Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

I have a whole lot of reasons. It boils down to the fact that I think it amounts to rich people imagining they can cut a small check and make poor people shut up and go away rather than giving them real rights, access to the means to build wealth, etc.

Also, every time humans try to "share and share alike" like this -- socialism, communism, etc -- it winds up going bad places. Such idealistic schemes only ever work well when it is some small self-selected group of like-minded people. The minute it gets opened up to "everyone," it promptly goes to hell in a hand basket.

Articles about UBI suggest that we need UBI because automation is displacing workers and you can assume permanent high unemployment as a normal future state. The jobs that are going away due to automation typically pay $20k to $50k annually. UBI is usually posited as being about $10k annually or maybe $18k annually tops.

Such articles then go on to describe how wonderful it will be for people currently doing underpaid "good work," like social workers, to have UBI on top of their current meager paycheck. They never actually go into the dystopian scenario of 80 percent permanent unemployment, you getting a mere $10k annually with nearly zero hope of making more than that while rents, medical expenses, etc. remain just as high as they are today.

I think a much better solution is single payer healthcare and real solutions to the housing affordability crisis. Make it possible for someone to get free or cheap healthcare and a cheap, decent place to live where it is possible for a single person (for example) to support themselves working a minimum wage job or part-time at gig work that pays a bit better than minimum wage and a lot of social ills we see today will largely go away.

Here is a piece that I think does a good idea of outlining some of the issues with UBI. I especially like the phrase "California optimistic" in the piece:

https://medium.com/s/free-money/after-universal-basic-income...

It recently occurred to me that UBI treats most people as "consumers" and their "consumer" function as the only thing they can contribute to the system while trying to survive. This means UBI actively tries to turn people into parasites.

We need to integrate people into the body of the nation as productive, responsible citizens, even if they don't produce very much. There is no end to how much people can spend, as evidenced by the fact that about 2/3 of lottery winners wind up bankrupt within five years from what I gather.

>SalesForce was well aware of backpages business practices and activities

backpage had been doing its business in the open in USA for almost 10 years when it became client of Salesforce in 2013. So, until 2018 no DA was bothered by the human trafficking supposedly rampant on backpage during that time, while it sounds that it was Salesforce's burden to do that the DAs hadn't and wouldn't for years - i.e. to perform investigation, etc.

Do we really want a massive SaaS company to criminally investigate its clients at its own initiative? May be it is exactly what we want - I think there is a massive attack across the board on the provider safe harbor principle with the goal to scare the providers into skittish self-censorship which the most and foremost would affect the basic civic freedoms.

Since I originally mentioned UBI in my reply, I'm going to clarify. Many people oppose UBI in the sense of not expecting UBI as the one solution to every social issue. From that POV, I also oppose UBI. In fact, I think everyone should be enabled to engage in productive and highly-paid work, as far as practicable. However we should acknowledge that people sometimes get stuck in poverty/welfare traps, that traditional forms of assistance are all too often ineffective and lead to people falling through the cracks. It's hard to see a solution to this that doesn't involve a UBI of some sort.

Edit: We should also point out that UBI does play a role in addressing the housing-unaffordability problem. Being stuck in a high-rent, high-COL place is a sort of poverty trap that is solved by enabling people to move to somewhere cheaper and seek successful work there.

Actually missed that they did say a date, which is... After the police seized Backpage in April 2018.

"The company is helping to sponsor an anti-human-trafficking event in April"

It also said its nonprofit arm spotlighted groups that worked on the front lines of the issue in 2017, which could be said to be PR campaign but it is stretching the meaning of a PR campaign a bit.

"The lawsuit includes an order form billed to Backpage that’s dated in December 2016."

Which dates before the campaign done after April 2018, and after the nonprofit arm spotlighted groups in 2017.

So the dates did matter as I suspected. Saleforce did not first do a PR campaign and then elected to do business with backpage (as will_brown said above). They first elected to do business with backpage, had a nonprofit arm spotlighted groups a year later and then did the PR campaign after the police seized Backpage. That implies strongly that the PR campaign was a reaction to the police seizure.

The argument is that if a reasonable legal market exists to do things, there's less incentive for the dangerous/harmful ways to do things, hopefully to the point its not worth it. And I hope its fair to say that criminals are in the business of trading risk of arrest/harm for money, and an overwhelming majority of trafficking is for that purpose.

I'm not saying you'll fix it overnight, people still smuggle cigarettes as a form of tax arbitrage, but changing the market incentives absolutely has an effect on behavior.