, there are reasons you might not want to have a policy of redirecting users to porn sites for money even if Techcrunch isn't shaming you.

What makes you say the major ones are exploitative? And to who? the actors/actresses or the people watching their movies?

I'm not sure what he means, but negative-option free-trial scams, credit card banging, fake messages on dating and cam sites to get you to buy credit packs, etc., are pretty run-of-the-mill issues.

There are plenty of legit porn sites out there though.

Re: Three Stories

#45

Post by hamburglar »

Such a great summary of "unlimited vacation":

> Because we were young and terrible managers, we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation.

Re: Three Stories

#46

Post by ovi256 »

patio11 wrote: post #38
cba9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you don't need fast physical deliveries of short messages that often. For example, a few days ago I was pondering how to reach a particular person on very short notice; I had an address, but nothing else, so I couldn't call them, and while I could spend like $50-100 on international mail, it wouldn't get there faster than 3 days from sending. Ultimately, the best solution I could find was... telegrams.…

Japan spends far in excess of $500 million on telegrams a year, the overwhelming majority of it because it is traditional to send one if you're invited to a wedding and cannot attend. There exist a variety of circumstances where a business has to put a piece of paper in someone's hand within about 24 hours. It's doable between virtually any two endpoints in the first world. It also costs whatever FedEx/DHL/etc think…

The amazing observation in your example, for me, is that it's one of the few things you can get cheaply, fast, and reliably. The holy trifecta of impossible requirements.

Some 60-70 years ago, you could not get it done for any sum of money. Maybe the military could do it, on a good day. A few years later, it's not just possible, but cheap.

Re: Three Stories

#47

Post by throwaway3487ds »

girvo wrote: post #41
throwaway3487ds wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wins. Philosophers and specifically feminists have to spend valuable cycles deciding and debating whether sex work is morally wrong or whether there should be a sex-positive part of the free market. This time could be much better spent on questions such as war, income inequality, discrimination other than as regards sex work, or a thousand other things. But it needs to be done, it's not like there is gen…

I don't think I understand your argument?

I was just stating that not everyone wins, regardless of the correct moral conclusion regarding sex work (including the existence of pornography and the sex industry.)

I was being quite neutral, saying, that at a minimum the philosophers and feminists who have to debate and decide this stuff don't win, since they have better things to be doing.

I don't know how else to put it other than the link I included - this isn't a settled question, some feminists are sex-positive and support the sex industry, others explicitly exclude sex work from the idea of feminism. (Because it's degrading, or hurts women, etc, by their viewpoint, which I don't mean to summarize here. Some say the very existence of pornography anywhere hurts women everywhere.)

So no matter how you slice it, not everyone wins via a redirect to pornography. I don't mean to make a deeper or more profound statement than I did, which is why it is quite narrow. At a minimum it causes feminists and philosophers to spend time on the issue that could be put to better use.

Here is a link to a book I haven't gotten around to reading: http://gaildines.com/pornland/pornland-about-the-book/

(I also am a user of pornography, though don't pay for it, and don't yet have a moral position on the matter. In fact I consider it possible that I might be "in the wrong" for being a user of pornography, given some of the above links. I haven't decided! The only position I have is that it is obviously not trivial or beyond the need for ethical analysis, i.e. it's not something you can pass summary judgment on in good conscience, like some trivial ethical question with an obvious answer - is it wrong to pretend to your dog you're going to the park but then go to the vet instead, no, it's obviously not wrong, even though you're being misleading, next question. Unlike this example you - or someone - has to look at the issue. Which is a chore.)

Re: Three Stories

#48

Post by girvo »

throwaway3487ds wrote: post #47
girvo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I understand your argument?

I was just stating that not everyone wins, regardless of the correct moral conclusion regarding sex work (including the existence of pornography and the sex industry.) I was being quite neutral, saying, that at a minimum the philosophers and feminists who have to debate and decide this stuff don't win, since they have better things to be doing. I don't know how else to put it other than the link I included - this isn…

Ah, fair enough! Thanks for explaining, I appreciate it :)

Re: Three Stories

#49

Post by pbreit »

"we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation"

I've never heard this described so succinctly and perfectly!

Re: Three Stories

#50

Post by cba9 »

patio11 wrote: post #38
cba9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you don't need fast physical deliveries of short messages that often. For example, a few days ago I was pondering how to reach a particular person on very short notice; I had an address, but nothing else, so I couldn't call them, and while I could spend like $50-100 on international mail, it wouldn't get there faster than 3 days from sending. Ultimately, the best solution I could find was... telegrams.…

Japan spends far in excess of $500 million on telegrams a year, the overwhelming majority of it because it is traditional to send one if you're invited to a wedding and cannot attend. There exist a variety of circumstances where a business has to put a piece of paper in someone's hand within about 24 hours. It's doable between virtually any two endpoints in the first world. It also costs whatever FedEx/DHL/etc think…

I did not know that about Japan, but apparently here, as with the fax machine, Japan is an exception. Japan may spend $500m on telegrams (which incidentally, doesn't seem like very many telegrams per person per year - if each is cheaper than I was quoted by quite a bit, say $50 total, and there's 127m people, then that's one a month on average. I'm also not sure they spend that much since I can't find any quick hits in Google discussing it recently; perhaps you could blog about it sometime.), but nevertheless what delivery services in Japan do or people do in Japan is not that useful, in terms of amortizing fixed costs and realizing economies of scale, to American or Australian delivery costs, nor is it informative about how often Americans or Australians send telegrams.

I also didn't bother to check Fedex/DHL because I figured while they probably did have faster deliveries than USPS, they always charge way more and we were unsure we really needed within a day delivery (which is the only place on the Pareto frontier the private companies would be for general document delivery).

As it happened, we were unsatisfied with our options so we kept digging and eventually came up with what we think are the phone number & email address of the person we need to reach, so hopefully it all turned out to be moot.

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